Page 58 of Spade

She nodded, then did something I hadn’t seen in years. She smiled. Big, stupid, full of teeth.

The rest of the Harlots relaxed, a visible shift, like a barometric drop. Joker muttered something about pancakes again. Aces grinned, all teeth and bone, then fished out a cigarette and lit it off the fire’s edge.

Selene just watched me, then Jenna, then the ruined building. “We’ll ride out together,” she said. “Show of force.”

I looked at Jenna, and she looked at me. We both knew what came next. Road, dust, heat, and the knowledge that every line in this life had to be redrawn every night.

But for the moment, we had the fire, the silence, and the simple, vicious fact that neither of us had blinked.

21

Shaw

Iwatched Spade cross the parking lot, her stride a little slower than usual. She had a duffel slung over one shoulder, and from where I stood behind the glass of the entryway, I could see she was carrying more weight than what was in the bag. She stopped under the sickly blue flicker of the outside light, checked the street behind her, then buzzed my unit.

I pressed the door release and waited. She was up the stairs in less than ten seconds, boots landing soft on the rubber-treaded steps. I opened the door before she knocked. The air between us felt like the split second before a fistfight: all anticipation, no momentum.

She looked me over, then past me, like she was looking for a squad of detectives. Her eyes were even flatter than normal. I saw the knuckle split on her right hand, the old jacket zipped up to the throat, and the new tension in the line of her jaw.

She said, “I’m back on the saddle,” she said. “Selene is cool with it all.”

I stepped aside and let her in.

Inside, the apartment was cold and underfurnished, just the way I liked it. Two chairs at a table that didn’t match either, a secondhand couch with stuffing pushing out the armrest, and a desk along the back wall. No books, no family pictures. The window shades were drawn, but she went to them anyway and peeked outside. I watched her posture soften by a single micron when she saw there was no one parked across the street but a battered sedan with a Lyft sticker peeling off the rear window.

She set the duffel down by the door and left it there, like maybe she’d have to grab it in a hurry.

I closed the door and bolted it. She didn’t flinch. She was already reading the room, mapping out the possibilities. I liked watching her do it, the way she held every risk in her head and then dismissed them, one by one.

She turned to face me. The silence was solid enough to lean on.

I said, “What’s going on?”

Her hands went to the zipper on the jacket, but she didn’t open it. “You.”

“I’ve got bourbon,” I said. I pointed at the bottle on the kitchen counter. “Or coffee, if you aren’t planning to stay the night.”

She shook her head. “Not going anywhere.”

I poured two fingers and set the glass at the edge of the counter. She didn’t touch it.

She took three steps closer and said, “The place needs a woman’s touch.”

I shrugged. “Never liked clutter.”

“Never liked evidence,” she corrected. She looked at the desk, at the locked box, then at the spot under the couch where I kept a backup weapon. “You always expect company?”

“What’s happening here, Spade?”

She sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on knees, hands steepled. She looked at the ground. I could feel her winding up, getting ready to say something that would put the night on a new course.

I sat across from her in the other chair. The bourbon glass sat between us.

“Do you really think we can make this work?” she asked. “And don’t give me any of this we can try bullshit. Is it going to work or not?”

“We both know it will.”

“I stay with the club, and you keep catching the bad guys. That's how this is going to work?