Chapter Sixteen
Davy braced himself against the wall as a crash made the glass rattle in the windows.
He glanced at the ceiling, cracks spiderwebbed through the expensive plasterwork, and then checked the time on his phone. He ran a few timings through in his head on how long it would take the Hounds to get there.
They still had time.
Just about.
Probably.
It would be different if it were just dead-on-dead crime. He could estimate to the minute by neighborhood how long it would take the Hounds to show their snouts. Polt activity always involved the living, though, and that would light a fire under their hairy asses.
Davy grabbed a handful of sweets from the stash in the drawer.
He unwrapped a blue Jolly Rancher, popped the candy onto his tongue, and crinkled the cellophane wrapper into a ball between his fingers.
The sugary pop of flavor on his tongue was almost sickly.
He tucked it into his cheek as he flicked through the handful of irritably scrawled Post-its on the desk.
By the time he picked up the phone, he had sucked the candy down to a sliver. He cracked it between his teeth as he navigated his way through the menu to the call log.
He didn’t know most of the numbers.
There were a handful of missed calls to Gallagher. It looked like she’d decided to keep her distance from whatever was going down. Smart. She’d always been a canny operator. There were also two to Davy’s old number, so some of the breadcrumbs he’d dropped had gotten back to Fraser.
Shame the Invocation didn’t give him more time. He could have gone back to his grave and dug up his old phone. It was probably still in his pocket. He’d been on his way to the club before—
Davy paused as he caught the tail end of that thought as it breezed through his head.
Had he been? His memory of the night was blurred with trauma and the gap between the memory being recorded and it being mapped over onto his spirit. The few he had of those last few years were snapshots at random, filed away in no particular order.
You didn’t have to do this…
That one he assumed came from just before he died, but he hadn’t been on his way to the club. The door had been… Davy flexed his fingers as he tried to scrape any more details from the memory. It had been a front door, slick green paint under his fingers. Not his door. Not Fraser’s.
He’d never been to Greg’s house, but there’d been a Mrs. Tannenbaum, apparently. So it seemed unlikely they’d hook up there. It felt domestic too. Davy would have run a mile from “domestic” back then.
Not now, though? He snorted at himself, but let that go. There wasn’t time to chase it down.
He redialed a handful of the numbers at random and got mostly voicemails.
The accountant, his wife, and an actual person who answered with the angry retort, “He’s not here!
I told you. I’ll call the police!” Davy assumed the accountants’ in-laws.
There was also the Truisi Waste Management company, a few states over, and an Irish pub with a vaguely familiar name.
Davy hadn’t had a chance to stir things with the IRA, but maybe Fraser wanted to make sure there weren’t going to be any surprises on Christmas morning.
A nagging sense of seconds passing made him check the time again. He grimaced as he realized how badly he lost track of it. Whatever haunting Hill had planned needed to wrap itself up.
But first, Davy had one more card to play to throw Fraser off balance.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded photo. The only photo that Hill had of his dad. Davy stared for a moment at Albie’s face as he tried to dredge up some shred of memory about him. He drew a blank.
“When I’m dead again,” Davy muttered as he started to slide the photo into the desk drawer, “I’m going to work out how you managed to do that.”
He thought better of it at the last moment and pulled the photo back out. Sentiment had never been his vice, but the photo mattered to Hill. It was all he had left, and Davy realized that’s not how he wanted Hill to remember him.
Davy put the photo back in his pocket and then nudged the office chair into place with his foot. He grabbed another candy from the stash and shoved the drawer shut with his knee. As he turned to go, the raw sound of the security alarm cut through the dark silence of the house.
Time to go. He might be fairly confident about how quickly the Hounds would get here, but he was 100 percent certain that Fraser paid for a prompt response. Davy tucked the candy in his pocket and headed out.
He met Hill in the hall as he came down the stairs at a run.
“How did it go?” Davy asked.
Hill grimaced and rubbed his hand over his face. “I scared him,” he said. “But he’s—”
Before he could finish, Fraser appeared at the top of the stairs. His eyes passed right through Hill and landed on Davy. Between the darkness and Davy’s black clothes, it didn’t look like Fraser recognized him.
That came with its own problems, of course.
“Who the fuck are you?” Fraser asked as he raised his gun.
Fuck. Davy bolted for the door. A bullet hissed by his ear and chipped a chunk of the door jamb.
Splinters caught the side of Davy’s face as he half-fell, half-jumped down the stairs.
Habit made him throw out a tentacle to catch himself with.
It didn’t work, and he fell down the last two steps.
He skinned his knees on the pavement, cursed under his breath, and scrambled back to his feet.
Behind him, Fraser threw his front door open.
He wasn’t the only one. As doors opened and witnesses appeared along the street, he grimaced and tucked his gun behind his leg.
Davy cut over the road, vaulted a fence, and dodged the side of a house—ignoring the startled protest from the owner—to cut through the back yard.
A dog bolted up out of its sleep to snarl groggily at him as he ran past. It would have been more threatening if it weren’t for the festive red velvet and gold bells collar that jangled around its neck.
Before it could do more than grumble at him, Davy hauled himself up onto the roof of the kennel and over the fence.
As he dropped down on the other side, knees bent to absorb the impact, he slowed to a walk. A quick yank unzipped his hoodie and stripped it off. He lifted the lid of a bin as he passed and tossed it in on top of bags of rubbish and a chicken carcass.
He’d dropped back to a relaxed saunter as he stepped out onto the road. No one headed to see what was going on around the corner bothered to give him a second look.
The few hours sleep that Davy had grabbed should have been more than enough, but apparently Hill’s body expected more from his shut-eye. Davy sat in the pew and tried to keep from yawning too widely as the sermon dragged on.
“ For as John says in his gospel, ‘light (that) shines in the darkness, and the darkness overcomes it not,’” the tall, stocky priest said from the pulpit.
He shuffled through his notes to check something, and then shuffled back to the place he’d marked with his finger.
“That is the message and measure we should take from the solstice…”
Davy sat on the hard wooden bench next to his murderer and the boy whose body he’d stolen’s mother and tried to look like he was paying attention.
His tentacles, uncomfortable on hallowed ground, squirmed sheepishly around his feet as they tried to stay out of sight.
He tried to discreetly check the time to see how much longer this was likely to last.
Fraser reached over and put a hand on Davy’s forearm to push it down. He tugged Hill’s sleeve down over the watch. It took everything Davy had not to react by slapping his baby brother across the back of the head.
“Pay attention,” Fraser murmured to him. “You might learn something.”
Davy glanced sidelong at him. He couldn’t really picture how Hill, who hated his stepfather and yet wanted to redeem him, would interact with Fraser. He could have looked to Hill for answers, but Hill had shied away from the family pew and lingered at the back of the Church.
“Like what?” he went with.
“That’s up to you, isn’t it,” Fraser said mildly. He picked up the hymn sheet and flicked idly through the cheaply printed pages. It was Trudy’s turn to take that off him and tuck it under her leg for safekeeping.
Davy smirked to himself as he leaned back against the hardwood pew and folded his arms.
It looked like they were both going to be paying attention to the rest of the sermon.
It would have been useful if Hill had been a smoker. Since he wasn’t, Davy pretended to be occupied with the gravestones. He stood, hands in pockets, on the narrow path and studied the names etched on the snow-topped granite.
“I thought he might at least have a sleepless night,” Hill said bitterly. He leaned on Marie De Luca’s memorial, hands loosely crossed, and watched his family over Davy’s shoulder. “Do you think he gets visited by the spirit of his wronged dead every year?”
Davy shook his head. “He’d have moved the breakables,” he said. “Besides, you’re wrong. He’s off balance.”
“Really?” Hill asked. “He looks like it’s business as usual.”
Davy turned to look. In fairness, Fraser didn’t look like he was under spiritual—and financial—attack. He stood, his arm around his wife’s waist, as he spoke to the priest and a few of the other well-heeled parishioners.
“He was fidgeting,” Davy said. “He only fidgets when he’s pissed off.”
Hill snorted. “Yeah, well, he’s pissed off at the wrong person,” he said. “I hope Mark appreciates us doing his haunting for him.”
That part actually wasn’t ideal. “We could still work with it if we knew who Mark was,” Davy said.
“And we could work with Tannenbaum if we knew what he’d done,” Hill pointed out. “But we don’t have time to find out.”
True.
“It’s not like we can ask for an extension,” Davy pointed out. “We’ll just have to hope that Mark would have wanted Fraser to better himself, too. Come on.”
He offered Hill a tentacle.