In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan Read Free Book Online Page A

giving thanks when thanks were due. No funeral, but dead was dead, no matter what sort of spin anyone tried to put on the deal. The morgue and then the crematorium, ashes to ashes, dust back down to the grainy fur of dust again.
    Maybe it is because of the lack of finality, the ritual sense of closure that really only comes from standing in a church, crying through the words and then watching that boxed-up loved one slip down into the earth of a grave or be eaten up by the flames of a cremating furnace, that Melissa has refused to be chased entirely away. Wherever Johnny walks now he sees her, there on the familiar corners or tucked up in certain doorways, shielding herself from yet more of that dog day Sunday morning wind, there and just as real as breathing while the shadows keep their depth. Always out of reach though, and gone at the very moment he risks a step of approach, banished out of teasing or out of terror. Melissa had always delighted in a game of teasing, and she had more than earned her right to fear. So either is understandable. There she is as she might have been on her prettiest day, until just as he is about to step within reach, she is gone from him, dissipating first to a frail, smoky outline and then down to nothing at all. His heart breaks without fail every single time it happens, yet he falls for the trick over and over, both because he is helpless to resist and because he is afraid that if he doesn’t at least try then a day may come when she will vanish for good. The passing of time cannot so much as touch the ache of his loss, and because she feels so constantly near, the wound falls open and bleeds anew every day, but he tells himself that feeling pain is at least feeling alive, and that, apparently, is worth something.
    He stays in the city and he walks the streets, without hurry in his step, and the only way that he can go on is by holding fast to the lie that he is just walking, not thinking about her or looking for her at all, even when he is. Lies are like crutches, now just as much as always.
    Of course he understands that she is gone, dead, and that is clear in his mind as the very worst sort of fact because he was there, right there on the scene with the others when they found her after two entire days and nights of searching. Her body had lain slumped in that doorway after a long and bitterly cold night, there and beaten down to nothing, with her clothes torn away to expose her harried, rail-thin frame all glassy-skinned from the exposure and the malnourishment and wretched beyond nightmares. Something bestial had found her in the darkness and ripped out her throat, and all around her shattered carcass the snow was a thick and filthy brown, polluted from its proper crimson hue by the sullen amber cast of a lonely nearby streetlight. That obscene shade of brown was the only colour of any note in a sullen after-dawn cracking open into a new day, this one yet another aimless middle-stop in that long line of dog days, with January beating vicious one-two combinations into the front end of February. He was there on hand to see all that, and he understands completely what that means, that she is gone and he will be forever alone, but knowing that doesn’t stop the dreams. A man lost in the desert will dream of a drink of water and if he gives up the dream then he will die because there is no more reason to go on.
    Whoever was responsible for butchering Melissa down to chump had been as neat as doily lace about his work, skilled to the point of perfection that only came with stone-hard practice. A man that good with a knife poses a genuine threat everyone, even to society’s upper echelons. They’d look for him, the police would, not so much because he’d done what he had done to Melissa, but because of the very fact that he’d done this at all, that he was imbued with enough poison in his veins and hatred in his heart to be able to take up a tool designed for nothing more