Page 6 of Spade

I worked the zip ties around his ankles, then his wrists. The pliers were for that; easier to pull them tight without slicing skin, keeps the blood inside until you want it out. He squirmed a little, but the garbage behind him made a cage, keeping him from moving too much.

Strangers passed by, but this was Vegas. Nobody gave a shit about two adults in a dark alley, having a little fun.

He tried again, louder this time. “You fucking psycho! You touch me, you’ll get the same, I swear to god, my crew will gut you and dump you in the goddamn desert—“

That was when I took the knife and, slow as reading, pressed the point under his chin. The pink neon stuttered over the blade, turning it ghostly. “Don’t,” I said. “Not yet.”

“I’m sorry,” he whimpered.

This made me chuckle. “Not yet.”

He shut up. Even with the fear turning his face to meat, he understood something in my voice: the absolute lack of hurry. I cut his shirt sleeve up to the elbow and saw the ink—old, blue prison tattoos, letters faded into blotches, a story told in half-erased threats. I dragged the blade along his forearm, just the surface, enough to let blood bead up and roll down to his palm. He watched, riveted, every muscle tense with the expectation of more pain than I was giving him.

The kick to the face had made him wobbly. A smarter man would have fought back or at least tried to run. Not this asshole. He was into some dark, satanic shit and wanted to see what I would do next, having no idea I’d take him to the edge and dump his ass off.

“Why?” he said, almost to himself. It was a genuine question, and it caught me off guard for a second. Most of them never get there. I could have told him the truth, but it would have changed nothing. I leaned in, close enough for him to smell my breath, and said, “Because you earned it.”

“Fuck you.”

I chuckled in his ear.

He cried a little. They always do. Once the hope goes out, the tears start. It makes people ugly in a way that’s hard to explain; the mask slips off, and what’s underneath is just raw animal panic.

I kept my eyes on the work. I used the wire to loop his fingers together, second knuckle to second knuckle, and then cinched it with the pliers until the flesh puckered white and the joints started to fail. He tried to scream, but all that came out was a hoarse animal noise, so I packed a wad of rag into his mouth and taped it in place. Yes, when I was out on the prowl, I carried a small amount of Duct Tape with the kit.

I kept going, methodical, crosshatching the backs of his hands, watching the blood drip onto the concrete in patterns that looked almost deliberate.

Halfway through, he managed to buck his head back against the bricks, popping the gag loose enough to spit it out. “I got a family,” he sobbed. “Please. Please. I got a little girl.”

I stopped, looked at him. For the first time since this started, I let some emotion show—not pity, but a kind of weary disgust. “So did she,” I said, and his eyes went flat, all the light gone out. “So did all the others.”

“What the fuck, bitch? How’d you know about the others?”

See, someone like him never has just one victim. They leave a bloody path from one to the other. That’s why they deserve what I give them.

“What’s your name?” he asked

“Spade,” I said, and fixed the gag.

The rest was clean. I angled the knife under his jaw, found the pulse, and made a single cut. His blood was hot and fast, pulsing out in a fan that hit the dumpster and painted the metal before it began to slow. His body slumped sideways, wrists still bound, and for a few seconds, he looked like he was just taking a nap, chin to chest, the darkness creeping up his neck.

“Goodnight, asshole.”

I wiped the blade on the inside of his jacket, not my own. I sat there for a moment, feeling the wetness under my boots, the roar of the strip filtering in through the end of the alley. I checked my own wrist, two fingers pressed to the vein, not for the pulse but just to feel the pressure—an old habit, a ritual I couldn’t remember starting.

I rolled up the kit, snapped it shut, and put it away. On the way out, I stepped around the growing pool of blood, careful not to track it. At the mouth of the alley, I checked both directions, then walked out into the open, letting the casino lights and the crowd swallow me up. In a city like this, even the ghosts had places to be.

3

Spade

They called it the bone room, though there were no bones, not anymore. Officially, according to the club bylaws, the room was called church. A long table, pitted and scored by decades of ashtrays and wayward pocketknives, and an overhead bulb, which did nothing for the color of anyone’s skin. Cigarette smoke had worked its way so deep into the walls that even after a month-long ban, it still curled under the door, faint but permanent.

Selene was already at the head of the table when Aces and I came in. She always stood when someone entered church, especially when presidents from the other chapters visited. She said it was her way of showing respect to others. At least until they gave her a reason not to. There was a folded piece of printer paper in front of her, creased and refolded to the point where it looked more like a betting slip than a briefing.

Aces sat to my left, the same as always. We didn’t talk on the way in. Selene waited until the door swung closed and the click of the deadbolt echoed around the walls.

“We’ve got something new out of California,” she said, and flicked her eyes at me, then back to Aces. “Not one of the old dogs. Queens of Chaos, out of Modesto. You heard of them?”