Page 130 of Long Way Down

The night Pongo met Dixie had not been fate or the heavens aligning, or anything so pure. One of the Dogs’ dealers, Patty, had decided he was an entrepreneur, and started pimping out girls without the Dogs’ knowledge. He and one of said girls got picked up after they were caught fist-fighting in the middle of a street. Patty cold-cocked the girl, the blue lights cut on, the siren whooped, and suddenly he was using his one phone call from holding to reach out to Maverick and beg for bail money. Mav bailed him out – the girl, too. The girl got a fat stack of bills and stern orders to never darken their door. Patty had gotten a one-way ticket to a landfill in Jersey. But when Patty didn’t show up for his trial date – that being a little hard to do while in pieces and rotting beneath heaped-up banana peels and dirty diapers – a warrant was put out for his arrest.

Maverick had put Pongo onto the situation. “Go to Monroe’s, talk to Anderson. He’s…amenable.”

So Pongo went to Monroe’s, that crumbling, hole-in-the-wall pub full of mostly cops and blue-collar types, and he looked for Anderson. But Anderson had retired, and the Vice detective he found sitting at the bar was amuchbetter alternative.

She’d surprised him, that night, with her sweet face and acerbic tongue, her Southern drawl and her wary, distrustful nature. And then surprised him again when she’d started to lean into the flirting; she hadn’t flirted back – there wasn’t a coy bone in her body – but he’d seen the flash of raw hunger in her eyes, had noted the way she dampened her lips when she glanced at his mouth. She’d wanted him, and he’d been all too eager to throw himself on the sacrificial altar.

But despite what some of his brothers claimed, he wasn’t an insensitive idiot. He was perceptive, in his own way. Between the low-lidded, considering looks she’d tossed his way that first night in Monroe’s he’d caught flashes of fear. Self-doubt and something darker, and thornier. Old, buried emotions she’d armored herself against.

Maybe it made him an asshole (nomaybeabout it), but those unplumbed depths, the angst long-buried, were what made him brave enough to ask for her number, in the wee small hours while he was searching for his clothes across her bedroom floor. She’d pushed her delightfully messy hair off her face, squinted at him through the dark, a passing car catching her eyes a moment, lighting them up like an animal’s, and he thought her buried past, the dark thing he’d only glimpsed the folded edges of, was what inspired her to actually punch the digits into his phone for him, and ask for his in return.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she’d muttered, mostly to herself, but he’d grinned, because it had meant so many things.

He’d loved the challenge of her, at first; he’d had to work to earn a smile, even her eye rolls like little victories.

But by this point he was fairly certain he just plain lovedher, and the way she shook, and shuddered, and couldn’t catch her breath now left him aching.

Unsure if she’d allow it, he reached to smooth her hair off her forehead, careful of her bandage, and she turned into the touch, blindly seeking more of it. He petted her hair along the crown of her head and murmured nonsense. “It’s okay. I got you. You’ve needed this for a while, huh? Shit, I’m sorry. I shoulda said something. Shoulda told you that it was okay to cry, baby. Not that you need my permission, it’s not like that, it’s just, you hold everything in so tight, you know? It’s not healthy. You–”

She dragged in a shuddering breath and managed to raggedly croak out, “Shut up.” Then the sobs came properly, the low, keening sounds of someone badly injured.

“Okay. I’ll shut up.” He shifted her around so she faced him, bundled her in, and lay back against the arm of the couch.

She cried, and cried, and cried, heaving and twitching on top of him. She’d told him to shut up, but he was tired, and the adrenaline crash had left him a little loopy – not to mention the two vodka shots he’d slammed down in the kitchen before bringing her her drink. So he got both their glasses safely onto the table, kissed the top of her head, and started talking again. He’d never been able to abide silence when he was upset as a kid; his mother had this way of keeping up a light, low-stakes chatter that had scared away all the monsters under the bed when he was little, and he thought, hoped – perhaps loftily – that his voice might do the same for Dixie.

“…and then you start with a second layer of the ricotta,” he was saying, when Dixie took a few deep breaths, and stilled, finally, body vibrating with faint tremors, hiccups finally gone. She snuffled, wiped her eyes with her hoodie sleeve, and said, without lifting her head, “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been blessing you with my mother’s famous lasagna recipe, and you’ve been ignoring it, thanks very much,” he teased, delighted to hear her voice again.

A beat passed. Voice wet, tone very dry, she said, “You know a lasagna recipe, and you offered me a Hot Pocket.”

“Hey,whatis with all the Hot Pocket hate lately?”

She pushed up so her forearms were resting across his chest, her chin propped on the back of her hand. Her face was blotchy and red around eyes still wet with tears. She sniffed, and wiped stealthily at her nose with the edge of her cuff, and regarded him with puffy, half-lowered eyelids. All the tension had bled out of her face, and he realized she’d always been even more tense than he’d known, so devoid was her expression now. Totally lax in the way of a person who didn’t have one scrap of energy or pride left with which to hold onto a guarded mask. She regarded him in a whole new way that he found instantly addictive.

He reached to tuck a snarled lock of pale hair behind her ear, and thumbed a tear track across her warm cheek, face still flushed from all the crying. “You okay?”

I’m fine. That was what she always said, always tight, and strained, and anything but fine. But not tonight.

Tonight, unable to hide, she looked him dead in the eye with her too-tired, glassy gaze, and said, “When I was six, the pastor who lived next door raped and murdered my older cousin.”

All the air left his lungs as if she’d elbowed him sharply under the ribs. “Fuck,” he said, for lack of anything better. “Jesus…fuck.”

“There was this little stretch of swamp out behind our house,” she went on, voice weary. “I never found out how deep it went – deep enough. We weren’t supposed to go back there, but if nobody was watching us, we’d sneak away. Chase butterflies, look for frogs in puddles. You could hear the gators moaning, during the hot part of the day, when the big males would fight over sun patches, and I wanted to see one.” She shook her head. “Ivy was just looking for trouble, though. I didn’t understand her, then, as a kid. She was angry that her dad left her and her mom, and she was always spoiling for a fight. Bad attention was better than no attention, in her book: I think she was starved for it. Her mama let her wear stuff that wasn’t appropriate for a girl that young, too much skin showing, red lipstick sometimes. She wanted to grow up quick and move on.”

Her accent thickened as she talked, the vowels rounding, consonants hung with lazy, dripping moss. He could see the swamp in his mind’s eye, hear its cicada drone and smell its damp earth.

“We found this shack, one day.” Her fingers toyed with the zipper teeth on his cut; a groove of tension tried to form between her brows, but it melted away on the next exhale. “There was a table inside. A buncha tools and rope. And liquor. I think it was some kinda home brew. Strong shit. She drank some of it and got sick all over herself on the way back. The shack looked like it belonged to a hunter; there were crawfish traps. I never did find out if it belonged to Pastor Keith, or if he just…used it.” She gulped, and pressed gamely forward before he could interrupt.

“We saw him out there, once, before…it happened. He was smiling at us and he was just…” She shuddered. “You ever look at someone and know right away, deep down in your gut that there’s somethingwrongwith somebody? Like a snake wearing a person suit?”

“Yeah.”

“He’d never done anything, but I hated the sight of him. Didn’t wanna breathe the same air as him. I was too afraid to go back into the swamp after the day we ran into him, but Ivy…shit, Ivy insisted. He’d said something to her. Whispered to her. I have no idea what it was. If he’d invited her, or threatened her, or…I guess it doesn’t matter, in the end.

“She went out there. And I waited, and waited, and a thunderstorm blew up, and I thought I’d better go get her before Mama got back from work and tanned both our hides – her for going and me for not waking Daddy up and going after her. So I put on my rain jacket and ran out the back door.”

“You were…six?” he asked, sick over the idea of it. She was a petite adult; what a tiny, defenseless little slip of a thing she must have been. He could picture her raincoat sleeves over her little, fluttery bird hands, and the same look of determination she got now on a tiny, baby-soft jaw.

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