Ledger paused. He didn’t want it—whatever it was—and it would go onto the bonfire with the rest otherwise. It had no value to him. Gifts were never a good idea, though. The terms of exchange should always be established upfront. It was safer that way.
“Fifty bucks,” he said.
“Money?”
“OK, make it forty,” Ledger said as he folded the letter back up. “You drive a hard bargain. Come back tomorrow. If Bell had it, I’ll have found it by then.”
Wren stared at him for a moment, then shook his head.
“You’re a weird one,” he said. “I could have given you the woman of your dreams, you know, but forty bucks it is. Tomorrow.”
He stalked back to his idling pickup, climbed in, and screeched away.
Ledger shook his head.
“The only woman I dream about is the dinner lady who chewed her nails and spat them into the food,” he muttered as he walked around the car to look at the window. It was broken but not shattered. The glass bagged in the frame, a spiderweb of cracks spread out from the impact point. “I’d rather have forty bucks than fingernail stew.”
CHAPTER2
IT WAS GOODto know that Bell was going to leave this mortal coil the same way he’d spend his afterlife.
On fire.
Good riddance. Ledger sat on a hard plastic chair and watched a cleaner wipe dust off the fake flowers that decorated the small chapel. He checked his watch. It had been forty seconds, give or take, since he did that last.
He shifted position. It made the chair legs scrape on the tiles and the cleaner jump. She dropped her cloth and swore out loud as she turned to glare at him. Ledger raised an apologetic hand. He’d felt apologetic since he came back. Everyone knew who he was. It didn’t matter how long ago he’d left, there was no mistaking Ledger for anyone but a Conroy. They all had the same look: tall and lanky, with dusty blond hair and a face you could plane wood on.
They had the same reputation too. Bell might have been the worst of them, but nobody had ever much cared for the Conroys.
While the cleaner went back to work, Ledger checked his watch again.
Sixty seconds.
To distract himself, Ledger pulled Wren’s envelope out of his pocket. He pulled the old deed out and unfolded it. The light in the chapel was unexpectedly good, all harsh overhead fluorescents that made it easy to see. It was still hard to read. Whoever drafted it had handwriting like two spiders fighting with fountain pens, but he could pick out the inconsistencies.
It looked genuine.
The paper felt right, the script looked like what Ledger would expect of an old document, and the wording was spot on.
Nothing about it looked like it was worth anything to the kind of people that traded a year’s life for a bit of paper.
Ledger folded the page back up and lifted it to sniff along the crease, where every hand to touch it had pressed the fold to get it crisp and wear the paper thin. It smelled old and dusty, with a hint of vanilla sweetness that cut pleasantly through the aggressively floral chemicals that filled the funeral home.
Atrocity—and that was the only thing anyone in this line of work paid for—smelled like salt.
So why had Wren wanted it? And how the hell had Bell—a man who couldn’t even stay out of jail with a demon in his back pocket—gotten hold of it?
The mystery of it tugged at Ledger.
He didn’t particularly like his line of work. He was good at it, but that wasn’t the point. Most of his days were spent turning over grave goods for anything that had soaked up enough sin it could be milked for it. The rest he spent in negotiations with the things that could use that tainted milk.
It was a step up from Bell. At least Ledger didn’t make his own sins to sell. Not a huge step, admittedly.
Sometimes it could be satisfying, though. When he couldn’t just depend on the stink of salt, and he had toworkto find what he’d promised.
The chapel door creaked behind him, and Ledger shrugged his distraction off. The key to those satisfying hunts was that he was paid well for them. For forty bucks, he’d flick through some old photo albums, not do a deep dive into New York state property archives.
He tucked the deed quickly back into the envelope as he got up and turned to greet the funeral director, Matthew Lonsdale, Snr. When the funeral home had opened, he’d been one of the Sons on the sign. He’d buried a dozen of Bell’s victims, what they found of them anyhow, after the trial.
