Kovit sighed. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know how the search is going?”
He clarified. “I’m second-guessing if it’s such a good idea.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“What if she doesn’t speak English?”
Nita blinked. “So? Don’t you speak Thai?”
“I did.” He looked away. “I mean, I do. But I haven’t spoken it since I left Thailand when I was ten. There was no one to talk to. So I don’t know. What if I’ve forgotten how to speak?”
Nita leaned forward. “You’ll relearn. Or maybe she speaks English. You won’t know if you don’t try and find her.”
“I did. Try. No hits online.”
“Yet.”
“Yet,” he agreed.
She raised her eyebrows. “It sounds to me like you’re making excuses. Did something happen to make you doubt if you should look for her?”
“No,” he said, but he looked away, and changed the subject. “We need to find somewhere to stay tonight.”
Nita let the topic lie. “Yeah. A hotel?”
“Hotels are expensive. Hostels are cheaper.”
“One of those, then.”
“All right.” He hesitated. “Do you have ID?”
Nita shook her head.
“You need to show ID. It’s the law in Canada.” He shrugged at her look. “I Googled.”
She sighed, thinking of her brand-new passport in her mother’s hands. She wasn’t getting that back anytime soon. “Maybe you can book a hostel and just check in yourself, and then sneak me in the window?”
Kovit tipped his head back. “Not a bad idea. But I think the only way we could do it would be in a hotel.”
She frowned. “Do you have the money for that?”
“Nope.” He mused. “I could mug someone?”
“Let’s hold off on that as long as we can.” Nita’s answer was a bit too fast, and she took a breath before she explained, “I want to maintain a low profile.”
“All right. Do you have a better idea to get money?”
“No.” Nita snorted, yanking her hair back from her face and tying it back. “I feel like all we ever do is try and figure out how to get money when we run out.”
“Money makes the world go round.” Kovit’s voice was singsong.
She grinned. “That it does.”
They were quiet for a time, before Nita finally offered, “We could sleep in the park?”
Kovit made a small sound of distaste. “No.”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
She could contact her mother. But after her dramatic exit, she’d rather sleep on a bench than go back to her mother.
Kovit hesitated. “There is one other option.”
“What?”
He ran a hand through his hair, and wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I was in Toronto before, three years ago, with my friend Matt and the Family.”
“Who’s Matt?”
Kovit blinked and looked away. “He was my friend in the Family. He screwed up, and I was supposed to torture him as punishment, but—”
“But you helped him escape. And as punishment you got shipped off to South America.” Nita nodded. “I remember.”
Kovit cleared his throat. “Well, anyways, a few years ago when we were in Toronto, Matt had an . . . incident.”
“What kind of incident?”
“The kind that the Family couldn’t find out about.” He shivered.
Nita raised an eyebrow. “What happened?”
“It, uh, it involved a body to clean up.”
“Matt murdered someone?”
Kovit shrugged. “I mean, you didn’t think he was some saint, did you? He worked for the Family. He was friends with me.”
Nita snorted. “I’m friends with you.”
“Yes, and you’ve got a bigger body count than me and him combined.”
Nita opened her mouth to deny it. She wasn’t like Kovit. She didn’t thrive on others’ pain, she did what needed to be done to survive. But she closed her mouth without saying anything. Because in terms of sheer numbers, he might be right.
She’d burned a whole market full of people alive.
A strange emptiness opened inside her when she realized that. It wasn’t that she hadn’t known that she’d done something awful, but she’d always just assumed she wasn’t as evil as Kovit, that she had the moral high ground on him.
She wasn’t so sure anymore. And that thought made her stomach lurch, made her wonder how skewed her perception of her own misdeeds was becoming that she hadn’t even realized when she’d crossed that line.
Nita forced a breath out, and tried to draw them both back into the story. “All right, so, you needed to get rid of the body.”
“Yeah. Matt knew someone who ran a cleanup service for incidents like that.”
“Meaning this wasn’t the first time Matt had needed a cleanup.” Nita’s voice was deadpan.
Kovit shrugged and wouldn’t look at her. “I doubt it.”
Nita shivered, something in the back of her mind deeply uneasy at the thought. Kovit wouldn’t look her in the eye when he talked about the body. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was ashamed.
Any crime that made Kovit feel guilty was serious.
She cleared her throat before imagination let her take that thought too far. “So you think this person who covered up for Matt will put us up? Seems risky, and we already have a money problem.”
“He takes payment in information too.” Kovit still wouldn’t look at her.
Nita considered what she had to offer. A list of corrupt INHUP officials. Knowledge about her mother, the fate of Mercado de la Muerte. “That might work.”
Kovit took out his phone, but hesitated. “There’s something else you should know about this guy.”
“What?”
Kovit sighed and leaned back. “He’s a kelpie.”
A kelpie.
Well, fuck.
“You want to trust a kelpie?” Nita was incredulous.
“You’re trusting me, and I’m a zannie,” he snapped.
Nita flinched. She swallowed and went to tell him that was different, but stopped, because it wasn’t, not really.
Nita sighed. “Fine. So you trust this kelpie?”
“Not at all.”
She glared. “Then why are we even considering this?”
“Because we’re out of options.” He raised an eyebrow. “Unless you have another idea?”
She didn’t.
“Fine.” She frowned. “But do we have any assurance he won’t drag us under the water and eat our rotting corpses?”
Kovit shook his head. “None.”
Ten
KOVIT CALLED THE KELPIE and set things up. After he hung up, he placed his phone on the table.
Her eyes snagged on Kovit’s phone. A smartphone. Last she’d seen, he’d had a dinosaur-age flip phone, and it had been shattered across the floor of their prison in the market.
“Nice phone,” she said casually. “Where’d you get it?”