Chapter Eight
Davy opened the door and looked outside.
Just sweaty handprints on the door and the faint, lingering scent of puke.
“You could have just answered the door,” Hill said, his voice sour. He was in a mood. “He’s a co-worker, not an assassin.”
That gave Davy pause. He’d assumed he didn’t really need to ask—the answer seemed obvious—but given Hill’s optimism about human nature, maybe it shouldn’t have been.
“You know what CIRATTA does, right?” he asked.
Hill looked annoyed. “I work there,” he said.
Davy waited.
Finally, Hill rolled his eyes and gave in. “It’s a military contractor,” he said. “I know what they…we…do, but I don’t think international assassins buy egg salad sandwiches in the company canteen.”
That was a very specific example. Davy felt a scratchy weight in his chest and wished he’d stuck a tentacle further into Renolds’ cerebellum. Maybe he could have triggered an aneurysm, not just a migraine.
“What’s throwing you?” he asked. “The egg salad or the canteen?”
“Both,” Hill said promptly. “He’s a consultant, not—”
“Yeah, my fee got put down as that on a few tax returns,” Davy said as he stepped back into the room. “And even assassins have to eat, Hill.”
He closed the door with a click and tried to put Reynolds out of his mind for now. Maybe he’d been there to get Davy, or Hill, to sign out of the building or pay his share to the party fund. Or something else innocuous.
At the back of his mind, it nagged at him, though. Something about the way Reynolds had hammered the door or the set of his shoulders as he’d headed to the elevators. Whatever monkey was on his back hadn’t looked innocuous.
But there was nothing Davy could do about that currently.
And with any luck, the shit show that Davy was about to unleash on Fraser would give Reynolds something else to think about after the holiday season. Davy brushed his hair out of his—
He squinted at the dark hair that still dangled over his eyes. Fuck sake.
He reached up, waved the tentacle out of the way, and raked Hill’s hair out of his eyes with one hand.
“You said you wanted to help?” he said.
“I did,” Hill said. “I do. How?”
Davy wagged a tentacle at him. “Ask the ‘how’ before you agree to anything,” he advised. Then he looked Hill up and down. He didn’t mind the view, not at all, even if it did revive the dull ache in his balls from earlier, but… “But first of all, would you say you look anything like your dad?”
The photo was slid between the pages of a book on tort reform.
Davy was glad that the solstice fell during the holiday season. He’d not have wanted to try and pull off Hill’s nine-to-five as well as his revenge.
“Dad always said I looked like Mom,” Hill said. “Mom said I looked like him, until he died, and then she stopped talking about him at all. But other people sometimes say I look like Fraser, so I think they see what they want.”
Albie Rosen. In color.
Davy looked at the photo of the man he’d been trying to place for the last day…
…and he still had no fucking idea who he was.
He couldn’t even blame it on it being a bad photo.
It wasn’t a headshot, but it was a clear enough snapshot of the man as he sat on the front steps of a house with a bright green door, his kid on his lap.
Dark-haired, pasty, and fairly hairy in his shorts.
He was a bit overweight, but in the way that people get when they’re doing well in life.
The sort of light flab overlay that Davy had always vaguely associated with white-collar workers and desk officers.
Davy had to disagree with Hill’s mom. Hill didn’t look much like his dad. If anything, in fact, Davy would have to side with “other people.” He could see their point about the resemblance to Fraser, not physically, but in the way they reacted to things.
Luckily, accuracy rarely mattered.
“Did your dad lose a lot of weight before he died?” Davy asked as he turned the photo over to look at the back. The Florida Keys. Two years after Davy died.
“I…how do you know that?” Hill asked.
“People under stress tend to either eat their feelings or starve them,” Davy said. “It could have been either, but…I rolled the dice on the one that would be useful.”
“How is that useful?” Hill asked. “And what does it matter if I looked like him?”
Davy shrugged and slid the photo back into the book before he reshelved it.
“At this point, it only matters that people think you looked like him,” Davy said. “Thin, dark-haired, and dead is close enough for our purposes.”
“Which is?”
It was important to frame the answer to that question in the right way. Most people didn’t care for pragmatism, even when they said they did. Hill wanted to see his stepfather realize what he’d done wrong…because it was wrong.
That was never going to happen.
To get Fraser to repent, Davy was going to appeal to his self-interest. They’d always known they were bad men; it had just always seemed like they had enough time to think about the consequences later.
Fraser needed to realize that if he didn’t get to work on that now, his afterlife was going to suck.
“I’ve set the stage for his professional life to start to fall apart,” he said. “Once he’s on the back foot dealing with that, we need to sow the seeds that it’s the result of his own actions over the years. You’ll be the ghost of his past sins come home to roost.”
That sounded reasonable enough.
Hill seemed to agree, but then he frowned and held up his pale hand. The hole in his palm, Davy noticed, looked bigger. He felt a quick, bone-rotting itch in the flesh version he was wearing and absently dug the knuckle of his thumb against the dressing to squash it.
“How’s that going to work, though?” he asked. “He can’t see me. Nobody can.”
“We’re—” Davy started his answer, but before he could get it out, the words clumped up in his throat. After a brief attempt to force them out, he had to clumsily edit what he’d been about to say mid-sentence. “There are ways around that. I can show you a few tricks later.”
Hill looked confused, but Davy was the dead man, so he accepted the line with a shrug and a nod.
“Anything else I can do?” he asked. “In the meantime?”
Davy hadn’t really expected the second thoughts, so he hadn’t prepared a backup. He shrugged and went with the first thing that popped into his head.
“You could talk to some dead people for me,” he said. “If you’re up to it.”
Hill pulled a face. He looked like the idea of that was more daunting than stabbing himself in the hand. He still nodded grimly.
“I can do that,” he said. “How will I find them?”
“You said you’ve spent years looking into Fraser’s sins,” Davy said. “Local. Dead. Fucked over. That’s got to ring some bells.”
Hill hesitated as he chewed his thumbnail.
“I was pretty focused on you,” he said. “But I have an idea who I could ask.”
That couldn’t have been a long list to choose from after not even a whole day dead. Davy frowned.
“Not the Company man,” he said. “The information wouldn’t be worth the debt.”
Hill gave him a look. “I don’t remember you asking my permission for any of this,” he said. “But no, not him. I’ll need a few hours, though. Are you going to need me for anything?”
That wasn’t the problem. Davy hesitated as he weighed how useful it would be to have skeletons other than his own to rattle, against the idea of Hill wandering the Beyond alone.
“Fraser doesn’t think I can hack it out in the real world,” Hill said. “Don’t be like your brother.”
Too late for that. That had always been the problem.
Still, Davy gave in with a grimace. Not because he trusted Hill…or any of the dead assholes in the Beyond…but the Company had an interest now. Word would have gone out. That was probably better protection than Davy operating a set of tentacles blind.
“Just don’t make any promises,” he said. “And don’t eat anything that isn’t you.”
Hill grimaced sickly at that and rubbed his hands together. His thumb grazed the nearly grown-back nub of his finger, and he hesitated as he looked at the door.
“How do I?” he asked.
“There’s a knack to it,” Davy told him.
His tentacles weren’t talking to him.
Davy double-bagged the glass from the desk and ignored their knotted-up sulk. He didn’t have the time to deal with them and work out why the fuck he’d lied to Hill.
Twice.
He cursed under his breath as he stepped on a bit of glass and had to balance on one foot as he reached down to pick it free from his heel. The splinter glittered between his fingers as he looked at it.
Hill’s ash-toned pallor and washed-out silver-green eyes had blanched white. A hollow outline of a person, only a shadow of a panicked Hill visible under its skin. The temperature in the room plummeted, and Davy’s breath ghosted into life as it left his lips.
It had been a long time since he’d felt cold. It definitely wasn’t as good as food.
The desk broke first, shattered into chunks and splinters of frosted glass.
It felt like it took forever to stop gawping like an idiot at the broken bit of furniture.
It couldn’t have been that long, because his tentacles were already trying to crawl back inside him, squeezed in tight to his body and braided around each other, when what was left of the computer was smashed into the ground by an invisible something, and the word dropped like lead in his gut.
Polter.
He’d not felt his heart stop for a long time either, but this had been what it felt like.
Shit.
The memory made Davy uncomfortable in his borrowed skin, like lemon sting in the back of his throat.
Fight, fuck…and fear. If anyone had asked him, that wasn’t the emotion he’d have picked, but he guessed it made sense it was the one that dropped for paywalled users. Luckily, it turned out his panic response was to make a wisecrack about blue balls through his dry-as-dust mouth.
And it had worked. This time. Next time they might not be so lucky.
Orrrrr…the part of Davy that was a full-time asshole nudged at him impatiently…they could roll the dice and find out. Hill wasn’t really dead. Who knew if he was bound to the same awful scale as other spirits when it came to the turn?
To the type of man Davy had always been, that made sense.
It wasn’t his skin in the game, so why not go all in?
Polters could manifest in the living world, and even if Hill didn’t look much like his dad, it wouldn’t take much to convince Fraser that the dark-haired, lean spirit was the dark-haired, lean man he’d murdered.
But Davy had seen the Company’s polters rolled out. Just the once, to clear a neighborhood they’d wanted for some obscure, unpopular Company project.
They had shuffled out of the Company trucks in shackles of bone, nothing but shrouds of who they’d been. Burned-out eye sockets and tongues, wet ash on white cheeks. Then, when the shackles were taken off, they’d exploded into shredded skins fluttering over screaming, brutal rage.
Davy didn’t want to see Hill like that. He definitely didn’t want to be the one who pushed him to it.
The thought gave him an uncomfortable feeling under his skin, and he grimaced as he rolled his shoulders back. Maybe it was just self-preservation of a sort that had made him bite his tongue? The last thing he needed was to learn “guilt.” Four emotions were definitely one too many.
He flicked the splinter of glass into the sink and hefted the bag to carry it over to the door. Halfway across the living room, someone knocked at the door.
Reynolds again?
Before Davy could work out a response to that, there was the beep and click as the door was unlocked. It swung open.
“So, you aren’t dead?” a pretty blonde, vaguely familiar woman said from the doorway as she brushed snow off her sleeves. “I assumed that was why you weren’t answering your phone.”
Davy drew a blank for a second, then remembered the gross cookies.
Fuck.
“Mom,” he said. That felt fucking weird. “What are you doing here?”