Page 38 of Spade

“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?”