“I…how do you know that?” Hill asked.
“People under stress tend to either eat their feelings or starve them,” Davy said. “It could have been either, but…I rolled the dice on the one that would be useful.”
“How is that useful?” Hill asked. “And what does it matter if I looked like him?”
Davy shrugged and slid the photo back into the book before he reshelved it.
“At this point, it only matters that peoplethinkyou looked like him,” Davy said. “Thin, dark-haired, and dead is close enough for our purposes.”
“Which is?”
It was important to frame the answer to that question in the right way. Most people didn’t care for pragmatism, even when they said they did. Hill wanted to see his stepfather realize what he’d done wrong…because it was wrong.
That was never going to happen.
To get Fraser to repent, Davy was going to appeal to his self-interest. They’d always known they were bad men; it had justalways seemed like they had enough time to think about the consequences later. Fraser needed to realize that if he didn’t get to work on that now, his afterlife was going to suck.
“I’ve set the stage for his professional life to start to fall apart,” he said. “Once he’s on the back foot dealing with that, we need to sow the seeds that it’s the result of his own actions over the years. You’ll be the ghost of his past sins come home to roost.”
That sounded reasonable enough.
Hill seemed to agree, but then he frowned and held up his pale hand. The hole in his palm, Davy noticed, looked bigger. He felt a quick, bone-rotting itch in the flesh version he was wearing and absently dug the knuckle of his thumb against the dressing to squash it.
“How’s that going to work, though?” he asked. “He can’t see me. Nobody can.”
“We’re—” Davy started his answer, but before he could get it out, the words clumped up in his throat. After a brief attempt to force them out, he had to clumsily edit what he’d been about to say mid-sentence. “There are ways around that. I can show you a few tricks later.”
Hill looked confused, but Davy was the dead man, so he accepted the line with a shrug and a nod.
“Anything else I can do?” he asked. “In the meantime?”
Davy hadn’t really expected the second thoughts, so he hadn’t prepared a backup. He shrugged and went with the first thing that popped into his head.
“You could talk to some dead people for me,” he said. “If you’re up to it.”
Hill pulled a face. He looked like the idea of that was more daunting than stabbing himself in the hand. He still nodded grimly.
“I can do that,” he said. “How will I find them?”
“You said you’ve spent years looking into Fraser’s sins,” Davy said. “Local. Dead. Fucked over. That’s got to ring some bells.”
Hill hesitated as he chewed his thumbnail.
“I was pretty focused on you,” he said. “But I have an idea who I could ask.”
That couldn’t have been a long list to choose from after not even a whole day dead. Davy frowned.
“Notthe Company man,” he said. “The information wouldn’t be worth the debt.”
Hill gave him a look. “I don’t remember you asking my permission for any of this,” he said. “But no, not him. I’ll need a few hours, though. Are you going to need me for anything?”
That wasn’t the problem. Davy hesitated as he weighed how useful it would be to have skeletons other than his own to rattle, against the idea of Hill wandering the Beyond alone.
“Fraser doesn’t think I can hack it out in the real world,” Hill said. “Don’t be like your brother.”
Too late for that. That had always been the problem.
Still, Davy gave in with a grimace. Not because he trusted Hill…or any of the dead assholes in the Beyond…but the Company had an interest now. Word would have gone out. That was probably better protection than Davy operating a set of tentacles blind.
