One Crow Alone by S. D. Crockett

Author:S. D. Crockett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

19

A short wiry man with tatty hair the color of straw heard the whistling dip and rise of the police siren and slunk quickly down an alleyway that led behind an abandoned warehouse. Above two metal doors at the back of the building the words COOL TOWN SQUAT were painted in fading letters on the dirty gray bricks.

The man’s name was Rory Moss.

Rory pulled a key from his pocket and rattled it in the low keyhole, pulling the rolling doors up and over and closing them with a clang behind him.

He peered into the cavernous workshop, eyes adjusting to the dingy light. He slung the rucksack off his back, took out a roll of tools, and threw a siphon hose and a crowbar down on the oily workbench where he had been breaking an engine for parts that morning. In one corner the chimney from a large unlit wood-burner disappeared through a crude hole in the brickwork.

He fumbled in the semidarkness and lit a paraffin lamp, then filled the tank of a generator with the last of the diesel from a jerry can. He pulled the starter cord—the generator thumped into life, and he connected jump leads to a bank of tractor batteries on the floor. Digging around in the pocket of his coat, he pulled out a battered mobile phone, which he plugged into a trailing extension cable.

Turning down the lamp, he tramped up a dusty stairwell at one end of the workshop, with his thin-soled boots scuffing on the dirty concrete steps.

At the top of the landing, he bashed on a door.

“Tom! Open the feckin’ door,” he shouted in a faded Irish lilt.

There was a short wait.

“That you, Rory?” came a muffled voice.

“Who the feck do you think it is?”

The door opened and a scruffy-looking man stood in the light. “You find any more diesel?”

“Did you?” Rory pushed past him into a wide corridor, boots clumping on the bare boards.

The scruffy-looking man shot the bolts with a scowl and followed Rory into the kitchen. “I was just asking…”

Rory took off his hat and laid it on the table. A girl sat there smoking a thin tarry roll-up and she looked over and smiled a dirty-toothed smile.

Someone was asleep under a blanket on an old sofa pushed against the wall.

Rory put his rucksack down on the floor. The girl got up, brushed strands of long mousy hair off her face. “You get any food?”

“Yes. In the bag.”

“Shall I make some tea then?” she said, pulling the long fraying ends of her sweater down over her hands.

Rory looked at her. Grubby face, greasy hair, clothes that needed washing, dirty boots like his; the floor was filthy, the bare boards dark and grimy, and the snow had started to fall again behind the window, from the tiny rectangle of gray sky visible between the grim-faced backs of the warehouses. “Jayzus.”

“Where are the others?” he said.

“Asleep,” said Mousy Girl, placing a large kettle on the range.

“Well, they could get their lazy feckin’ arses out of bed and help tidy this shitehole up a bit.

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