Chapter 4 4

The safe house was an apartment on the fourth floor of a building scheduled for demolition. Jessie climbed the fire escape, the chill of the Las Vegas night a welcome relief after two days on a bus. She'd walked for an hour from the station, doubling back, changing direction, making sure she wasn't followed.

The window was unlocked, like she'd left it. She climbed through, closed it, pulled the blackout curtains. Then she let herself fall onto the mattress on the floor.

She lay there, breathing, counting. When she reached sixty, she sat up. When she reached one-twenty, she stood. When she reached one-eighty, she started moving.

First, the hoodie. The white skull on the back was a liability, a beacon. She pulled it off, the cheap cotton smelling of rain and fear. She carried it to the metal barrel in the corner, the one she'd prepared weeks ago for exactly this moment. She dropped it in. She lit a match.

The skull burned. The cheap cotton caught fast, the white pattern blackening, curling, disappearing. She watched until there was nothing but ash, then stirred the ash with a stick until it was unrecognizable.

She turned to the mirror. Her face was pale, drawn, her eyes too bright. She needed to disappear.

She opened the closet.

The clothes inside were another life. Baggy jeans with holes in the knees. T-shirts three sizes too large, stained with coffee, with grease, with the careful application of makeup that looked like dirt. She dressed in them, layer by layer, transforming.

She found the scissors. She looked at her hair in the mirror-long, dark, distinctive, the way it had been since she was sixteen. She grabbed a handful and cut. The sound was loud in the empty room. The hair fell around her feet, a dark halo.

She cut again. And again. Until what was left was choppy, uneven, falling across her face in a way that hid her eyes, her cheekbones, everything that might be remembered.

She added the glasses. Thick black frames, no prescription, bought from a costume shop. She added the makeup, the special clay that created freckles, the powder that dulled her skin to gray.

She stood straight, then deliberately slumped. She let her shoulders roll forward, her spine curve, her chin drop. She practiced breathing through her mouth, short and shallow, the way asthmatics did, the way victims did.

The mirror showed a stranger. A girl who'd given up. A girl who'd never fought back, never held a knife, never cut a man's wrist in the dark woods and watched him live.

Jessie nodded at her reflection. She took a deep breath. Now, she could move. The last pill was gone. She needed more, and she knew where to get it.