Chapter Five
153B WEST MAMREAvenue didn’t look like a building site either. It was a dive bar, with bikes parked outside and the name painted over the window.
CROSSROAD CROWS. A drawing of a stylized crow strung from a gibbet filled the rest of the window.
That was portentous. Jonah pushed the door open and stepped inside. It was dimly lit and smelled of beer and smoke. The sound of pool balls bouncing off each other was the loudest sound in the joint. It stopped as the players registered that he wasn’t a regular visitor.
The barman was a lean, sandy-haired woman with ink that started at her wrists and spread up to her shoulders. She gave Jonah an unimpressed once-over while she poured a beer.
“We aren’t open,” she said.
“I’m not here to drink,” Jonah said. “I’m looking for Levi and Sons.”
She showed him her teeth in an unfriendly grin. “That’s me.”
Jonah wondered if a lot of people took that bait. He pulled the business card out of his back pocket and held it up, the corner pinched between his fingers like he was about to do a trick. There were more creases in it now, and the corners had started to peel.
“I was told to ask for Shiloh.”
The woman stared at him while she took a long, slow drink of her beer. “Aren’t you too old to be picking up pretty boys?” she asked.
Jonah winced. The men at the pool table laughed and leaned back to watch, cues held lazily in their hands.
“I’m twenty-nine,” he said.
She twitched a scarred eyebrow at him and wiped foam off her lip with her thumb. “I said what I said.”
“And I’m not here for a date,” Jonah added. It was for his own benefit as much as it was anyone else’s. This was business, even pro bono, not pleasure. He didn’t mix the two. That always ended badly. “I’ve information about Deborah Slater.”
The woman set the beer down on the bar. The click of the glass against old black wood was loud in the quiet bar.
“Next time, lead with that.” She turned and caught the attention of one of the men at the pool table. A jerk of her thumb ordered him to take her post behind the bar. While he laid his cue down and headed over, she grabbed her cut from a hook and shrugged it on. Her name was stitched on a tag over her breast: Witch. She popped the collar as she stepped out from behind the bar and jerked her chin toward a door marked PRIVATE in the back of the bar. “It’s that way. Get a move on.”
Someone had slaughtered a crow in the back room. It was laid out on the old oak table, blood and entrails placed neatly around it. Its feathers were matted with blood; so was its great black beak.
Jonah shouldn’t have looked, but he did. The future was plotted in the dark spots on the liver and the congestion of the heart, in the way the blood ran.
There was a bad wind coming, but it was on the heels of opportunity. Grasp one or lose both.
Shit.
Jonah looked away and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. That didn’t count either, he assured himself. He couldn’tnotread it. The augury was practically written out in neon letters, ALL CAPS for clarity. He’d not killed the bird himself.
The itch of adrenaline at the base of the skull called him a liar.
He ignored it.
“If you don’t like blood,” a rough voice said from the corner of the room, “you’re in the wrong place.”
Jonah turned in that direction.
A lean man with scruffy brown hair and hollow cheeks sprawled out behind a messy desk. His shirt hung open enough to flash the crow tattoo that decorated his breastbone, its wingtips stretched along his collarbones. He looked bored.
Shiloh stood next to him, a bloody handkerchief wrapped around his hand. He stared at Jonah across the room, suddenly intent, and then leaned down, arm slung over the high leather back of the chair, to mutter something in the man’s ear. Interest sparked in cold gray eyes, and the man straightened up in his chair.
“So, apparently, you know my son,” he said. “You don’t seem his type.”
Jonah rubbed his jaw. “He punched me, we didn’t go on a date,” he said. Behind, Witch snorted hard enough he felt it on the back of his neck, and he clenched his jaw for a second. “And that’s not why I’m here.”
