Chapter Six #2
Huh. He filed that away for later. It might be useful, or it could be a problem. Either way, Hill didn’t need to know about it just yet.
“Look,” Davy said. He laid a tentacle on Hill’s shoulder. “Fraser probably does value being part of your family.”
“Interesting way to put it.”
“Cut him a break. To him, that’s a lot,” Davy said. He pulled an ID out of the envelope, flicked the card in his fingers, and read the front of it. Then he held it up so Hill could see. “Anyhow, it’s not that Fraser doesn’t care, it’s that Kyle Bennett from Idaho doesn’t have a family, so…”
Hill didn’t look comforted. He pointedly shoved Davy’s tentacle off his shoulder.
“You sound like you’d have done the same thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have married your mom,” Davy said.
Something told him to leave it there. What was it the social worker used to say, “It might be true, but is it helpful?” The fact that taking marriage off the board as a way to monitor whatever threat the dead man’s widow posed made it more likely Davy would have just…
removed her from the board. That was true, but probably not helpful.
And people thought he didn’t listen.
“Look, once we show Fraser the error of his ways…I’m sure he’ll sort it out so it’s a family affair if he has to flee the country,” he said.
“Or maybe he’ll stop doing things that might lead to him fleeing the country?”
Davy hesitated for a beat to see if the rite thought that particular request came under the whole “invoker gets what the invoker wants” thing.
It didn’t feel like it, as much as Davy could tell that sort of thing, anyhow.
Apparently even dark, metaphysical contracts of unknown, and best to keep it that way, origin knew when clients were pushing their luck.
“Maybe,” Davy agreed vaguely. “Sure.”
He grabbed the emptied-out duffel and pulled it back over the table. Most of the contents were on the table, but a quick pat down of the pockets turned up a believably worn wallet with 250 bucks in used money and, zipped into a hidden pocket, a lime-green burner phone.
“That’s a Samsung Galaxy S21,” Hill said in a cool, precise voice. “It came out four years ago, and I upgraded two years ago. Just before Fraser redecorated his office. So definitely after the vows were said.”
Awkward.
Davy groped for how to respond to that and came up with nothing. He’d already thrown his best at the wall to try and make Hill feel better, and there was nothing else in the tank. So…
“Fraser always was a cheap bastard,” he said. “Do you still have a charger for it?”
Hill pointed to a set of drawers on the other side of the room.
Davy pushed himself up and went over to hunt through them. The sullen silence started to weigh on him as he fingered through the spaghetti junction of old leads, so he cleared his throat and kept talking.
“Anyhow, it looks like Fraser still uses Gallagher for his fake IDs.” He pulled a long woven pink cable out and looped it around his fingers. Only to find out it was micro-USB. That was useful. “She always makes Fraser from Idaho. I have no fucking idea why. It was always…ah…Texas for me.”
“You’re from Victorville, aren’t you?” Hill said.
It wasn’t like it mattered anymore. Hell, even if Davy hadn’t been dead, it was decades past being actionable information for anyone. It still gave Davy an itchy feeling between his shoulder blades. He didn’t like being seen. It was bad OPSEC, and it just made him feel weird.
“Is that what Fraser told you?” he asked.
“He said he grew up in New York,” Hill said. “But I did a lot of research to find out who my dad put in that shallow grave. Nothing went back as far as childhood, probably because Davy wasn’t what you went by then, but there were a few mentions that tied you to the place.”
There it was. Davy pulled the right wire out, checked the connection connected, and plugged it into the socket on the wall. The phone did nothing. He wiggled the lead a couple of times and held the buttons down until the screen begrudgingly lit up.
“For the record, the grave wasn’t that shallow,” Davy said.
He looked around at Hill. Despite the fact he’d been the one to bring it up, Hill looked uncomfortable at the reminder his dad was an accomplice as well as a victim.
“And at first you don’t know you’re dead, so you don’t know that you don’t need to breathe. ”
It was snowing.
Not much, but enough to attract Davy over to the window.
It never snowed in the Beyond. Sometimes there was snow on the ground, but it was never snowing.
Maybe it did up in the Company’s towers, high above the streets, but Davy had never made it up so high.
The Company had hired him a few times—good people were hard to find, good people who’d do dirty jobs even harder—but he’d never gotten beyond human resources.
Third floor. The coffee was shit and always tasted of corporate depression.
Davy leaned his shoulder against the glass and watched the skiffs of white powder get tossed around outside as he let the phone ring.
His tentacles tested the window until they found a spot where the Beyond didn’t overlap with the living world.
It was only big enough to let one squeeze through to try and grab the flakes out of the air as they fell.
The chill surprised Davy. Not that it was cold, but the way it mapped the bite of winter air against his tentacle down the backs of his legs, a stripe of iciness that clenched his thighs and made his balls tighten.
“Exactly what’s the plan?” Hill asked. “You just going to tell people what Fraser did?”
The ringtone cut out as the call dropped. Davy let it. He held the phone loosely in one hand as he shifted around to watch Hill pace. His cock ached with the dull reminder that the best use of nervous energy was fucking.
Davy adjusted the waistband of his sweats and reminded himself of the minor obstacle that he couldn’t touch Hill. His cock didn’t care. It thought he just hadn’t tried hard enough.
“Trust me, they’d not give a shit,” Davy said, trying to sound like he wasn’t thinking anything filthy. “Neither would Fraser. My death wouldn’t be a problem for any of them.”
The phone buzzed back to life in his hand. A different number than the one he’d dialed was on the screen. Davy smirked to himself as he held his thumb over the screen.
“Me being back, on the other hand?” he said. “That would be a problem for a lot of people.”
He hit answer and lifted the phone to his ear.
There was no way he was going to be able to make Hill’s voice pass as his.
He’d given it a go while he waited for the phone to charge, but Hill was not a natural mimic.
To be honest, Davy wasn’t actually too sure what his living voice had sounded like anyhow.
So instead he went with cool and precise.
“I have a job for you,” he said. On the other end of the line, Gallagher snorted and started to say something. Davy didn’t give her a chance. “It’s from Davy. He said you’d know better than to ask too many questions.”
There was a brief sound of choking and then silence, except for the faint sound of glass on glass.
Davy could almost see Gallagher’s nicotine-stained fingers grinding out a cigarette in one of the big ’70s orange ashtrays she’d kept around the place.
Every one a keepsake from some Belfast bar she used to drink at.
“Davy’s dead,” she said. Her voice sounded old. Somehow, that was more of a shock than it had been to see Fraser in all his middle-aged spread in the office. “And that ain’t a question, if you were wondering.”
“He told me you’d say that.”
“Fucker, it’s been thirty years. Only thing anyone says about Davy Jones is ‘he’s dead’ or ‘who the fuck is that.’”
“Pensacola. Twenty-two.”
There was a pause. It wasn’t much, but Davy could feel the hook catch in that slight hitch of her breath.
“Asshole, how old do you think I am?” she said.
“Pensacola. Twenty-two. Wawa.”
She hung up. Actually, from the brief “whoosh” and crack, she’d thrown the phone across the room.
The tentacle finally snagged a snowflake out of the air. It actually hung there for a second, a pinprick of chill against the pale end of the limb, and then started to slowly slide through as it melted. A flick sprayed the melted droplet into the air as it finally seeped all the way through.
“What was that?” Hill asked, sounding baffled. “A party game?”
The phone rang for a second time.
“Yeah, but not the fun kind,” Davy said and took the call. He didn’t bother to pretend he needed to go through the dance again. They both knew Gallagher would do what he wanted. “Davy needs three things from you. A full set of fake papers, two phone calls, and a location.”
He listened to Gallagher’s attempts to hedge until a yawn hijacked his stolen body.
Once he’d given in to it, the exhaustion of the last few days sank deep into Davy’s borrowed bones.
It had been, he realized, as he ground the heel of his hand into gritty eyes, a while since Hill had gotten any sleep.
“I sympathize,” he said. “Davy doesn’t. He says just make it happen by Christmas Eve.”
He hung up, tossed the phone aside, and stretched.
Davy also needed a nap. Now that he thought about it, it had been even longer since he’d gotten any sleep. Thirty years. The phrase wasn’t “the restless dead” for nothing.