Page 47 of Spade

“You look like shit,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Long night.”

Aces’ jaw flexed. “Yours, or ours?”

I let the question sit for a beat, then said, “Detective Shaw made contact.”

That stopped even Tempest’s orbit. She leaned in, knuckles gone white on the curve of her arms.

“Where?” asked Selene, voice barely above a whisper.

“Alley behind Starlight. Two blocks east of the last drop. He watched me finish. Had the drop on me with a nine-millimeter.”

Glitz raised both eyebrows, smile going glassy. “So why are you standing here instead of bleeding out in evidence?”

I shrugged. “He wanted to talk.”

Joker’s laugh was a single exhale, no humor in it. “Fuck me. Cops are getting sentimental.”

Nines clicked her pen. “Was he alone?”

“Yeah. No backup.”

“Armed?”

“He’s a detective. Of course.”

Selene’s fingers drummed a syncopated rhythm on the table. “What did he want?”

I told them. The part where he put it all together and then offered a deal—he buries the case, I stop putting holes in Las Vegas’ worst.

For a moment, nothing. A single, perfect bubble of silence.

Tempest was first to break it, voice raw. “So we put him in the ground.”

Joker cut in, “He’s a cop. You kill a cop, you get a hundred more. And a thousand cameras. We’re not ready for that heat.”

Aces didn’t look at me. “A detective who’s got your face, your pattern, your count—that’s not a liability we can manage. That’s a countdown.”

Glitz’s smile flickered off. She set both hands on the table, the rings catching every photon from the overhead bulb. “Every dollar this club moves, every license we hold, every arrangement we have—it’s all one bad week from unraveling. If this cop wants to burn us, he can and he will. There’s no clean fix here.”

Nines tapped the pen twice, eyes not leaving the pad. “If he’s documented any of this, the file survives him. We need to know what exists in writing before we do anything physical.”

Nobody spoke. Selene watched me from the head of the table, letting the tide of opinion roll until she was ready to stem it. When she spoke, it was so quiet I thought maybe I’d hallucinated it.

“Tell me you didn’t make a deal with him,” she said.

I met her stare. I didn’t blink. “I did.”

Every woman at the table leaned, pivoted, tensed. Even the ones who’d seemed calm before. The silence wasn’t silence; it was a threat. The overhead light caught the ridges of the Royal Harlots patch on my jacket and made it gleam like a target.

Joker’s jaw worked, her teeth grinding so loud I heard it over the AC. “You let a cop get leverage.”

Aces straightened up from the table. Her voice was grave-cold. “That’s not how we do things.”

Glitz didn’t say a word, but her eyes were open wider than I’d ever seen. She looked at me and saw the ghost of the club’s future.

Nines wrote something, then set the pen down and folded her hands over the page. She didn’t look up.