I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off the bed. She kicked Klein on the way down and gave a faint yelp. I pressed a hand over her mouth, gripping her cheeks so hard they turned white.

“We have to go now.”

Klein wasn’t a big man, a little taller than Ellen but not as tall as me, and while not thin, per se, not exactly fat, either, but he was heavier than I’d expected him to be and more difficult to hold on to. The blood made him slippery, and the feeling of his guts on my hands made the hackles at the back of my neck rise so that I jerked and nearly dropped him every time I thought I felt a slickness on my palms. Soon Ellen and I were sweating, wrestling the bedding and shower curtain around the body—starting to smell, which wasn’t helping matters, either—clipping Klein into place with the bungee cords.

“Oh God,” Ellen muttered as the body slumped against the bed frame, neck jammed unnaturally against the wood. Then she bent over and threw up on the floor, most of the splatter hitting the shower curtain tucked around him and outlining his sunken face in wet bile. I didn’t say anything as she apologized over and over again. I was too busy trying not to stare, trying not to get sick myself.

“Now or never,” I said, as much to myself as to Ellen, and grabbed him under the armpits. He was heavy and sagged unnaturally between us—a human hammock—but we got him to the window. Before I knew it, I had my arms full of dead producer on her fire escape, feeling backward with my toe for the next step, trying not to breathe through my nose, not to groan or trip or make any noise at all.

Together, we bumped him down the stairs. The shower curtain slipped once, and I caught a glimpse that made me queasy. I stopped to cover him back up so that I didn’t throw up, too. The entire time, a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, like even as everything was lurching forward without my permission—the dead producer, having to bring the car around to the alley before we could completely douse the apartment in bleach—it was all happening exactly the way it should.