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“Cents?” I hoped.
Riggs laughed. I whimpered. When we left her office, he patted my back.
“Don’t worry, Poppins. We’ll sell your organs on the black market.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
DUFFY
Riggs wasn’t joking.
Abandoned prisonwasn’t a euphemism for something else.
It wasactuallywhere he’d taken me.
“Is that ...?” My breath hitched. I put a hand to my heart, only to find it trying to drill its way out of my chest and run away, like the rest of me should.
Riggs and I were upstate, at the Northeastern Penitentiary, where he’d so far taken hundreds of pictures of eerie kitchens, exposed walls, rat-riddled corridors, and dirt roads. Now we were in a particularly small room, and I was standing in front of a funny-looking seat, running my fingers over its headrest.
“An electric chair?” Riggs crouched on one knee, camera in hand, taking a picture of the chair. “Yup. That’s Old Sparky, all right. Now get out of the frame, Poppins.”
I gasped, jumping back. “Bollocks. I touched it.”
“You do know it’s not plugged in anymore, right?” He moved across the room to take a picture from a different angle.
“So what? Itouchedit, Riggs.” I was hyperventilating. “People died on this thing. Their eyes popped out while they were sitting here.”
“That’s a myth, kid.”
“Is it, though?”
“They used to cover their eyes so they wouldn’t roll on the floor and weird everyone out.” He snapped his gum, taking position on the other side of the room, his cameraclick-click-clickingaway. “Besides, it’s not like now that you touched it, the ghost of a gnarly-looking executed murderer is going to chase you.”
“I think I’m gonna throw up.” I clutched my stomach.
“I see a theme here.” Riggs chuckled. “You should get checked for reflux.”
Mumbling something unintelligible toward him, I created more space between the chair and me. The chair was rooted to the floor, its red vinyl pads still pristine, in contrast to the ruins around it.
Wait a minute. Red vinyl pads ...
It was a barber chair.
I hurried to Riggs, smacking his shoulder. Said shoulder was already quivering with barely restrained laughter, making the camera shake in his hands.
“You bastard!”
“Come on! In the words of every asshole who deserves to be locked behind bars for rape—you were asking for it.” He snickered, straightening.
“Just like them,youdeserve to be castrated.” I shoved at his chest.
He grabbed my wrist and kissed the inside of it, in the sensitive spot where you spritz your perfume. “That’s very convenient of you, Daphne.”
Daphne?“Convenient how?” I eyed him suspiciously.
“You using the goods, then throwing them away.” He gave me his back. “Grab my backpack. Let’s get more pictures of those rusty exposed pipelines. They were cool.”
I grabbed his heavy backpack, trailing behind him. Riggs had put me to work in the five hours we’d spent together. If I thought he wasgoing to hand me free cash because he felt bad for me, I was sorely mistaken. I set up umbrella reflectors, carried his equipment, cleared spaces he wanted to take pictures of, fetched him water, did all the driving from prison to prison, and kept a chart of all the places we’d been to, the names, the rooms, the history—everything.
