Finn swiveled around on his stool and looked at the rest of the restaurant. Just before noon on a Tuesday. Despite the gray clouds and cold, rainy weather outside, I should have had at least twenty customers by now, with more coming in every minute, all eager to get their barbecue fix on, and the phone ringing off the hook with takeout orders. Instead, a lone woman huddled in a booth in the back of the restaurant, out of sight of the storefront windows. A young girl who looked all of eighteen, nineteen, tops.

Nobody else sat at the long counter or in the booths.

Not a single person stood outside staring in through the windows, and no one had called for takeout. Not even my Tuesday regulars. Hell, nobody besides the girl had come in all morning, not even the mailman. He’d just slid the day’s bills through the mail slot and scurried on to the next stop on his route as though this were a house of lepers.

“And you wonder why you don’t have any customers,” Finn murmured. “Jonah McAllister’s put the word out that you are persona non grata. And I’m sure the story in the newspaper didn’t help matters, either. Nobody wants to eat someplace where they might not have cleaned up the blood yet.”

“What does McAllister think he’s going to do?” I asked. “He can’t keep people away forever. The food’s too good. Even if he could, I still wouldn’t starve.”

“Thanks to my years of wise monetary advice and stellar investing skills,” Finn not so humbly stated.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, thanks to your skills. If Jonah McAllister thinks a couple of days of lousy business are going to intimidate me into dropping the charges against his loser kid, then he needs to think some more.”

“Jonah McAllister doesn’t know who he’s dealing with,” Finn replied. “If he knew you were the assassin the Spider, he’d probably just borrow a couple of Mab Monroe’s giants to try to kill you before you could testify against his son.”

“Former assassin,” I corrected. “And let Jonah McAllister send some of Mab’s goons after me. We both know exactly how that would turn out.”

Finn snorted. “Yeah, with their blood on the floor of the restaurant.”

I grinned. “C’mon. You have to admit I do good work.”

“Deadly work, perhaps. You know how I feel about the word good.” He shuddered.

Like me, Finnegan Lane was firmly entrenched in the shady side of life, with morals that bent easier than wet grass. Banking regulations, married women, public indecency laws. Finn fucked around with whatever and whomever he could without getting caught. Even when he did, he always found a way to wriggle out of whatever messy love triangle he currently found himself in.