He had to get rid of the cop's body and his truck, and then he had to clean off the walls and the floors where he shot the cop and made what had been inside his head come outside. But he couldn't yet think about all of those things. He had to take care of the girl.
Her feet were bleeding from the cuts, and she rolled around on the bed in a panic, which only smeared and stained the sheets and the floor. He knew firing the gun so close to her scared her, and he wished he hadn't had to do it. But it came down to the cop's life or his own. He knew the cop would take the girl away, and then he'd take Roger away and they'd never see each other again. Roger thought it was bad to live alone in the house. He didn't want to think about the way he'd live if the cops took him away.
He ran to the bathroom and came back with several towels and a tube of antibiotic cream. His mother always used antibiotic cream when he had a cut, and the tube in the bathroom closet must have been sitting in there for years. But it beat not doing anything to help the girl. Roger knew an infection meant big trouble. He wouldn't be able to cure that himself, just as he hadn't been able to help the last girl when she got sick.
The girl refused to sit still. She kicked and bucked while Roger tried to apply the towel to her wounds, and finally he sat on her legs, pinning them to the mattress, and told her to knock it off if she wanted to live. The girl stopped resisting.
Roger dabbed at her wounds with the towel, and while he did, his eye caught the body of the cop at the foot of the bed. A part of his bald head was gone, revealing the bloody mess inside, and his eyes stared forward, like he'd been frozen while concentrating on something fascinating. A light trickle of blood still leaked out of the hole in his neck, and Roger felt a wave of nausea rumble through his stomach as he looked at him. He turned his head away and concentrated on the task at hand.
He managed to wipe the blood off in a few minutes and saw that the cuts weren't very deep or wide. One gash just above the anklebone did most of the bleeding. Roger pressed the towel against it, and even though the girl took in a quick breath of air through her nose as though it hurt when he touched her, he maintained the pressure. He knew he could and should stop the bleeding before doing anything else. When he had it stopped and looked at it more closely, he decided it didn't need stitches. She'd be fine, but just to be safe he opened the tube of ointment and, as gently as possible, applied some to her cuts. The girl squirmed a little but let him finish. He threw the things aside and tried to decide what to do next. He felt overwhelmed.
He turned to the girl first. If he intended to clean the mess up, he had to have the girl out of the way, so he took the ropes and re-tied her feet to the bed, making sure the knots were extra tight, limiting her wiggle room to almost nothing. She grunted behind the tape, but Roger ignored her. If she needed to go to the bathroom, she could pee in her pants. For now, wet sheets were the least of his concerns.
He turned and faced the body of the cop. The guy was big, but not so heavy Roger couldn't carry him. He knew it was a huge deal for a cop to die. He saw it on TV all the time. When somebody killed a cop, there was hell to pay. The other cops all came together and did whatever it took to bring the killer to justice.
Roger tripped over that word.
Killer.
He wasn't a killer. Not at all. He hadn't killed the last girl, and he didn't want to kill this one. And he'd only killed the cop out of self-defense. It was justified or justifiable, whichever they said on the TV. It meant he needed to do it for his own survival. If he hadn't killed the cop, then the cop would have killed him, or at least made his life miserable.
But none of that mattered now. What mattered was what he'd done. That was all. Nobody would care about anything else. And when this cop didn't show up at his house or his job or wherever else he was meant to be, they were all going to come looking for him. It was going to be bad.
Roger sat on the edge of the bed and let his shoulders slump.