Page 74 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“The police are at The Sycamores right now raiding your apartment,” I say, and to my utter shock, Rosa pulls out a video she took of the police, less than an hour earlier, to show Callum that it’s true.

He glances at it and sees the swarm of police and flashing lights—the open door to his unit—and stares at it.

I give her a subtle, surprised look, and she gives me a tiny confident nod.

“They found ten thousand dollars wrapped in plastic under your sink. It was in a woman’s pink makeup case—Lily’s, I guess. Pink. With tulips on it. It’s the money from Eddie’s backpack.”

“You killed him and then stole from him,” Rosa says, shaking her head in disgust, putting on a show to drive home the hold the two of us together really have over him now.

“That’s bullshit. You’re... Whatever you’re doing...there was no money. We buried it. You? What did you do!?” he snarls. In the cones of headlight illuminating us, I see his face redden and his eyes become narrow and full of fear. He’s seething with rage, and I don’t know what he’ll do next.

Rosa knows that I took the ten thousand out of Eddie’s backpack when I moved his body, and she knows that I placed it in the back of a cabinet in Callum’s bathroom when I fixed his leaky sink. We told each other everything, and he has no chance against us now.

He leaves Anna slumped against the back tire of the car and rushes at me so quickly I don’t have time to run—to move, even—and then he has me. He stands behind me with a knife to my throat. It’s so fast it steals my breath. I grab his arm with both hands and scream, but that makes him poke the tip of the knife into the side of my throat, and I’m silent.

Rosa stands frozen, helpless as Callum backs up, holding my body to his, and inches toward the cliff.

I squeeze my eyes closed. I’ve done a lot of shitty things, and I’m not proud of the way I’ve hurt people. I thought about just leaving—taking the ten thousand, getting the fuck out and not going to the police. Why be connected to Eddie at all—I could just keep Callum’s terrible secret, so I don’t destroy my own life. It was a consideration.

Maybe it was penance for all my mistakes, but I had to do what I did and turn him in. It was my only real way out of this anyway, but it wasn’t just for my own safety... It was for Lily and for Henry. And most important, for Anna.

I can’t see the bottom beneath the rocky cliff because it’s cloaked in blackness, but I know it by heart. I’ve hiked here, camped here, picnicked here, and everyone knows the bottom is death. This is how I always thought it would end—after I learned who Eddie was, the vision of this moment flashed behind my eyes—me with a slit throat, left in a Mexican desert. This is close enough.

I shake violently, but every time I pull his arm to try to loosen it around my neck, he pushes the blade closer, and I can feel the sharp edge and hot blood trickle down my skin. I think about kicking him, but I don’t have the leverage, and he could startle and plunge the knife deep into my throat, and that would be it.

Anna is trying to stand up. She gets to her hands and knees, and maybe whatever she was given is starting to wear off. Or maybe she is summoning up strength from somewhere deep inside and willing herself to move. She tries to use one knee to steady herself since her hand are tied, and she gets to her feet, and it startles him—it looks like he didn’t expect her to be this coherent, and it’s throwing him off.

But all of this happens so fast that it’s like a series of flashes—his grip, the knife, my scream—we’re inching backward. Anna screams out, “Please, no!” but we step closer to the edge, and he has me now by the back of the collar, pushing me forward, enough distance in front of him that he doesn’t get too close to the edge himself. Would he really be crazy enough to do this? Or is he just trying to scare me? Maybe he’s just that psychotic—getting caught or not isn’t as important as revenge. But if that were true, he would have slit my throat by now, right?

And just when I feel my feet about to slip at the crumbling edge of the rocks, a gunshot rings out. Deafening, it echoes across the valley and stops Callum in his tracks.

He lets go, and I fall to the ground, scrambling to move away from the cliff’s edge, grabbing handfuls of dirt and rock, and I crawl my way to safety. I feel my head for blood. It’s too dark to see anything, so I feel down my body to see where I’m hit. Am I dead? Maybe this is what death is, and I still think I’m alive for a moment longer as my soul floats away, because I must be dead.

It takes me a moment until the ringing in my ears stops, and I realize I’m in fact not even shot, and that’s when the panic comes. If he didn’t shoot me, who did he shoot? And this all feels like slow motion, but it happens in seconds, and then I hear it...and I see it.

Callum is on the ground, a bullet through his thigh as he writhes in pain.

I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing at first. In the beam of my car’s headlight, I see Rosa holding a small revolver, and Anna standing next to her with both hands cupped over her mouth in horror.

“Cops are coming, you better go,” Rosa says to Callum, who looks up at us in a mix of agony and disbelief.

He has no earthly idea about what Rosa really believes and must be entirely confused about why we’d tell him to run instead of holding him here until the police arrive, now that we have him trapped, but he doesn’t wait around to ask questions. He limps, practically crawling to his car, leaving a trail of blood beading on the chalky ground in front of the bright headlight beams, and then he takes all the strength he can summon to get into the driver’s seat and speed away from us, leaving plumes of dust in his wake.

“You’re letting him go!?” Anna cries, but she doesn’t know that he’s driving a car tracked with GPS, and he can’t evade us. Right now, we need to protect ourselves first.

“Don’t worry,” is all I say in the moment because there is no explanation for this—no way we should know they were here, and no way we can tell the police how we tracked him without digging ourselves a hole and getting more and more connected to the whole thing. Right now, I’m just the girl who works at the apartments who happened to stumble upon some suspicious things while cleaning. They don’t have any reason to suspect me. I’m not the one with a history of killing people or any direct evidence linking me to Eddie, so we need to keep it that way.

Maybe he could have trapped me—stopped me from fleeing from him and away from the scene with that flat tire, but he didn’t expect to be the one running away and forgot that this particular “yippy female” can easily change a flat tire, so we need to get the hell out of this place and pretend we were never here to begin with.

Rosa takes a sanitizing wipe from her big purse in the car and wipes down the gun, and me and Anna watch in amazement as she walks over to the cliff’s edge and drops it into the abyss like it’s something she’s done a dozen times before.

“It’s Eddie’s. I found it in his truck, so the serial number is scratched off, don’t worry,” she says, and Anna and I are speechless for a few moments. Then it’s time to jump into action.

I change the car tire by the light of Rosa’s phone flashlight, then the three of us drive down the black dusty road until we can see city lights again, until I hear Rosa say, “He stopped!”

And I pull over and shut the car off. I turn to the back seat where Rosa has been tending to Anna’s wound and monitoring her tracker app on her phone to see where Callum is going.

We tell Anna everything. The night it all happened in the front office, how Callum stumbled into the wrong place and how that one moment is the only reason he’s not getting away with what he’s done to Lily and Henry. We tell her of Eddie’s past and the GPS tracker and how I stashed the dirty money in Callum’s bathroom and filmed him dragging Eddie’s body...and that he’s entirely and utterly fucked. And most important, how he’s tried to destroy all of us, and we need to stick together.

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