Free Deadly Chaos by Annette Brownlee

head. I'm not giving up my life for you, she thought. Besides, she didn’t know where his body was and she sure as hell wasn't going to drag Paolo into this.
    “See you tomorrow, chica.”
    Dead Bill disappeared. Heart pounding, Chaos clamored across the bed and snagged her cell phone from the bedside table. “Please let it have recorded something. Please don’t let me be crazy.” Of course as soon as she said that she wondered which was worse, being crazy or actually finding out that ghosts existed and she had one of her very own. Fingers shaking, Chaos stopped the recording and pressed play.
    Her hope slid to the ground. All she could see was her back sitting on the edge of the bed. No Dead Bill. Sorrow filled her as she listened to her own voice on the recording.
    “Are you a ghost? I think I’ve lost my mind. You’re dead.”She didn’t hear his responses. This proved she was crazy. She was imagining the whole thing. “What am I going to do?” Rewinding it, Chaos turned the volume up as loud as it would go and pressed play.
    “You’re dead.”
    “ahkilledme.”
    Chaos froze. Her heart skidded to a stop. She heard something. She rewound it and listened again.
    “Killed me.”
    There was an inhalation before he said it and the voice sounded almost electronic but there was no mistaking it. She had Dead Bill’s voice on her phone’s recorder. “I’m not crazy.”
    Halfway through the third playback, Chaos didn’t hear any more voices but she realized something wasn’t right in the video. There were two shadows in the room. With the bedside table light behind her, it made sense to see her silhouette on the wall but there was another one beside it. A larger, taller shadow. It had mass and form too, like it wasn’t really a shadow at all but a large black cloud. True, the image quality on her phone was pretty crappy but still. She put the camera back on the table, pressed record and sat back in the same place she’d been when Dead Bill had been in the room. Chaos waited sixty seconds and then grabbed the camera and pressed play.
    “One shadow.” Dead Bill wasn’t a figment of her imagination. He was a ghost. A stalker ghost. She wanted to cry, both from relief and from the terror that was bubbling up inside her. “How do you get rid of a stalker ghost?” On the one hand it wasn’t so bad because it sure as hell beat a live stalker. Ghosts couldn’t do bodily harm, right? But she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life being haunted by such a vile man. He had to go. He’d said confessing would end it. If she went to the police he would go away. But that wasn’t really an option. If she did that, not only would she go bankrupt spending the little money she had on legal counsel, she’d also be sacrificing Paolo and the people who helped her. She was indebted to them. Betraying them wasn’t an option. Trusting Bill would be stupid anyway. If she confessed and ended up in jail, he’d probably haunt her in her cell and she really would go crazy
    No, she had to get rid of Dead Bill on her own. Glancing at the clock, she regretted not bringing her laptop with her. Not that she'd have wireless internet connection in this motel in the middle of nowhere.
    Slipping into her shoes and coat, Chaos grabbed her room key and wallet and headed for the registration building. She remembered seeing a computer for guest use there. She crossed the poorly lit parking lot and shivered. It probably wasn’t a great idea to be running around outside in the middle of the night. She reached the building and turned the knob. “Locked. Damn.”
    She tried her key hoping it would work to let her in. No luck. Remembering that the laundry room connected to the registration area, she made her way around the back of the building to the laundry room. An orange security light cast long shadows down the alley between the registration building and the motel. Anxious to get safely inside, Chaos inserted her key and held her