Stalker's Luck (Solitude Saga Book 1)

by Chris Strange

  “You could try to run.”

  “There’s no running. The Feds have this place locked down. No, I’m going to die here. My last few weeks alive and I can’t even enjoy it because I’m so scared.” He looked sideways at Eddie. “Can you help me? If I help you, will you help me?”

  Eddie stared straight ahead. He held no judgement. Everyone died differently. He’d learned that. Some cried, some blanked it out, some fought, some tried to run. Some watched the others dying, recording it, trying to understand it.

  He dug the blister pack of downers out of his pocket and handed it to the prostitute. Five more Bluens remained. Enough for a couple of days, if the man was careful. Enough to blank out the panic as doom ticked closer.

  The cross-dresser popped a pill out of the foil and slipped it into his mouth. The tension drained slowly from his shoulders.

  “Thank you, honey,” he said.

  “The name and address.”

  “Victoria Palmer. Green Acres apartment building, five blocks that way. Apartment nine-oh-three.”

  Eddie committed the information to memory. “Tell me. What kind of place was Lady Luck? Did they treat the girls right?”

  “Do you want the lie or the truth?”

  “The truth.”

  “It was the worst kind of place. The kind of place even the most perverted bottom feeders would be ashamed to be seen going into. The kind of place you only worked when you had nowhere else to go.”

  Eddie nodded.

  “Do you wish you’d asked for the lie?” the cross-dresser said.

  “What would’ve been the point?” Eddie turned away in the direction of Green Acres and raised two fingers in a wave. “Thanks for your help.”

  “I hope you find who you’re looking for, honey.”

  Eddie thrust his hands into his pockets and kept his head down as he walked away.

  7

  Roy Williams picked up the wrench once more and slammed it down on Scott Hudson’s knee. The bound man screamed into the socks stuffed in his mouth, sweat pouring down his cheeks. The chair rattled beneath him as his body shook in agony.

  Roy put the wrench down on the bed and stood over the man in the dim half-light of the abandoned apartment. He waited, breathing. In and out, in and out.

  He had to remain calm during this. It was the only way he’d get anywhere. Be calm, be patient. He hadn’t broken out of the Bolt and skipped halfway across the system to screw everything up now.

  Slowly, Hudson’s muffled screams subsided to coughs and groans and panting. His eyes drooped. Black bruises marred his normally feminine cheeks. Roy had been tempted to break the man’s long and pointed nose, but he didn’t want the gagged man choking on his own blood. That wouldn’t do at all.

  Roy stood between the overhead light and Hudson, casting his large shadow over him. Hudson kept his eyes on the floor. Roy grabbed the man’s chin and forced his face upwards. Grunts escaped Hudson’s throat. His nostrils flared.

  “Three hours,” Roy said. “That’s all it’s been, Hudson.”

  He hadn’t known the man’s name when he’d knocked him out and brought him here. Never seen his face before. He didn’t even know if the name he’d pulled off the ID in the man’s pocket was real. But that didn’t matter. It’d do. Hudson was nobody. Nothing but an unfortunate pawn.

  “It’s going to keep going like this, Hudson. I don’t get tired. I don’t sleep anymore. Maybe a couple of hours a night. It doesn’t pay to sleep in the Bolt. I had a lot of enemies in there. Plenty of guards willing to leave my cell unlocked for one of the other cons to come and stick me. Guess how many of them succeeded? Guess how many of them were flushed out the airlock with their own shank buried in their throat?”

  Hudson tried to look away, but Roy gripped the man’s damp chin tighter and tugged his face upwards.

  “Temperance has perhaps two weeks. Say I keep doing this for, I don’t know, twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-one times fourteen, that’s…let me see…nearly three hundred hours. Three hundred hours for me to get the answers I want out of you. And you’ve only been through three. Three hours and you’re already crying. Look at your knee.”

  He grabbed the back of Hudson’s head and pulled it down to face the pulped and bloody mass that should’ve been his knee. Hudson went even paler.

  “You’re not going to be able to walk on that leg again, Hudson. You know that, don’t you? But you’ve still got another leg and two arms and two eyes and a cock and a couple of balls. You’re doing pretty good, all things considered. For the moment. Because make no mistake, I will take each of those things from you one by one until you tell me what I want to know. Do you understand? Hudson, listen to me. Do you understand what I’ll do? Do you understand how far I’ll go? You’ve heard tales about me? Those tales are nothing compared to what I’ve truly done. You’ll talk. Everyone always talks.”

  He dragged his hand across the man’s face and then brought his fingers to his mouth, tasting Hudson’s fear sweat. The man’s eyes spun wildly in his head.

  “Are you ready to talk?” he said. “Are you ready to tell me how to get to Leone?”

  Hudson twisted his head around as if looking for escape.

  Roy stood up straight and turned back towards the bed. “Maybe you don’t understand yet. Maybe you need another lesson.”

  He lifted the wrench and faced Hudson. His captive began to hyperventilate, eyes fixated on the wrench.

  “You’re bringing this on yourself,” he said. He raised the wrench.

  Music drifted through the damp air. Someone whistling a tune.

  Roy froze and half-turned his head towards the apartment door. Footsteps in the hall outside. This apartment building was supposed to be near empty. And the few residents that remained didn’t whistle.

  Roy glanced at Hudson and tapped the man’s cheek with the wrench. A little reminder to keep quiet. Hudson got the message. Holding the wrench down by his side, Roy crept to the door and pressed his eye against the peephole.

  A figure strolled down the hall, hands in pockets. He was a thin man, skin a yellowish-brown with eyes so sunken he looked malnourished. His body became that of a gangly alien in the fish-eye lens of the peephole. He whistled a song Roy didn’t recognise. His dress was simple: a shirt and waistcoat with dark trousers. A man who’d chosen to blend into the crowd. There was a pistol strapped to his thigh. Roy’s hand tightened on the wrench.

  A muffled cough came from behind Roy. He spun his head and bared his teeth at Hudson. The captive thug’s eyes were wide in panic. His head jerked as he tried to suppress another cough. He looked up at Roy, pleading for mercy with his eyes.

  Roy held the wrench up so Hudson would know what would happen if he didn’t control himself. Hudson nodded quickly. Roy glared, then carefully brought his eye back to the peephole.

  The sunken-eyed man was staring back at him. Roy held his breath. The whistling had stopped. The man couldn’t see through the peephole. But he was staring at the door like he could. What the hell was a gunslinger doing in a place like this? He didn’t look like a local. He wasn’t one of the residents. There were no casinos or whorehouses in the apartment block. So if he wasn’t a tourist and he wasn’t a local, what was he?

  Roy’s gaze flashed to the man’s gun. Stalker.

  He knew it was true as soon as the thought came into his head. He could tell by the way the man carried himself. The casual vigilance. The calm stare. This was a man prepared for the swift and cold application of violence. Not unlike himself.

  They couldn’t have found him. Not yet. He wasn’t done yet! He glanced back into the room. A pistol lay on the bed. Three steps away. Half a second to pick it up and turn back. Would he be fast enough? He had to be quick. His muscles tensed.

  But before he could move, the whistling tune returned. Roy looked out the peephole once more. The man was moving on. Roy watched him through the fish-eye until he was out of sight. His footsteps stopped again. The whistling continued, but qu
ieter.

  Then three sharp knocks on the next door along. Victoria Palmer’s door. Roy glanced past Hudson at the wall that this apartment shared with Victoria’s. And the hidden panel he’d installed to connect them.

  Roy crossed the room silently, lowered the wrench onto the bed, and picked up the pistol. He brought his lips close to Hudson’s ear.

  “You don’t know pain. Not yet. If you make a noise, any noise, then I will truly hurt you. You’ll talk, you’ll tell me everything about Leone, you’ll tell me how many fucking pubic hairs he has. But it won’t stop me. I’ll hurt you and I’ll keep hurting you until this station dies and you spend your last minutes gasping for the oxygen that just won’t come. Understand?”

  Hudson nodded.

  “Good.” Roy pulled back the pistol’s slide as quietly as he could and aimed at the hidden panel.

  Not today, stalker. I have too much left to do.

  Three more knocks. And then he heard Victoria’s door creak open.

  Victoria Palmer was the prettiest thing Eddie had encountered since setting foot inside the Green Acres building, but that wasn’t saying much. Like the apartment building, with its stained carpet and cracked walls, Victoria Palmer had been left an empty shell of her former self. She answered the door wearing a ripped shirt. Dark eye shadow surrounded her tired eyes. Her hair was cropped so short he could see her scalp.

  “What?” she said.

  Eddie glanced past her at the apartment within. “Victoria Palmer?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m looking for Victoria Palmer. I take it that’s you?”

  “I haven’t got nothing I want to buy and I haven’t got nothing worth stealing.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” Eddie said. “I only steal from the dead. I want to ask you about a girl you might’ve known.”

  “I don’t know anyone.” She started to shut the door.

  Eddie jammed his foot in the door. “No need to get hasty. I can pay for the information.”

  “What the hell do I need with money? Move your foot.”

  He ignored her. “You worked the bar at Lady Luck Gentlemen’s Club.”

  “You’ve got the wrong woman.”

  “Someone says otherwise. And your picture was on the vid screen advertising the place.”

  “And?”

  Eddie slammed his shoulder into the door. She bounced back and he slipped inside, pulling the door closed behind him.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Palmer said. “Get out of my house.”

  Eddie shook his head, crossed the room, and sat down in a broken couch with half the stuffing missing.

  “Sorry, sweetheart. I’ll get lost as soon as we’ve had a little chat. I talked to a friend of yours, he told me where to find you. I just want to know about another girl who worked at Lady Luck.”

  She glared at him from the door. “I’ll call the law.”

  He cracked a smile. “Go ahead. Maybe they’ll get here in a day or so. Then I’ll tell them who I am and they’ll be on their way and you’ll be right back where you started. Trust me, sweetheart. The fastest way to get me out of here is to talk. This girl—”

  “I didn’t talk to any of the other girls. It was a job. I did it five nights a week for three months then left when it burnt down. I didn’t know anyone.”

  “That’s all right. Anything you can tell me will be helpful. This girl, she’d be about thirty-five now. Curly reddish-brown hair, green eyes, bit of a curve to her. The vid ad called her Daisy.”

  “I don’t know. They’ve all got some stupid flower name like that. Daisy or Violet or Rose or Petal. It could’ve been any of them.”

  Eddie leaned back and spread his arms on the back of the couch. “Why are you being so difficult? It’s a simple question.”

  “I can’t remember. Why can’t you get that through your head?”

  Eddie let his head loll to the side as he examined the apartment. It was a tiny shoebox, more of a cheap motel room than a proper apartment. The single bed was crammed into a corner in the back of the room. A tiny kitchenette was built into a hollow in one wall, alongside an open door leading to the bathroom. On the other side of the room were a couple of shelves holding a busted vid screen and a handful of synth-paper books. He turned his head to the side to read the titles. He grinned.

  “What?” Palmer said.

  Eddie pointed. “That book. That’s one of mine. The Fall of the Virgin Assassin. What’d you think?”

  “It’s not mine. It came with the apartment.”

  Eddie stood and strolled over to the shelves.

  “What are you doing?” Palmer said, her voice rising slightly.

  “Easy, sweetheart. I just want to have a look. I didn’t know they put this one out in paper. I forgot I even wrote it.” He pushed a couple of other books aside to pick it up. The text was smeared slightly on the thin pages; always the trouble with this piece of shit synth-paper. He thumbed through a few pages and remembered why he’d forgotten this particular book. Not one of his best.

  As he returned the novel to the shelf, his eyes caught on a thin seam running vertically down the wall at the edge of the shelf. Strange workmanship. He tried to follow the seam. It looked almost like there was a panel there. Maybe a storage cupboard. He reached out to find a handle.

  “She’s dead,” Palmer said.

  Eddie stopped. He turned to look at the woman. “What?”

  “The girl you’re looking for. She’s dead.”

  He studied her face. Her lips were tight. She was nervous. “You’re lying.”

  She shook her head. “She was causing trouble at the club. Stealing from customers, trying to get hold of a travel pass. So her employer had her killed.”

  Eddie slipped his hands into his pockets. “Her employer? You mean the woman who burned her club down?”

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  “You’re lying again.”

  “It was her. We called her the Witch. She had the contracts. The club was under her name. But she wasn’t the true owner. She wasn’t the one who called the shots.”

  “Then who was?”

  “The same man who calls all the shots on Temperance. Feleti Leone.”

  The name tugged something in the depths of his memory. “White Hand syndicate?”

  Palmer pressed her lips together and said nothing. Eddie thought it through. The White Hands. Roy Williams’ ex-gang. Now that he thought about it, he remembered reading somewhere that the White Hands were still operating on Temperance. Was that why Roy Williams came here? Was he back in charge? But why here, on this dying station?

  And Cassandra. Why would she be working for a man like that? He turned back to his book lying on the shelf, touched the cover. It was because of Cassandra he’d discovered the kinds of tales he now wrote. Absentmindedly, his hand drifted away from the book, back towards the almost hidden crack in the wall.

  Why was she dancing for this Leone? It made no sense. But if Leone had killed her….

  His fingers touched the panel.

  His tab beeped in his pocket, snapping him out of his thoughts. He turned away from the wall and answered the call. Palmer was still staring at him, but he couldn’t read her expression.

  “Yeah?” he said into his tab.

  “You need to get back to the Solitude,” Dom said. “We have to regroup.”

  “I’m kinda in the middle of something, Freckles.”

  “I just killed three people for sure. Maybe four.”

  He paused. “You’ve had a busy afternoon.”

  “This isn’t funny, Eddie. Get back to the ship. Now. We’ve got a lead on Williams.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  He ended the call and returned his tab to his pocket. He directed a smile at Palmer.

  “Thanks for your hospitality. But I have to get going. No rest for the wicked.”

  She was silent as he went out the door. She knew more than sh
e was saying, that much was obvious. Half of what she said was rubbish. But the bit about Leone, something in that rang true. Not the whole story, maybe. He wasn’t willing to accept that Cassandra was dead. Not yet. But there was a connection there. Someone knew something. And he’d find out what.

  He started whistling again as he strolled towards the stairs.

  Roy Williams watched silently through the peephole as the stalker passed. His whistling faded as his footsteps echoed lightly in the stairwell. Finally, when silence returned to Green Acres, Roy allowed himself to breathe. The tension drained out of his shoulders. He put his gun down on the bed, gave the bound Hudson a cool glare, and eased open the panel connecting his apartment to Victoria Palmer’s.

  She was waiting for him, a glass of vodka in her hand and a cigarette between her lips.

  “Is he coming back?” he asked.

  Victoria blew twin streams of smoke from her nostrils. “I don’t think so.”

  “He was a stalker, wasn’t he?”

  “A writer, he says.”

  Roy glanced towards the door. A writer?

  Victoria pointed her cigarette at the shelf behind him, next to the hidden panel. “That’s his book, so he says.”

  He picked it up. A cheap dime novel with a big-titted woman on the cover. “Eddie Gould.” The name didn’t ring a bell. “You’ve read this?”

  She shook her head. “It was Lilian’s.”

  He shot her a look, then dropped his eyes back to the novel. Lilian. What was she doing with that man’s book? And why did a writer need a gun?

  “He’s looking for her,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Gould. He’s looking for Lilian.”

  A cold hand wrapped its fingers around Roy’s heart. He tossed the book down on the shelf. “Find out everything you can about him. Who he is, why he’s here, how he got to Temperance. Everything.”

  She sneered. “I’m not your secretary.”

  He straightened, hands curling into fists at his side. “You will be if you want your next fix. You’re exactly what I want you to be until this is over.”