Chapter Six

Chapter Six

LANCE’S SCARS LOOKED softer in real life than they did in photos. Less livid. The edges blended into his tan, except where a curl of scar roughed the skin. He’d pulled a T-shirt on after his performance, and glitter smudged over the black cotton.

“Barman said you wanted to talk to me,” he said as he sat down. He lifted the glass of clear liquid, cherries floating in it, that he’d brought with him.“And I guessed you wanted to buy a round too.”

Cade glanced at the bar and saw one of the staff on their way over, two glasses of whiskey and a bowl of salsa and chips on the tray they carried. He shrugged as he turned back to Lance.

“I’ll call it a business expense.”

Lance laughed and took a drink. “Yeah, me too.”

“They charge that much for the water here?” Cade asked.

He’d never stripped, but his stepmother had after Dad threw her and Lem out. The first rule was to get in good with the bouncers; the second was the customers got pissed and she got hydrated. It was a lot easier to take advantage of a drunk when you were sober.

“I finished my shift,” Lance said. He necked whatever he had in his glass and plucked one of the tumblers from the server’s tray. The woman gave him a disapproving look but didn’t say anything as she unloaded the salsa and the last glass. Lance waited until she was gone before he took another drink. “What do you want? Private shows are no-touching and—”

“We wanted to talk, not watch,” Marlow said. He took a chip from the bowl. Cade took it off him before he could eat it and gave Marlow an exasperated look. SKINNED was not the sort of strip club where the food was part of the draw, and he doubted good hygiene was either. Cade tossed the chip back in the bowl, and Marlow gave him the finger. He ignored that. “About Ned Piper.”

What expression there was on Lance’s face shut down. He took a long drink of the whiskey and then set the glass down with a click, his fingers loose around the rim.

“What about him?”

Cade smiled, the professionally empty one he deployed at board meetings, and laced his fingers together.

“Certain individuals within the SDPD and outside it have encouraged me to take a look at Piper’s conviction,” he said. “They question how fair and measured his sentence was, considering all the good work he did and how many other people were involved.”

Lance pulled a sardonic face; the scars twisted at the expression in odd ways.

“Yeah, he was a saint. Does Piper know about this?”

“How else would we find you?” Marlow asked. “You’re not exactly on his list of known associates.”

“I’m not an associate.”

“Employee?” Cade suggested. “Contractor?”

Lance absently turned the glass in small, tight circles on the table, a wet trail dark against the scarred laminate. After a second, he picked it up and smacked it back down again with a click.

“I’m the fuckin’ help,” he said. “I just do what I’m told, and I guess, finally, he’s got something to tell me. So what is it? What’s he want me to say?”

Marlow’s knee tapped against Cade’s under the table. That didn’t sound like someone who’d been doing Piper’s dirty work. Willing to do it, maybe, but it wasn’t the dynamic that they had tailored their play for.

It wasn’t exactly a problem. Cade could think on his feet, and Marlow’s usual laid-back demeanor was useful for hiding whether he was flustered or not. But it would have been nice, just this once, if Cade got to look like he knew what he was doing.

Although, wasn’t Marlow meant to be the one doing the running now? That had been why Cade had forgiven him, hadn’t it?

The question hung around in Cade’s head as if it expected him to realize how profound it was. He dismissed it impatiently—he liked to be respected, he’d take envy as the next best thing, and that wasn’t new or exclusive to Marlow—and focused on the current problem.

“He told us you could get us what we needed,” Cade said as he worked on the mental edit of their approach.

“What?”

“Evidence,” Marlow said. “His safety net. All the people he could bring down if things don’t go his way.”

Lance rubbed his scarred socket with the knuckle of his thumb. “Hasn’t he wrung that well of favors dry already?”

“This is what happens to a spent favor,” Cade said. “It becomes leverage. It becomes a trading card.”

Lance’s eye flickered from Cade to Marlow, and he bit his lower lip as he shook his head.

“Yeah, fuck off,” he said. “I’m not biting.”

Cade let himself look annoyed. “I didn’t come here to waste my time,” he said. “If you want proof of my bona fides, I can get it—“

“I’m sure you can,” Lance said. He braced his hands on the table to push himself up. “Until Piper tells me otherwise, go fuck yourself.”

Marlow reached over the table and grabbed Lance’s wrist. “Sit down,” he said. “Or I’ll call Vice and have this place raided.”

“Go ahead,” Lance sneered. “It isn’t illegal to dance.”

Marlow smiled faintly. “But the place will be shut down for a week—or more—if I tell them I’m sure there’s something to find. And I came up under Piper, so if I’m sure I can find something? I know how to be sure I find it.”

Doubt flickered over Lance’s face. He sat down hard, as if his knees had given way under him, and Marlow let go of his wrist. Lance sat back and rubbed his wrist as if Marlow had gripped him hard enough to hurt.

“Piper didn’t send you,” he said. “He made sure I don’t know shit about that stuff anyhow.”

“So what’s the money for, then?” Marlow asked. Cade gave him an irritated look. He’d been ready to edit the plan; Marlow had just ripped it up entirely. Marlow hitched a shoulder in response and pointed out, “He knows we’re not working for Piper. Might as well cut to the chase.”

“Run errands,” Lance said. “Spy on his ex-wife, deliver messages. That sort of thing. Give the big hero something to feel good about while he’s locked up.”

The mix of gratitude and resentment that twisted through Lance’s words was acidic. It might be useful too.

“What?” Cade asked. “Don’t tell me he still expects you to grovel just because he saved your life once?”

Lance stared at him for a second and then twisted his mouth into a bleak grimace of a smile. The music dropped in volume as the redhead grabbed the last notes from a customer’s hand and hopped off the stage. The music cut out, and a bored voice introduced the next dancer. She took the stage to a remix of what sounded like choral music and Madonna, all wild curls and aggressive hip action.

“That’s his version, yeah,” Lance said. “Maybe I don’t remember it the same way. In my version, I might just get what I’m due.”

“What is your version?” Marlow asked.

Lance looked up, honest surprise on his face for a moment. “You know what, no one ever asked that before. Not back then. Not since.”

“And?” Cade asked.

It took a moment, but finally, Lance shrugged. His voice softened, the rough edges burred off the words as he remembered. He sounded younger.

“I’ve heard the story he tells, and it’s pretty much true. Close enough that no one ever questioned it. Except he’s the one who froze, who freaked out. I was the one who dragged the wolf out the front door and managed to get back inside to pass out in the hallway. By the time I woke up in the hospital, though, Piper had told his version of the story to everyone. He got to be the hero, and I got this.”

Lance dragged his thumb along his jaw, just under the uneven, roughly raised scar.

The part of Cade that wasn’t entirely sure how Marlow had felt about Piper—once upon a time before the murder attempt—reveled in the revised story. So, Piper wasn’t a good cop who’d made some bad choices; he’d always been an asshole.

“You didn’t tell anyone?”

“Couple of people. No one believed me. I was just some music nerd, and Piper already looked the part.”

“The other kids—” Marlow started to ask.

“Didn’t see anything or didn’t want to get involved. The only one who could have corroborated was Raymond—the wolf—and he obviously didn’t remember anything after it started.” Lance looked bitter for a second and then shrugged. “It didn’t matter anyhow. Not like being called a hero in the paper would make my eye grow back. Piper could have it.”

“And he paid for the privilege?”

“Not till it went down with him shooting that rookie.” Lance picked a chip from the bowl and broke it between his fingers. “I guess prison worked, made him think about everything he’d done wrong. The people he’d done wrong. First time I’d heard from him in years. So, you want something on Piper? You’re talking to the wrong guy. All I know about him is how much he’ll pay to feel like the big man.”

He was wrong. Or maybe just lying.

Piper had run his racket out of the heart of the SDPD’s Night Shift for years without a single complaint or flag on his file. That wasn’t the sort of man to be suddenly overcome with regret. Never mind that there were plenty of people who should have been ahead of Lance on the amends list. Marlow for a start.

No. The reason that money dropped into Lance’s account every month wasn’t altruistic; it was self-serving. Lance was someone that no one had any reason to tie to Piper’s racket and who was bitter enough to accept the idea that his payday was “reparations” without any questions.

Errands. Messages. The ex.

Cade got his phone out of his pocket and pulled up a picture of Maria. He turned it around to show Lance.

“Do you know her?”

Lance glanced at the photo and then back at Cade, his face set in a studiously blank expression.

“Even if I did, why the hell should I do anything for you?” he asked.

“Why do anything for Piper?” Cade asked.

For a second, Lance looked like he didn’t know the answer to that question. He started to answer, changed his mind, and took a drink instead.

“He pays me,” he said. “Why else?”

Cade raised his eyebrows. “Is that all?” He leaned back in the chair and reached into his jacket for his wallet. “I can pay you. How much will it take? Ten grand? Twenty?”

Behind Lance, the dancer on stage drained the bottle of champagne and wrapped up the act to whoops and applause. The DJ lowered the music to a distracting background drone and announced it would be ten minutes till the next act.

Lance licked his lips and stared at the wallet as if Cade had that much in actual twenties stuffed into the leather folds.

“I don’t know. I mean, Piper’s basically got me on retainer. It’s, like, steady employment… I mean, if he finds out—”

“I won’t tell him,” Cade said. He pulled a business card out and pushed it over the table. “Give me a price.”

Marlow provided the pen, rolling a black ballpoint over the table. It bumped to a stop against Lance’s fingers. It took a moment, but he picked it up and clicked it twice in nervous succession.

“I get the money?” he checked. “Whether what I know is helpful or not?”

“As long as you answer our questions the best you can,” Cade said. He tucked his wallet back into his pocket and smiled wryly. “As long as I think your quote is reasonable, of course. I want to know what Piper is up to, but there’s a limit to what any information is worth.”

The tip of the pen hovered over the paper as Lance tried to work out how far to push it. He started to write, the scrawled loop of a dollar sign carved into the shiny card, and then paused as he looked up at Cade.

“He’ll never know, right?” he said. “I know he’s in jail, but he still—”

Lance stopped mid-word as he looked at something over Cade’s shoulder. His face went slack and then flushed, a quick tide of color that didn’t touch his scars.

“Did you see—?” He stopped mid-question and gave Marlow a quick, hard stare. “I know you. You’re Night Shift. I know you. You work for Piper!”

For a bright, suspicious moment, Cade considered the accusation. It would explain… absolutely nothing. In fact, it would raise more questions. The only thing that theory had to recommend it was the punch of adrenaline that paranoia released into the bloodstream.

“Trust me,” Marlow said. “He’d not have me, even if I’d have him.”

He sounded the way he always did when he talked about Piper—the familiar protective guard of his dry humor laced through with something astringent. Regret? Anger? Unresolved sexual tension? Cade wasn’t sure he could tell, with his own emotions in the way of practicalities.

Lance crumpled the card in his hand and threw it at Marlow.

“Fuck you,” he blurted as he bolted to his feet. The backs of his legs hit the chair and knocked it over backward. Lance clutched the pen in his hand, his knuckles white through the taut skin, as he glanced over Cade’s head again. His eye flickered as he tracked something. “I never told you shit. You tell him that. I didn’t tell you anything.”

Cade started to turn around to see if he could pick out what was so interesting. Before he could, Lance snatched up his glass and tossed the dregs of it into Cade’s face. Cheap liquor stung his eyes, and Cade recoiled with a spluttered “Fuck” as he tried to wipe it away on his sleeve.

Through the blur of tears and booze, Cade saw Lance back away from the table.

“Nothing!” the scarred man repeated, his voice cracked with tension. “You tell him that!”

He turned on his heel and bolted toward the back of the club through the maze of scantly occupied tables.

“You get him,” Marlow said as he stood up. He stretched up onto his toes as he scanned the dimly lit club and the clots of customers clustered around the bar. “I’ll see if I can find who spooked him.”

The hem of his T-shirt rode up. The narrow slice of pale skin, drawn taut over lean muscle, made Cade’s mouth go dry. He grimaced at himself—there was a time and place, and this was neither—as he gave his eyes one last scrub.

“The way Lance reacted, the connection he made,” he pointed out. “Whoever he saw—”

“Is Night Shift,” Marlow finished for him. “We already knew that, though. It’s fine.”

“Is it?” Cade asked.

It was one thing to believe that someone you worked with—that you might be close with—was corrupt. It was another to come face-to-face with the evidence. Cade had been there, back in Alaska on the private-security circuit. He’d not even bothered to learn half of their names, and it had still been unsteadying.

Marlow hitched the corner of his mouth up in a wry shrug. “Close enough.”

He headed toward the bar. People got out of his way. Even when he wasn’t dressed for the Night Shift, Marlow moved like someone who knew their own body. Cade filed that away for later and went after Lance.

The floor was sticky underfoot as Cade wove through the tightly placed tables. A waitress in high-waisted short-shorts and a furry bikini top dodged back to get out of his way, one arm crooked protectively around the champagne some mug had paid for. Her eyes widened as she checked him out, and she tossed a worried glance over to the barman.

Angry men in expensive clothes didn’t bode well in a place like SKINNED. Or anywhere, for that matter.

Cade ignored her. He didn’t plan to hang around long enough for them to have to deal with him.

The DJ kicked the volume of the music up. The first beatboxed kick drum notes of “Mrs. Officer” pumped out of the speakers, undercut by a static buzz from one, while the stripper crawled onto the stage. Cued by the song, other dancers got up from the tables with whoever had bought their time to writhe to the music. Dark hair flicked against Cade’s face as one of the dancers tossed the long rope of a ponytail over their shoulder. He batted it out of the way and pushed past her.

“Fuck off,” she hissed at him through glossy red lips. “I’m working.”

He ignored her and craned his neck to catch a glimpse of Lance. From the back, without the scars to set him apart from the crowd. Cade cursed under his breath as he tried to remember what color Lance’s hair was.

It hadn’t seemed like something he’d need to know.

The hard crack of the flat of someone’s hand against his ass made Cade jump a moment before he felt the sting of the slap through his trousers. He turned sharply, grabbed the man’s wrist before he could retrieve it, and squeezed.

“Don’t touch me,” Cade warned him flatly.

The baby-faced man—razor burn on his throat and body paint on his shoulder—had the good sense to look uneasy. It passed, drowned in the fumes of whatever he’d drunk that night.

“Free world,” he said.

Cade brought the man’s arm down against the edge of the table. The sharp line of it caught him just under the joint of his thumb. Something cracked—loud enough to hear over the music—and the whiskey-flush blanched from the man’s face. His mouth opened, but whatever strangled shriek came out was drowned under the police-siren vocals of the song.

Asshole.

The man doubled over, clutching his wrist, and Cade left him to it. He loped over to the heavy double doors that led backstage and stiff-armed them open. The kid on the other side yelped and swung his mop up.

“Where’s Lance?” Cade asked. He let his old accent out from under a decade’s worth of elocution lessons. It sounded more hick than ever to his ears, especially with the punch of anxiety he put behind it. “He’s in trouble. There’s someone looking for him.”

Sometimes the most believable lie was just the truth… as if you weren’t part of it. It kept things simple, and it always fit the situation.

The kid gawped at him for a moment and then turned to point down the hall.

“He went that way,” he said. Cade shoved past him and loped along the grubby carpet. Behind him, the kid raised his voice and called after him, “He went outside. I heard the fire door slam.”

Cade broke into a proper run. He rounded the corner and scanned the hall. The fire door was halfway down, two heavy metal doors painted a dull red. He slowed to a stop in front of them and gave them a shove. The safety bar depressed under his hands, and the doors started to open—until they hit something on the other side.

“Fuck,” Cade muttered under his breath.

He took two steps back and rammed the door with his shoulder. The doors scraped open a couple of inches, and the sound of Lance’s voice, pitched thin and nervous, filtered in from outside.

“I didn’t speak to them. I swear. All these years, I’ve kept my mouth shut. Okay? Why would I talk now?”

“I’d think of a reason,” a rough, unfamiliar voice said, “before I give you one. Get in the car.”

Whoever this new player was, they weren’t Piper’s man, then. Cade threw himself against the door again. He could see the grubby yellow paint of the dumpster that Lance had pushed in front of the door. Luckily it wasn’t full, and it scraped reluctantly over the ground as he put his weight to it. It almost drowned out the sound of the scuffle in the alleyway.

“Get away from me!” Lance yelled, his voice muffled. “Who do you work for? Piper will kill you for this!”

The other man laughed. “Piper couldn’t kill a cat in a sack,” he sneered. “Open the fucking trunk.”

Cade squeezed through the crack in the fire doors and boosted himself up over the edge of the dumpster. Cheap black plastic bags puffed and split under his weight, the reek of burned oil and cheap liquor sour in the air.

The alley was dimly lit by a yellow light over the club’s back door that flickered and buzzed. Lance was on the ground, blood matted in his hair, as a man in a black hoodie dragged him toward a car that was parked, open trunk first, in the mouth of the alley.

“Let him go,” Cade said.

The man in the hoodie let go of Lance’s arms and swung around. He pulled a gun from the small of his back and aimed in one smooth motion. So did Cade as he dropped into a crouch on the trash. A bullet tore past his head as he went down, close enough he could feel the burn of it kiss his temple, and a bottle cracked under his knee. The dumpster rang like a cracked bell as bullets punched into it, and the metal dinged in shiny puckers.

Cade counted three shots. Most people, unless they were in a frenzy, paused at three. The first spike of adrenaline had worn off, maybe they had second thoughts, or their hands hurt. It didn’t last long, but if you needed a window, it was a way to pick your moment.

He pushed himself up and fired twice. Once at the space where he’d last seen the hoodie-wearing thug, and then he corrected and shot the man in the torso. The man staggered back into the wall as he absorbed the impact, one hand up to clutch his chest.

After a moment, the man’s knees gave way under him, and he slid down the wall, his legs folded at awkward angles. He wheezed for air, his face gray, as he dropped the gun by his feet.

On the ground, Lance rolled over and tried to prop himself up on his elbow. He touched his head with one hand and flinched away from the sting of raw flesh.

“Lance,” Cade said. “Come here.”

He braced his hand on the edge of the dumpster and boosted himself up and over. The smell of the dumpster came with him. Something slimy and halfway to rancid had soaked through the knee of his trousers and plastered it to his leg. Cade had woken up after the full moon and smelled worse.

Sweat itched on the back of his neck as he kept the gun pointed at the man in the hoodie. Cade’s shot had hit the man in the center of his body mass. If it had penetrated, the man would be well on his way to being dead. At this distance, even with a Kevlar vest, he’d have broken ribs at least. He could still get back up once the numb shock of a hammer blow to the sternum wore off.

Cade held his free hand out and crooked his fingers. “We can’t help you if you don’t come here.”

Lance lifted his head enough to stare at Cade, his eye narrow and grim with suspicion. He spat a thick wad of phlegm on the ground, the strings of spit dangling from his lips, and scrambled gracelessly to his feet. For a second, it looked like Lance was going to make the smart choice as he half-turned toward Cade; then he bolted for the mouth of the alleyway.

It was a clumsy run. Lance bounced off the brick wall twice as he staggered woozily, but he managed to squeeze past the bumper of the car there to kidnap him. Cade glanced quickly at the man in a hoodie—still down, still gray about the mouth, all that was really visible under his pulled-down hood—and took the risk. He went after Lance and was almost close enough to grab his shoulder when the idling engine revved.

There had to have been someone to pop the trunk, Cade realized with a flash of frustrated self-recrimination. He’d spent too much time behind a desk. That wasn’t a mistake he’d have made when he was in the field more often.

The car screeched forward, veered at the last minute, and clipped the back of Lance’s leg with the corner of a bumper. He was thrown into the air and came down on the windshield. It shattered on impact, cracks spiderwebbed across the glass, and Lance rolled off to the side. He bounced when he hit the ground, and this time he wasn’t going to push himself back up anytime soon.

Cade leaned down and tucked his fingers under Lance’s jaw to check his pulse. It was thready—and something in his jaw felt gritty and loose under Cade’s fingers—but it was there.

The car turned sharply onto the street outside, reversed backward, and the back door swung open. Cade cursed under his breath, grabbed Lance by the collar, and hauled him unceremoniously over toward the wall. A woman, hat pulled down over her ears and leather jacket zipped up to her chin, climbed out with a gun.

Bullets stitched at Cade’s heels as he ducked behind a couple of old, charred oil drums. It wasn’t much shelter. It would have to do. Cade propped Lance up against the wall and crouched there for a second.

“For fuck’s sake,” the woman yelled. “Get him.”

Through a crack between the drums, Cade saw the man in the hoodie grab his gun and drag himself up the wall. The woman stayed by the car, ready to jump back in for a quick getaway.

Cade weighed his options. He could get out of this. Not unscathed, but alive. Lance wouldn’t, though. And apparently, he was more valuable than any of them had expected.

The sound of the door as it hit the dumpster interrupted his grim calculations.

“Put your hands up,” Marlow’s voice snapped.

Cade rolled his eyes at Marlow playing by the rules as the man in the hoodie swung around, one hand still clutched to his chest as he raised the gun in the other. Before he could fire, Cade kicked the oil drum out of the way and shot the man in the leg.

No Kevlar there. A plug of flesh blew out the back of the man’s thigh, and he gave a high-pitched wail. He staggered backward and fired wildly in Marlow’s direction. For a second, Cade’s heart seized in his chest. It wouldn’t be as bad as when he thought he’d eaten Marlow, but he didn’t want him killed.

The woman at the car screamed, shrill and a bit hysterical, and strafed bullets along the alley.

“Get in the car!” she yelled. “Get in the fucking car.”

Hoodie lurched down the alley in a hobbled lope and was shoved unceremoniously into the back of the car. The woman scrambled in after him and slammed the door. Smoke belched out from around the tires as the driver hit the gas and reversed back into the wall with a crunch.

Marlow stepped out into the middle of the alley and shot at the car. Bullets punched shiny-edged holes along the back panel and through the doors. Both side windows smashed and sprayed glass into the interior.

A yelp of pain escaped through the broken window—it sounded like the woman—and then the car fishtailed over the road and was gone.