Page 33 of Spade

I shrugged. “You’re not the first to notice.”

He looked at me, really looked, and I saw the war behind his eyes. Part of him wanted to handcuff me. The other part wanted to take me home and figure out why.

“Tell me you’ll stop,” he said. “Tell me you’ll quit, and I’ll bury every file I have. I’ll make sure nobody ever ties you to any of this. You’ll be clean. Just stop.”

His voice was flat, but the edges were all desperation.

I considered it. I looked past him, down the length of the alley. I looked at my hands—clean, but never for long.

He said, “Spade.”

I said, “Okay.”

He flinched at that, like he wanted to believe it and couldn’t.

He stepped away, hands deep in his pockets, eyes flicking up and down the alley. He’d already decided how the report would read: a cold trail, some evidence lost, witnesses unreliable. A story stitched up tight.

I stood and pulled my pants back into place. The zipper stuck, so I forced it. My hair was a mess. My mouth tasted like blood, but it wasn’t mine.

Jason leaned against the opposite wall and watched me light another cigarette.

“You’re a fucking sociopath,” he said.

“Takes one to know one.”

He smiled, cracked, and felt real for the first time. “You’re not even sorry, are you?”

I shook my head.

He looked at the sky, then at me. “If you do it again—”

“You’ll shoot me,” I finished.

He nodded.

I flicked ash at the ground. “You missed your shot tonight.”

He didn’t argue.

I started walking, headed for the end of the alley, boots splashing through last week’s rain. He didn’t follow, but I knew he was watching. I felt it, all the way to the sidewalk.

I turned once, halfway down the block. He was still there, shadow in the mouth of the alley, a man who’d just made the biggest mistake of his life and couldn’t bring himself to regret it.

I kept walking.

Vegas waited, ugly and perfect and brand new. Of course, I couldn’t stop killing.

13

Shaw

Iparked in the dark. The engine clicked over to silence, headlights throwing a cold strip of white on the garage’s cinderblock. My hands stayed locked around the steering wheel, knuckles bleached, nails denting the fake leather. The inside of my mouth tasted like copper, like the air in a crime lab. I made myself count the breaths, then started over when I realized I’d missed a number. In the rearview, my face looked wrong: jaw tight, something simmering at the corners of my eyes, skin pallid in the sodium vapor trickling through the slit of the parking structure.

She’d stood there, and I hadn’t pulled the trigger. That was the line I replayed. I hadn’t pulled the trigger, and she hadn’t even flinched.

I got out of the car. The walk to the apartment was short, two flights up, the walkway bare except for last week’s pizza flyer crumpled by my door. She was there waiting, as I knew she would be, half-shadow in the yellow halo of the porch bulb. She wore heels, the sound of them impatient on the concrete, arms crossed, coat cinched too tight at the waist. Cara was not the kind of woman who let herself be left hanging. Her silhouette, slim and severe, always reminded me of those stick-and-ink drawings in autopsy reports: the outlines you fill in later with whatever mess is left.

She didn’t wait for me to get close. “You going to tell me what happened to you the other night,” she said, not a question, “or are we just pretending it didn’t?”