Fraser lifted his head off the wall he was pressed against and gave Davy a sour look.
“You,” he said. “You died, and I forgot all this. The chaos. The lack of planning.”
Despite the pressure he had on the wound, Davy could feel the slow leak of blood well up under his fingers. He pressed down harder, but that was a stopgap measure. Atbestthat was what it was. His tentacles tried to help, bunched up in knots of muscle and flesh that slipped off and through the wound.
“I’m sure you’d have done a much better haunting yourself,” he said.
“Me too,” Fraser said.
Reynolds turned on his heel and glared at them. He had one hand clenched in his hair, chunks of his curls stuck up between his fingers as he dragged on it. There was a spray of blood across the front of his floppy-sleeved white shirt and dark, sweaty stains under the arm.
“Shut up!” he ordered as he waved his gun in the air. The silencer made it look clumsy, the weight awkward in his hand. “You have to shut the fuck up. I need to…I need to think. I need to…think.”
Trudy cowered politely in the far corner of the room. Her blonde hair was tangled in fresh knots, and she held Tannenbaum’s head on her lap. His overalls were ripped open from where she’d already done CPR, bruises livid on his chest as they spread and darkened under the skin. It probably wasn’t the time to pay attention to things like that, but Davy couldn’t help but notice that his ex really hadn’t kept himself up.
Of course, a gym membership had probably been low on his list of priorities. What with Fraser kicking his life over every few years.
“He needs an ambulance,” Trudy said, in a calm voice that assumed Reynolds wouldof coursesee reason. It was an effective approach. “He’s having a heart attack.”
Reynolds turned away from Fraser and Davy to glare at her.
“I kidnapped the bastard,” he said. “On your husband’s orders. His surviving isn’t going to do any of us any good. Is it?”
It turned out that though Davy might have addled him a bit, the man still wasn’t stupid.
“You...You’re Hill,” he said as he looked at Davy.
“If you want,” Davy said. “I can be whoever you want me to be.”
Fraser made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat and then wheezed in pain as Davy dug his thumb down harder into his thigh. It was medically necessary, but also satisfying..
“Bastard,” Fraser muttered through clenched teeth.
“Shut up,” Davy told him.
“He told me,” Reynolds muttered to himself as he started to pace again. “Hetoldme he had a visitor. That someone had called up the dead, and that was the source of everything that’s gone wrong. He told me.”
Reynolds rapped his fingers hard against his forehead to hammer that thought home.
“I was wrong,” Fraser said.
“He was right,” Davy said.
They spoke at the same time, with identical levels of confidence.
“It was Hill,” Fraser argued. “He set this all up. The ungrateful little bastard thinks I did something to his coward of a dad.”
There was a soft, pained gasp from Trudy. She might haveknownit was a lie, but she couldn’t stop the hurt ‘don’t’ that escaped her.
“I gave him a job at the company because he couldn’t hold one down anywhere else,” Fraser sneered, ignoring her. “He usedthat access to find out how to attack us from within. It had to be an inside job. How else could he have known where the bodies were buried? And look at you. For fuck’s sake, Reynolds, you’re one of my top contractors and you’re sweating like a whore in church overHill?You ever even sucked a cock?”
Trudy closed her eyes and primmed her lips together in a thin, waxy pink line. She rolled her eyes up behind her lids as if she were looking at the heavens. Davy imagined the ‘Jesus’ that she probably captioned the gesture with.
“That’s bullshit,” Davy said. “I knew where the bodies were buried because I buried them, thirty years ago, before someone buried me. You really think Hill could have pulled this off, could have turned you?”
The flattery was a bit obvious, but Reynolds wasn’t at his best. He visibly reacted to the appeal of that idea as he stared at Davy.
“Some of the old guard used to talk about you,” he said. “They called you Davy. Davy Jones, because you knew—”
