Hill reached out and flicked a ghostly finger at the pile of cash. It moved, just a little. “So in the worst-case scenario, he runs and we’re left behind?”
“I…yeah, I guess,” Davy said.
He poked at the cash with a tentacle, and it just passed through the paper, dipping through the table beneath. It felt the way that nails on a chalkboard sounded and made Davy squirm, but it didn’t shift so much as a note.
Huh. He filed that away for later. It might be useful, or it could be a problem. Either way, Hill didn’t need to know about it just yet.
“Look,” Davy said. He laid a tentacle on Hill’s shoulder. “Fraser probably does value being part of your family.”
“Interesting way to put it.”
“Cut him a break. To him, that’s a lot,” Davy said. He pulled an ID out of the envelope, flicked the card in his fingers, and read the front of it. Then he held it up so Hill could see. “Anyhow, it’s not that Fraser doesn’t care, it’s that Kyle Bennett from Idaho doesn’t have a family, so…”
Hill didn’t look comforted. He pointedly shoved Davy’s tentacle off his shoulder.
“You sound like you’d have done the same thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have married your mom,” Davy said.
Something told him to leave it there. What was it the social worker used to say, “It might be true, but is ithelpful?” The fact that taking marriage off the board as a way to monitor whatever threat the dead man’s widow posed made it more likely Davy would have just…removed her from the board. That was true, but probably not helpful.
And people thought he didn’t listen.
“Look, once we show Fraser the error of his ways…I’m sure he’ll sort it out so it’s a family affair if he has to flee the country,” he said.
“Or maybe he’ll stop doing things that might lead to him fleeing the country?”
Davy hesitated for a beat to see if the rite thought that particular request came under the whole “invoker gets what the invoker wants” thing. It didn’t feel like it, as much as Davy could tell that sort of thing, anyhow. Apparently even dark, metaphysical contracts of unknown, and best to keep it that way, origin knew when clients were pushing their luck.
“Maybe,” Davy agreed vaguely. “Sure.”
He grabbed the emptied-out duffel and pulled it back over the table. Most of the contents were on the table, but a quick pat down of the pockets turned up a believably worn wallet with 250 bucks in used money and, zipped into a hidden pocket, a lime-green burner phone.
“That’s a Samsung Galaxy S21,” Hill said in a cool, precise voice. “It came out four years ago, and I upgraded two years ago. Just before Fraser redecorated his office. So definitely after the vows were said.”
Awkward.
Davy groped for how to respond to that and came up with nothing. He’d already thrown his best at the wall to try and make Hill feel better, and there was nothing else in the tank. So…
“Fraser always was a cheap bastard,” he said. “Do you still have a charger for it?”
Hill pointed to a set of drawers on the other side of the room.
Davy pushed himself up and went over to hunt through them. The sullen silence started to weigh on him as he fingered through the spaghetti junction of old leads, so he cleared his throat and kept talking.
“Anyhow, it looks like Fraser still uses Gallagher for his fake IDs.” He pulled a long woven pink cable out and looped it around his fingers. Only to find out it was micro-USB. That was useful. “She always makes Fraser from Idaho. I have no fucking idea why. It was always…ah…Texas for me.”
“You’re from Victorville, aren’t you?” Hill said.
It wasn’t like itmatteredanymore. Hell, even if Davy hadn’t been dead, it was decades past being actionable information for anyone. It still gave Davy an itchy feeling between his shoulder blades. He didn’t like being seen. It was bad OPSEC, and it just made him feel weird.
“Is that what Fraser told you?” he asked.
“He said he grew up in New York,” Hill said. “But I did a lot of research to find out who my dad put in that shallow grave. Nothing went back as far as childhood, probably because Davy wasn’t what you went by then, but there were a few mentions that tied you to the place.”
There it was. Davy pulled the right wire out, checked the connection connected, and plugged it into the socket on the wall. The phone did nothing. He wiggled the lead a couple of times and held the buttons down until the screen begrudgingly lit up.
“For the record, the grave wasn’t that shallow,” Davy said. He looked around at Hill. Despite the fact he’d been the one to bring it up, Hill looked uncomfortable at the reminder his dad was an accomplice as well as a victim. “And at first you don’t know you’re dead, so you don’t know that you don’t need to breathe.”
