On the Other Side(67)

She remembered that Neal kept a large stash of money in the house. She assumed it was the money he used to buy his drugs. She would have to sneak out undetected and would not have an opportunity to go to a bank. She had much more in her account, but there would be no way for her to get to it. After searching for at least twenty minutes she found twenty thousand dollars inside of a box in Neal’s underwear drawer.

“It’s mine now,” she said.

The more she thought about it the more she realized that no one had probably ever been presented with a better opportunity to disappear. The world had watched while the building she worked in collapsed to the ground. No one would ever question where she had gone or what had happened to her.

She felt remorse about the agony her mother would be forced to endure as she hoped upon hope that she had survived. At some point, her mother would probably try to find her at Carmella’s and the apartment she once shared with Neal. Damita’s only hope was that someone else would discover Neal’s body and her mother would at least be spared that.

She went online to figure out where she should go and if there was anyplace she could go under the circumstances. All of New York City was a mess. Flying was out of the question and even if there hadn’t recently been a terrorist attack involving an airplane and flights weren’t grounded, she didn’t think flying was the way to go. She considered using Amtrak, but that would delay her departure, since the train station would take some time to recover. The only way to go would be by Greyhound bus. She booked her trip to Seattle and a motel room in New York until it was time for her to leave. She wanted to wait until things calmed down, at least a little bit, before she tried to get out of New York. She didn’t want to risk anyone coming to the house and finding her there, so she would have to find a way to leave the apartment before morning. She contacted a car company that could care less who she was and booked a ride to take her to the Staten Island motel room she had gotten. It was cheap and out of the way and no one she knew would ever find her there.

While she was packing, she thought of Brandon and smiled. His motto was to always travel light.

She booked both the trip to Seattle and her hotel room online. Under the circumstances, everyone would probably assume that someone had either stolen or found her credit cards, and that was if anyone even noticed that her credit cards had been used.

As Damita fully expected, it was at least a week before it made sense for her to travel. During that week, she never left the hotel and ordered all her meals in. She considered using her credit cards to order her food, so that she would have more money available for use when she got to Seattle, but she didn’t want to take any chances. She decided she would, however, stop at an ATM machine on her way to the bus station, when she was leaving, and get as much cash off her cards as possible. There were cameras at most of the ATMs and she realized that she would have to cover and disguise herself as much as possible, so as to be unrecognizable, if it should come to that. She colored her hair dark ash blonde and cut it severely short. She wore a sweatshirt with a hood, pulled securely around her head, so as to disguise her features—just in case.

Every time she looked at herself in the mirror, she couldn’t help but think that she looked more like a teenage boy than the sophisticated, attractive woman she had once been. The irony of it all was unbelievable. From the moment they were married, Neal’s jealousy about what she might do was what ruled his actions. Every man she encountered he viewed as a potential fuck buddy. Now, here she was, at a seedy Staten Island motel, all alone. And, after months of her husband beating her mercilessly, she was the one going into hiding for doing little more than defending herself.

Lying on the bed, she felt so lonely; not for a man, but for the life she once knew. There wasn’t a situation, an accomplishment, a painful event that she couldn’t count on her mother and her friends to help make better. Now, she was forced to make so many hard decisions without being able to reach out to her mother or her friends. She thought of friends and realized there were people she spent years working with that could be dead now. She had no way of knowing and probably would never know. She thought of Underhill and how he had mentored her from the very start. Her vocational success had been due in large part to him. He was almost like a father to her. Damita wished Underhill was here right now. With all of his connections and his reputation, he would be able to help her. She considered trying to reach him, but fear ruled out and she put the thought out of her mind.

“This is useless thinking,” she said out loud.