They still had time.
Just about.
Probably.
It would be different if it were just dead-on-dead crime. He could estimate to the minute by neighborhood how long it would take the Hounds to show their snouts. Polt activity always involved the living, though, and that would light a fire under their hairy asses.
Davy grabbed a handful of sweets from the stash in the drawer. He unwrapped a blue Jolly Rancher, popped the candy onto his tongue, and crinkled the cellophane wrapper into a ball between his fingers. The sugary pop of flavor on his tongue was almost sickly. He tucked it into his cheek as he flicked through the handful of irritably scrawled Post-its on the desk.
By the time he picked up the phone, he had sucked the candy down to a sliver. He cracked it between his teeth as he navigated his way through the menu to the call log.
He didn’t know most of the numbers.
There were a handful of missed calls to Gallagher. It looked like she’d decided to keep her distance from whatever was going down. Smart. She’d always been a canny operator. There were also two to Davy’s old number, so some of the breadcrumbs he’d dropped had gotten back to Fraser.
Shame the Invocation didn’t give him more time. He could have gone back to his grave and dug up his old phone. It was probably still in his pocket. He’d been on his way to the club before—
Davy paused as he caught the tail end of that thought as it breezed through his head.
Had he been? His memory of the night was blurred with trauma and the gap between the memory being recorded and itbeing mapped over onto his spirit. The few he had of those last few years were snapshots at random, filed away in no particular order.
You didn’t have to do this…
That one he assumed came from just before he died, but he hadn’t been on his way to the club. The door had been… Davy flexed his fingers as he tried to scrape any more details from the memory. It had been a front door, slick green paint under his fingers. Not his door. Not Fraser’s.
He’d never been to Greg’s house, but there’d been a Mrs. Tannenbaum, apparently. So it seemed unlikely they’d hook up there. It felt domestic too. Davy would have run a mile from “domestic” back then.
Not now, though? He snorted at himself, but let that go. There wasn’t time to chase it down.
He redialed a handful of the numbers at random and got mostly voicemails. The accountant, his wife, and an actual person who answered with the angry retort, “He’s not here! I told you. I’ll call the police!” Davy assumed the accountants’ in-laws. There was also the Truisi Waste Management company, a few states over, and an Irish pub with a vaguely familiar name.
Davy hadn’t had a chance to stir things with the IRA, but maybe Fraser wanted to make sure there weren’t going to be any surprises on Christmas morning.
A nagging sense of seconds passing made him check the time again. He grimaced as he realized how badly he lost track of it. Whatever haunting Hill had planned needed to wrap itself up.
But first, Davy had one more card to play to throw Fraser off balance.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded photo. The only photo that Hill had of his dad. Davy stared for a moment at Albie’s face as he tried to dredge up some shred of memory about him. He drew a blank.
“When I’m dead again,” Davy muttered as he started to slide the photo into the desk drawer, “I’m going to work out how you managed to do that.”
He thought better of it at the last moment and pulled the photo back out. Sentiment had never been his vice, but the photo mattered to Hill. It was all he had left, and Davy realized that’s not how he wanted Hill to remember him.
Davy put the photo back in his pocket and then nudged the office chair into place with his foot. He grabbed another candy from the stash and shoved the drawer shut with his knee. As he turned to go, the raw sound of the security alarm cut through the dark silence of the house.
Time to go. He might be fairly confident about how quickly the Hounds would get here, but he was 100 percent certain that Fraser paid for a prompt response. Davy tucked the candy in his pocket and headed out.
He met Hill in the hall as he came down the stairs at a run.
“How did it go?” Davy asked.
Hill grimaced and rubbed his hand over his face. “I scared him,” he said. “But he’s—”
Before he could finish, Fraser appeared at the top of the stairs. His eyes passed right through Hill and landed on Davy. Between the darkness and Davy’s black clothes, it didn’t look like Fraser recognized him.
That came with its own problems, of course.
“Who the fuck are you?” Fraser asked as he raised his gun.
