Just sweaty handprints on the door and the faint, lingering scent of puke.
“You could have just answered the door,” Hill said, his voice sour. He was in a mood. “He’s a co-worker, not an assassin.”
That gave Davy pause. He’d assumed he didn’t really need to ask—the answer seemed obvious—but given Hill’s optimism about human nature, maybe it shouldn’t have been.
“You know what CIRATTA does, right?” he asked.
Hill looked annoyed. “I work there,” he said.
Davy waited.
Finally, Hill rolled his eyes and gave in. “It’s a military contractor,” he said. “I know what they…we…do, but I don’t think international assassins buy egg salad sandwiches in the company canteen.”
That was a very specific example. Davy felt a scratchy weight in his chest and wished he’d stuck a tentacle further into Renolds’ cerebellum. Maybe he could have triggered an aneurysm, not just a migraine.
“What’s throwing you?” he asked. “The egg salad or the canteen?”
“Both,” Hill said promptly. “He’s a consultant, not—”
“Yeah, my fee got put down as that on a few tax returns,” Davy said as he stepped back into the room. “And even assassins have to eat, Hill.”
He closed the door with a click and tried to put Reynolds out of his mind for now. Maybe he’d been there to get Davy, or Hill, to sign out of the building or pay his share to the party fund. Or something else innocuous.
At the back of his mind, it nagged at him, though. Something about the way Reynolds had hammered the door or the set of his shoulders as he’d headed to the elevators. Whatever monkey was on his back hadn’t looked innocuous.
But there was nothing Davy could do about that currently.
And with any luck, the shit show that Davy was about to unleash on Fraser would give Reynolds something else to think about after the holiday season. Davy brushed his hair out of his—
He squinted at the dark hair that still dangled over his eyes. Fuck sake.
He reached up, waved the tentacle out of the way, and raked Hill’s hair out of his eyes with one hand.
“You said you wanted to help?” he said.
“I did,” Hill said. “I do. How?”
Davy wagged a tentacle at him. “Ask the ‘how’beforeyou agree to anything,” he advised. Then he looked Hill up and down. He didn’t mind the view, not at all, even if it did revive the dull ache in his balls from earlier, but… “But first of all, would you say you look anything like your dad?”
The photo was slid between the pages of a book on tort reform.
Davy was glad that the solstice fell during the holiday season. He’d not have wanted to try and pull off Hill’s nine-to-five as well as his revenge.
“Dad always said I looked like Mom,” Hill said. “Mom said I looked like him, until he died, and then she stopped talking about him at all. But other people sometimes say I look like Fraser, so I think they see what they want.”
Albie Rosen. In color.
Davy looked at the photo of the man he’d been trying to place for the last day…
…and he still had no fucking idea who he was.
He couldn’t even blame it on it being a bad photo. It wasn’t a headshot, but it was a clear enough snapshot of the man as hesat on the front steps of a house with a bright green door, his kid on his lap. Dark-haired, pasty, and fairly hairy in his shorts. He was a bit overweight, but in the way that people get when they’re doing well in life. The sort of light flab overlay that Davy had always vaguely associated with white-collar workers and desk officers.
Davy had to disagree with Hill’s mom. Hill didn’t look much like his dad. If anything, in fact, Davy would have to side with “other people.” He could see their point about the resemblance to Fraser, not physically, but in the way they reacted to things.
Luckily, accuracy rarely mattered.
“Did your dad lose a lot of weight before he died?” Davy asked as he turned the photo over to look at the back. The Florida Keys. Two years after Davy died.
