Martin was starving. He’d had bugger all to eat. Rifling through the fridge, he was finding a lot more meat than he remembered buying, but the real question was what he could cook fastest.
Meat… Meat… Finally he grabbed the thinnest piece. Canola oil in the frying pan. Didn’t even bother to wash the meat, just tossed it in the pan to sizzle. In so much of a hurry that he dropped some on the floor.
Hands shaking, Martin leaned over to pick it up. Funny, the floor was solid black, not the vintage linoleum he’d paid so much for online. And he couldn’t find the meat he’d dropped until he reached under the stove and pulled out a slab of Karen’s face.
Martin sat up on his mustard-colored, vintage Danish Modern sofa and screamed at the top of his lungs. How could he have allowed himself to fall asleep again?
Jennifer’s phone. He remembered the ringtone. Somewhere on the sofa. Ringing again. Maybe it was Ms. Morales from work again. Maybe calling to say the tall man with the gun, looking for him…and Frank, who he’d killed…was gone. Maybe they’d had him arrested.
Martin scrambled to find Jennifer’s phone, wondering why Ms. Morales hadn’t called him on his own phone. Found Jennifer’s phone between the cushions just as it stopped ringing.
Bloody hell!
Maybe Ms. Morales had called Jennifer because she couldn’t reach him. He checked his own phone for voicemail. Battery was dead.
A beep from Jennifer’s phone. Martin picked it back up and saw a message about new voicemail. But how could he get it without her bloody password?
He called her voicemail and tried “Jennifer” for her password, and all possible permutations of her birthday, without success. Then inspiration hit. He typed in “Martin.”
“You have six unheard messages.”
None of them indicated that the tall man with a gun had been arrested. The second to last message was from a dry cleaner complaining that he, Martin, hadn’t picked up Jennifer’s dry cleaning…which she hadn’t yet asked him to pick up. The message that had just come in was from a collection agency. It said they had tried, and failed, to reach Martin about paying her bill…which she hadn’t told him about either.
Bloody fucking hell!
Martin sat on his expensive Danish Modern sofa, stained with the sweat of his nightmares, and stared down the endless road of what his life imprisonment by Jennifer was going to be like. Could serving the time in a real prison really be worse? Tortured by frustration and helplessness, he clicked around in her apps, idly noting the stupid games she played. Really by mistake, because his shaking finger hit the wrong thing, he clicked into “Notes,” then started reading…eyes widening. Suddenly he heard something he hadn’t thought he’d ever hear again: his own laughter.
