Page 18 of Shadows of Justice

I’ll bet that if I point it out that he’s late for a cut, he’ll have a coronary episode.

“I get your point, Tim, but trying to force me out of my place wasn’t the way to go about it,” I say. “You should have talked to me.”

“I tried!” he says, the scary forehead vein making its first appearance. He takes an imposing step forward, and my hand instinctively goes to my mace. His eyes follow the motion and he scoffs. “What, you going to mace me, officer?”

“Back off, Tim,” I say, my heart rate beginning to pick up.

“You think you’re so much better than everyone because you have a fucking badge.” He sneers at me and continues to walk across the landing. “Cops are assholes just like the rest of us. You’re not perfect.”

“I’m not going to tell you again.” I take my mace out of its sleeve.

He laughs at me. “You’re too stupid to see a good thing when it’s staring you in the face. I would have gotten you out of this fucking dump. Helped you meet quality people and have a respectable life. But, maybe you belong here. With all the other trash.”

He launches at me, and grips my wrist with the mace while simultaneously stunning me with an elbow to my nose. He’s alarmingly quick, for a cubicle guy. My finger presses on the plunger of the mace, but all it does is squirt the ground, his hand holding my wrist down by my side. My eyes water and I momentarily see stars, long enough for him to snake his fingers around my throat and squeeze—hard.

Up close like this, I wonder how I ever found him attractive. His teeth bared, skin sweaty, he shoves me back toward my front door. I drop my keys and water bottle, my other hand still immobilized. With my free hand I punch him in the jaw, making firm contact with his face the minute my head slams against the wood. Spots blur my vision and tears flood my eyes, both from the impact and the discharged mace wafting through the small space. With his shoulder, he pins my free arm against the wall, using all of his weight to smush me into submission. I go to knee him in the balls but he pulls his own knee up quickly, diverting the force of my attack.

I panic for a moment, wondering how this number-crunching, happy-hour-gushing asshole is really overpowering me right now. I suppose he caught me off guard. A year and a half, and the guy hasn’t ever done a single threatening thing, except maybe boring me to death.

He slams my hand against the door, forcing me to drop my only weapon. Then, he spins me, shoving my cheek into the chipped green paint of my front door, my arms pinned painfully behind my back.

“You should get on your knees and thank me now, Viv,” he says in a lascivious tone, his hot breath hanging in the air.

He’s choking me hard enough to break skin, my vision spotty. He smells clean—like soap and cologne, but I realize in that moment that I hate his expensive scents, and I want to pop his eyeballs out just for forcing me to smell them.

My position is very reminiscent of a certain one that I was in not too long ago. Now, however, nothing about how my body is reacting feels good. I actually liked every inch of skin that Leo had pressed into me, the feel of him sparking something that was delicious and dangerous, but not in a way that made me fear.

All that this fucker is doing is making me want to kill him and then shower, scrubbing every place that his grubby hands have ever touched me.

I can’t believe I had sex with this asshat. Mediocre, maybe-one-orgasm-if-I’m-lucky sex, but—sex all the same.

Tim rubs his half-hard cock against my ass and groans, breathing in the smell of my hair. My stomach rolls, but a smirk plays on my lips, and I retry my earlier move on Leo—with newfound vigor.

I head butt Tim in the teeth and he releases me, backing up and clutching his nose as it floods, staining his crisp blue button down bright red. He yells in pain—a garbled, wet sound—and then turns his beady, rage-filled eyes back on me.

“You’re fucking dead, cunt!” he screams, and then takes a step toward me.

Mrs. Gonzalez swings for the fences, the baseball bat I had a hunch about making perfect connection with the back of his head. Tim grunts and drops to his knees, out cold. He’s passed out before he hits the ground, landing flat on his face.

She stands behind him, the bat poised on her shoulder. She’s got a proud aura about her, like she just hit exactly the home run that she did, and quirks a brow at me, smiling.

“Cabrón,” she says, and spits on Tim’s still body. I huff a shocked laugh, rubbing my swollen neck.

All right, Mercury better get the fuck out of the microwave now.

“Your little old lady landlord really popped his ass with a bat?” Carlos exclaims. “Damn, what a way to start your shift.”

“You’re telling me,” I say, rubbing the inflamed marks on my neck from Tim’s hand. His class ring must have added to the injury because there’s a slice there as well, which I doused in disinfectant at the station. “But, anyway, that’s why I was late. Lawrence and his trainee answered the call and I got out of there as soon as I could.”

“No problemo, chica. Best reason I’ve ever heard.” Carlos laughs again, and turns right on Harrison. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

I swallow, pain lancing my throat at the motion.

Yeah, me too.

I should have said screw the mace and shot the bastard.

Carlos and I dive into an eventful shift, much of our time consisting of a possible DUI who narrowly passed the field test, breaking up a brawl at a college bar, and an old lady who called 911 thinking someone was breaking into her house, but it ended up just being her son.

---