Page 77 of Long Way Down

She recalled the brown water in the bottles from the cabinet, Ivy swigging it and then throwing up and, once they got back to the house, curling up in a little ball and sleeping for hours. Sleeping so solidly that Mama had shaken her awake when she got home from work and asked if she was getting sick.

“Ivy?” She took a step toward the table.

Lightning flashed, and for a moment, the inside of the shack was bright as daytime. Brighter, even; was flooded with harsh white light like a doctor’s office. Melissa blinked, and the image she’d seen, in that one flash, glowed behind her closed eyelids, indelible, and incomprehensible.

Ivy lay on her back on the table, arms lifted and hands resting on the table on either side of her head, palms up, fingers curled like half-open lilies. Her eyes were open, wide and blue-white in the lightning flash; her mouth, too, a dark smear on her lower lip, two front teeth peeking out from the top. Her shirt, a sequined tank top, was pushed up, and torn, and twisted. Her shorts were missing. Her daisy-printed panties had gotten crooked, somehow, like she’d been trying to pull them off, but clumsily.

She lay utterly still, and the lightning carved odd shadows between her ribs and around her hips, the bones prominent beneath skin gone stark white in the flare of the lightning. Like a flashbulb on a camera, it had bleached all her color so that she looked like an abandoned department store mannequin.

She lookedwrong. Her pallor, and her fixed expression, and the way she didn’t move at all, not even a twitch of her fingers. A tableau that set Melissa’s pulse to racing again.

“Ivy?” she whispered, and took another tentative step toward the table.

Just before a hand clapped over her mouth from behind, and another gripped her around the neck.

~*~

When Pongo left, Melissa showered off the reek of the club and climbed into bed, though she didn’t think the few hours she spent there tossing, plumping her pillow, and glaring into the darkness could be counted as “sleeping.”

Alone in the dark, she could admit that she regretted letting him leave. That she even wished she’d met him halfway, and told him her own day-that-changed-everything story. But in that moment in the kitchen, with him fresh-faced and earnest and jaded all at once across from her, the words had gotten stuck in her throat. Pongo, she was learning, was a fixer. Without her asking, he’d gone out to investigate her case. Had even found a way for her to interview one of the reluctant vics, albeit through unorthodox methods.

Why? For the club? He’d said the Dogs were taking an ever-expanding active role in the cities from which they hailed, but of all the scumbags and murderers and rapists in this city, he’d chosen this one to focus on; had chosen the same one she hunted. This was personal for him. It was about helping her, and not about the Dogs.

She had no idea how to feel about that.

She did know, however, as she laid in the dark watching the numbers click on her bedside clock, that it was far, far too tempting to call him and say, “Fuck warrants and protocol. Find out who he is, and kill him for me. I’ll pretend I don’t know anything when the body turns up.” The more she saw of the world, the greater the appeal of vigilantism.

She switched off her alarm ten minutes before it was due to sound, and went to take another shower.

~*~

Sing Sing lay thirty miles north of the city, in Ossining. She’d only ever seen it in pictures, its white stone cell blocks and razor-wire fenced yards perched at the edge of the river, overlooking the train lines.

They took the unmarked up, and the river looked gray-black and choppy beneath a cloud-stacked sky on their left. She didn’t realize she was nervous until Contreras glanced over at her nails tapping on the window ledge, and she forced her hand still.

“Did you know,” he said, “that we’re about to drive through Sleepy Hollow? Like, as in, the actual Sleepy Hollow?”

She hitched herself up higher in the seat and glanced out the window at the trees flashing past. “Really?”

“Yeah. Keep a lookout and maybe you’ll see a headless horseman.”

She snorted. “There was only one.”

“What?”

“There wastheHeadless Horseman. Not several.”

“Listen to you, Miss Paid Attention in English Class.”

She shrugged and scrunched back down in her seat. Shehadpaid attention in English. In all of her classes, truly, hungry for scholarship money and anxious to do anything she could to get out of her hometown.

“Oh no. Did I put my foot in my mouth?” he asked, when she was quiet too long.

“No. I’m just tired, I guess.”

He hummed a sound that wasn’t quite convinced, but didn’t press further.

Outside of the city, autumn was in full bloom. The overcast day set off the oranges, yellows, and reds of the hardwoods, all bedecked in October splendor. They passed restaurants and convenience stores designed to charm rather than dazzle. The landscape wasn’t truly sleepy, didn’t drowse the way it did in Mississippi, but the frenetic pace of NYC gave over to woods, and neighborhoods, and waterfront.