Page 75 of Long Way Down

“Damn,” Dixie murmured.

“One of my buddies called the cops, and another one came and helped me sit on him. He cut up my arm, there was blood all over the place.” He pushed up his sleeve and tilted his arm so the light would catch the faint, silvery line that curved along the underside. “But I knocked his knife away. It felt like it took forever for anyone to show up, and he was fighting the whole time, screaming at us and clawing at us – he had these long nails and he scratched Benji up pretty bad. He was bleeding, too.”

He remembered the reek of the man’s breath, the wild, white-rimmed rolling of his eyes.“Hell, hell, you’re all going to hell! Satan’s minions! Antichrist! Damn you all to hell!”

“After, when they finally got him in handcuffs, I got another look at the knife, and I realized the stains on it were blood. He’d stabbed other people, just like he was gonna stab that little girl.”

She watched him with rapt attention, blue eyes wide. She’d never looked at him like this before, transfixed, and the novelty of that softened the sour taste this story always left in his mouth.

“The cops who came to get him told us that they’d picked him up a few times before. That they’d taken tire irons and other knives and even a golf club off of him before. He was homeless, and had some sort of psychosis or something – swore he saw angels and demons walking on earth. They said he always freaked out the other guys in the drunk tank when they took him in.

“They used that word specifically:always. They were always arresting him, and he was always getting back out. I asked them what would happen when he finally killed somebody, and they shrugged and said then the DA’s office would slap a murder charge on him, but that a public defender would plead insanity.”

Her gaze hardened, anger flexing the tendons in her throat.

“Three weeks later, I heard screaming again. It was that same guy, and he had backed this group of girls in against a dumpster. He had a big long-handled wrench, stainless steel, and I watched him hit one of them across the face with it. She went down like a sack of bricks. I yelled, and started running, but he didn’t hear me coming. He cocked his arm back to hit the next one, and I took the wrench out of his hand and hit him with it. Right here.” He touched his own temple.

He hadn’t meant to deal a lethal blow. But with his heart leaping, adrenaline flooding his veins, with one girl on the ground and the others screaming, he’d swung hard – harder than he’d known he was capable. The head of the wrench met flesh with a wet crunching sound, and through the handle he’d felt something give in the man’s skull, a sensation like busting through ice with a hatchet.

The man staggered sideways, struggling to keep his feet, clutching at the air and bellowing like a bull. He was tilting, swaying; blood trickled out of his ear and there was no way he could attack anyone else in that shape. A light shove would have sent him to the ground. Pongo could have pinned him down without much effort and told one of the girls to call 9-1-1.

“I thought about what the cops said last time. About him getting let back out. The girl was just lying there, and maybe she was dead, I dunno, but…I hit him again. I hit him again several times.”

The wrench came away bloody with the last strike.

“I hit him until he stopped twitching.”

It had been staggering at the time, that wellspring of aggression. The fortitude to hit and keep hitting. He hadn’t felt sickened; hadn’t been appalled by his actions. It had feltright. Had felt like the best and only option.

“Then,” he said, tone darkening, “the cops came, and they putmein handcuffs.”

“Shit. What’d they stick you with?”

“Man 2. Didn’t charge me as an adult, so, I had to do community service, probation, and mandatory therapy. That’s how I met Maverick, actually. He was running a workshop at the camp.”

Her brows lifted in clear surprise. “Was that some sort of community service forhim?”

“Nah. He was volunteering. I remember: my first day, he told us all that he knew what it was like to be young and pissed off and to not have anyone to look up to.” He snorted. “I thought he was full of shit, and I didn’t need him. I had my dad, and he was a good guy.

“Never beat anybody to death with a wrench, though.” He tried to get a sense for her mood, now, and struggled. She watched him closely, brows furrowed, frowning, but he thought she looked more concerned than anything. “I guess what I’m getting at,” he said, “is that, after that, I looked at everything differently. All that right and wrong, good and bad my parents talked about growing up, that only applied at home. Out in the real world, being good didn’t mean shit. You could do bad, and keep rocking along, unbothered…until someone who’d had enough put a wrench through your head.”

She blinked.

“So, yeah. That was my ‘aha’ moment. I joined the club ‘cause it makes sense to me. When the club says they care about you, they really do. If they want you dead, you’re fish food. But the government’s full ofshit. I don’t know how you sleep working for it, I really don’t. But you’re persistent. Youcare. And I think there’s a reason for it. Ithinkit’s the same reason you looked like you’d seen a ghost when we walked into that club.”

Her lips pressed tight together, color bleeding out of them.

“That’s my guess. An educated guess, maybe, given what I’m a part of and what I’ve seen. And if I’m right, I think maybe I could understand that reason, if you told me. Maybe even better than anyone.”

He let out a deep breath. “That’s all I wanted to say. You can tell me to fuck off, now, if you want.”

His pulse was thumping, heartbeat echoing in his palms and the soles of his feet, toes curled tight around the stool rung. He’d felt like he’d just bet everything, and the roulette wheel was spinning, spinning, spinning…

She turned away, lashes falling, mouth softening into a frown. “Maybe,” she said, quietly. “I didn’t kill anyone…but I wish I had.”

He’d been right! There was something more to it, and finally, finally she was going to tell him.

Except…

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