Page 56 of Kill For Me Kill For You
Amanda
Banging shut her apartment door, Amanda limped to the kitchen cupboard, threw it open, grabbed the bottle of vodka and took a hit from it – straight.
The burn felt good.
She needed it. She couldn’t think straight. Naomi had lied to her about killing Crone, and seeing him on that train, alive and well, it hurt in a way Amanda had never known. She knew pain. It had been an animal that had lived with her for months now. And yet this, this betrayal, was a different kind of creature whose claws tore at her flesh in a whole new way.
She had been given release – the knowledge that Crone was dead – and she had believed it. Every word of it. More than that, she’d felt it. And when she’d seen him that peace had been cruelly ripped away.
Now that she’d had a taste of what it would be like if Crone was dead, she knew she wanted that, needed that, now more than ever. She had to calm those raging seas in her dreams. Amanda closed her eyes, enjoying, just for a moment, the memory of the stillness that had come with news of Crone’s death. She promised herself then that she would kill him. She would do it herself. She had to.
But not yet.
She put the bottle of vodka on the table, went through to her bedroom and found the pages from the web she had printed out. It was the article she’d found while researching Naomi, sitting in that Starbucks while she’d waited for Crone to make his appointment. It was from theNew York Post. She’d printed it at home because it was the one article with the largest, clearest picture of Quinn. Still only half his face, the other in shadow.
The picture looked like him. No doubt, that was the man she had killed last night.
She went to her laptop, typed in the search terms again. This time focusing on Naomi.
Nothing.
Not one relevant hit.
She clicked on her favorites bar in the browser. She’d bookmarked the relevant sites. The top one was the picture of Quinn alongside the article inUSA Today. She clicked on the bookmarked link.
The results sucked the air out of her lungs.
Error 404 ‘Page Not Found’.
She clicked through the rest of the bookmarks for theNew York Daily News, thenMetro New York,The Queens Chronicle, and theNew York Post.
Same error message for every single one.
Shaking her head, Amanda typed in a fresh search for ‘news’ and found all of the websites for those publications were up and running. She did a fresh search on Naomi, Quinn and the school.
Zero relevant hits.
Then something hit Amanda. She picked up the article she’d printed and examined the URL at the top of the printout.
https://www.usetoday.com/ny/frankquinn/naomi . . .
She didn’t need to read any further. It wasn’t USATODAY, it was USETODAY. One letter had been changed.
The web articles were fake.
All of them. And now they’d been deleted.
Amanda had taken an afternoon course on how to create a website for her art. It was easy these days. You could do it in a couple of hours. Anyone could.
Naomi had laid a careful, convincing trap for Amanda. One that had almost gotten her killed, and had made her take a life just to stay alive.
She bounded off her bed. Her knee reminded her it wasn’t working properly by sending a squealing hot jolt of pain through her joint and dumping her on the floor.
Amanda got up carefully, made her way to the kitchen and found a box of Advil. She washed the pills down with more cheap vodka, grabbed her keys and left, headed for the subway.
All the way to Naomi’s apartment, she tried to reach her on the phone. It didn’t even ring. Either it had been switched off, or had no signal. When she got to Naomi’s building, she found the front door slightly ajar. It was almost nine, and people would’ve been rushing out of the building for the last two hours, on their way to work. The last person out must not have closed it properly. This was the first piece of luck she’d had that morning. She got out of the elevator on Naomi’s floor and pounded on her apartment door.
No answer.
