Stone Cross (Arliss Cutter #2) - Marc Cameron Page 0,47

bed.

Neither looked to be over twenty-five. The woman scrambled to her feet to face him, screaming back. The man stood on his porch and ordered her back in the house. When she didn’t move, he spat out an obscene threat and ran down the steps directly toward her, leaving no doubt as to his intentions.

The woman held up her hands, bracing herself to ward him off. Blood dripped from the point of her elbow, painting the snow. Her index finger bent unnaturally at a right angle from her hand.

Cutter was already running. This guy had thrown a woman out a window. He was, as Grumpy used to say, bought and paid for.

Cutter came in at an angle, reaching the shirtless kid just as he cleared the last step. Instead of trying to catch him before he got to the screaming woman, Cutter simply reached out and gave him a shove between the shoulder blades. Momentum and blind rage carried the guy’s torso forward faster than his legs. He threw his hands out in front of him, still cursing as he surfed into the sloppy snow on his chest. His feet, wearing the weight of the heavy, ungainly leather boots, kept moving forward even after the rest of him stopped. His back arched, his legs bent at the knees, and the boots flew up, slamming into the back of his head like a scorpion stinging itself.

Cutter glanced up to see the woman pedal backward. Too drunk or high to know how much pain he was in, the young man scrambled to his feet, but Cutter came in from the side, grabbed a handful of hair. He pushed up and over, driving the kid back and down, as if he were spiking a ball. Grumpy always called long hair a murder-handle. It certainly made for a nifty handhold when there wasn’t much of anything else to grab.

The shirtless man’s chin shot skyward as his head followed Cutter’s fist toward the snow. The image of the bleeding woman was burned into Cutter’s mind, and it was all he could do to keep from following up with an elbow to the kid’s face. Instead, he let the ground administer the beating.

The kid hit with a sickening oomph, the wind driven out of his lungs. Cutter had him rolled onto his belly and cuffed while he was still attempting to manage a croaking breath. The kid was in his twenties, no small fry, probably pushing five-ten and one eighty. Cutter still had him by five inches and fifty pounds, not to mention a lot more experience smacking people who were even bigger and stronger than he was.

A Native woman holding a baby peeked out the door of the neighboring house, looked at the scene, then glared at Cutter like he’d been the one to attack the half-naked woman. She ducked back inside without saying anything. A wizened old man carrying a plastic bag of groceries over the arm of a traditional parka slowed his ATV long enough to look from Cutter to the man in handcuffs, and then drive stoically on.

The kid cursed and jerked against the cuffs, trying to get his feet under him so he could stand. Cutter kept him in the snow with a knee in his back.

Two elderly women from across the muddy street brought out a blanket and covered the sobbing woman. Both appeared to ignore the handcuffed kid, instead giving Cutter the same accusatory stare and head shake before leading the sobbing woman through the fog, back inside the house with the broken window. She left a trail of barefoot tracks and blood in the mud and snow.

The VPSO looked sheepishly at Cutter. “I guess some of us do yell.”

“You’ve handled this guy before,” Cutter said, once the women were out of earshot.

“Oh yeah,” the VPSO said. “And I haven’t been here all that long. This is Archie Stepanov. As you can see, he gets a bit mean when he hits the home brew.” Jasper squatted next to the handcuffed man. “How are you doing, Archie?”

“I didn’t know the Troopers were comin’,” Stepanov said. “Tell him to let me stand up.”

“Ready?” Cutter said to Jasper, ignoring Stepanov.

The VPSO gave a curt nod, and helped Cutter haul the kid to his feet.

“Where’s your lockup?” Cutter asked.

“Across from the school,” Jasper said. “But it’s not really much of a lockup. More like a big dog kennel with a padlock on it. I’ll need to hire someone to watch him until the