Chapter 15
Spade
The air in my apartment never moved. When I killed the A/C, it was a desert tomb; when I let it run, it was the kind of cold that made your hands ache after five minutes.
I’d forgotten which version I left behind that morning, but the difference didn’t matter.
The heat that hit me when I nudged the door open felt exactly like the air on the other side, stale and legal-pad gray.
Jenna didn’t look up. She was exactly where she always landed: edge of the seat, elbows planted on knees, phone canted in both hands.
She wore a cut tonight, the big white Q on the back stitched so fresh it still had the backing paper in spots.
The club patch looked two sizes too big for her, but she held it like body armor, chest thrust out just enough to signal she owned the room.
I didn’t move, so neither did she.
“You’re home late.” Her voice was bored but sharpened. “I counted three hours since you parked across the street.”
“Who let you in?” I asked.
She jerked her chin at the deadbolt. “Picked it,” she said, with a flick of tongue over her teeth. “Like old times.”
I stepped in, relocked the door behind me. “You did it wrong,” I said. “This one’s only a minute job if you go in reverse.”
She rolled her eyes. “I had time to kill.”
“You could’ve waited outside.”
“I had calls to make. Chairs to break. Don’t you want to ask why I’m here?”
“No,” I said. I meant it. I was already opening the fridge. It was empty except for beer and a little green cylinder of espresso shots, four for a dollar at the Vietnamese grocer. I took out a beer, spun the cap off with the stub of my thumb. The glass was already warm, but that was a feature.
I crossed to the chair by the window, the only other seat in the room.
Jenna’s gaze tracked me, her attention granular.
Her hair was longer than last time, combed into a stripe down the center of her scalp, but the baby face under it hadn’t changed.
She was in her late twenties and still looked sixteen, dangerous in the way a wolf pup was dangerous if you tried to corner it.
“I’m not coming back,” I said.
She made a face, all teeth, like she’d bitten something sour. “Oh my god. Like I’d even ask.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
Jenna shrugged. “News travels. Clubs don’t like leaks. You made the Weekly.”
“That’s not my kind of paper.”
“Not this week. You want to hear the headline?”
“Not really.”
She read off her phone anyway, in a dead monotone: “Serial Sadist Strikes Again—Detective Promises Justice for Predators.”
“I don’t do headlines,” I said, taking a long drink.
“I told you. Not my club.”
Her attention shifted off me, lasering into her phone. “You should’ve torched the car,” she said after a second. “You left prints. Not yours, but the mirrors were clean enough to take them from the paint.”
“I left what I needed to,” I said.
Jenna looked up, something like pride registering for half a beat, then flattening into her default. “You’re a goddamn psycho,” she said, no heat behind it. “You know who’s on it?”
“Not my problem.”
She tossed the phone onto the glass coffee table, cracking it against the edge for effect.
“He’s not like the rest of them,” she said.
“He’s already got half your timeline mapped.
There’s a whiteboard in his office, and you’re the only thing on it.
If you want my advice, you should burn everything and bail. ”
I picked a spot in the carpet and watched it. “You talked to him?”
“I talked to his partner. She wants to put you in a room and see what shakes out. He wants to put you in a ground hole.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said.
Jenna laughed, short and hard. “At least I’m honest.”
A patch of orange streetlight fell through the window, striping her face in prison-bar shadow.
She let it stay, making no move to shift out of the glare.
“You could come north,” she said. “We have a place in Mendocino. Queens only. No old men, no foot soldiers, no drama. Just girls, bikes, and dirt.”
“I don’t do cults.”
“This isn’t a cult. We don’t even do patches. The Q is just for the look. If you want out, you walk. That’s it.”
I said nothing. The silence ate a minute between us.
She sniffed, wiped her nose with the heel of her palm. “You’re going to get caught. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“You care?”
I weighed the word for a second. “I’m still here.”
She let out a whistling breath, stretched out her legs until her boots hit the base of the coffee table. “Do you remember what you said, the night I patched in?”
“I remember the knife,” I said.
“That was a joke,” she said. “You said, ‘The world wants you to fuck up so they can lock you down and make it your fault. Don’t let them.’”
I sipped my beer, waiting for the part where she made it a lesson.
She didn’t. Instead she said, “He’s good, Spade. Like, scary good. You’re not going to see him coming, and I don’t want to get a call saying I need to come claim your fucking remains.”
“He’s already been here,” I said.
Jenna’s face locked up, shuttered behind something harder than her usual pose. “You knew and you stayed?”
“He’s not going to turn me in, Jenna. We have an agreement.”
“You fucked him, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“I do what I have to do to survive.”
Jenna stared, her mouth twisted. “I always thought you’d be the smart one. I always said—she’s the only one of us who’ll live to see forty.”
“Maybe I will.”
She shook her head, letting the hair fall over her eyes. “No you won’t. Not if you keep doing this.”
The orange light ticked over a notch as a car passed outside, making her look like she was on the inside of a slow-spinning carousel. She plucked at her cut, running her thumbnail along the edge of a fresh patch. “Tell me what it’s like,” she said. “The killing.”
I expected her to spit it like a dare, but her voice had lost its point. She sounded… not vulnerable, exactly, but too direct for comfort.
“It’s work,” I said. “Every time it’s the same. You pick, you prep, you wait. When the moment comes, there’s a click, like you’ve just solved a combination lock. And then you’re done. Everything after that is cleanup.”
She snorted. “You never even get a rush out of it?”
“Not anymore.”
“Then why?”
I set the beer on the table, letting the condensation pool under it. “Because the world needs people who do the things no one else will.”
“That’s your excuse? That’s it?”
I shrugged. “What’s yours?”
She didn’t answer, just watched me with her wolf-pup eyes. Finally: “How many?”
I thought about lying, but the energy it would take to sell it seemed excessive. “Twenty-four,” I said. “Maybe twenty-six.”
Her mouth curled up at the edge, not quite a smile. “You know your count better than your age.”
“I keep records,” I said.
“You always did.”
She reached into her pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Lit one. She blew smoke at the ceiling, eyes never leaving mine.
“You want to know why I came tonight?”
“No,” I said again.
“Tough,” she said, the smoke curling between her teeth. “I came because you don’t know how to ask for help, and I know you’re in over your head.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. You would’ve kicked me out by now if you weren’t.”
I leaned forward, elbows on knees to match her posture. “What do you want, Jenna?”
She met my eyes, all performance stripped out, just the bone underneath. “I want you to stop being a fucking martyr for people who don’t know your name. I want you to come with me. Or at least get rid of the cop.”
“He’s not going to stop,” I said. “He’s obsessed.”
Jenna flicked ash onto my floor. “He’s a badge. They always want to own the thing they can’t destroy.”
I almost laughed at that. “He knows everything,” I said. “All the names. He’s got the story, but he’s sitting on it.”
“Why?” Jenna leaned forward, too.
“I think he wants to see what I’ll do next,” I said, and I felt the truth of it settle in my bones. “Like maybe he wants me to keep going.”
“That’s fucked,” she said, admiration and worry fighting in her voice.
I nodded.
We sat in the long pause that followed, neither of us sure who would break it. Outside, a motorcycle started up, the engine echoing against the low ceiling of the parking structure. Jenna’s gaze flicked toward the window, then back to me.
“You want a ride?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
She stood, stretching out every vertebra one at a time. She zipped her vest up over her chest, made a big show of tucking her phone away. “You still have my number?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll call?”
I didn’t answer. We both knew I wouldn’t.
She crossed to the door, walked past without touching me. At the threshold, she paused, hand on the knob. “If he comes for you, don’t let him do it quiet,” she said. “Go loud. Go with style.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
She flashed a lopsided grin, then put her hand on the door frame. “You told your therapist I wasn’t around anymore, didn’t you. Said I had some comfy tech job in Seattle or some shit.”
“There’s a storm coming, Jenna, and there’s not one fucking thing I can do about it. It’s not me who needs to decide which team to be on. You’re gonna have to make that call sooner rather than later.”
“I’m a Queen for life, big sister. I don’t know any other way.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I really am.”
“Love you, Spade.” She made a heart sign with her hands, and I made one back. She left without another word. Roux had been talking about Jenna.
I sighed and thought about my next victim, a man in his forties, a massage therapist who was a bit too handsy with clients. So far, he’d managed to lie his way out of jail.
That was the part they never understood: the doing was easy. It was the stopping that took work.