For the first time as far as I knew she turned her head to stare at me. I couldn’t have looked a particularly pretty object. I knew I had collected a number of bumps and bruises and the cut on my right cheek where the Wop had hit me was bleeding again. Somehow I managed to grin at her: a little crooked, not much heart in it, but still, a grin.
She looked at me the way you look at a frog that’s jumped into your morning cup of coffee.
“Get up!” she snapped. “You can’t be as badly hurt as all that.”
But then she hadn’t been slapped over the skull three or four times or kicked in the throat and ribs or punched in the jaw, so it wasn’t fair to expect her to know if I was badly hurt or not.
Maybe it was because she was such a lovely that I made the effort and somehow got to my feet. We Malloys have our pride, and we don’t like our women to think we are soft. I had to grab hold of the back of a chair as soon as I was on my feet, and I very nearly spread out on the floor again, but, by clinging on and riding the pain that went shooting down into my heels and back again to my skull like a roller-coaster gone haywire, I began to come out of it and get what is termed my second wind.
MacGraw and Hartsell were looking at me the way tigers look at a lump of meat that’s been sneaked out of their cage.
She began speaking to them again in that scornful, blistering voice:
“I don’t like your sort. And I’m going to do something about it. If this is the way Brandon runs his police force the sooner he gets the hell out of it the better!”
While MacGraw was mumbling excuses I set my compass and steered a zigzag-course towards the overturned whisky bottle. The cork was well home so no damage had been done. It was quite a feat to bend and pick it up, but I managed it. I anchored myself to the mouthpiece and drank.
“And before you go you’re having a taste of your own medicine,” she was saying, and, as I lowered the bottle, she thrust the rubber cosh she had picked up towards me. “Go on, hit them!” she said viciously. “Get your own back!”