Days ago, I’d been so eager to catch those slaps on Jackal’s bedside mic. What great leverage they’d have been. I forced myself to shake it off, count backward from fifty until my head cleared. If I fell down that self-loathing path now, I’d be no use to Ellen or myself.

“. . . and you told me, you said, ‘Make him pay,’ and that’s what I . . . that’s what I thought . . .” She circled her hands in the direction of the ruined producer, fingers flopping and jerking from loose wrists.

“Wait, stop. Start over,” I said. Make him pay. Jesus Christ. Come on, Jo, get a grip. “Why was he even here?”

But I knew the answer to that one, or could guess. Which way had the call gone—inbound or outbound? Sorry, baby, let me make last night up to you. The same script, from either party. In the end, it didn’t matter. Here we were.

Instead of answering, Ellen’s face crumpled and she sobbed into her hands.

I let her sob. I walked back to the bedroom door, staring at the thickening black pool behind what was left of Klein’s head. One day before the sting. One day before I would have had my money back, before the Lady would have canceled the debt. I closed my eyes for a moment against the wave of nausea that burned my stomach. I’d been so close.

And now, instead of cash, I’d be laying a dead body at her feet.

From the corner of my eye, I saw something on the bed move and I flinched, but it was only his hand, made slippery with blood, settling. I turned away from the body and walked to Ellen’s window, the one I’d been on the other side of a few days prior, and peered down into the street. No one congregating in the alleyway, making notes about a suspected murder. No one outside at all, in fact. A fire escape that looked like it had seen very little use.

I hadn’t known what to bring, hadn’t been thinking at all, in fact. All I’d wanted to do was get in the car and see for myself. I hadn’t thought to bring anything to cover the body, and I didn’t even stock cleaning materials in serious supply in my own apartment. We’d have to use whatever Ellen had on hand. I looked around the living room—not so much as a wheeled bar cart we could’ve used to move him. I left Ellen chattering away in the living room, confessing everything to the walls like someone was capable of absolving her, and poked into her bathroom.