Chapter SIXTY
Jeff Worthington was in big trouble. He’d panicked when Royal showed up at his door, and he’d run. The controller would see this as a failure, and Jeff didn’t want to think about what the consequences of that would be.
He’d stashed the bike behind his condo in case he ever needed to make a quick escape. Maybe he shouldn’t have spooked so easily when Royal knocked on his door. The only concern he’d had about playing lawyer was that someday a real attorney would question him on some point of law. He hadn’t really expected that to happen and certainly not this soon.
Damn Royal. If he’d only come into the apartment, he would have died there on the floor. Jeff would have used his knife and carved him up right there in the living room. No noise, no nosey neighbors wondering about a gunshot. But Royal had balked. How had he given Royal any reason not to trust him? Well, it couldn’t be undone. He needed to call the controller, get out in front of the storm that he knew was coming. Maybe he could convince the controller that it wasn’t his fault.
Worthington reached in his pocket for his cell phone. It was gone. He checked the other pocket, his mind sending signals of panic to his adrenal glands, flooding his system with hormones triggering his flight instincts. If he’d lost the phone, he was dead. He didn’t know how to contact the controller. The number was in his phone, and he’d never bothered to memorize it.
Oh, shit, he thought. The phone. If the cops found it, they’d be able to track his calls, maybe even find the controller. God, he was a dead man.
Worthington had left the condo and run east on Fruitville Road. He had followed it blindly for twenty miles. He seemed to have ridden right out of civilization, the road running straight through flat open space. He’d pulled to the side of the road to think, to figure out what he could do to salvage his situation.
Worthington knew he was a resourceful guy, but there were limits on what he could do. He only had the money that the controller deposited in his bank account when he needed it. He couldn’t even get to that account without alerting the controller and, probably now, the cops. He checked his wallet. He had a couple of hundred dollars in cash and three credit cards, two in the name of Ben Flagler and another that he’d set up right after he’d gotten out of prison. It was in the name of an inmate he’d befriended at Glades named James Barber. He’d used the card on a regular basis, paid the bills on time and developed a credit line of five thousand dollars. He could survive for a couple of months if he was careful, but after that he’d be broke.
He had no place to go. Glades Correctional Institution had been his home for the past fifteen years. Before that, he’d lived on the streets of Tampa. He knew nobody there anymore. Maybe Orlando. He’d heard that the city had a pretty large underground economy, lots of illegal aliens working construction and in the groves that had so far escaped the bulldozer. The fifty million tourists that visited every year would help him disappear into the crowds.
His heart rate was slowing as he brought his fear under control. He had to think, figure a way out of this. The name, Geoff Woodsley, skittered across his brain, almost too fast for him to catch it. He thought some more, bringing Woodsley back into focus. That was the name he’d used in Tampa before he killed the bouncer and went to jail under his own name. That was the alias he’d so painstakingly set up so that he could get into the real estate business. He laughed out loud. What a stupid idea. But it might have worked, and there would have been no prison, no deaths, no need for him to kill middle-aged women. He had never thought much about why that held such allure to him. Perhaps it was a mommy fixation. Maybe since she’d never given him any love or guidance or even a little bit of her time, maybe, just maybe, it was his sense of control that he had over the dead women that gave him such a warm feeling. The dead were at his command. They couldn’t do anything, and they never complained about what he did to them.
He sat, pondering how he might reactivate the Woodsley persona. Was it possible? It had been foolproof when he set it up. Would it still work? He knew that most of the documents, like the passport and the driver’s license, would be outdated, expired. But he had a valid birth certificate in Woodsley’s name. He could use a cash advance on the credit card in James Barber’s name to rent an apartment and get the utilities’ deposit paid. He’d then have a utility bill in Woodsley’s name to back up his claim of residence. The big question now was whether he could find the documents. He knew where he’d hidden them, but he didn’t know if the place was still there.
If he could find the original forged documents, it might work, but how would he explain his absence since the expiration of the license and passport? He’d need the driver’s license as an ID before he tried to rent an apartment. Once he had that, he could use the expired passport for a second ID. If he needed to leave the country, he would be able to renew the passport with a copy of his birth certificate and the old passport. He’d work on that, but right now he needed money. And the controller had a lot of it. The problem was, he didn’t know who the controller was or where to find him. He’d think on that while he rode to Tampa, where he hoped to find the Woodsley documents.