The Weeping Lore (Witte & Co. Investigations Book 1) by Gregory Ashe Page A

surroundings. A quiet, narrow street of quiet, narrow houses. An old German woman in a bonnet and a patchwork coat watched him with mouse-eyes as she swept her stoop. The smell of the river had faded. Here, Cian smelled the leftover, yeasty odor of fermentation. Perhaps the smell lingered from the days before the Volstead Act. Perhaps some of St. Louis’s finest were still making their own beer. The smell turned Cian’s stomach, though, and he dropped to sit on a stoop.
    The old German woman kept sweeping and watching him. Her face was a wrinkled apple. A sour, wrinkled apple.
    Old German women, though, were the least of Cian’s problems. With trains and boats both closed to him, Cian would have to leave town on foot. Or, if he were lucky, perhaps hitching a ride, although that seemed unlikely.
    Run, the smart part of Cian’s brain was still saying.
    But now another part of him had woken up. The part that had seen the lieutenant, that night in France, and pulled the Colt, and squeezed the trigger, and never thought twice about it. The part that had been glad—glad—to see the bastard’s brains and bone spattered across the wall.
    Cian’s life wasn’t worth a wooden penny. He was a murderer, a deserter, and a drunk. Most jobs wouldn’t take him, and the ones that did, he managed to screw up. But it had been his life. And someone had taken it from him.
    Then he knew who it was.
    The thin man, the one who had shot Seamus and left Cian to take the fall.
    That’s when everything had gone wrong.
    Cian got to his feet and started walking. His feet hurt. His head hurt. The ham from that morning had taken a bad turn in his stomach.
    He had less than five dollars in his pocket, but he found someplace warm, a little Hun soda shop in Dutchtown, and he bought himself a bottle of Bevo, an egg salad sandwich, and then a second sandwich to eat on the road. His head had settled by the time he’d finished eating. He thought Mrs. Doyle might even be proud of him, if he hadn’t left Bobby Flynn dead in her back yard. Two days now and he’d woken up sober. Even St. Patrick might find that hard to believe.
    It took Cian longer than he thought to find Eileen’s apartment. One reason was that he didn’t know her last name, and Eileen was a common enough name in the Patch. The other reason was that, even in the middle of the day, the Patch was still the Patch, and Cian had to keep to back streets and places where Seamus’s men didn’t have a handhold.
    By mid-afternoon, though, Cian had wandered into the courtyard of a rickety log structure. It was a cold, dark, quiet spot of the Patch, walled away from sunlight and fresh air, and doors studded both stories of the courtyard. He guessed that women like Eileen tended to live in place like this: little, one-room hovels with nothing more than a bed. It was better than what some folk in the Patch had. Cian stood on the ground floor outside a rough door. He hammered on the door and heard movement inside, and a moment later, the door popped open a crack.
    A red-rimmed eye looked out at him, widened in surprise, and the door started to shut.
    Cian wedged his foot into the crack.
    “Morning, Eileen. Afternoon, really.”
    “Get lost,” she said. “You’re bad news, Cian Shea. You should leave town.”
    “See, that’s really funny, Eileen. I thought the same thing.” Cian gave the door a shove. Eileen fell back, landing on a narrow cot. The room was as spare as Cian had imagined it: the cot, a lone chair with clothes hanging off the back, and a three-legged table with a pitcher and basin. Cold winter air mixed with the smell of Eileen’s body. Cian closed the door and stood with his back to it.
    “You don’t mind, do you?”
    Eileen grimaced and pulled her flimsy dressing gown closer. She watched him for a minute. She was still throwing off those tiny shivers that Cian remembered from the first time he met her.
    “You’re sick?” he asked.
    No answer.
    “You might as well get