Page 53 of Femme Fatale
I heard him behind me, coming down the stairs. Every step was heavier than the last. He’d pulled on a clean shirt, but the stains spread fast over his chest. He looked at me, then at the cop, and raised his hands. “Here.”
They were on him in a blink, three blue bodies piling up, pinning his arms, one of them cuffing him while another recitedthe Miranda like a church litany. They didn’t rough him up; they didn’t need to. Zeke didn’t fight. Didn’t say a word.
He just looked at me. Not an apology. Not a goodbye. Just the look of a man who’d finally run out of roads.
They dragged him past, the cop’s hand tight on the back of his neck. He didn’t limp, didn’t wince, just let it happen. He stopped at the threshold, turned, and held my gaze.
“Take care of your crew,” he said.
I nodded. “Always.”
And that was it. The door closed. The lights faded. The city outside was the same as ever, dirt and neon, the smell of someone else’s blood in every breath.
A detective came in, face soft now, and asked if I needed an ambulance. I shook my head.
“We got a statement from your friend,” he said. “Simone. She said you’re the good guys, in all this.”
I laughed, hollow. “She’s a liar.”
The detective smiled, almost kind. “Aren’t we all?”
They left us alone after that. I waited until the sirens disappeared, until the girls started to pick themselves up off the floor, until the bottle of Four Roses made its way to me. I poured three fingers into a clean glass, drank it in one go, and let the burn carry me through the dawn.
Zeke was gone, maybe forever. The club was mine if I wanted it. Vegas rolled on, chewing and spitting out the next set of fools. The old stories were over, but the scars ran deep, and I was alive to count them.
I closed my eyes, leaned back in the chair, and let the world keep turning.
After all, it always did.
***
The weeks that followed were brutal and filled with vices I should have avoided. I’d expected the city to shrink without him, but Vegas only got meaner, like it thought I was daring it to come at me. I leaned in. Life as a club matriarch wasn’t in the cards when I got here, but Vegas didn’t care about your plans, and neither did I.
People thought the Harlots would fold the second the cops took Zeke. They thought I’d run for it, sell the bar, vanish into the bottle or the night or both. The joke was how wrong they were. The girls took to it, this new world with me at the center, like sharks to a fat ferry passenger. Joker, with Glitz’s help, learned to run the books, Aces got certified as an actual EMT, and once we even performed CPR, just for the hell of it. Nines started a side hustle ghostwriting emails for the local Congresswoman, and Spade transferred her killing instinct from slot machines to accounting, auditing every dime. Leadership by a girl with a bullet in her leg and a chip on her shoulder—who saw that coming?
They let Zeke out after thirty days, on a plea bargain that made him a local legend. By then, the war was over. Jack Smalls, still dead. Simone Smalls, managing a downscaled empire and buying up every foreclosed house on Lake Mead. Kara, or War Lady if you want to glamorize it, went east, maybe to start another fight, maybe just for fun. It didn’t matter. There were new ghosts to house, and I had a lifetime of vacancies.
That first morning he came home, I found him in the backyard, shovel-deep in hardpan. "Trying to dig your own grave?" I asked from the steps, coffee in one hand, Glock in the other. He looked up, sweat painting a mask on his face, and said, "Planting a tree." He stabbed the shovel point-down and looked at me, the smile stripped clean of all the old tricks.
“Figured I’d leave something,” he said. “In case I ever go for real.”
When the heat broke in October, and the club reopened, we lit the sign again with a new name. The Selene. He said it was too obvious, but I liked the way the neon looked, my name on twenty feet of gambling-and-booze corridor. Zeke ran the bar. He made it look easy, pouring beer and whiskey for men who would have slit his throat a month before. Sometimes he wore a tie, just to show he could play house. Sometimes he dyed his hair a different color. He always came home to me.
The first time I let him top me in the new office, I left the blinds wide open. He bent me over the desk, his hands bigger than any regret he’d ever had, and I let him fuck the trauma out of both of us, the way only two broken people ever could. I’d yell “Zeke!” so the entire floor heard, then wait until the applause from the strip-club dancers below died down. He never blushed, not once. That was my job.
We both bore the scars but never counted them aloud. Instead, we counted tips, counted pills, and counted the number of hours we lasted without fighting or fucking. Sometimes the difference was just a word, a look, a new rip in the bedsheet. Some nights we talked about running away, but we both knew we’d stick around for the next war, or the next idiot who thought Vegas had an ounce of innocence left.
On weekends, I drove us out to the lake. Let him swim if he wanted, or just smoke on the sand while I watched. Sometimes we’d see a wedding party on the party boat, all white dresses and bad decisions, and I’d feel the urge to crash it, to see if I remembered how to be human in a room where nobody was hunting anyone. Zeke thought it was funny.
“Maybe next time,” he’d say, flicking his cigarette toward the water.
Sometimes I’d think about Jack and how a monster can still create life worth saving. How a girl from nowhere could survive acity made to kill her, and end up owning the only thing that ever mattered.
But mostly, I just lived. I made payroll. I kicked out the assholes. I let the girls take a vacation if they earned it. I made sure the strippers all got a raise after the union threat, and that the bouncer who called Joker a bitch never did it again.
When the cops came by, I smiled, poured them coffee, and pretended not to see which of them still took bribes from the Italians. The cops pretended not to notice Zeke, even when his shirt rode up and showed the old bruises, or when a stray girl from the old casino called him “sir” in front of their wives. Vegas is a city built on pretending.
One night, he came in after close, bleeding from a gash in his arm. “Fell on the bottle,” he said, and winked. I patched him up, then we fucked on the pool table, the smell of chalk and old felt mixing with blood and sweat. After, we just lay there, staring at the ceiling. He said, “I could do this forever.”
