Free Whiskey and Wry (Sinners Series) by Rhys Ford

at his face, suddenly wishing he’d drunk more of Leigh’s toxic coffee.
    Sionn scanned the pier, searching through the cloud of blue uniforms interspersed with a thin smattering of tourists. A large, rough-faced blond man in a suit was chatting up a pretty barista at the coffee cart, and a few yards down, the fill-your-own bath salts stall was setting up for the day, the ancient hippie woman who’d worked there since Sionn was a teen puttering about the sealed bins, seemingly in no hurry to bring in business. Leigh was talking to a handsome junior inspector Sionn belatedly realized was his younger cousin. Turning his back to her, he stood firm against Browne’s smirk.
    “You can’t hide from the family forever, you know,” the inspector teased. “They’ll root you out like terriers.”
    “Yeah, I know.” He made a face. There would be too much to explain to his aunt and her brood. His thigh was fine, with a bit of residual scarring that sometimes put a hitch in his step, but if he knew her at all, she’d have him up on the couch with his pants down around his ankles so she could see for herself. “I just need some time. To work up to their prying and shite.”
    The fog had lifted a bit, but the press of rain remained, sheets of water lurking offshore and moving in quickly. Browne nodded at one of the cops pulling away from the pier, his cruiser’s lights flashing once to push traffic to the side. A water drop hit the inspector’s notebook, smearing a blue ink scribble on the page.
    “Shit, can’t read my own writing as it is,” the older man swore. “Tell you what, stick around while I go talk to your boy and….” Browne looked past Sionn, his mustache twitching around his frown. “What the fucking hell?”
    Browne’s frown flattened out, and Sionn winced immediately. The man was displeased, and if he’d been any younger, Sionn would have expected to be grabbed by the ear and duck-marched outside to get a talking to. Past thirty, and within seconds, he reverted to being a freckle-faced teen caught whispering in the back pews at St. Patrick’s.
    “Where’s your boy gone, Murphy?” Browne growled angrily, scanning the pier.
    Dee was nowhere to be seen. The old amp was lying sideways, its front screen a victim of the shooting, but Sionn couldn’t spot the man’s electric guitar or the flat case he used to cart it around. Other than the damaged amp, all signs of the man Sionn lusted for had been erased.
    “Damn it, I think he spooked,” Sionn ground out. “Fucking hell and damn.”
     
     
    T HE electric guitar was heavy. No heavier than others he’d carried, but running with it was a bitch. Damie’d hit more people than he avoided. The flat case was wide and long, unwieldy most of the time, but going full tilt through a herd of businessmen was whacking the heads of mums off with a golf club.
    “Slow it down, Damie,” he cautioned himself. Cops were going to spot someone running before they noticed anything else. Forcing himself to a slow saunter, he wove through the stream of people pouring out at the BART stop. Keeping his head down, Damie glanced around, his spine stiffening with fear every time he spotted a flash of bright blond hair bobbing up behind him. With his guts turned to jelly, he mounted the train car, slid down into a seat, and pulled the case up over his lap.
    “Fuck.” He let loose a few more curses, muttering under his breath fiercely enough the woman sitting a seat away looked at him nervously before getting up to move off. Left alone in the back of the car, Damien waited for his heart to stop trying to pound through his ribs.
    What little he remembered of the night he’d fled Skywood was fragmented at best, but he clearly recalled the gargoyle frame of Jerome’s killer and his nearly sunburst-bright shock of hair. Even in the dead of a winter night, it had shone yellow in the smoke-filtered moonlight. When he’d turned and aimed the gun at Damien, the man looked more