Page 49 of Spade

18

Shaw

Ipulled into the precinct lot at 5:27. The sky was an ashen blue, the kind that never really let go of last night. My headlights threw two cones across the empty blacktop—empty but for the one bike leaning on its kickstand near the far end, directly under the busted sodium bulb that made everything beneath it look jaundiced and weak.

Selene. Not in the office, not on the clock, but here and waiting. Not a surprise, but not something I’d ever let myself predict, either.

She didn’t look up as I killed the engine. Just sat there, helmet off, spine like a steel cable, arms folded across her chest. There were a dozen open spaces between us, a football field of asphalt and whatever had been done to make it necessary. I got out and locked the door behind me. The keys swung on their ring, the weight of them heavier than I’d remembered. I walked, hands loose, nothing in them. No gesture to the badge, not the suggestion of a weapon. Selene watched my approach the way you’d watch a car in the rearview—peripheral, cautious, never with the full of her attention unless you swerved. I didn’t.

“Good morning,” I said, because someone had to break the surface.

Her eyes flicked over me. “Not really.”

I stopped a car length from her. Close enough that a lunge could clear the gap. Far enough that if she started the engine, I’d have to run. All her calls.

She let me wait in the silence. I didn’t fill it.

“I saw you,” she said, tone level and flat. “Out on Northshore. Rolling the blue tarp.”

I felt something run through my teeth, cold and electric. I didn’t let it reach my face.

She shifted, finally. One boot scuffed the pavement, a slow, deliberate gesture. “Didn’t expect it to be you. Not like that. Not for her.”

“You followed me?”

“Watched,” she corrected. “From the service road.” She finally gave me the full of her eyes, black and sharp. “Don’t flatter yourself. I was there for Spade.”

“She asked you to—”

“She didn’t ask,” Selene said. She straightened up on the bike, still not getting off. “She’s handling her part of this, whatever this is. I watched to make sure you did, too. For the record, you did. Tidy work, no mistakes.”

I exhaled through my nose. The air was thick with the aftertaste of burned fuel, the ozone funk of the busted light. “This a warning?”

Selene’s mouth didn’t move, but I caught a trace of a smile, a curdled thing. “This is professional courtesy. I’m telling you I saw. No one else needs to.”

I nodded, slow. “And if I get a sudden urge to do paperwork on Spade?”

She tilted her head, the way a snake will before it checks if the thing in front of it is dying. “Then the club goes full transparency. The footage goes to the DA. The department. The mayor, if you want headlines. Nobody comes out of it clean.”

I let the keys dangle at my side. They rattled, louder than they should have in the open lot. “So that’s it. I keep my mouth shut, we’re good.”

“That’s it,” Selene said. “Unless you get creative.”

“I’m not creative,” I said. “Never have been.”

She considered me for a second, maybe two. “That’s what I told the club. You do understand that I will do what I have to do to protect my club. Even if it means killing a fucking detective.”

“You’re threatening me,” I said. “That’s not the way this needs to go.”

“You killed a woman in sexual rage, Shaw. You know how well that’s going to go over in court these days? The public outrage.”

“I’m not like Spade,” I said.

“Yet you’re in love with her, at least the killer part of her.”

I shook my head. “All of her. The good and the fucked up.”

“The two of you have a lot in common now, Shaw.” She climbed on her bike. “You fucked a serial killer detective, knowing she was a monster.”