Chapter 78 Laura
Laura
Laura reacts to the video of Garry twice being run over by Damon as casually as she might respond to a TikTok short of pets doing silly things.
This clip is something she returns to regularly.
Sometimes she’ll replay it to see if it prompts an emotional response, as she has yet to muster up a shred of guilt for sending Garry to his death.
Today is no different. She feels nothing.
She can justify her lack of concern by reminding herself they weren’t really friends, so the murder of a drug-dealing rapist is no great personal loss to her.
A minor inconvenience. The only emotion she concedes to is a small pang of jealousy for the moment she views Damon leaning over Garry’s body, and how he might have caught his last breath without even realising it.
Without appreciating it. It’s like eating caviar on a digestive biscuit.
‘How far do you want me to go with him this time?’ Garry asked, when they last met face to face at a café close to the hospital where they once both worked.
She’d been a volunteer visitor and he was a porter, wheeling patients in chairs and beds from ward to theatre.
One day she had watched from a doorway as he’d pocketed medication from the sleeping and unconscious.
He later admitted, when pressed, that he’d sell those meds on the nights he moonlighted as a nightclub doorman.
She’d promised not to report him, but told him in return she might one day need a favour.
A year later and she had called on him for help with Damon.
‘What we did last time wasn’t enough for him to take me seriously,’ she said. ‘That’s my fault. I need you to up the ante.’
‘Kill him? Because that ain’t my—’
‘No. I want him to come away terrified of what I’m capable of doing to get what I want. I want to make his life hell.’ So hellish, in fact, that death would become a more attractive option than life.
He nodded. ‘And what did he do to twist your tampon?’
‘He took something away that he promised to me,’ she replied vaguely. It was better Garry didn’t know the ins and outs. He wouldn’t understand.
Three weeks have passed since Garry was run over.
When Laura discovered his car, she also checked each refuse container to see if one contained him.
There was no trace of his body, so she assumes he’s in a landfill somewhere with the rest of the rubbish.
Such a waste, quite literally, she thinks, then chuckles.
She switches from that video clip to another, the footage she recorded in Damon’s apartment.
Specifically, the moment before he was supposed to die.
His taut limbs, the fear in his face, the guttural gasps travelling up his throat as he tried to fight her.
While this video encourages her brain to release enough dopamine to cause her skin to tingle, it stops short of giving her that feeling of euphoria she craves.
There’s only one way for that to return.
And it is all dependent on Damon dying again.
It’s been a fortnight since she sent him the clip of Garry’s last moments.
He has been left to stew for long enough.
Laura scrolls through her WhatsApp messages and rereads his twenty-seven replies she has yet to respond to.
There’s a lightness in her chest when she thinks of his increasing anxiety, signalled by the arrival of each successive message.
They’re a delight to review, becoming angrier and angrier and eventually more threatening. She rereads his last few.
What the fuck do you want from me? he wrote. And now she is ready to reply.
We had an agreement, she texts.
His response comes almost immediately. You had a rope tied around my neck. You were trying to kill me. Not bringing me back wasn’t part of our agreement.
Do you believe everything your ex-wife tells you?
A minute passes before he responds.
What do you want from me? he asks.
What I’m owed.
And what do you think that is?
For her own amusement, she responds with three emojis. The first, a rope with a knot in it. The second is a face exhaling a puff of air. And the third is a coffin.
She hits send, then switches her phone off and enjoys a second dopamine influx.