Her Christmas mornings were never like that. She got presents. Mookie gave Mom money, Mom bought stuff. But Mookie – Dad, ugh – was never there. Maybe he was when she was really little, but by the time she was seven or eight, he hardly ever left the city. When he did, he and Mom fought like a mongoose and a cobra. Few times a year she saw him, he was itchy, edgy, sleep-deprived. Beaten to hell, too. Mom would patch him up. She even got good at stitches. That was the one time the two of them didn’t fight. He’d sit on the toilet, wincing and bleeding. And Mom would hover at his side, behind him, in front – Bactine, Band-Aids, gauze, peroxide, swabs, needle, thread, a fistful of Tylenol. Bloody rags in a trashcan. Stain-stick for the shirts.

That’s what she really wanted for Christmas in those days: just to have Daddy come home and be with her.

But that turned sour by the time she was a teenager.

No amount of money he’d send would matter.

And now all that money is hers, anyway.

Sometimes she thinks: I can still take the inheritance. I can still blow town. I can go anywhere I want.

She thinks that, but she keeps going up, up, up.

Six floors. Seven.

It’s on the seventh floor that she sees the first fly.

A fat one, too. Fat like he’s been feasting on a Thanksgiving turkey.

Buzz, buzz.

Eighth floor.

That’s when she sees the gun.

It’s just lying there. Little .38 snubnose. Blued pitted steel.

Three steps up above that is an empty .38 shell.

She smells it, then, the stink of gunpowder. Hanging there. Not too strong.

But there just the same.

Alarm bells go off. Run run run.

No. Hold your ground, she tells herself. This is New York Fucking City. Stand tall. Hang tough. Nobody abides a coward in this town. You want to go up against the Organization, you can’t shake like a leaf anytime there’s a stiff breeze.

Ninth floor.

Blood. Just a speckling – a few flecks of it. Still a little wet. Not dried yet.

Turn and go, nobody will know you were here. This isn’t good–

She has to see. Has to know. Information is power. If she comes and goes without finding out what happened, what’s the value? There has to be value. She has to own this, earn this, learn something she can use.

At the top of the tenth floor steps, she sees a dark-skinned hand draped between the bars of the stairway railing.

She’s shaking now. Trying not to, but shaking.

A leaf in a wind.

Shut up.

Stupid girl. Don’t be weak.

Keep walking.

Walking.

To the top.

Bodies. Five here. Hoodies. Crowns. Halos. Blood.

One shot in the head, his brains caught by the hood of his sweatshirt. Another with bullets stitched across his chest.