And then Tony jerked, as though someone had pushed him, and the bat’s trajectory slipped, and it smashed against the stage. Tony made another of those little jerking movements. He stared at Shaw, his eyes wide with surprise. And then he looked like he was trying to sit, only his crippled knee wouldn’t support him, and he toppled to one side. He didn’t move after that.

Behind him, picked out in the nightmare blur of the blue-green lights, North was on his knees, both hands wrapped around his pistol.

Chapter 32

He thought North was unconscious,” Shaw said at what he assumed was a very reasonable volume.

Judging by the way Detective Reck winced and worked a finger in his ear, Shaw figured his own hearing was still slightly messed up. Reck said something like, “And then he shot him?”

Shaw settled for nodding.

They were at Barnes again, and Shaw was in a hospital room meant to be shared, although currently he was the only occupant. Barr had put him through a series of questions, and Shaw had answered them, and then Barr had left and Reck had come in and asked basically the same questions. Shaw guessed that Barr was currently running North through the same series of events.

“What about the blackmail materials? The recordings?”

Shaw shook his head. “No sign of them.” He had hidden the flash drive inside an ancient gas oven—the metal barrier that he had crashed into on stage at the Lucky—before the police arrived. Shaw wasn’t sure why. He knew something was wrong, but he wasn’t sure what. Something was swimming in those dark waters deep in his brain, and Shaw wasn’t about to hand over the blackmail material until he knew why he felt that way. “I thought I’d find them in the dressing room—Regina had told us about a blackmail video involving a dressing room—but there was no sign of the drive.”

“What drive?” Reck asked, his eyes suddenly bright.

“External hard drive. Flash drive.” Shaw shrugged. “Whatever he stored the videos on.”

“You really think Mark Sevcik would store his blackmail materials within ten feet of a person he was blackmailing?”

Shaw smiled. “Pretty stupid, right? Regina was convinced we had them, though. She was going to kill us to make sure nobody else got them.”

Reck shrugged; he was wearing another of those damn-near-transparent white shirts, and it rode tight against the ripple of muscle in his chest and abdomen. He stood, stretched, and considered Shaw again. “You’re very pretty. Not classically pretty, God, I don’t mean that. But very, very pretty in your own way.”

“Thank you?”

“But you’re a shit liar.”

“What am I lying about?”

“I don’t know. But I’d guess it has something to do with your boyfriend.” He jerked his head down the hall toward the room where they had taken North.

“North’s not my boyfriend. He has a husband.”

Reck had a tight smirk on his face. “I know.”

Eventually, the detectives released both men, and Shaw found himself standing in the hallway, studying the bandage on the side of North’s head. Aside from the injury, aside from the blood on the Carhartt jacket, aside from North’s pallor and the way it made those ice-rim eyes huge and glowing, aside from the memory that played and replayed in Shaw’s mind—the way North’s head had rolled, the bloody swatch of hair, the certainty that North was dead—aside from all of that, everything was exactly the same.