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He looked in the fridge and only saw healthy foods that he had no intention of eating. Deb had to change her eating habits, and quick.

There was a couple of beers sitting there, and he grabbed one and twisted the cap off just as he heard the first few bars of
Summer Drive
playing on his iPhone. He wanted to ignore it, because that was a special ring tone he’d set up years ago. Cindy.

He drank half the beer in one long gulp and then picked up his phone. This time it was an e-mail, not a phone call or text. A small nagging part of his mind tried to remember the last time he’d been home. Three days? Four?

Finally noticed, you dumb bitch?

He clicked open the e-mail.

* * *

Tony,

I’ve changed the locks on the house and I’ve changed the code on the security system. The police know about the beatings. They will protect me from you now.

You can have your stuff, but it has to be somebody else who picks it up, something like a moving company. And the police will be here when it happens. Your clothes are out on the curb right now in six green garbage bags. It makes no difference to me if you actually pick them up, but as you know, it’s only four days until garbage day.

I’ve also changed all our banking. You’ll find that our joint accounts are all closed and our shared credit cards no longer are active.

You’ve hurt me enough. I’ll be filing for a divorce in due course. Until then, I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear from you. I don’t want you to e-mail or text me. If you do, I’ll just start blocking you.

Just make this easier for us both and leave me alone.

Cindy

* * *

Tony read the e-mail and then re-read it two more times.

“You fucking bitch . . .”

He licked his lips and felt himself breathing heavier. He wanted to throw something and found himself clenching his phone tightly enough that he was worried it would snap to pieces.

“You think you can just get me out of your life, do you?”

His voice was somber and low. He ignored the rest of his beer and rushed to the door, slamming it shut behind him. He felt his face turning red from anger and he marched to his car and climbed in, not even stopping to buckle his seatbelt. His car screamed as he floored the accelerator and took off.

Tony had no intention of leaving things the way that
she
wanted them left. She would not humiliate him by throwing
him
out. Even after being married for a dozen years, clearly she still had a lesson or two to learn.

He didn’t notice that he raced right through a red light. Fortunately for him, there were few other cars on the road. It wasn’t quite rush hour yet, and Deb lived in a quiet area of town.

Tiny random drops of rain spit on Tony’s car. At first he didn’t notice but eventually the windshield was spotted all over and he turned the wipers on. Just as quickly, the few drops of rain stopped, but the wipers carried on even as the sun peeked around the clouds. Tony wasn’t thinking of his windshield wipers. He was thinking of breaking the fucking bitch’s neck.

It took 20 minutes to get to his house. He slammed the door and stared at his home.

Yes, indeed, six green garbage bags on the curb.

A car was parked near the bags: a Vic Crown Royal. Tony hesitated and stared at the bay window. He could see two people.

The stupid bitch was there.

So was the cop who had interviewed him after Avril’s body was found.

He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. They hadn’t seen him, but he wasn’t sure he cared. He had his Colt .45 in the glove compartment, and he could just sneak up to the window and blast the shit right out of them both. Part of him wanted to do just that and he found himself climbing in the car to reach for the gun before a small amount of his good sense returned.

He finished getting into the car and pounded the steering wheel.

Bitch is gonna pay
, he thought.

He felt blood running down his chin as he’d bit into his lip.

Oh, yes, you’re gonna pay.

* * *

Tony drove back to Deb’s slowly, his anger slowly smoldering and turning to rage.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to turn out.

Step one was winning the lottery. That made him realize he had a future.

Step two was sucking every penny he could from his father-in-law. That didn’t work because the old man didn’t believe his own daughter.

Step three was dumping the bitch and starting a new life somewhere.

He tried to console himself, realizing he still had the money from the lottery. Deb had it safely stashed away, and nobody knew it was really his money, not hers. She was the one whose photo was on the news, and since she was a nobody, she was quickly forgotten, like last week’s trash.

Tony clenched the steering wheel, his car moving like a cat down the side streets to Deb’s house. He still couldn’t believe that Cindy had thrown him out. It was humiliating and every cell of his body just wanted to go back and beat the living shit right out of her.

This time he would kill her.

He parked the car and slammed the door. After hesitating only a second, he made a fist and slammed it into the front of the hood. A rocketing pain rushed up his arm but he didn’t care. He just looked at the dent in his car, imagining it to be Cindy’s face.

As he walked to the house, he felt every pore in his body, every atom crying out for him to do something. He couldn’t just be locked out of his own house.

Fuck that.

His vision was blurry from the anger shaking his body and when he saw Deb in the kitchen, smiling back at him, all he could think was,
Now she’s laughing at me, too.

The smile disappeared from Deb’s face almost immediately.

“What’s wrong?”

As he moved toward her, she took a step back and her mouth opened in the same expression he’d often seen on Cindy’s face. Pure fear.

Now it was his turn to smile.

He felt an erection growing through his anger as he reached Deb and grabbed her hair. He pulled it and then quickly slapped his other hand over her mouth.

“Don’t say a word. Don’t forget your lessons.”

Her eyes were wide and she tried to shake her head, but he was crushing her and she could barely move.

Tony pulled her hair harder, backward, and her head snapped back with it. A muffled cry escaped through his fingers and that just made him angrier.

“I told you to shut the fuck up!”

He made the same fist he had used to dent his car, pulled back, and then punched her as hard as he could. She went crashing backward into the granite counter beside the sink, and her head banged hard against a cabinet.

“Please, stop. You’re not yourself.”

The words were like little bubbles, slowly dropping from her mouth along with the stream of blood.

Anger and the need to hurt overtook Tony. He grabbed Deb’s head and smashing it over and over onto the countertop. Each hit got sloppier and mushier but that didn’t stop him.

This was Tony as he wished he could always be. It was him being truly alive.

He smashed her skull until it burst like a watermelon and the blood and spongy brain spurted out all over the floor.

Finally he dropped the body and stepped back. He tried to control his breathing, taking a long deep breath, trying to force the animal part of himself back into its cage.

“Deb . . .”

Shit.

He’d gone too far this time.

He hadn’t loved her. Hell, he barely liked her. But, she was useful to him. She let him hurt her and then fucked him after. She made him food and provided a place for him to hang out that Cindy wouldn’t know about. And, of course, she’d cashed the lottery ticket.

He blinked as he thought of the ticket.

“Goddammit.”

He looked around and found Deb’s purse sitting in the living room. He dumped the contents out and sorted through them.

“Where’s the bank book, Deb.
Where’s my money
?”

Nothing.

He looked around and saw a pile of papers on a desk in the corner. Bills, junk mail . . . but no bank book.

He pulled open the drawers of the desk, but mostly they were empty. The only contents were a stapler, a roll of tape, and some paper clips.

There was no other obvious hiding place, but he searched every inch of Deb’s living areas to no avail. He spent two hours looking. Nothing.

Tony couldn’t believe his bad luck. How the hell had he gotten rid of her before finding out where she’d stashed the money?

And why wasn’t there any record of it around? Maybe she’d planned all along to take the money from him? Stupid bitch deserved what she got.

Now what?

He drank the last of the beer that was sitting in Deb’s fridge and thought. By the time he was done drinking it, he knew he had to get rid of the body. If she was gone, nobody could nail him for murder. Nobody even knew he had ever been here. If she just disappeared, well, she was young, and who knew, maybe she just wandered off. She’d been a 15-minute news celebrity after winning the lottery and could easily have decided on an extended vacation in Europe.

The neighborhood was dark, which was very useful tonight. He crammed her body in the trunk and threw all her clothes in there too, along with her personal items, her purse, all her shoes, and a few other odds and ends. Then he cleaned up the blood and brain matter scattered around the kitchen. By the time he left, the place was spotless and nobody would ever suspect anything. She was just a runner.

He drove back to the abandoned farm house that he’d held Avril captive in. By the time he got there, it was after midnight and he was dead tired. He left Deb’s body in the trunk of his car to bury in the morning, and he just found the couch in the barn and fell asleep almost immediately, dreaming of finding his lottery winnings again and having a fucking wonderful life yet to come.

Cindy stared out the window of the front of her home. She’d spent a lot of time doing exactly that over the past few days, expecting that at any moment Tony would come banging on the door, possibly try to break a window to get in or just wait until she went out to get some groceries and spring on her from the side. He’d kill her. She had no doubt.

Suzanne McDermott had recommended she get an injunction ordering him to stay away from her, but she didn’t have money to hire a lawyer for things like that.

Except for the donations, of course. When she’d talked on the radio about needing money to save Avril, the money came flooding in. She had no idea how much there was, but just in the Paypal account that Ryan had set up there was more than $20,000. In addition there were boxes full of envelopes stuffed with cash and checks sitting at the station and a large pile of envelopes on Cindy’s kitchen table.

All of it would be returned, but sometimes she couldn’t help but think of how useful all that money would be. She’d transferred all the money out of their joint bank account to one of her own, but there was only a few thousand dollars in it.

She’d never asked Tony where the money went. She knew that would just lead to him losing his temper.

“No more pain,” she whispered to the glass window. It was her new mantra. “It’s time to start over.”

So far, so good. It’d only been 48 hours since she e-mailed Tony and told him he was no longer welcome in their home, but those two days had been peaceful and quiet.

Actually, longer
, she thought.

She wasn’t sure when the last time he’d come home. It might have been a week, but whatever time it was, she cherished it. For the first time in years, no part of her body hurt.

“Where are you, Tony?”

She had no clue. Part of her didn’t give a rat’s ass, but part of her worried what he was up to. Was he planning something?

It’d be best if he found somebody else to spend time with, and that made Cindy wonder if there actually
was
anybody. She’d never suspected anything, but where else could he have been spending his time lately?

Why hadn’t she wondered that before?

She went to the office and turned on his computer. He had a password, but she knew it. He never worried about her snooping in his e-mail, because he had her under an iron grip. She would never have had the courage to do a damned thing he didn’t want her to do.

She fired up his Gmail account . . . and there it was. A dozen e-mails to somebody named Deb Stewart. She clicked through each one and realized they’d been having an affair for some time now. One of them had a photo of Deb, just her face. She was really pretty, with beautiful green eyes and a smile that was full of promises.

Cindy didn’t feel betrayed or angry. The only thing she felt was pity for the other woman. She thought about e-mailing her to warn her about Tony, but she selfishly realized if Tony ever found out, he’d have just one more reason to come back to some unfinished business with her.

Deb smiled from the monitor . . . and then it hit her. She’d seen this girl somewhere before. She stared at the photo but nothing came to her.

She almost forgot about it, but with no other pressing business on a dreary Saturday, she decided to Google Deb Stewart.

“Ohmygod . . .”

Cindy was stunned to see that Tony’s new flame was the girl who’d claimed the million dollar prize in the state lottery recently.
Now
she remembered seeing her on the news.

“What?”

She stared at the news story, confused. From the e-mails, she could see that Tony and Deb had been together some time prior to her claiming the lottery winning. What were the chances he picked her?

“He had to have known somehow . . .”

But she couldn’t figure out how. Maybe they met somewhere and Deb mentioned winning the lottery? She shook her head.
Doesn’t seem very likely.