Excerpt from Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood , plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I still had the pipe raised above my head when the figure turned and looked at me.

"I'd prefer not to end my day with a concussion," she said with a voice even as a tightrope. The hefty guy I had been afraid would rush me was a woman. She was around the age my mother would have been with her hair done up tight in an intricate bun.

"You're not supposed to be here," I told her, managing to keep my vibrating heart out of my voice.

"That remains to be seen," she said. "Have you worked here long?"

"A few nights."

"Hmmm." There was disappointment in that murmur.

By all rights, I should have told her to scram. But for some reason, call it fate or boredom or an inborn pernicious streak, I kept talking. "I think McCloskey—that's the site manager—only just started hiring night guards. I think he used to spend the night here sleeping in his shack so he could double dip. That's what some of the morning shift guys told me anyway."

"Better," she declared.

She stood slowly, using the cane in her left hand for lever age. She was tall and solidly built, wearing a tailored houndstooth suit that looked expensive and an ankle-length coat like the kind Blackheart Bart wore when he did his sharp shooter act.

"Is that his shack?" she asked, looking over at the small wooden structure a quarter turn around the pit.

I nodded.

"Show me, please."

By that point, it was clear to both of us there would be no clobbering, so I figured why not. Maybe it was because the alternative would have been ringing up the police, and I have a cultivated dislike of anyone with a badge.

I headed over to the shack in the corner of the yard. She followed a little behind, using the cane as she went. She wasn't limping so much as wobbling a little. I wasn't sure what was up with her, but the cane obviously wasn't for show.

McCloskey had called the shack his office, but I'd seen chicken coops built sturdier. We were never supposed to go inside, and besides, the door was locked. The mysterious woman took something from an inner pocket of her coat—a thin, bent piece of wire—and went to work on the padlock. After a minute of fumbling, I piped up, "You need to go at it from the bottom."

"How do you mean?"

I took the wire out of her hand and had the job done in ten seconds flat. I'd picked harder locks blindfolded. Literally. "You should get yourself some real picks if you're going to do this kind of thing regular," I told her.

In all the years after, I only ever saw her smile about three dozen times. She graced me with one then.

"I'll keep that in mind," she said.

The inside of the shack matched the outside. Dirty and jerry-built. There was a desk fashioned out of a couple dis carded boards and some sawhorses. Papers were scattered hap-hazardly across it. On it were also a lantern and an army-issue field phone that someone had rigged so McCloskey could make calls without leaving to find a pay phone. The rest of the space was taken up by a narrow cot and a pile of dirty rags that on second glance were clothes.

My companion lit the lantern. The addition of light didn't do the cramped room any favors. I've seen monkey cages less filthy.

"Describe Mr. McCloskey," she said, fixing me with eyes the gray-blue of a winter sky.

"I don't know. Forty or so. Average, I guess."

She gave me a look I have come to refer to as her disap pointed schoolmarm. "Average doesn't exist. Not when it comes to human beings. And don't guess unless circumstances force you to."

I was starting to regret not using the lead pipe.

"Okay," I said with a bit of a sneer. "About a foot taller than me, so figure six feet, give or take. About two hundred pounds—a lot of it fat, but there's some muscle under there. Like a roustabout who's taken to the bottle. From the patches on his trousers, I'd say he has two sets of clothes, neither of them more than three bucks combined. He's cheap but wants people to think he has flash."

From Fortune Favors the Dead: A Novel by Stephen Spotswood, published by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2020 by Stephen Spotswood.