Chapter Twenty
“I’ll admit,” Davy said as he wadded up his costume and pressed it against the bloody wound in Fraser’s thigh. He hoped Hill hadn’t planned to try to return the outfit tomorrow. There was no way he could pull off ‘I didn’t wear it’ now. “Things have gotten out of hand.”
Fraser lifted his head off the wall he was pressed against and gave Davy a sour look.
“You,” he said. “You died, and I forgot all this. The chaos. The lack of planning.”
Despite the pressure he had on the wound, Davy could feel the slow leak of blood well up under his fingers.
He pressed down harder, but that was a stopgap measure.
At best that was what it was. His tentacles tried to help, bunched up in knots of muscle and flesh that slipped off and through the wound.
“I’m sure you’d have done a much better haunting yourself,” he said.
“Me too,” Fraser said.
Reynolds turned on his heel and glared at them. He had one hand clenched in his hair, chunks of his curls stuck up between his fingers as he dragged on it. There was a spray of blood across the front of his floppy-sleeved white shirt and dark, sweaty stains under the arm.
“Shut up!” he ordered as he waved his gun in the air. The silencer made it look clumsy, the weight awkward in his hand. “You have to shut the fuck up. I need to…I need to think. I need to…think.”
Trudy cowered politely in the far corner of the room.
Her blonde hair was tangled in fresh knots, and she held Tannenbaum’s head on her lap.
His overalls were ripped open from where she’d already done CPR, bruises livid on his chest as they spread and darkened under the skin.
It probably wasn’t the time to pay attention to things like that, but Davy couldn’t help but notice that his ex really hadn’t kept himself up.
Of course, a gym membership had probably been low on his list of priorities. What with Fraser kicking his life over every few years.
“He needs an ambulance,” Trudy said, in a calm voice that assumed Reynolds would of course see reason. It was an effective approach. “He’s having a heart attack.”
Reynolds turned away from Fraser and Davy to glare at her.
“I kidnapped the bastard,” he said. “On your husband’s orders. His surviving isn’t going to do any of us any good. Is it?”
It turned out that though Davy might have addled him a bit, the man still wasn’t stupid.
“You...You’re Hill,” he said as he looked at Davy.
“If you want,” Davy said. “I can be whoever you want me to be.”
Fraser made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat and then wheezed in pain as Davy dug his thumb down harder into his thigh. It was medically necessary, but also satisfying..
“Bastard,” Fraser muttered through clenched teeth.
“Shut up,” Davy told him.
“He told me,” Reynolds muttered to himself as he started to pace again. “He told me he had a visitor. That someone had called up the dead, and that was the source of everything that’s gone wrong. He told me.”
Reynolds rapped his fingers hard against his forehead to hammer that thought home.
“I was wrong,” Fraser said.
“He was right,” Davy said.
They spoke at the same time, with identical levels of confidence.
“It was Hill,” Fraser argued. “He set this all up. The ungrateful little bastard thinks I did something to his coward of a dad.”
There was a soft, pained gasp from Trudy. She might have known it was a lie, but she couldn’t stop the hurt ‘don’t’ that escaped her.
“I gave him a job at the company because he couldn’t hold one down anywhere else,” Fraser sneered, ignoring her.
“He used that access to find out how to attack us from within. It had to be an inside job. How else could he have known where the bodies were buried? And look at you. For fuck’s sake, Reynolds, you’re one of my top contractors and you’re sweating like a whore in church over Hill? You ever even sucked a cock?”
Trudy closed her eyes and primmed her lips together in a thin, waxy pink line. She rolled her eyes up behind her lids as if she were looking at the heavens. Davy imagined the ‘Jesus’ that she probably captioned the gesture with.
“That’s bullshit,” Davy said. “I knew where the bodies were buried because I buried them, thirty years ago, before someone buried me. You really think Hill could have pulled this off, could have turned you?”
The flattery was a bit obvious, but Reynolds wasn’t at his best. He visibly reacted to the appeal of that idea as he stared at Davy.
“Some of the old guard used to talk about you,” he said. “They called you Davy. Davy Jones, because you knew—”
Davy nodded his encouragement of that line of thought. “We can work together. You and me. It’s been a while, after all, since I was in the game on this side.”
The muzzle of the gun swung indecisively back and forth between Davy’s head and Fraser’s. After a second’s thought
Reynolds pulled his lips tight against his teeth and shook his head.
“He’s your brother,” he said. “You expect me to believe you’d turn on him? Huh?!”
Davy traded a brief, confused glance with Fraser. The idea that they wouldn’t turn on each other had never come up before. It had always been taken as a given, if anything.
“Have you met him?” they both asked at the same time.
“Then why are you trying to save his life?” Reynolds asked.
“Because he can’t sign the company back over to me if he’s dead,” Davy said. “What do you think, that I want to go back? Do you know what it’s like on the other side, Reynolds?”
The hook swung in the air. Davy had baited it, now to see if Reynolds would bite. There weren’t many people in their line of work who wouldn’t. After you’d sent four or five people ahead of you, most people started to wonder. A few near-death experiences of their own, and it kept you up at night.
“What is it like?” Reynolds asked with a sort of queasy fascination.
“Boring, mostly,” Davy said, falling back on the truth when he couldn’t come up with a lie that sounded better. “And the cost-of-death is sky high around here.”
Reynolds looked irritated. “Are you mocking me?” he asked. “I love you. I did this for you. It was your idea to kill him.”
“Yeah,” Davy said. “Are you ever going to?”
Reynolds flushed. Two spots of red rode high on his cheekbones as he took a step forward and lifted the gun jerkily to point at Fraser’s head. His finger, nails bitten down to the bloody quick, tightened.
“Look at my desk,” Fraser blurted out. “The first envelope. Look at it. He’s lying to you. My brother isn’t dead. He’s probably behind this, but not as a spirit.”
Reynolds licked his lips. “You’re trying to fool me,” he said.
“No.”
“He is. Don’t listen to him.”
Reynolds hesitated a second and then stepped forward to shuffle, one-handed, through the paperwork on the desk. He picked up a heavy, manila envelope and shook out a handful of documents.
“See?” Fraser said. “He’s alive. My brother faked his own death. This was all Hill.”
The gun sagged slightly as Reynold let it drop while he fumbled through the IDs. Fraser dug his own hand down on the makeshift dressing as Davy pushed himself quietly to his feet.
“How do I even know this is real?” Reynolds muttered in protest as he opened the passport to look at it. “This could be anyone.”
Davy grabbed a chair by the back, stepped forward, and swung it in one smooth movement. The arc ended as the chair shattered against Reynolds’s back. Two legs snapped, splinters dug into Reynolds’s shoulders, and the leather seat flapped forlornly from studs as Davy dropped it.
When people heard someone was good in a fight, they always expected something out of the Karate Kid.
In Davy’s experience, that wasn’t necessary.
A crane kick might look impressive, but it didn’t accomplish anything that the application of something heavy to the back of the head would do just as effectively.
Of course, he could do both.
Reynolds staggered and Davy swept the man’s feet out from under him. As he went down, Davy grabbed his gun hand. He dug his fingers in, crushing Reynolds’s hand as they wrestled for control of the weapon.
“This was what you wanted,” Reynolds snarled into Davy’s face. “This is what you asked me to do so that you’d love me.”
Davy shrugged. “Plans change,” he said as he shoved his tentacles up Reynolds’s nose and into his brain. The static discharge of lust and twisted memory poured back and forth between them. Davy gritted his teeth against it. “And I lie. If you love me, you have to accept that about me.”
Rage twisted Reynolds’s face and, a little too late, Davy wondered if repeated exposure might have helped the man work up some sort of resistance.
The answer was probably yes, since instead of staggering off to puke, Reynolds snapped his head forward.
He drove the top of his skull into Davy’s face, the almost airy pop of a broken nose spilling hot, wet pain into Davy’s head.
Davy recoiled, blood dripping down his chest, and realized it didn’t hurt as much as he expected.
The pain was there, but it felt like being scorched through a layer of silicone.
Distanced, insulated. Realization made him glance at the clock on the wall.
It was an aesthetic but unnecessary bit of interior design in a digital era, but it provided a suitably sombre notice that there were under five minutes to midnight.
“I don’t have time for this,” he said as he wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “And you’re not good enough for this.”
Reynolds swung the gun up. “I’ll see you soon,” he said.
The muzzle jammed under his jaw, dug in so deep the stubbled skin looked ready to split.
His finger tightened on the trigger. Davy lunged forward to try and pull the gun away.
He wasn’t sure why; this solved his immediate problem. But he did it anyhow.
He was too late.
The gun went off. Whatever flesh made Reynolds into Reynolds sprayed over Fraser’s desk and what was left toppled over backwards onto the floor. The gun dropped out of his hand.