Because he should

“Wilhelm spent his youth searching for vaults,” Davy revealed, “and he never did stop looking for them even after he settled down and started a family.”

“What, he kept searching through his house for a vault?” Brenan found it much too hard to resist from asking a smart-ass question.

“He was a scientist, Brenan, a proper one with a lab and all, and he spent way too much time compiling every piece of information on the vaults that he could get his hands on.” Davy then stopped, apparently deciding that he should keep his cards close to his chest, or maybe that was all that the twins had told him. You don’t tell a man you barely know about how you found a way to get your hands on a giant treasure, even if he was a friend of your grandfather.

“So what, he made a map out of rumours and hearsay? Sounds like we’d just end up in the middle of an ocean, realizing that there isn’t even an island where the map says that there should be a vault.” Davy might be his old friend, but that didn’t meant that he should seem too eager to accept his offer, so Brenan did the best he could to appear sceptical. Still, it’d be good to have a least three people who could hold their own in a fight, even if he might need one or two more before he felt at ease with lifting anchor and heading out. And a navigator sounded like a good thing to have, particularly since he had hired Michaels on the strength of his mad ideas alone, with him completely forgetting to check if he even knew which way was up on a map.

“Brenan,” the sudden sharpness to Davy’s voice suggested to Brenan that he’d better take it easy from now on, “Wilhelm was my friend, and he wasn’t just some crazy old man who liked drawing pretty maps out of shit and crumbs. I’d prefer it if you didn’t badmouth him.”

“Fair enough, I’ll meet with the boys and see if they amount to anything,” Brenan replied, considering it odd that he could joke about signing Davy’s wife up as his ship whore but that his friends were strictly off limit from any disparaging remarks, but then the memory of what Red had said about him popped up in his head and he heard himself saying “Say Davy, what do you say when someone calls me a murdering son of a bitch?”
Brenan knew that the term to use was “when” and not “if”.

“That I can’t comment on that last part, since I never did meet your mother, but that I’ve never known you to kill a man if you didn’t think that he deserved it, and that deserving it meant a lot more than just looking at you funny,” Davy’s words didn’t affect Brenan like Red’s had, but at least it was good to know what he thought of him.

“Speaking about killing, though it isn’t my favourite topic under the moons,” Davy went on, “a couple of corpses turned up in the middle of town not more than a couple of hours ago.”

“So?” now it was Brenan’s turn to try and not reveal too much, “People die.”

“Yeah, but one of them had a Dor-weasel’s angry head tattooed onto the top of his shoulder, which was kind of a popular motif amongst Veertorian sailors and soldiers a couple of years back, wasn’t it?”

“Meh, fashions change,” It felt absurd to Brenan that they were going on like that when the both of them knew that he was the man who’d killed the sailors.

“Yeah, but the other one had his ear cut like he **** somebody when he shouldn’t have.”

“So maybe they were both deserters?”

“They got knifed to ****, and I don’t mean that somebody just happened to stumble and stab them by accident or anything… rumour has it that the man who did it must be of the kind that has forgotten more about killing than most people will ever know.”

“Yeah, well…”

“That cook you hired, she wouldn’t happen to be a redhead, would she?” Davy asked.

“Nah, she’s more of a brunette…” Brenan knew that Davy knew that he was lying, but they both figured it to be best that way if anyone came round to ask Davy any questions.

“Good, because those two dead men are supposed to have been asking around about a certain redhead. Maybe you should start considering leaving this island as soon as possible.”

“Red’s not due for a couple of days…” Brenan replied.

“Brenan, she’d understand,” Davy tried to reason with him, “I mean, I’d tell her about it and why you had to leave.”

“I’m staying,” Brenan interrupted him, and that was that.

“Davy,” Brenan asked a little while later as his friend made his way towards the gangplank, “why’d you tell me about the twins and their map?”

“Oh, I guess I’m hoping that you won’t forget when the time comes to sell all those treasures,” Davy chuckled to himself.