She twisted away and pressed her back flat against the seat again with another deep exhale. She felt cleansed. She felt like he was probably going to tell their captain she was unhinged. “Aw, fuck,” she said, tiredly. “He was a sick freak, and a pedo, and a murderer, but Keith was probably right about one thing: I’m going to hell.”
Quiet reigned a long moment, filled with the hum of the engine and the regular, flashing bars of yellow from the lights they passed beneath; they panned across the car like spotlights, gliding over her knees, and the dash, and his hands on the wheel before the dark swallowed them again.
Finally, in a surprisingly warm tone, he said, “Well, I don’t have a pastor, but I have a priest. A padre. Been going to the same mass since I was this big.” He held his hand a scant inch off the top of the center console. “And he’s got this saying, yeah? I always liked it. He says, ‘Hell is an awfully long way down.’ We all have sins, yes, but yours aren’t so heavy as all that. You didn’t fall too far.”
Taillights glowed red in front of them, and silhouettes shifted behind all the lighted windows that glowed around them; people moving in their own private worlds, acting out their own private dramas. The good, the bad, the evil, all existing in little parallel pockets. How many heavy conversations like this one were taking place behind those twitching curtains? Was anyone else as lucky as her, to have not one, but two men in her corner? Not absolving, no, because not even Contreras’s padre could do that…but listening. Hearing. Accepting.
She felt a smile tug at her mouth. “A long way down,” she murmured. “I like that.”
“Thought you might. And just think: Pastor Keith’s down there saving some seats.”
She barked a shocked laugh, and he echoed it.
From Long Way Down, Lean Dogs Legacy Book IV
Sometimes a book is conceptualized over months and years, planned far in advance of the writing of it. And sometimes a book is a spontaneous event, thrusting up through the cracks like a stubborn weed and demanding immediate attention. All of them begin with the characters - understanding who they are, what they want, what keeps them up at night - but in the early stages, there's usually one scene that coalesces in my mind and drives the rest of the planning process. That one scene, one moment, one line, one mental image I'm working toward the whole time.
In the case of Long Way Down, the scene above, Rob's quote that provides the book with its title, was that scene. I had the book named before I'd put down the first line of it, and I knew from the get-go what Melissa needed to learn over the course of the novel. In this way, writing was quick, and clean, and I sat down at the computer each day knowing exactly what I needed to achieve in each writing session.
But Long Way Down was not one of those Big Plan, Bigger Picture books. It wasn't planned far in advance, the way books like Loverboy or The Wild Charge were. The Wild Charge was in fact the inspiration for it: Melissa was supposed to be a throwaway side character whose existence helped the Dogs further their goals, and she was that...but her scene with Pongo proved inspiring: she had a story of her own to tell, and a big, rattly skeleton in her closet, and I knew by the time I typed THE END on TWC that I wanted to tell her story, and Pongo's, too.
It's Melissa's book, though. The club is there, and we learn more about them, and meet some new faces, and see more of Toly, which sets us up for Nothing More...but Missy carries the largest portion of the narrative. A risk, given I've not had the best reader response in the past to my female characters who are...shall we say...prickly. It would seem that writing a woman who is resistant to the idea of romance, and who has a more practical, unromantic, foul-mouthed approach to life is not all that popular with most audiences. I argue that if male characters are allowed to be thus flawed, why not the women, too? Melissa has become one of my favorite leading ladies, alongside Amelia Drake, and Lisa Russell. Her emotional struggle in this novel was one of the most seamless, inspired character arcs I've written in the past few years.
The book sidesteps the more obvious, in-your-face trademarks of an "MC book." The club is there, and the bikes are there, but at its heart, this is a detective novel. It was a fun change of pace. I especially loved writing the interviews with Osborn. I've talked previously about my love for Thomas Harris's novels, and both Hopkins' and Mikkelsen's portrayals of Hannibal Lecter, and so I loved getting to write those Interview With a Psychopath moments.
I *think* Long Way Down can be read as a standalone crime novel, though do recommend reading it in order with the others in the series. Melissa, and Rob, and of course Toly all appear in Nothing More - out now! - and in it, Melissa finds herself even more deeply entangled with the club, a situation she still marvels over. Long Way Down helps explain, though, why she's ready to trust and protect outlaws. She learned a long time ago that sometimes, the right thing isn't always the legal thing.
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