Page 28 of Subduing the Shark

He was about to be alone.

Jack opened the door and stepped outside and pulled it shut behind him. The click of the latch was small and final and it echoed in the quiet street like a bone breaking.

The air was warm, dry, and smelled like pavement mingled with jasmine from the neighbor's fence. Jack stood on the front step and breathed it in and felt the door at his back. Closed. The house on the other side of it going on without him the way it would go on without him forever. He'd walked through that door thousands of times and he'd always come back. He wasn't coming back.

He turned his back to it and started walking.

It took forty minutes for him to reach Kinky Kritters on foot. The warehouse district was dead at that hour, streetlightsbuzzing, the occasional car passing on the main road. Jack walked fast, hands in his pockets, the hotel notepaper pressing against his fingers. His heartbeat wouldn't slow down. Every block he put between himself and the shiver house felt like a rope being cut, one strand at a time, and he could feel the remaining strands pulling taut.

He reached the staff entrance at quarter to four. The door was locked. He didn't have a key. He sat down on the concrete steps, in the spot where Harold had sat beside him weeks ago, and pulled out his phone.

He had one number saved that wasn't the shiver. He'd added it from memory the day Lady Leo gave him the phone for work purposes. He hadn't used it. He hadn't needed to. But he'd typed the number in and saved it under a name that made his chest ache every time he scrolled past it.

He called Harold.

Chapter Sixteen

Harold's phone rang just before four and he was awake before the first ring finished.

He'd been sleeping with his phone on the nightstand for weeks, volume up, ringer on, a habit he'd developed over years of working as a cop. His hand found the phone in the dark.

"Hello?"

"I need to talk to you." Jack's voice was tight. Controlled, the way it always was, but underneath the control something was running fast. "I'm at the club. The staff entrance."

Harold was already pulling on jeans. "I'm twenty minutes out."

"Hurry."

Harold drove the way he drove as a cop responding to a call. Fast, focused, every traffic light a suggestion. The streets were empty at that hour. He made it to KK in fourteen minutes and pulled around to the staff entrance and found Jack sitting on the concrete steps with his hands between his knees and his face white under the streetlights.

He got out of the truck. Jack stood up. The ocean scent hit Harold from ten feet away, thick and sharp, the fear layer stronger than Harold had smelled it in weeks. Not the background fear of Jack's shifts or the dull grief of the three AM conversation. Active fear. The scent of someone who'd made a decision that terrified him.

"Tell me," Harold said.

Jack told him. Dresden. The plan. Three targets: Lady Leo, Bethany, Amani. Saturday night after closing. The loading dock, the dead zone camera, the south hallway. Rashe on Bethany. Lichen on Amani. Dresden on Lady Leo. Jack as the map.

Harold listened without interrupting. His hands were in his pockets because if they weren't in his pockets they'd be on Jack and it wasn't the moment for that. He cataloged every detail, the cop brain taking over, filing the information the way he'd filed case notes for fifteen years. Location, targets, entry point, timeline. Two days away.

"When did he tell you this?" Harold asked.

"Tonight. After my shift. House meeting."

"And you said yes."

"I said okay. I always say okay." Jack's jaw was tight. "Then I waited for them to go to sleep and I walked here."

Harold looked at him. The shark on the steps, gray eyes in a white face, hands still pressed between his knees to keep them from shaking. Jack had walked forty minutes across the city at three in the morning to betray the only family he'd ever had, and he'd done it sitting alone on concrete steps with a phone number he'd never used until tonight.

"Come inside," Harold said. "We're going to Lady Leo."

Jack didn't argue. Harold let them in through the staff entrance and they took the stairs up to Lady Leo's floor. The hallway was quiet. Harold knocked on her door and waited.

She opened it in a silk robe with her hair down, looking less like she'd been sleeping and more like she'd been waiting for someone to bring her news. Her eyes went from Harold to Jack and back to Harold, and Harold watched her read the situation in under two seconds.

"Come in," she said.

Her apartment was larger than the rest. Living room, kitchen, a hallway that led to bedrooms. Everything was precise and expensive and smelled like coffee and the warm amber musk of a lion who'd lived in this space for years. She sat at the kitchen table without offering them seats. Harold and Jack stood.