Chapter Four #2
Davy stared at it. He’d forgotten that.
Sweat itched under Davy’s armpit. He scratched absently as he shoved his soaked hoodie into the locker.
“We can’t let what happened in Palmyra go unanswered.”
Davy shifted the door so he could see his brother without having to turn around.
In the reflection, Fraser frowned at him. He looked, like always, like someone had drawn Davy from memory.
“I saw you already sent a reply,” Davy said.
Fraser clenched his jaw. “This is the private sector,” he said. “It’s not enough to be good at what you do; you have to be seen being good at it.”
Davy smirked at him. “I look good enough,” he said.
“Not that good.”
“Better than you.”
“Older than me.”
They glared at each other. Blood had always been enough reason to stick together, but not enough to like it. But…Fraser was good at what he did—crawling up rich people’s holes—too.
And, like it or not, black ops was a young man’s game. Davy wasn’t old, but he’d run himself hard. After a workout, these days, the ache lingered along stress lines that he could feel weren’t going to get any better.
He knew where people like him ended up when they lost their edge. In a grave.
He’d come very close to one in Palmyra.
“I know.” Davy gave in to the inevitable. “But we also can’t look scared. So if your slap on the wrist works, we’ll call it even.”
Fraser gave him a thin-lipped smirk. “And if it doesn’t?”
That was a good question,
Davy closed the locker, briefly making his brother vanish, and then turned around to look at him.
“It will,” he said. “I know Coate. He’s not stupid.”
“Stupid enough,” Fraser interrupted him. He pulled his Blackberry out of his pocket and frowned at the screen. “He nearly killed us. Rosen and his wife were there too, and they’re civilians. She lost the baby.”
“Don’t pretend you care.”
“I care about keeping Rosen happy,” Fraser said. “He knows where to find the money. So answer his email about the corporate logo. Make him feel like he’s got a reason to stay. That he’s an equal partner.”
“Is he?”
“Where money’s concerned? Yes,” Fraser said. “Don’t be a dick about it, either.”
Davy didn’t check his email until the next day. When he did, he’d rejected all of them. He might start to slip one day, but right at that moment, he was still good. So why not lean into his rep?
Davy Jones and CIRATTA HOLDINGS. What else could you have but an octopus? He’d gone over to their house to go through the designs, though. That had shown willingness.
A thick tentacle curled around his throat and draped over his shoulders. He couldn’t feel it, but the memory of the dry, fidgeting heft of it still made him shift his weight back automatically.
“Yeah, I get it,” he said as he popped the sucker out of his mouth. “One way or another, I picked you, not the other way around.”
The tentacle tightened, long straps of muscle moving visibly under the pale skin. It could have been meant affectionately, or not, but either way it didn’t have much effect. Davy left it to it as he twiddled the chewed white stick of the sucker between his fingers and stared at the computer screen.
Thirty years, give or take. That was how long ago Fraser had started his day and ended it with a reminder of fratricide. It seemed like the sort of thing that implied something about the person who did it.
Davy didn’t know what exactly—guilt, pride?—but it had to have a psychological impact. He stuck the candy back in his mouth and tucked it into his cheek. The sickly-sweet taste seeped slowly into his teeth as he pulled the keyboard toward him.
The box on the screen, brusque and free of a user-friendly interface, demanded a password.
Davy hovered his fingers over the keys as he ran through his options.
ikilledmybrother didn’t work, which was a surprise.
Neither did hedeservedit.
The computer told him that if he got the password wrong one more time, it would lock him out.
“That is the point,” Davy said absently.
He flexed his fingers. The knuckles didn’t pop. He grimaced to himself. Between this and the fight that never was in the lift, he was getting blue-balled left, right, and center today.
DavyJonesLives.
He hit enter and smirked as the computer shut down. With luck, whoever got tapped to fix his system would actually do the legwork to log the failed run of passwords. That would be awkward for Fraser, which would be a shame.
Now, for what he had come here for.
Davy braced his propped foot against the edge of the desk and pushed.
He rolled jerkily back toward the floor-length windows, the wheels of the chair bogged down in the plush gray carpet.
His tongue curled around the tacky paper of the candy stick as he dropped his feet to the floor and looked around the room.
If he were a go-bag, where would he be?
Under the floorboards was industry standard, but—
Davy pushed himself up out of the chair and walked over to the bookcase that took up one wall.
There were only a few books in it, all industry titles and uncracked spines.
Like Fraser hadn’t been the weird neighborhood kid with no friends, three library cards, and an addiction to pulp sci-fi and Westerns.
As opposed to… Davy picked up a workmanlike silver frame from a polished black shelf and looked at… a heavy-set middle-aged man with high cholesterol, a classy wife, and a hot stepson.
Now that was creepy in a different way, but Fraser wasn’t that sort of asshole. He’d never had anything but contempt for the perverts who’d come sniffing around when they were kids.
Davy studied the posed, postcard-perfect family portrait for a second longer.
It was fairly recent from Hill’s haircut—he had the vibe of someone who didn’t think about that often—and age.
Fraser looked content, or at least pleased with himself, and like someone who’d consider the comfort level of his having to crawl around on the floor.
So, make it eye level.
Davy set the photo back down and stepped back to take in the rest of the room.
His gaze hooked on the bookshelf, and he cocked his head to the side.
Maybe, but it wouldn’t be Davy’s first choice—if you were in the shit that deep you wanted to get in and out—and, like it or not, he and Fraser had the same instincts.
He moved it down the list of possibilities as he turned on his heel to check out the rest of the room. It didn’t take long. Fraser liked having expensive things, but it gave him no pleasure having them around. Unless there was a need to posture, he preferred things to be “clean.”
It was why they’d worked so well together. Davy made problems go away, and Fraser cleaned up the mess.
Funny that he’d swapped those roles with Hill’s dad after he killed Davy.
Davy snorted to himself at that and rubbed the back of his neck.
Probably something pretty fucking psychological there too, but not real useful right now.
He walked over to the only other prominent decor in the room, a clutch of letters of commendation and Fraser’s commission framed and hung prominently on the wall over the narrow couch.
Without him thinking about it, his tentacles squirmed over his shoulder and groped through the glass and paper and plaster into the wall behind. It felt—
Davy screwed his face up as his brain tried to map sensation onto a body that didn’t have the actual bits.
It wasn’t unpleasant, just very weird to feel dust and dry wood on his earlobe and in his ass crack.
The gossamer stickers of spiderwebs in his nose made his stomach turn, and it took a lot to do that.
Finally, he felt the graze of rough fabric and cold metal trail down his back. He squirmed his shoulders back in reaction and then pulled in all his tentacles but that one. It lingered in the wall, a pale, fleshy pointer straight through a framed medal that Fraser had never actually gotten.
Davy snorted and withdrew the last tentacle. It hung attentively over his shoulder as he reached out to move the wooden frame and set it neatly down on the couch. He tapped a finger against the smooth gray paint underneath and listened to the light, hollow thump of it.
Just in case.
He punched through the wall.
It fucking hurt.
Davy recoiled in surprise at the jolt of pain that brought tears to the back of his throat. He pressed his lips together on a yelp and shook his hand as if that would make it better.
What the hell? He sucked in a ragged breath and stuck his hand into his armpit as he waited for the sting to subside. His mind raced from confusion to paranoia that Fraser really did have some sort of anti-spirit measures worked into the structure of the building.
Salt or relics or some shit like that. Davy leaned forward cautiously to peer into the hole he’d made. He’d heard the dry dead talking about stuff like that before, but he’d never paid much heed to it. It hadn’t seemed relevant to his problems.
Nothing looked out of place. Just a dark cavity in a wall and a battered canvas bag hung from a cheap hook.
So why the fuck did Davy’s hand feel like he’d shoved it into a nest of angry wasps?
He gingerly took it out from under his arm to look at it and grimaced. His knuckles were split open, blood slowly oozing out over ragged chunks of skin, and already stained with the start of bruising. It looked like…
Davy mentally trailed off as he realized that it looked like the hand of someone who’d never punched something before.
Probably because it hadn’t. He lifted Hill’s hand to his mouth to suck the blood out of the scraped skin.
Between this and the hole in his other hand, currently bandaged up with gauze pads and Band-Aids, Hill’s deal with the dead was going to leave a mark.
Something in Davy’s chest pinched like that was his problem.
It caught him off-guard. Nothing about this deal was new to him.
OK, possessing someone who’d never been in a fight before was kind of novel.
The rest was SOP. He had always been a targeted-strike kind of operative.
If he saw the fallout, it was because something had gone to shit somewhere.
Hill would have to deal with the New Year on his own. All Davy could do to make that any easier was his job.
He grabbed the edge of the hole and broke off chunks of the wall, paint chips and plaster dust scabbed over his bloody knuckles. Once it was big enough, he reached through, grabbed the bag, and pulled it out.
It felt usefully heavy, but there wasn’t time to make sure.
Davy picked up the frame he’d set aside, the medal inside askew on its mounting from being handled, and hung it neatly back on the wall. It didn’t quite hide the edges of the hole.
Again, though, that was the point.
Davy brushed himself off, slung the bag over his shoulder, and headed back out.
He grabbed a package from the Secret Santa pile on his way out.
It was neatly wrapped and felt heavy enough that the fact it didn’t rattle when he shook it suggested that—he checked the neat, smiling Santa tag—Steven Wills had scored a good present.
Sucked to be him.
Davy pulled the tag off and tossed it in a bin on the way past. He whistled tunelessly to himself as he went to find Reynolds.
Halfway there, he paused as the thought of Hill nudged at him.
There wasn’t much he could do to find Hill in the Beyond, but he could give him a heads-up that he was leaving.
Somehow?