“Phones.” The short one—Delaney didn’t remember the name from his ID and didn’t much care—held out a proprietary hand. They’d stopped just short of a closed door and clearly weren’t going farther until the niceties were observed. Delaney took her time as she carefully pulled it from her pocket and handed it over. Passive-aggressive tart, as Donna would have pointed out with a smirk. Rake took even more time, possibly because he had trouble bitching and digging out his phone simultaneously, which culminated in the tall one all but snatching the thing out of Rake’s hand.
Amateurs. Should have taken them right away.
“You stay put, okay?” Delaney said to Lillith, who had been with them the entire way, sometimes holding her hand and sometimes Rake’s. The child had obediently taken one of the chairs outside the office and was idly looking around and swinging her feet back and forth. Small and Tall were clearly relieved she’d stopped with the tornado sirenesque yowls, and they had no interest in damaging the child’s equilibrium, which could result in frightened hysterics or, worse, more yowling. “You stay out here and we’ll be just inside, talking to his boss and straightening everything out. See? We can all see you through the windows.”
“How do you know what we’re going to do?” Small asked, having the hilarious nerve to look affronted.
“Because you’ve got no imagination.” Delaney opened the office door and gestured for Rake and Tall to enter. “Not a single one of you.”
“Non tieni la porta per me,” Tall grumbled, trailing her in. “Ti tengo la porta per te.” Then, louder: “Mr. Kovac, you wanted to talk to these people.” Then, unnecessarily: “Here they are.”
Kovac nodded and tossed him a small hammer, the kind with a head you could unscrew and replace with any number of screwdriver heads; the handle was decorated with small pastel flowers for that extra surreal touch.* Small and Tall took turns destroying Rake’s and Delaney’s phones and, judging from their grunts of exertion and wide smiles, quite enjoyed themselves. Delaney took a step closer and slightly in front of Rake, in case the hammer was going to be utilized in even less pleasant ways.
“Hey! Knock it off, dickheads!” Rake yelped, because his survival instincts were for shit. “Do you have any idea how hard I had to work for that thing? The debasing tasks I had to perform? I don’t even want to think about them, but being here is bringing it all back.”
Tall let out a disbelieving snort, which paired nicely with Delaney’s eye roll.
“All right,” Kovac said with a mild American accent. He was short—Delaney could see that although he was seated, he was like one of those crash-test dummies with no legs—announced his baldness with a bad comb-over, and his eyes blinked slowly behind rimless glasses. He looked like an insurance adjuster, which, she supposed, was valuable in his line of work. “Let’s get to this. Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Rake asked.
Kovac sighed. “Jesus. Really? You’re gonna make me do the threats and intimidation thing, and then rough you up a little? Can’t we just get to the part where you put my mind at ease and we all go back to our lives?”
“No one’s making you do anything,” Delaney said.
“So you’re definitely not cops,” Rake said, nodding. “Or from the consulate. I’m pretty sure.”
Delaney smothered a giggle. “What tipped you off first? I told you when they rolled up, you shouldn’t have assumed you knew what it was about. They don’t care about your al fresco park sex almost a decade ago.”
“Why not?” Rake threw up his hands. “Everyone else does! If you knew it wasn’t a legit arrest, why are you here?”
“Why wouldn’t I be here? What, I’m gonna let you and Lillith ride off—well, walk off—into the literal sunset? Besides, you’re looking at this all wrong. It’s good they’re not cops. Better than if they were cops, actually.”
“What? Why?”
“They have no lawful authority, for starters.”
“Excuse me.” From Kovac, in the tone of a man forced to watch a tennis match he didn’t care about. “This is my meeting.”
“We don’t have it,” Delaney told him. “We’ve never had it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Donna’s been dead for months. It would have turned up by now,” she pointed out. Then, colder: “I would have paid you a visit by now.”
“And again I say bullshit. That dim quim wouldn’t have dropped off the grid without giving you what she had.”
“Dim…”
“Oh boy,” Rake muttered.
“… quim?” Delaney wanted to pace—well, she wanted to break Kovac’s nose, blacken his eyes, and then really go to work on him—but time and place, time and place. Unfortunately, there wasn’t room to pace; the windowless office was only about six feet by five, and other than the wooden desk and two chairs filched from the kitchen, the only furniture in the room were multiple heavy bookshelves crammed with any number of heavy old tomes. “D’you want to get down to business, or do you have more insults to run through first?”
“I can do both. And I’m not sure you’re getting it, sunshine. I have to know what Donna Alvah had and where it was, because I fucking hate prison, and while I don’t mind having my guys smack you around a bit, I don’t want to kill you.”
“Also because you hate prison,” Rake guessed.
“You got it,” Kovac replied, smiling like Rake was the prize pupil who correctly guessed the capital of Serbia.*
Delaney leaned back against the bookshelves and shook her head. “You’re not hearing me. I don’t know what she did with the flash drive. Hell, I didn’t know what she’d done with her daughter for way too long. If it hasn’t surfaced yet, you’re probably in the clear.”
“‘Probably’ isn’t gonna do it for me. ‘Probably’ means there’s still a chance I’ll get pinched again. And at my age, I’ve got no interest in making new friends on my knees.”
“Uh, I don’t think that’s an age thing,” Rake began.
Delaney shrugged, cutting him off. “I don’t know what to tell you, Kovac. She left me a letter. And that’s it. That was always it: two pages, single-spaced.”
“A letter.”
“Yep.”
“In code?”
“No, in English. But it’s not the smoking gun, Kovac. And if it was—well. Like I said. You wouldn’t have had to spend the last week having your people skulk around. The cops would have knocked on your door, or I would have. Oh—and what happened to the A and B teams?” she added, jerking her thumb toward Tall and Small. “Why are you using subs?”
“I like how you’re asking me that, as if you don’t know the answer. They were on your boy toy until Lake Como.”
“Hey! I’m a man toy.”
“Then somebody kicked the shit out of them, and they lost him.”
“Aw.”
“The B team picked him up again outside the hotel that first morning, and then someone stole their wallets, led ’em on a merry chase, and called the cops and reported a pickpocket. Who brings their righteous ID along when they know they’re gonna be up to some shady shit?” Kovac lamented.