#TeaserTuesday - Long Way Down

I've spent the day making excellent progress on the next Dartmoor installment - this one's actually going to be a Lean Dogs Legacy novel, for classification purposes. It takes place in New York (and a little bit of Mississippi) and focuses on Melissa Dixon and Pongo, both introduced in The Wild Charge. In a previous post, I described it as Silence of the Lambs meets Law & Order, and I'm sticking with that comparison for now. It's a bit of a tighter story, if you will, focusing on our main couple and their personal issues, rather than the club action as a whole - though there will be references to all that's happened in the Dartmoor universe thus far. 

It's titled Long Way Down, and here's an unedited look at part of chapter two:

From

Long Way Down
Copyright © 2022 by Lauren Gilley 

She sensed Contreras’s gaze, and turned her head to find him studying her, slight frown plucking downward at the corners of his mouth.

“What?”

He took a beat before responding, and she had the sense he was choosing his words carefully; a sense that left her bristling, because even if she was new to this department, and even if she was younger than the vets who’d been at it a long time, she loathed the idea of being handled with kid gloves.

“It’s late,” he said. “It’s…” He checked his watch and made a face. “It’s really late. We’re on hold until Lana Preston wakes up, and Forensics is gonna take a while getting everything processed. Why don’t you go home and grab a little sleep for now? We’ll start fresh in a few hours.”

“I…” can stay was swallowed up by a massive yawn.

Contreras grinned. “Go home. I’ll call soon as I hear anything.”

It felt like quitting, but Melissa switched off her computer, shrugged into her jacket, and headed out.

As late as it was, the sidewalks were far from empty. She’d been in New York almost ten years at this point, but it still startled her, sometimes: the hum and pulse of its nightlife. Nights back home had been alive, too, but in a way that was wholly natural: the songs of insects and laughs of foxes; the groans of gators and bullfrogs and trill of whippoorwills. Any humans out and about in the wee hours were up to no good, there.

Back home. She’d stopped thinking of it that way.

Until tonight.

Irritated with her slip, she pulled out her phone once she’d settled in a cab to check her messages – and then groaned. Five of them were from Pongo.

Yo what up?

Doing sumthin 2nite?

Big important detective shit, huh? 😊 😉

Wanna meet up later?

Call if u still wanna. I’ll be up late. Got something good for u this time.

Given the lack of an eggplant emoji at the end of the last one, she assumed he meant some sort of intel and not his dick.

She left him on read and scanned the rest of her threads.

She had a new cat meme from Leslie. Her best friend had three of the things, all rescues, and they had a running gag about Leslie being the crazy cat lady and Melissa being the spinster on the porch with the rocking chair – sue her for liking to knit. It was relaxing.

Her only other messages were notifications from the bank, her credit card company, and a politician begging for money. Because she had absolutely no social life.

Seeing anyone special? Contreras had asked on their first day together, and whatever face she’d made in response had left him chuckling and offering his palms in surrender. Hey, I can take a hint.

So could she. A hint that had proven the final push in her decision to put in the paperwork for her transfer.

She caught sight of Cole’s name farther down her list – a simple OK he’d texted in response to an inquiry months ago, during one of their cases – and set the phone face-down in her lap.

She was yawning again, when she climbed out of the cab and stepped up onto the sidewalk in front of her building. The window above hers was illuminated, which probably meant the Mendozas’ baby was having another sleepless night. She grimaced to herself at the thought, and fished out her keys.

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. She was curious 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 swelling. 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 say what 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 was things, plural, could be devastating, if she allowed it.