Page 34 of Long Way Down

“Holy fuck,” he breathed. “Holyshit.”

“What?” A spike of adrenaline set her pulse lurching. He was excited, and it was infectious. “What?” she repeated, when he only stared at her, eyes big.

“Holy – okay.” He shoved his plate aside and leaned forward, arms braced on the island. His eye contact was intense and unwavering; it raised goosebumps on the back of her neck. “Iknewthere was something up with you wanting to watch that movie. And get this,” he continued, before she could protest. “This morning, when I left here, a guy reached out to me about somebody getting raped, and the freak who did itcarved those same words into her back. ‘This one’s for you, Davey.’ Great big in scabs all over her.” He gestured to his own back over his shoulder in demonstration.

“Somebody got – but we didn’t get the–” A frantic sense of having missed out on a case gave way, a beat later, to horror, and ground her to her a halt. “Wait. You said he…carvedthe wordsinto her back?”

“Sick, right? It’s gonna scar something gnarly.”

“You saw it?”

“Yeah. Her boss says she’s pretty shook up about it.”

“Her boss.” All the heat that had gathered in response to his gaze dissipated, stomach sour in its wake. “She’s a hooker?”

He pulled a face. “And here I’ve been trying to be delicate saying ‘working girl’ all day.”

“Is she? Stop fucking around. I don’t care what she does for a living, if she was raped, she needs to report it. It has to be the same guy, and we’ve got shit for leads right now.”

He frowned. “I can ask, but I’m betting she won’t wanna talk to the cops.”

“Won’t want to? Or won’t beallowedto by herboss?”

“I said I can ask. That’s the best I can do.”

“Pongo,” she said, growing impatient, “if there’s other victims out there besides mine, I need to know about them. When, where, how? Did she get a look at him? Was he a john who got violent? If I’m gonna catch this bastard, I need details! Not to mention, cutting a message into a vic is a whole other MO than leaving a handwritten note behind.”

He didn’t back down. “I hear you, but what makes you think a prostitute would ever go to the cops for help?”

“Because I’m Sex Crimes, and I don’t give two shits what she charges for a hand job. I can work out a deal with a judge, make sure her and her pimp won’t face charges in exchange for their cooperation.”

He flicked a wry grin. “You can offer that, you can even mean it, but it doesn’t mean it’ll work out. How many times is somebody promised immunity or a plea deal or something, and then it all falls apart after the prosecutor gets what he wants?”

She struggled to form a response that wasn’tI don’t know. Because he was infuriatingly right: she could hope, and she could try, but she couldn’t promise definitive protection. “Did you at least take pictures? Did she give you anything useful?”

“Even if I did, none of it would be admissible in court.”

She ground her teeth, because he was rightagain. “Fuck,” she muttered under her breath.

“This is why.”

“What?”

“You asked me a while back why anyone would want to become a Lean Dog. You asked if motorcycles were really that special, or if I had a leather fetish.” He tilted his head, grin edged with sharpness, and her face heated as she recalled that conversation, the way she’d downright insulted him in an effort to get rid of him.

They’d wound up fucking up against her bedroom door, clothes half-torn off and hands clutching bruises into one another’s skin.

“Thisis why,” he continued. “It’s why I am, at least, and why a lot of my brothers are, too. Because we don’t need warrants. Nothing has to play out to a jury.”

“You arguing in favor of vigilante justice isn’t all that helpful.”

“Come on, Dixie.” He leaned closer, tone earnest. “Haven’t you ever – at least once – seen somebody who was just the worst piece of shit, total scum of the earth, get to spend his life in a cell, or, even worse, get off scot-free, and thoughtI wish somebody’d off the motherfucker?”

Knowing pale eyes gleaming at her behind the lenses of glasses. Small teeth and a too-wide smile.Hello, Miss Melissa.

It hurt to swallow. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she snapped. “What matters is that I do my job, and that’s finding and arresting this scumbag. If you have something helpful to contribute, fine, but if not, then screw you.”

Anger boiled beneath her skin, an old, ugly, impotent rage that had plagued her since she was six-years-old, when Pastor Keith mounted the dais at the front of the funeral home, and stood above the coffin draped with lilies, and read bible verses chosen to ease their grief over the tragic, untimely loss of Ivy Grace Jones. An anger that could choke her; that could shred her, if she let it.