Part 3
I didn’t get
home that night until past eight. As I made myself a drink in the kitchen I
could hear the droning and thumping noise from the basement of Cheryl running
on her treadmill. She must have heard me because the noise stopped. A minute
later I could hear her clumping up the stairs. Another minute and she joined me
in the kitchen.
“Hi, Honey,”
she said as she reached over to give me an overly wet kiss on my cheek. “I just
finished three miles on the treadmill.”
Cheryl was
wearing her workout leotards. It kind of firmed her up some, but even still her
body over the last few years had lost most of it’s definition and was becoming
shapeless. To be fair, she was forty-six, a good seven years older than me and
twenty-one years older than Svetlana. Still, all the countless hours running on
her treadmill and performing aerobics didn’t seem to stop her body from
spreading and growing small unsightly bulges. As I looked at her, I noticed how
puffy her face had become. Maybe the sheen of her sweat exaggerated the
puffiness, I don’t know, but it almost seemed as if a layer of stucco had been
applied. I took a sip of my martini, wished I had put in a little less
Vermouth, and muttered something about how great she looked.
Cheryl put a
sweaty hand on my drink hand—she was really sweating all over, dripping in it
really—and twisted her body around to give me a slobbering kiss on my lips. All
I could think of during it was how she smelled like sweat socks and how much
that contrasted with Svetlana’s sweet jasmine scent. Even when Svetlana was
sweaty after making love, she still smelled of jasmine.
“How’d the meeting
with the Corrections Board go?” she asked.
She had a
sweaty hand resting on my arm. I took a sip of my martini, using that as an
excuse to disengage myself from her, and then took a few steps away.
“I think I sold
four of the five members. But even if I hadn’t, it wouldn’t matter. I’ve got
the Governor and the State Senate behind me. The clinical trials are a go.
Sometime in the next few weeks the first human test subject will be connected.”
I could tell
Cheryl was both happy and a bit disappointed by the news. She knew once the
clinical trials started she’d see even less of me. For a moment I felt sorry
for her. And for a moment I even felt a pang of regret about how I now felt
about her. But the regret was fleeting.
Cheryl warmed
up some dinner that she had prepared for me earlier. Later, when we were in bed
she was all over me. I tried to pretend I was sleeping but she wouldn’t give up
and after a while I couldn’t ignore her. I tried my hardest to think of
Svetlana and somehow got through it.
The next morning
I received a call from Svetlana and we arranged to meet. When I saw her, her eyes
and skin were flushed with excitement and it drove me crazy. It just made me
feel weak in my knees. She gave me a long hard kiss, letting me taste her,
letting me feel her warmth. Then she told me how we were going to get rid of my
wife.
Her plan was
for me to arrange a trip to Paris for me and my wife. I would explain to Cheryl
that I wanted to squeeze the trip in before things got too crazy at work. We
would first spend a long weekend at our summer home in the White Mountains and
then fly to Paris. I knew Cheryl would be thrilled with the idea and I knew
she’d tell her friends about it. At the last minute, while in the White Mountains,
I would have to postpone my flight for a few days due to an emergency at work. I
would insist that Cheryl still leave on her original flight and that I would
catch up with her later. Of course I’d have to make sure she told her friends
about the change in plans. Then I’d kill her and bury her. Svetlana would find
a Russian look-alike for Cheryl. She wouldn’t have to look exactly like my wife,
just enough to match Cheryl’s passport and for people on the flight to remember
her. Later, she would disappear back to Russia. Svetlana would also arrange
with her Russian contacts for a corpse to be found in a car crash along with
Cheryl’s passport and suitcase.
As Svetlana
told me her plan, her voice came out in a breathless whisper. I touched her
cheek and felt a hotness from her skin. She was burning. Before I knew it I had
her in my arms and could feel her body tremble and push into mine. I told her
we would do it. It seemed like an eternity before we separated. She told me
she’d need a photo of Cheryl, and I told her there was one on my company’s web
site.
That night I
told Cheryl about our trip to Paris and she burst out crying. She gave me a
flurry of wet kisses and then told me how happy she was. Later that night, I
overheard her calling her friends, telling them about how we were going to
spend the weekend at our home in the White Mountains and then fly to Paris.
The next day I
got a call from Svetlana letting me know that the look-alike was en route from
Moscow. We arranged the final details of where and when she would be waiting
for me with Cheryl’s look-alike. Then I hung up.
The rest of
the week felt rather normal. I was surprised at how indifferent I was about
what was going to happen. I was able to focus on work and really felt no nerves
or anxiety. Thursday before leaving I modified a software module so that our
weekend test would fail. I knew that sometime around Sunday morning I would get
a panicked call from my assistant, Hanson.
Friday morning
Cheryl and I headed off to the White Mountains. It was a beautiful fall day and
Cheryl could barely contain her happiness. I felt oddly at peace. The whole
ride up Cheryl rested against me.
The weekend
went according to plan. Sunday morning I got a frantic phone call from Hanson
that the weekend test had failed. I told Cheryl that I would have to book
myself a later flight. I could tell she was disappointed, and she started to
argue that she would postpone her flight so she could be with me, but I
insisted that she fly out Sunday night as planned. I’d rather have her enjoying
herself in Paris than sitting around waiting for me to fix a critical software
bug. In the end she relented.
I had a few mildly
anxious hours waiting for her to relay the bad news to her friends, but by four
o’clock I heard her on the phone. After she put the phone back down, I walked
over to her and gave her a kiss. My hands were resting on her shoulders and
slid slowly up to her neck. Before she realized what was happening, I was
choking the life out of her. I just stared at her indifferently and kept
squeezing, putting all my muscle into it. There was something about the look in
her eyes that got to me, though. And there was something about how blood-red
her lips became, and her tongue, the way it just sort of thickened as it pushed
through those lips. Something oddly familiar about it all …
Part 4 tomorrow
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