Page 116 of Over the Edge

“Hey! This is crazy.” She began pounding on it. “Let me out! You’ll never get away with whatever you have planned.”

Yes, he would.

As soon as he developed a plan.

But he wasn’t in this alone. Two heads would be better than one, especially when one of those heads was fuzzy, thanks to a raging fever.

Ignoring Lindsey’s hammering and her shouted demands for release, he pulled out his burner phone and walked down the hall toward his bedroom, away from the noise.

She answered on the second ring. “You’re a day early. I thought you weren’t going to call until—”

“We have a problem.” He explained it in three clipped sentences.

The word she uttered burned his ears. “I knew she was going to be trouble. Didn’t I tell you we should get rid of her?”

“I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. Now that it is, the question is how.”

“You said you were working on a plan.”

“I was going to. But the tattoo’s infected. I’m not operating at full capacity.”

Her tone changed from agitated to solicitous in a heartbeat. “Oh, Anthony. How bad is it? Do you need to see a doctor?”

Yeah, he did.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

“You know I can’t risk having anything about a tattoo on medical records.”

“I’ll take you somewhere out of town. An urgent care. You could give a fake name and pay cash.” Alarm raised her pitch.

“Urgent care centers require IDs.” An ER might work, but they didn’t have time for an out-of-town drive tonight to reduce the risk of someone recognizing him. “I have antibiotics. I’m hoping they kick in. We have a bigger issue to deal with at the moment than a sore arm.”

“Do you have a fever?”

He had to get her back on track.

“Yes. It’s not that high, but I do have a bit of brain fog. We need to focus on the more immediate crisis. Any suggestions?”

“Let me think for a minute.”

In the silence that followed, he sank onto the edge of his bed.

She’d be pacing right now, her brain processing at warp speed. When it came to subtle conniving, she was in a league by herself.

“I have an idea.”

“I’m listening.”

As she spelled it out, his sluggish brain searched for flaws in her rationale.

None jumped out.

While it would be easier to simply kill Lindsey here and dump her body somewhere, the cops would assume a death with no other obvious motive was related to the Robertson situation. This way, there would be no concrete evidence to prove that theory.

And the idea to use Lindsey’s propensity to do good deeds against her—like delivering food to people who were ill—was ingenious, if chilling.

For an off-the-cuff plan, it wasn’t half bad.

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