In retaliation, someone close to Gee shot Mikey. However, Mikey ended up killing Gee, the wrong man. The reader learns that Will's father Mikey died because he tried to abide by The Rules and avenge Uncle Mark’s death. Will has no memories of his father, but he feels an immediate connection when they hug. On the next floor, Will's father gets on the elevator. Will digresses to tell the story of how Mark was killed in a battle for drug-dealing turf after he started selling drugs to earn enough to buy a camera and be a filmmaker. Uncle Mark is friendly with Will, but also challenges him on his certainty that he is capable of killing Riggs.

On the next floor, the ghost of Will's uncle Mark steps on. Dani asks will whether he has considered the possibility that he could miss his shot, potentially harming an innocent bystander. Will flirts with her until she reveals she is Dani, a childhood friend who died before Will's eyes when they were eight.

Buck lights a cigarette and the elevator stops on the next floor, having moved incredibly slowly between floors.Īn attractive girl Will's age gets on. Will attempts to act like a gangster, although he has never fired a gun. Buck also reveals that the gun in Will's waistband used to belong to him. Buck teases Will, implying that he does not have it in him to exact revenge. However, he is visited by the ghost of Buck, a local gangster who was once a father figure to him and Shawn. Will gets in the elevator to go down to the lobby. Will is convinced Riggs must have been the killer, despite the fact that he didn't see the shooting. He plans to shoot Carlson Riggs, a former friend of Shawn’s, who belongs to the Dark Suns gang.

He sleeps with it under his pillow and slips out of the apartment while his mother is asleep. He lies in his bed and suppresses his tears, because The Rules for dealing with the death of a loved one are: 1) No crying, 2) Don't snitch, and 3) Get revenge by killing the killer. Will returns to his mother's eighth-floor apartment and listens to his mother sobbing in the kitchen. This happens with every shooting because The Rules dictate that nobody ever snitches. When the police come, none of the witnesses will say that they saw anything. Will notes that the killers didn't steal Shawn's gold necklace. Their mother is distraught and moaning, while Shawn’s girlfriend, Leticia, kneels over the body and screams. Will goes back to the day, explaining that he is talking with his friend Tony when Shawn is shot outside their building. Written in verse and narrated in the first person by Will Holloman, a fifteen-year-old Black American, Long Way Downopens with Will revealing that his older brother, Shawn, was killed two days earlier.

Long way down book