Page 84 of Caution Tape

“No, we split, actually. Haven’t seen her in a while. I started hooking up with this Cora girl.” I smile. “Cute but, woah. Crazy, you know? Like immediately fell in love with me.”

Jay nods emphatically. He knows exactly what I mean. Every guy has a crazy girl story. Their mom is crazy, their ex is a psycho. That teacher in high school was a lunatic; that woman that didn’t want to date them is batshit. It’s a universal, recognized truth amongst men, and when I affirm this belief for Jay, validating his worldview, he’ll eagerly spill it out to any male cop that comes around asking questions.

“I once had a girl steal my wallet,” Jay says. “Maxed out all my cards. I had to call this company and get the charges removed. It was a pain in the ass.”

I order another round of beers. “Get this… we’re in bed one night and she starts telling me she has fantasies aboutkillingpeople. And not in that fun way, like how you joke about killing your coworkers and stuff. I think she means it.”

“That’s a crazy girl for sure.” He fixes his backwards cap and grins at me. “But is she hot though?”

“Wouldn’t be talking about her if she wasn’t.”

It goes on like this for a while. I find myself looking around the bar, and for one exhilarating moment I think I see Cora lurking in the shadows, but when I look again, she’s gone.

I see Natalie too, briefly, walking in with a crowd of loud college girls, but she disappears just as Cora does.

Jay asks what kind of video games I play, and I can’t help but think about the kind of games I want to play with his corpse.

Finally, he starts making the standard noise of “got a lot to do, tomorrow’s a long day” and I nod, making the standard responses. We pay and start heading toward the door.

I walk him to his car and then double back, a wide grin breaking off my face.

This bar still has a pay phone. The plastic receiver is chipped and covered in graffiti, but it has a dial tone.

It takes me a minute, but I figure out how to work it. The quarters go in, and using my cell phone, I pull up the police department’s anonymous tip line.

The line clicks, and a smooth female voice instructs me to leave a detailed message at the tone. It assures me that this is anonymous, safe, and completely confidential. I am not being recorded in any way.

Still, I raise my voice into a mock falsetto and drop some of my consonants. “Hey, I wanna let someone know there’s a lotta noise out by the river, at that old trainyard? I walk my dog by there sometimes and I think I heard yellin’. Could be kids up to somethin’. I dunno. Thanks.”

I hang up the phone. Excitement is flooding my body now.

All I have to do is go home, grab my stuff, the little stash of money I have saved, and I am gone. I can take a new name, a new life, a new city full of potential victims.

What about Cora?

It doesn’t matter. It’s easier now that I’m in motion. Now that I’m away from her. It would be impossible to turn down those eyes, that warmth, the very scent of her. I can admit that.

But freedom. True freedom. Solitude. It’s all a few short hours away.

There’s yellow caution tape on my door.

I approach it warily, checking around my shoulder for SWAT teams and stern-faced police officers, but I already know it isn’t them. They need warrants, paperwork, and an entire system to come together to take any sort of action. I would’ve been tracked down and questioned long before this step.

I push the crisscrossing layers of tape aside and enter my apartment. I try to do it quietly, but of course the keys jingle, the door clicks, and the floorboards creak.

She’s draped the tape all over the place. It lays over my couch and coffee table like a dead snake. It hangs from the ceiling fan and loops around the kitchen chairs.

I see a shoe, then socks, and then a blouse in a loose winding path leading to my bedroom door. It’s propped open slightly and a soft red light emanates from it. Music plays gently.

I bite back a laugh. Cora has Halloween store taste.

I begin undressing as I move toward my room, dropping clothes behind me as I follow Cora’s trail. I nudge open the door. My mind oscillates between an alarm siren thought ofthis is a bad ideaand this other feral desire to see what she’s going to do, to see what I’m going to do. The game is escalation and I want to see how far we both can go.

That part wins when I see her on the bed. She’s taken everything off and wrapped herself in more caution tape. It weaves over her curves and between her breasts in a loose harness. She’s tied a collar out of it around her throat.

She smirks when I enter, spreading her legs and letting me see underneath the crude skirt she’s crafted out of the tape. She’s twirling a knife and beckoning for me to come closer.

“People say to watch out for red flags in dating, but I figure maybe we should be wrapped in—“

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