Page 66 of Long Way Down

“Sing Sing got back to me. We can see David Osborn at eleven tomorrow.”

The knowledge hit her like an espresso shot: it didn’t energize her body, but sent a pulse of adrenaline through her that intensified her headache and left her hands unsteady. “Huh. Alright.”

“Go home and get a good night’s sleep. Osborn’s tricky, and you’ll have to be at the top of your game. Warden says he prefers talking to women.”

She nodded, and gathered her stack of notebooks to keep her fingers from betraying their tremor. “Right.”

They turned out the lights, ensured her makeshift sign was still affixed to the conference room door, and headed back through the bullpen.

Where Pongo was waiting at her desk.

“Damn,” Contreras murmured. “Puppy’s got itbad.”

“You can’t call him that,” she whispered back, “he’ll probably like it.”

Contreras failed to smother a laugh in his palm and headed for the main door. “I’ll see you,” he called back over his shoulder. “Eleven, remember? And Pongo, good to meet you, man!”

“Yeah, you too,” Pongo said, hauling himself upright and arranging his hair. He tossed a lazy wave at Contreras’s back as he slipped out of sight, and then turned toward Melissa, elbow propped on the desk, chin landing in his open palm.

He was not, she noted, as sleepy as he was pretending to be. His eyes sparkled under the harsh lights, one corner of his mouth tugging upward in a smirk.

She couldn’t decide if it was anticipation or dread that kindled in her chest as she approached him, her breaths a little quicker and shallower, helpless but to respond to that hint of a smirk. “What?” she asked, when she stood beside the desk.

“You too tired?” he asked. “You headed straight home?” The way his tongue touched his lower lip, turning it shiny, suggested he could have had a host of alternatives on his mind, alternatives her body responded to with a flush of heat and a pulse of awareness.

“I need to get some rest. Big day tomorrow.”

His grin widened, flashing teeth. “That’s not what I asked, sweetheart.”

She glanced around, checking to see if anyone had heard the endearment. It was bad enough Contreras knew about him; she didn’t want her private business broadcast to the whole department. But Sloane was the only other detective still at her desk, absorbed in something on her computer, and the janitorial crew was busy unrolling the long, orange cord of the vacuum across the floor.

A touch landed on her wrist, two light fingertips over her pulse point, which meant he could feel the way her heart leaped in response. His grin had darkened, when she looked back at him.

Don’t, she thought.Don’t call me that. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t think my heart’s leaping becauseofyou.

But it was, and they both knew it.

She swallowed thickly. “Have you been sitting here the whole time?”

“No. I went out for a while and came back.” The light in his eyes shifted to a new kind of eagerness. “You still want to get one of those girls I told you about to come forward?”

Her heart leaped for a different reason, now. Her lungs flooded with the scent of the hunt. “Yeah. You got one of them to talk?”

“I might be able to, if you help me. Wanna take a ride?”

Outside, his bike sat matte, and black, and deadly in an understated way…in a no-parking zone.

“How have you not gotten a ticket?” she asked as they walked toward where it sat crouched beneath a streetlight, an unreflective void of wrapped pipes and flat paint.

“See, that’s the magic thing about being a Dog,” he said, chest puffing out with pride. “Even the cops don’t wanna fuck with you.”

“Or haven’t noticed you yet.”

“Oh, they’ve noticed.”

As if on cue, a patrol car crawled past, its windows down, the driver shooting them a dark look. He didn’t stop, though.

Melissa was a little bit impressed…and also disappointed that a criminal organization held that kind of sway over law enforcement.