“Yeah, well,” Piper said. “There’s an exception to every rule. I’d not go so far as to call him innocent, but that was the only call I regret. Not just because it put me in here. Maria said he was with you. Is he still a stubborn little bastard?”
There was a flicker of something in Piper’s voice. It wasn’t quite affection, but it was close enough to put Cade’s hackles up. Admiration, maybe, or pride. As if he was still Marlow’s commanding officer and could take credit foranythingMarlow was.
He wasn’t wrong, though.
“Yeah,” Cade said. “He is.”
“So telling you both to stay out of this and let me handle it, that’s going to work?”
Cade smiled thinly. He could see the dim reflection of it in the glass, sharp and unhappy. It was over a week until the next full moon. He couldn’t blame the wolf for how feral it was.
“He won’t,” Cade said. “And they tried to use me as a murder weapon on the full moon, so I have my reasons too. Who is it?”
Silence for a second. Cade could hear the low background noise of the prison, the sound of hundreds of people breathing in concrete boxes. It made him feel claustrophobic by proxy.
“How’s Rilkes?” Piper repeated the question.
This time Cade answered. “In hospital,” he said. “Still critical. They didn’t want to kill him, but they weren’t too worried if they did.”
“Poor bastard was always in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Piper said wearily. Then he cleared his throat. “I don’t name names. That’s what kept me alive. As long as they trust me to keep my mouth shut, it’s not worth risking any fail-safes I might have set up in case I met an unfortunate end. Once I start talking to the authorities, killing me is worth the risk.”
“You think whoever is out there, taking over what’s left of your empire, is going to let you live?” Cade asked. “Whatever deal you had with them before, it’s obviously been broken. They found Rilkes. How long before they find Maria? Once they find her, they get everything, and then what good are you?”
Piper laughed. It was a short huff of sound, bitter but genuine. Apparently, he could still see the funny side.
“Sorry to tell you, but there’s not much left for them to find,” he said. “Back when I was first sent away, sure. I still had fingers in pies and debts to call in. But attrition is a terrible thing. People retired, got caught. Died. Fuck, one woman I could have hung a dozen… bad things… on got religion and joined a nunnery. These days? I could make some mid-level gangsters' lives uncomfortable. Maybe. People still think I have juice, but… five years is a long time in a high-risk profession.”
“And the people in Night Shift who were still loyal to you?”
Piper sucked his teeth. “I know my legacy is going to be this,” he said. Cade imagined the gesture that took in his cell, the cot, and whatever luxuries his reputation had kept him in. “But even if I wasn’t a good cop, I was good at being a cop. My people knew that I’d take care of them—that what I did was to make our job easier. Make people safer—”
“Line your pockets,” Cade corrected him. He had no control over what Piper told himself, but he didn’t have any reason to go along with the revisionist history lesson.
“Every month, we go out and put our lives on the line,” Piper snapped. “You’re a wolf, Mr. Deacon. You don’t know what it’s like to see your family, your friends, the fucking plumber become a killing machine that won’t even remember murdering you the next day. New York pays Night Shift a stipend and a bonus if they are hurt on the job. We get basic pay. Night Shift can’t even claim overtime during the full moon. So what if I found a way to make enough money that it was worth our while? No one got hurt. No one who mattered.”
“Liar,” Cade threw Piper’s accusation back in his teeth. “And I don’t care, so why are you telling me this shit?”
“People were loyal to me because I kept them alive and kept a roof over their head,” Piper said. “And I looked the part doing it. Been a while since I did anything other than pass the time between waking up and going to sleep. Hard to inspire much loyalty that way. Not when there’s someone else on the scene pulling their asses out of the fire and putting cash in their pockets.”
“And who’s that?” He didn’t get an answer. “Piper, whoever it is put the closest thing you have to a friend in the hospital. You and them? You aren’t working together anymore. They’ve left you behind.”
“I left them behind,” Piper corrected him. “That mess in The Reserve, with the traps? That wasn’t my style. It wasn’tbusiness;it was personal. That was always their problem. Me, I like to keep things… transactional.”
Cade clenched his free fist in frustration and thumped it against the window a couple of times.
“What do you want?”
“My life back.”
The glass was cold against Cade’s knuckles as he leaned on it. “Try again.”
“I’m not here to bargain.”
“No, you’re there to pay,” Cade said. “You did what you did, and you didn’t do it well enough to get away with it. Now you expect me to fix that for you? This is the hole you dug for yourself.”
“Yeah, well, now I’m in that hole, it’s full of shit,” Piper said. “I want out. Out of prison, out of the system, and out offuckingNew Mexico.”
“I can’t get you that.”
