Page 72 of Long Way Down

April straightened and tossed her hair, sliding back into her dancer persona. “It’s cool,” she told the bouncer, offhand, and went to the platform and the little remote lying there. She pressed a button and an Usher song started up. “Tell that guy in the ugly jacket I’ll be with him in twenty,” she said, with a dismissive hand gesture, and the bouncer finally jerked a nod and retreated.

April watched the curtains a moment after they closed, until they’d settled fully, still and heavy. Then she let out a deep breath, and her posture shifted. Cock of a hip, lift of a shoulder, flex of an arm, and she was the temptress again. A façade like armor, Melissa thought, as April turned and came back toward them, stalking now, predatory grin back in place. Melissa had her anger, her unpleasantness; girls like April wore sex appeal like chain mail.

“So,” she said, “you never told me. Who am I dancing with?”

Pongo grinned and hooked a thumb in Melissa’s direction. “My girl, here. Maybe you can get her all riled up for me.”

April chuckled, throaty and intentional. “Do my best.”

In any other circumstances, Melissa would have protested, but for now, she tried not to make a face and betray her discomfort as April climbed up into her lap and started grinding. Amidst what seemed an over-eager performance, April relayed her story in a low, serious whisper as odds with all the gyrating, hair-tossing, and hip-rolling she was doing.

The attacker had come up behind her, gripped her by the hair, clapped a hand over her mouth, and dragged her into the darkness of the alley. In those first moments, April had fought back, and it was easy to imagine the wildcat ferocity of her attempted escape. She’d elbowed the man hard in the solar plexus, and he’d let out a grunt and started hissing and cursing. “I musta hurt him bad,” she said, sticking her breasts in Melissa’s face and shaking them. “He was super pissed after that.”

After that, he smacked her head off the brick building wall, and the attack became a blur. She’d been sore from her last john, and he’d been rough. When the bite of the knife in her back brought her slamming back to full consciousness, he’d punched her in the back of the head until she blacked out.

She’d awakened the next morning, face-down in her own room, covered in bandages and in the grips of a panic attack. The blood from her back had puddled and run out on the sidewalk, attracting the attention of one of Titus’s other girls, passing by on her way back to the building.

By the time they left, April holding a generous tip and warning them again that she wasn’t willing to come down to the precinct and make an official statement, Melissa was cold and shaky inside. Whatever “riling” the dance might have done in other circumstances had been canceled out by the horror of April’s story; the compounding horror that no one save another hooker knew it had happened or even cared.

Sometimes, she really was convinced that humanity was a mistake.

She had a job to do, though, and she tried to parse the personal from the factual.

“Whatcha thinking?” Pongo asked when they reached the bike and squared off from one another across it.

“When she elbowed him. She said he made a lot of fuss about it.”

He nodded. “She’s a tall girl. Pretty strong in the upper body judging by her pole routine.”

“Yeah, but strong enough to deliver a blow that painful to a man strong enough to wrestle her to the ground?”

He frowned.

“You’ve been in fights.” She motioned to his still-bruised eye. “How hard does someone have to clock you before you start making noise about it?”

“Well, now, sweetheart. You can’t just go comparing ordinary dudes to someone with my experience.” He offered a cheesy grin and tugged at the dog on his shirt. “We warriors…” He trailed off in the face of her flat glare with a breath of a laugh. “Yeah. I dunno. I don’t guess I do make noise. When you’re in the middle of throwing hands, running your mouth is a good way to get hit in the mouth, you know?”

“That was my thought. And she got him here.” She touched her own midsection. “Throwing an elbow back like this” – she demonstrated – “even really hard, is something he should have anticipated and been able to grit his teeth and get through. But what if he was already injured there?”

His eyes widened and he snapped his fingers. “The girl at the Dog stabbed him there.”

“Yeah.”

“But that was months ago. He’d have healed up by now.”

“If he went to the hospital and got stitched up. What if,” she said, “he was too scared to go to the ER, so he patched himself up at home. Depending on the knife she used, it could have been a nasty puncture wound. If it never healed the right way, it could have been tender, or even infected. If April popped him there, it would have hurt like a bitch.”

He nodded. “Yeah. It would have.” He tilted his head. “But you’re doing a lot of what they call, in your line of work, supposing.”

She groaned. “I know. But it’s all I have to go on right now.” She tipped her head back and looked up at the sky. There were no stars; only tattered lines of gray exhaust against the yellow smudges of light pollution.

There were no answers there, either.

When she faced forward, he was watching her with an indecipherable expression. He pulled the helmet off the handlebars and extended it toward her. “Come on,” he said, tone unusually subdued. “I’ll take you home.”

Fifteen

In high school, Pongo had entertained a lengthy and embarrassing crush on Tamara Mosby. Her DDs and her cutting glances that looked right through him. She’d been way out of his league, and though they’d both known it, she’d been hellbent on emphasizing the fact at every opportunity. She’d let him get to third base in his car behind the Walgreens, then pretended he didn’t exist the next week at school. He was still a tit man, but he'd stopped chasing women who were ashamed to be seen with him.