The Weeping Lore (Witte & Co. Investigations Book 1) Read Free Page A

and dark eyes. She had spoken with a lisp, and he’d only understood one word in ten, and once they had made love in a patch of strawberries, and the smell of it had followed Cian all the way back to winter in St. Louis. Mostly, though, he remembered the screams from the last night he had seen her.
    “David.”
    The short man glanced up, not willing to meet Cian’s eyes.
    “Got a coat?”
    David disappeared into the back and came out with a bulky wool coat.
    “How much?”
    “Two dollars.”
    Cian pulled the handful of coins from his pocket and spilled them onto the counter. David sorted them.
    “Dollar seventy three.”
    “I’ll owe you the rest.”
    David nodded and passed over the coat.
    The cold hit Cian when he stepped out onto the street. He walked over to the girl, tapped her on the shoulder, and said, “Here you are, doll.” He dropped the coat into her lap.
    Then he started walking. The girl shouted something after him. Cian didn’t look back.
    He’d learned—he’d learned it in France, in fucking France—that it was better to keep walking.
    But that didn’t mean he didn’t still hear her screams.
     

 
    The clay mines of Cheltenham were another dead end.
    The copper-coin-sun glinted almost halfway across the sky when Cian reached the first mine.
    “No work,” the supervisor said when he saw Cian.
    Cian glanced at the line of men filing into the mines. “Looks like you’ve got plenty of work.”
    “Not for you. Last time you finished a shift, you got piss drunk, broke two of my boys’ arms, and disappeared for a month.”
    Cian tried two other mines, but word had spread, and so he started back to the Patch. When he passed David Fitzgerald’s, a dozen people still clustered outside, ghosts who refused to be driven off. The girl with the dark eyes was gone. Cian hoped she’d gotten a bit of work.
    Read any newspaper, and it told you things were good and getting better—unless you were a Bolshevik or an anarchist. Read any newspaper, and it told you about the rich getting richer. It told you about the parties and the champagne. It told you about new factories and new jobs.
    It didn’t tell you that if you were a mick deserter, if you were Cian Shea, you were going to have shit luck finding any of those new jobs. There wasn’t anyone to blame. Cian had made his bed. He’d made his bed in France, with a bullet to the back of a bastard’s head, and he’d never looked back.
    But it made it hard to pay the rent sometimes.
    And that was how, with the afternoon light glinting off the hard crusts of snow, Cian Shea found himself in front of Seamus’s. The rambling structure was purportedly a private residence owned by Seamus Daniels. Anyone who had spent more than five minutes in the Patch, though, knew better. Seamus’s had enough bedrooms, and more than enough girls, to be a brothel. It had enough thugs, and more than enough guns, to be a fortress. It had the slunk-down, broke-back look of a mangy dog. But most importantly, it had a steady stream of Canadian booze—the good stuff—and the men who could provide it to you.
    Cian went inside. The front room was large and drafty and cold. The smell of a fire and damp wood mixed with the harsher smell of spilled spirits. Tables and chairs clustered around an iron stove at the center of the room, but the coals had gone out, and the men and women who sat playing cards and talking looked almost as miserable as Cian. A few of them glanced up when he entered; most of them didn’t. At the bar stood a bull of man whose neck had long since been swallowed by his massive beard.
    The man had his hands under the bar, which meant he was holding a gun.
    The Colt poked into Cian’s back with every step as he crossed the room. The Colt was a good gun. A solid gun.
    Like any gun, it wasn’t going to do him a whole lot of good if this guy shot him dead first.
    Buried somewhere underneath the man’s beard was a mouth, and it said, “Yes?” The voice was