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Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I sprint out of the garage and to the front door. Can I get home in time? It's a hundred yards then up three flights of stairs. What if I fall over in the middle of the road? What if I only make it to the front yard? What if someone finds me, then comes and finds the woman's body?

I will wake up in jail.

I decide there's no way I can make it.

I have to hide.

I run to one of the small bedrooms, open the closet, and lie down. I'm still looking for a way to extend my legs when I fall asleep.

:03

He's on my stomach. The cat.

“Yo.”

Cat lifts his head, stares at me with his orange eyes, then rests his head back down on my chest. The events of the past night come flooding back. The woman's body. The phone under the car. The fact that I am hiding in a closet with a cat on my chest.

I push myself up on my haunches, sending Cat fleeing to places unknown. This time it isn't my neck, it's my back. It is screaming. I run my hand over my lower oblique and feel a quarter-inch depression that is sore to the touch. Gentle moonlight cascades through an open window, softly illuminating the plastic hanger I have slept on.

Ugh.

Once on my feet, I find my phone.

It is 3:02 a.m.

I feel around in my opposite pocket and find the other phone. The pink Samsung. A picture, a narrow white obelisk, the Washington Monument, fills the screen. The woman has been dead for going on forty-eight hours and I expect to see a barrage of texts, but there is only the missed call from the night before. Did this woman have any friends? Co-workers? Did anyone even know she was missing? I want to see what the number is that called, but the four boxes centering the phone screen lead me to believe the phone is locked. It is. I try 1234, but surprisingly it doesn't work. I make a mental note to put the Samsung back under the car for the police to find. I wipe any prints I might have left on the phone with my sleeve and put it in the pocket of my sweatpants.