Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) by Jay Stringer Page A

make me feel safe again. I’d gotten good at spotting dangerous people. I’d met gang members who had been ready to shoot me over territory, and I’d looked into the eyes of a psychopath who had cut me open with a knife. Once you’ve seen those eyes, you never forget them. The old man had those eyes, and they’d set off a flight-or-fight response in me. My father had always told me, “If there’s trouble, be far away from it.”
    But what kind of trouble was he? I’d never met him before, and I knew most of the local players, at least by sight. None of them scared me the way he had. Why was he in town? Who had hired him? There was something out there that connected him to Jelly and the Cartwrights, and all four of them to the fire at the hotel. Something or someone.
    I hate mysteries.
    I needed to slow down and think. And, as the nervous tug of my gut gave way to a rumble, I remembered I do all my best thinking in the kitchen. Or, if I’m lazy, over someone else’s cooking. Maybe eating a good meal was the best way to stop bouncing from mistake to mistake.
    I followed my stomach and drove back into the city.
    There were any number of places I could eat for free, but I headed to one where I usually had to pay, a spot called Cheapside Spice. It took its name from the street it was on, but there was nothing cheap about it. The kitchen did the best karahi in town, and lots of it. The Roma had originated in northern India, somewhere around modern Pakistan, and so the joke with Laura had always been that this was my spiritual food. I knew the restaurant’s owner; she had been a local radio celebrity who had been dragged through the press when a charity she worked with got mixed up with Gaines. She kept a lower profile these days, running a few restaurants and doing “consulting” work, whatever that was. She hated Gaines, but seemed to like me, so it was a place I could go and think, and avoid people who wanted to talk business.
    It usually was, anyway.
    I sat there after ordering, watching trays of food come out from the kitchen for other customers. My mouth watered at the sight of the heaping plates of balti, karahi, and curry, stacks of naan breads, and pints of Cobra Beer or mango lassi with beads of moisture down the side. The more I saw, the more my stomach told me how hungry I was. Finally my food arrived, but before I picked up my roti to dig in, Claire Gaines sat down at my table.
    She was dressed in a sharp black business suit, of the kind her sister used to wear before she stopped trying too hard. Her hair was pulled back into some fancy style that I couldn’t name. I hadn’t stopped to notice how much she had grown up in the last two years. She looked every bit as scary as her sister used to, and everyone in the room noticed it. I saw them all look at her and then very quickly set about not noticing her, in the way you wouldn’t want to attract Joe Pesci’s attention in Goodfellas .
    “You never texted me back.”
    I said, “What?” But through my second mouthful of karahi it came out as, “Mwhaft?”
    She pulled out her phone and read out the text messages as she flicked past them, like a court reporter reading back minutes, “Claire Gaines to Eoin Miller, ten thirty-two a.m., ‘You Are In The Shit, kiss kiss kiss.’ Eoin Miller to Claire Gaines, ‘Fuck you, I’m eating curry.’”
    “I never sent that.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but you’re thinking it now, bozo.”
    “Right. Well, I didn’t need to reply, did I? Your sister told me what was up.”
    She paused and eyed me for a second, and I couldn’t read what she was thinking. Had Veronica not told her any of what had happened? So what was Claire here for?
    She grinned after I’d stewed long enough. Then she said, “No. Daddy wants to see you. Now.”
    Claire stood up and stared at me. She took a step back and said, loudly, “You’re sleeping with my brother? How sick is that?” A smile split her lips in two as the other