“What can I do for you?”
“Joe?” Dylan checked.
There was a long pause, and the click of absentminded data entry stopped as the person on the other end shifted out of autopilot. A roughly indrawn breath rasped down the line, and then, “You bastard. I’m going to fucking kill you.”
Good. Dylan had gotten the right number.
“I didn’t do—”
“Oh yeah? Then why are the cops asking questions about you?” Joe interrupted him to ask. “Why do they want to know what your ‘relationship’ with my wife is?”
“Ex-wife,” Dylan corrected him.
His brain almost immediately caught up with his mouth, and he winced. It had just been habit to parrot the correction he’d heard from Alice every time her ex came up in conversation. After three years of marriage, and a move from California tohisnative city, she liked to be clear about that change in status. This probably wasn’t the time to point that out to Joe, though.
“Fuck you,” Joe spat at him. “You don’t get to be a smartass when I can’t tell my kid where mommy is.”
“That’s fair,” Dylan said.
“Like I fucking care what you think?” Joe said. “If you did something to Alice…”
“I didn’t.”
“Then why do you sound so fucking nervous?”
Dylan hadn’t realized he did. Then he paid attention to the tremor in his hands and the way his teeth chattered together.
“I’m just cold,” he said. “Joe, I swear that I didn’t have anything to do with what happened. But I need your help.”
Joe snorted. “Why the hell would I want to do that?” he asked. “Even if I believe you—and I don’t—I never liked you. You always thought you were better than me, out there saving lives when I’m generating bills for cancer patients.”
That was true. Dylan hadn’t thought it had been that obvious, though.
He took a breath of cold, sour air to try and argue his case, and it filled his lungs until they hurt. Icy fingers pinched at the seams of his skull and cramped his ribs. The taste of burnt grease and the bitter tang of charcoal filled his mouth, thick enough he could feel it coat his teeth.
“Joseph Breslin,” Dylan’s mouth said. He bit his tongue and the inside of his cheeks as he tried to keep pace with the words coming out before he knew they were there. The words hurt as they came out; the voice was his, but it stung and itched in his throat like papercuts. “When you were fifteen, you used to spy on your neighbor, Mrs. Watkins, when she had a shower.”
“What are you talking about?”
Dylan wished he knew. It wasn’thelping, whatever it was. Joe didn’t care about what he’d done as a child. He thought Dylan had killed his wife. That needed something more recent to use as leverage—
“When you were thirty-one, you billed Medicare for $30,000 dollars worth of cancer treatments for indigents who were not patients at the hospital,” Dylan said. He nearly choked on that one as he tried to shut himself up before he made it worse. It didn’t work. “You’ve thought about doing it again, but you worry your boss suspects you didsomething.She does.”
Dylan finally realized he still had control of the rest of his body. He slapped his hand over his mouth and dug his fingers into his cheeks to shut himself up. Joe breathed raggedly in his ear.
“How do you—” he started to ask, then interrupted himself with a justification. “I had to. That was… They threatened to hurt… Is that what this is about? Do you work for them? She’d nothing todowith this.”
Anger cracked Joe’s voice as he came to that conclusion.
A bit more detail would help, Dylan thought frantically. It had worked the first time, after all, but this time his tongue stayed his own. He held his breath and flicked through a mental hand of cards to play next, trying to decide which one would get him what he wanted.
“I know Alice isn’t involved in this,” Dylan said. “Neither am I. Right now, though, the policedon’tknow that. They’re looking at me, and not at who they need to look at. Because they don’t know about that, do they?”
Silence on the other end.
Joe took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I could tell them,” he said, his voice low and defeated. “I should tell them. If this is down to what I did—”
“Not yet,” Dylan said. Guilt tried to shoulder its way in as he said that, since confession probablywasthe right thing to do. It just wouldn’t be useful, since there was almost no chance Joe’s little bit of fraud had anything to do with Yule. “This is what’s going to happen. You get me what I need and I’ll get Alice back. After that…it’s your conscience. OK?”
