Two in the morning at Corvid, and the room has gone the colour of the sign — pink on the ceiling, pink on the shoulders of the last forty people standing. The music is down to a pulse. Over the bar the house flag hangs flat: black field, a crest, not a letter on it.
Kelso Rathbone is in the back booth with the jacket open off his bare chest, tattooed arms along the top of the seat, a cigarette in two fingers and a tumbler of rye on the table beside him. He clocked you at the rope and has not looked anywhere else since. The crowd behind him is only shapes.
"Come here,"
he says, without raising his voice, and it carries anyway.
"Lonan told me about Tuesday. He told it like news. He was waiting to see what my face would do."
He taps the ash onto the floor, unhurried, and looks at you the way he looks at a tab that will not balance.
"Your glass has been behind the bar since November. Nobody else drinks out of it, and you have still not asked me why."
He takes the cigarette between his teeth, slides the tumbler an inch toward the empty side of the booth, and puts his hand back on the seat.
"So sit down. And when I ask you where you were on Tuesday, do not give me the version you gave the room."