Page 6 of A Murderous Crow
I set things on the one sparse bit of counter space next to the stove and opened the fridge to pull out my chilled wine and pour myself a glass.
Three sips later, I was unwinding and taking everything into the small but cozy living room.
The fireplace didn’t work anymore, but that hadn’t stopped me from making it the centerpiece of the room, anyway. I had put a small space heater with a fireplace effect into it and had sealed off the chimney by taking a board backed with insulation and stuffing it up into the fireplace, holding it in place with spray foam – you couldn’t see any of that mess from in here – but it did the job, sealing out the damp and the draft. With just a flick of the switch on the side of the small heating unit, the glow effect of the false fire made this little house feel like a home.
I had done a majority of the restoration of the inside of this place myself. My dad had come to help me with some of the tougher stuff, such as tiling the bathroom and fixing some of the plumbing.
Did I ask permission to alter the interior of this dump? No, but Ihadmade it livable on the cheap and had probably raised the property value considerably for the slumlord I rented it from.
Not that the curmudgeonly old fool would ever know. It’s not like he ever came to inspect or to fix anything.
I dropped onto my Wayfair-purchased, cream, boneless couch and sighed with relief, setting my glass onto the glass-topped rescue French Provincial coffee table I’d stolen off the curb up the street. I had spent a weekend restoring, sanding, puttying, sandingsome more, and painting until it looked like a piece out ofHome & Garden Magazine, all for the cost of some masking tape, primer, and a crackle-effect spray paint.
I pulled my dusky rose faux chenille throw over my lap and set my laptop onto it next.
I dialed back Fabian, and he asked me, “You drinking your dinner?” by way of greeting.
“You know I am.” I rolled my eyes, and he chuckled.
“I’ve trained you well – so, what did you learn?”
“I have a much longer list of what he hates than what he likes,” I told him.
“Typical,” he said, and I could hear his mouse clicking on the other end of the line. “Let’s have it.”
And that was how we spent another fun-filled Tuesday evening – looking through listings online and coming up with a short list of properties to email to Hal Lindstrom in the morning.
It was the Savvy Savannah way, after all.
Chapter Four
Corvus…
She was ignoring me.
I hated it when she did that. It was childish, and it also stirred that part of me that wanted to hunt, to stalk, and to pin her up against a wall andmakeher listen to what I had to say, even if I already knew it was a nonstarter. Our respective clients were two very different kinds of people. No matter how in love with it my clients were, they weren’t going to get away with making the changes they had in mind after taking possession of the place without an uproar and lawsuits hitting them left, right, and center from the local historic societies.
Sometimes, it was about protecting your clients from themselves as much as it was about protecting the agency from becoming legally liable during a sale for making bad-faith investments and sales.
Still, I appreciated Savannah’s spitfire attitude and general stupidity in not backing down from me. She could be feisty when she wanted to, and it gave her hot looks an edge with personality that just did things for me.
Not enough to want to keep her around for anything but a casual fuck – I didn’t tend to do shallow and insipid for very long. Like I said, there was something about Savannah Davenport that screamedfake.Disingenuous. She certainly could mean girl and be as cutthroat as the best of them, but I didn’t tend to dig it when it was a woman’s whole personality.
I set my phone aside, put my feet up on my ottoman, and took up my glass of cognac, breathing deep its rich aromatics.
My phone started buzzing across the small side table, and I let out an explosive sigh. “Jesus Christ,” I muttered, and picked it up, half expecting her name to flash across the screen – but no, it was worse than that. Much worse.
I grimaced and answered the line. “Renaldo, to what do I owe this pleasure?” I asked.
Renaldo Benitez was the foot soldier for Benito Castañeda, our primary contact and boss for one of Colombia’s more notorious cartels. No, we didn’t deal in drugs – but we did deal in guns, and it wasn’t time for our monthly cache exchange for cash out in the middle of nowhere. So, a call was… out of place, and out of place was never a good thing when dealing with the cartel.
“We got a situation,” he said. Holding the phone away from his face, he rattled off in rapid-fire Spanish to someone in the background.
“What kind of situation?” I inquired, trying to suss out whether it was one that involved the club, or was just a problem the cartel was having and was coming our way, looking for a solution.
“The kind that requires the right tools to fix – if you catch my drift.”
I did indeed catch his drift. He needed weapons, and he needed some now, before the usual drop. I heard someone makea query in Spanish and Renaldo tell them, “El parche.” I knew what that meant. It meant posse, or group of friends – roughly.
