Page 13 of Long Way Down

Through the grimy window, the plaid shirt moved again. The door slowly opened inward, its warped boards scraping and juddering across the dirt floor within. Dappled sunlight skimmed up a pair of jeans, a belt, the plaid shirt, red and yellow. A man ducked under the lintel and out into the shack’s little weed-choked yard, and the trembling in Melissa’s belly eased when light glinted off his glasses.

“Oh,” Ivy said, sounding disappointed. “It’s Pastor Keith.”

~*~

The sun was coming up. Not fully, but the skyline through the window glowed pink in the narrow gaps between the curtains. Windows in the apartments and offices opposite glowed yellow, inhabitants waking, beginning their days…people who probably hadn’t wasted their few available hours of sleep on a crappy thriller movie.

It was easier, Melissa reflected as she spat her toothpaste in the sink and ran a brush hurriedly through her hair, to think of it as “crappy,” because then she didn’t get caught up in the way it had left her skin crawling. To civilians, it had probably been scintillating: an imaginary crime to get their hearts vicariously racing before they switched off the TV and resumed their ordinary, boring lives. But to her, it wasn’t fiction. Even if the lines had been written, and performances given by paid actors, the crimes committed were all too real.

Had clearly inspired a copycat.

She regarded her too-pale reflection a long moment, wishing away the dark bags beneath her eyes, that prey-animal gleam of fright in her eyes. She pinched her cheeks, hard, the way her mother used to do in the mirror.Better than blush, she would say.

But the pinch faded, after a few minutes. Wasn’t a proper mask like cosmetics.

In the living room, Pongo was still sacked out on the sofa. His head was tipped back, curls crushed against the cushion, and his mouth had fallen open. He was snoring.

She knew a moment’s temptation to leave him. To scribble a note on a Post-It and slip quietly out. The thought of him being here when she returned, ragged and haunted by Lana Preston’s firsthand account, was so sweet it left her teeth aching.

It was dangerous. Leaving him here while she was out showed trust.Wastrust. And she trusted no one.

Besides, he might get the impression she liked him or something.

“Pongo,” she said, firmly, and her shake was firm, too, as she gripped his shoulder and urged him awake. “Pongo, time to get up.”

He woke like a baby rather than an outlaw, all long-lashed slow blinks (from his good eye), and innocent, deep-groan stretches. He pushed his hair off his face as he sat up, grimacing as he probed his bad eye with the careful fingertips of his other hand. “’Time is it?”

“Time to get up,” she repeated. “I got called in, which means you need to go.”

“Aw, really?” He frowned. “But I just got here.”

“You’ve been asleep for an hour.” She fetched her gun and badge from her bag and strapped both onto her waistband where they’d show beneath her jacket. “Come on,get up.”

“Fine, fine.” He made a show of getting to his feet. She’d clocked that routine early on…but it didn’t mean she was immune to it. She bent forward now, foot up on the coffee table, so she could lace her boots…but she snuck a glance through the fall of her hair to watch him stretch both arms overhead in a way that lifted the hem of his hoodie and flashed a strip of chiseled stomach. He liked to affect a nonchalant attitude, but somewhere, somehow, he spenta lotof time in the gym. She didn’t know how old he was, but assumed it was at least a few years younger than her, and definitely younger than the guys she worked with. He had the young-god body of an overgrown twenty-something, and of all his faults, she’d never complained aboutthat.

She didn’t want to be caught watching, though.

“Pongo–” she started, voice tight with impatience.

“I’m going. Hey, look at me, here I go to get my shoes.” He shot her a grin as he backed into the foyer and stepped into his boots. “You in a rush, doll?”

She let her flat look sayno shit.

“New scene?” he pressed, crouching to do up the laces.

“Hospital, actually,” she said, against her better judgement, cursing internally. She wasn’t as immune to his curiosity as she used to be, either. “Our vic woke up.”

“Damn, she got really roughed up, huh?”

“Yeah.” She snagged a canned espresso out of the fridge and shooed him to and through the door, locking it behind them both.

“Hey,” he said, as she was pocketing her keys. His tone had changed – serious, now, undercut with an edge oflook at me. Laced with softness. It hit her like a shove, and left her helpless to do anything but lift her head and meet his gaze.

Even with one eye swollen shut, he managed an expression that both beckoned and bolstered. It was a unique quality of his, the ability to smolder and look like he was offering comfort at the same time. It was proof that, no matter what he said, or how goofy he tried to play, a true intelligence lay beneath his freckled surface, one he played close and dealt only in the subtlest of ways. An intelligence he’d doled out one heated, flashing look at a time the night they met, mixing dangerously with her whiskey-and-sodas until all her usual reservations crumbled.

“You got this, yeah?” he said. “Give ‘em hell, Dixie.”

She swallowed with difficulty. “I keep asking you not to call me that.”