Page 121 of Long Way Down

“Dixie,” he said, strained, tense. His gaze flicked up over her head, to Doug’s face, and his jaw flexed, a muscle in his cheek leaping.

The man beside him said, “Put the gun away,” a low aside.

“Fuck that.” Pongo lifted it, instead.

The knife pressed in harder. “I’ll cut her face off,” Doug shouted. “I swear to God, I’ll pop her eye outta her fucking skull!”

Pongo hesitated.

Melissa said, “It’s fine. I’m fine.” Her mouth tasted like cardboard.

Behind her, Contreras called out, deep and booming, a projected police voice. “Doug, release Detective Dixon and step away from her now.”

Now he was cornered. Pressed against him like she was, she felt his full-body shudder, the twitching and flexing of an animal at bay. Felt too that he was hard, cock stiff at the small of her back. A chemical response, or, more likely, the thrill of wrongdoing.

“I said,” he screamed, “I’d cut off her face! Put the guns down! Put all the guns down!” His hand spasmed tight on her throat, forcing her breath out in a gasp. “You, too,” he hissed in her ear, spraying the side of her face with saliva; she could hear his teeth chattering. “Drop the fucking gun.”

“Okay, okay,” she wheezed. Slowly, slowly, she lowered her arms to her sides.

And shot out his kneecap.

The hand at her temple spasmed, and she felt a slice of cold, and then a fast bloom of heat along her hairline. Doug howled and dropped in the same moment; she heard the meaty thump of his uncoordinated plummet.

Gun still in her hand, she spun around, and found him in a crumpled heap on the floor, a pool of blood rapidly expanding beneath him. The entry wound was right on the meniscus, a hole in the denim and a peek of flesh and blood. On the floor below, beneath the exit wound, was a much messier scene: chunks of meat, ivory bone chips, gush of blood.

The knife had fallen and lay three feet away, its edge wet and crimson with blood. Doug clutched at his ruined knee and howled like an ambulance siren, an ugly, ululating wail. He lifted his face, also wet and crimson, snot leaking from his nose, eyes glassy but fixed on her with hate – and fear, now. He was petrified.

Melissa holstered her gun, and kicked him in the face. Hard. She heard a crunch as his nose broke, and he keeled backward, boneless, head striking the floorboards with a dull thunk like a dropped melon.

Twenty-Three

“It’s fine, really,” Melissa tried to protest, but the medic pushed past her attempted waving-off and dabbed at the side of her head with a bundle of gauze.

“You lost a lot of blood,” she said, frowning.

“Did I?” Maybe that was why she was light-headed.

She sat on the bench where she’d taken the boys to wait for their interview. That felt like a lifetime ago, now, but in the minutes that had passed since Doug fell back, unconscious, the whole atmosphere of the building had changed.

Contreras had been the first to reach her, gun still drawn. He’d gripped her upper arm with his free hand. “You okay?” He moved as if to touch her head, thought better of it, and fished a handkerchief out of his pocket instead. When she nodded, he’d said, “Here, hold this on it. Put pressure.”

She complied, unable to feel her injury…unable to feel anything, really, and stood there holding the clean cotton to her temple while Contreras knelt to check Doug’s pulse and then called for a bus and backup.

Noise from the bystanders had swelled: shouting, screaming, crying. A hundred conversations battling back and forth, filling the hall with an insect buzz. A new hand had gripped her arm, and she’d flinched, hand moving toward her holstered gun.

“Dixie.” Oh. Right. Pongo. It was an effort to turn her head, and even then she had trouble parsing his expression, the flicker of his gaze across her face and the hectic color in his freckled cheeks. “Shit,” he murmured, and reached for the handkerchief. “I tried to call. I got here as fast as I could.”

She held onto the cloth, but let him lift it away so he could wince at her injury. “I’m fine,” she said.

“Pongo,” Contreras said, joining them. His face was doing Very Serious Things. “You’ve gotta get out of here, man. You and your friend, go.”

“But…” Pongo was cradling the side of her face in one hand, thumb sweeping over her cheek. He looked downright anguished.

“You have to,” Contreras said. “It’s bad enough you’re on camera, probably. We can’t afford to have the Dogs associated with this case. You’re wearing your cut.”

Pongo’s eyes widened. “Shit. Yeah.”

The man she didn’t know appeared behind him and tugged at the back of said cut. “Come on,” he said, tone as hard as his expression. There was a big tattoo on the back of his hand, she saw. “She’s gotta do her thing.Come on.”