Page 16 of Spade

Case Three: DAWSON, Harold, 63. Retired judge, but the type who collected enemies instead of stamps. Found in the garage of his McMansion, pants around his ankles, evidence of “pre-mortem restraint and deliberate wounding,” which was the polite way the pathologist wrote, “tortured the son of a bitch, then finished him neat.” In this set of security stills, the camera caught a silhouette and a cold-blooded casualness.

I traced the arc of the image with the tip of my finger, and felt a jolt like static.

I slid the victim photos to the edge of the desk, then reached deeper into the folder for the real poison.

I’d printed them at home, not even trusting the work machines. They were color this time: a series of nude photos, pulled off a Goth lifestyle forum, the kind of site the department’s IT would flag in six seconds flat. I spread them on the desk, right next to the carnage, as if conducting a séance. In every photo, the woman was alone: standing in front of a mottled backdrop, seated on a cracked velvet chaise, sprawled on concrete with her hands behind her head as if arrested by invisible police. She was tall, just as the cameras had promised, lean and hard in a way that was almost punishing. Her body was a battleground of ink: sleeves, ribs, thighs, even the hollow above her pubic bone marked with an hourglass in jet black. The only thing not tattooed was her face, which was left blank as a dare.

I looked closer at her naked body, the large, lush nipples that were closer to brown than pink. A stomach that showed signs of a six-pack. I let my gaze lower, eyeing the thick but closely shaved black bush between her legs. My dick hardened for a woman who would just as soon murder me as look at me. I shook my head, trying to replace my fixation with professional empathy.

She stared out of the photographs with the same flat, unseduced stare: here I am, now what. Come get me motherfucker, and die trying.

I leaned in, chin over the desk, five-o’clock shadow gouging my palm as I braced against the edge. The light made every detail harsh. The scar on her jaw, exactly where the security still had promised it. The spatter of tiny chemical burns on her forearms healed over with a kind of proud carelessness. In one shot, you could even make out the little crescent moon on her middle finger, black as coal.

I shifted my dick, realizing it was still hard for the woman. I wanted to catch her, but now, worse than that, I wanted to fuck her.

There was a word for how long I lingered, but I didn’t let it form in my head.

I flicked my gaze back to the crime scene prints. The parallels were absolute: no panic, no mess, no random violence. Even the way she posed in the nudes was a kind of anti-performance, the absence of seduction a negation more powerful than anything soft-core. She was in total control of her body, and by extension, the scene.

That was her signature. That, and the way she erased herself from the world right after.

I shuffled the security stills under the victim faces, then laid the Goth shots overtop, aligning her indifferent stare with the gaping faces of the dead. I tapped the jaw scar again, once, hard enough to leave a print.

This was the part where I was supposed to call in my superior, do a full department brief, loop in a psychologist to spitball about “female aggression patterns” and “trauma indices.” Instead, I closed the folder and pressed my thumb to the manila as if to drive it through the desk. I took my time standing. My back hurt the way it only hurts when you’ve failed at something big and secret.

I shoved the folder into the bottom drawer, cleared the desk with the side of my arm—let the junk avalanche into the trash—and reached for my jacket. It was the only thing I wore every day without fail: black canvas, plain, anonymous, like a man who never wanted to be remembered.

The elevator was dead, so I took the stairs two at a time, feeling the ache work itself out in my legs. The air outside the precinct was a physical shock, dry and electric, Las Vegas strip lights gouging the sky to the west. Somewhere out there, she was walking, the stride never hurried, never afraid. A woman in a leather jacket, unkillable, untraceable, unseduced. A woman I wanted to both catch and fuck. I couldn’t do both. Or could I?

I locked the car without getting in, stood in the lot under the sodium glare, and watched the city until my eyes hurt.

There was a kind of peace in knowing exactly what you wanted and exactly how much it would destroy you to get it.

I breathed in the gasoline stink and the low, predatory hum of neon. In a few hours, I’d start the questioning.

7

Shaw

You can tell everything you need about an organization by its clubhouse. Most MCs go for authenticity by way of brute force—rusty muscle car on the wall, a pool table with just enough green left to evoke the original color, maybe a sign hammered out of a road hazard they actually caused. The Royal Harlots went for something else: plausible deniability.

The front room looked like a casino bar somebody’s uncle might have invested in, assuming that all it took to print money was buying neon and figuring out how to staff the graveyard shift. The windows were dressed with faux velvet, but it was the same tier you’d find in a themed steakhouse. Poker tables lined the main floor, felt surfaces chewed bald at the edges, the kind of surface that made you want to keep your hands up. The tables were full.

Behind the bar, a flotilla of beer signs buzzed electric blue and fire engine red, breaking up the black-and-amber gloom. The stools were plastic, but nobody seemed to care. If you stuck around long enough, you could probably get a burger with a side of mescaline from the line cook, and a tattoo in the parking lot after.

There was no one at the front door—there never was—but inside you could feel the vetting. I had the sense of a dozen eyes on my back before I even got to the bar, and a separate sixth sense, the one that likes to warn you about traps, told me that there was at least one set watching me from somewhere I hadn’t spotted. The air was syrupy with cigarette smoke and something sweeter, maybe a bourbon spill from last night that nobody bothered to mop. I let myself absorb the flavor for a few seconds before making contact. No point in telegraphing anything. Let them see you, let them try to read you, and they’ll always tip their hand first.

Part of being a detective was knowing that the mundane was never the mundane. Something was always lurking in the shadows. You just had to be smart enough to avoid whatever the fuck it was.

She was at the bar, not drinking, just turning an unlit matchstick over in her fingers. The President. Selene. I’d seen her in mugshots, newspaper spreads, a candid or two from county. Always the same aura, like she’d stepped out of a different century and decided to run the world with a mixture of good bone structure and knowing everyone’s secret. She was shorter than I’d expected—most women you see in charges for aggravated assault are. She carried it with a posture you could shelve books on. Her hair was black and tight to the scalp, shiny with product, and the lines at the corners of her eyes only made her look more serious, not old.

She didn’t turn when I came up. “What’re you having?” she said. Her voice was dry as the Nevada air, and twice as cutting.

I played it casually. “Whatever the house suggests.”

“Tequila.” She let the matchstick roll onto the bar. “You’re a detective.”

I chuckled. “How the hell did you figure that out?”