Page 8 of Long Way Down

Halfway up the front steps, a shadow detached itself from the darkness that cloaked the portico, and moved toward her.

Melissa had her feet braced and her gun out of her bag and leveled on the silhouette between one breath and the next. “I’m a cop,” she announced, heart slamming wild against her ribs, voice hard.

“Jeez, Dixie,” the shadow said, and shifted into the glow of the security light to reveal a mop of curls and a scatter of freckles like a constellation on his face. “Anybody ever tell you that you’ve got a hair trigger?”

As abruptly as it had kickstarted, her pulse lurched back to a gentle lope. The sudden drain of adrenaline left her feet and hands tingling. “Pongo?” As if she could mistake his face for anyone else’s.

Or the fact that he was sporting an ugly shiner.

His teeth flashed in the dark as he grinned. “Surprise. Also, don’t shoot, ‘kay? It would crush my ma.”

More than a little alarmed that she still had the barrel trained on him, she covered it with a huff of annoyance and slipped the gun back into her bag. “Your mother?” she asked, before she could help it. Shewascurious about him – even if it was simply an attempt to understand why she kept letting herself be drawn back into his orbit again and again – and it was hard to picture the sort of woman who’d birthed and raised him. He was infuriatingly enigmatic, despite the doofy grins and stupid hair.

“She’s kind of a big fan,” he said, pointing to himself, and then his grin sharpened. “Like you are.”

“Ugh.”

“Come on.” He followed her as she climbed the rest of the steps and fit her key in the lock. He smelled, she noted, like a bar. Beer and cigarettes with a hint of onion rings. “You know you’d miss me if I croaked. Maybe even more if you’d been the one to snuff me out yourself.”

The idea sent a pulse of alarm through her belly. She pushed the door open, and he kept following. “Nobody says ‘snuff’ anymore. It’s not the Prohibition Era,” she grumbled.

“Ha! See, that’s what I like about you, Dixie. You’re always in the know.”

“Don’t call me Dixie.”

“Gotta work on that accent, sweetheart, if you don’t want it to stick.”

She pressed the button for the elevator and turned to him. Inside, in the light of the lobby, his bad eye was purple going black, swollen nearly shut, the skin shiny with it. Her hand curled: a fast, checked impulse to shove the errant curl off his brow and examine it more closely. “What happened to your face?”

She’d meant to saywhat are you doing here?But as usual, he had a way of turning her thoughts upside down and bringing out her impulsive side.

He shrugged. “Oh, you know. You got a friendly game of pool going, the drinks keep coming, and next thing you know, some guy thinks you’re ‘makin’ eyes’” – here he used air quotes; the elevator arrived and he ushered her in with a grand, overly gallant gesture, swaggering in behind – “at his girl, and it didn’t matter that I said, ‘No, sir, I’m not looking, I’ve got a girl of my own – a real important lady cop, in fact.’ He wanted to throw hands, so what was I gonna do? Look like a pussy?” He sighed and propped a shoulder against the wall of the narrow elevator car.

“Now you look like a dumbass instead,” she quipped, and he snorted.

“You’re a real smartass, you know? It’s one of my favorite things about you.”

Favorite things about you. She chose not to investigate the way that made her feel. The way it wasthings, plural, could be devastating, if she allowed it.

“You got in a bar fight, then.”

“Yep. Totally cliché, right?”

“I don’t think I believe you.”

“Hey, it might not be original, but it happens. It happened to me.”

The elevator arrived with a ding, and she turned to him when the doors opened. He offered another grand arm gesture, his face, around the shiner, doing something polite that was somehow smug, and she hated it.

She stared at him a long moment, searching for cracks, finding none, as usual.

“M’lady,” he prompted, giving his wrist a twirl.

She narrowed her eyes at him, which made him grin, and then strode out of the elevator and down the hall, Pongo easily keeping pace with long-legged strides that looked casual, but which she knew concealed a wellspring of physical strength. He tended to wear bootcut jeans and baggy hoodies under his cut; loose clothes paired with his unruly mop of hair softened his appearance, lent him a certain innocence.

But clubs with reputations as violent and nasty as the Lean Dogs didn’t let anyone patch who couldn’t more than hold his own in a bar fight, and do far worse besides.

He was lying.