Page 55 of The Vacancy In Room 10

I blink at the paper a few times, and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so numb. It’s like I can’t handle one more thing going wrong, and I don’t even have the capacity to physically react. My mind races, though—who could know? Who could possibly know what we’ve done? How? We were careful. Nobody followed us. How the fuck could someone know the location? But here it is on a map. And we were too stupid to see that a town was just beyond where we stopped...

Well, who uses a goddamn fucking map anyway!? I don’t know what every dot means! It felt like the middle of nowhere. We’d been driving for eternity. And just our luck that if we’d kept going a few miles, we’d hit some up-and-coming little town center. Fuck!

I stand up and try to breathe, crumpling the paper and throwing it in a fit of rage. Who knows? Why don’t they just turn me in? Why would they write this? Is it torture—they want to watch me suffer for what I’ve done? What does this mean?

I can’t tell Callum. He’ll lose his mind, and he’s already shitty at staying cool. I can handle this. Whoever this is, I can be a step ahead. Does someone have access to my phone? That’s the only way anyone could have known, right? There were no cars out there. Who would have access to my phone, though? I pace the floor and wrack my brain for who would do this and for what reason, and I come up with nothing, but I need to do something.

I have to move him. That’s all there is to it. I just...I’ll move him. I’ll do it right this time. I’ll leave my phone. I’ll tell everyone I’m going to visit my father for a night, and I’ll be back so they won’t wonder or speculate...and then I’ll go north. Yes. We should have done that to begin with.

Durango, Colorado, is only a few hours north—where there are actual green fucking trees and mountains and rivers and a landscape that’s not barren. Endless places to hide a body, and not just dirt and clay and flat land. A place that nobody is about to build apartments over. I know a place. I know what I need to do. I don’t have time to think. This person could turn me in anytime. I have to be quicker than them.

When Callum returns around three, my car is packed and ready to go. He comes into the front office, poorly imitating a man looking for a package. What a dweeb. Can he really not just act natural in any way?

“Just come in,” I say, and he nervously slips inside and closes the door behind him.

“I already heard the gossip between here and the parking lot,” he says. “So he’s officially missing?” he asks, calmer than I imagined.

“Yes, Rosa reported it.” I tell him about Eddie not having a trucking job, and we both agree that can only help us if shit ever hits the fan.

“Well, we knew this was coming. It gave us a few days. Sounds like Eddie already has a lot of suspicion around him,” I say.

“And anything they find on his phone from the truck can only be good for us. It’s probably horrifying and has nothing to do with us, so I mean. It’s falling into place the way we need so far,” he says. God, if he only knew.

“Look,” I say, stuffing some sandwiches and water bottles into my red Igloo cooler on the desk. “I have to go see my dad. Just until tomorrow night. He’s not doing that well,” I say, and I see his face redden and his shoulders tense.

“Your dad,” he says.

“Yeah, what?” I say.

“You’re not... Are you like, skipping town? Are you...”

“What? What the fuck? No. Yeah, that would look good!” I snap.

“Okay, sorry. Keep your voice down,” he whispers, accompanied by a shushing gesture.

“Well, seriously. You think I’m that dumb? Talk about painting a target on my back. Hey, someone suddenly skips town without telling anyone the day this guy goes missing? Sure.”

“Okay,” he says. “I just didn’t expect you to be leaving.”

“I’m legit going to see my dad and will be back tomorrow. I already told the residents. Any plumbing emergencies, call a plumber. Anything else can probably wait a half a day.”

“Yeah, okay, well, hurry back because if anything... I don’t know...happens and we can’t call or text, I don’t know. I just think we need to stay together.”

“Ya wanna come?” I say, knowing there’s no way.

“That would look even weirder, so no, but seriously. Come back like ASAP.”

“Oh, my God. Callum. I am coming back,” I say, and he gives a tentative nod and goes back out the front door, which I lock behind him, and it dawns on me for the first time that what if I don’t come back? What if I take the stacks of cash this time—all wrapped in plastic bricks safe inside Eddie’s backpack—and just disappear?

I think about it more on the long drive through the desert. I have my windows down and a George Strait song playing from the scratchy radio. It feels a little bit like the apocalypse happened, and I was left behind out here. Dark and deathly silent. I try to stay distracted and switch to the only stations that will come in on the radio. A talk show host gives callers shockingly terrible advice about how to handle their rebellious teenager. I change it to a Jesus station with a preacher giving a sermon. I listen to him for a few minutes talk about how the “wages of sin is death” and decide silence is better than the radio.

I go over my movements in my mind again. I have lined the inside of my trunk with thick sheets of plastic drop cloth and taped it all around the edges so it’s airtight. The body is already wrapped in thick sheets and then layers of duct tape. I have garden gloves and rubber gloves. I’m stopping at a mom-and-pop motel halfway back from the Colorado border to Santa Fe and paying cash so I can shower and change, and I plan to leave these clothes in a dumpster somewhere along the way just in case. I don’t fully understand DNA, but I’m not taking any chances.

When I drive up to the spot where we buried him, I feel my body start to shake, and the waves of nausea make me grip the door handle and take a moment to breathe and try to calm down.

We’re total idiots. Our tire tracks off the main road back here are so fucking obvious. It’s clay, and there has been no rain. It’s just evidence, hanging out. It’s lucky we only left this for a couple days. Nobody driving would have any reason to stop out here, fine. You see some tire marks along the long stretch of highway where people pull off for one reason or another, but now, coming back with new eyes, it looks like we just left a breadcrumb trail right to it if anyone was looking out here—like if someone had access to my phone somehow. Dammit. I don’t know what I’m doing. This is insane.

I breathe. I refuse to start crying. I have no choice but to do this at this point. It’s so surreal that the edges of everything look almost cartoonish. Nothing feels rooted in reality because it’s all too bizarre to be real, but here I stand.

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