A voice like a badly tuned synth-harp drifted from across the room. “Bones, you’re not looking so good. How many of your fingers am I holding up? Huh? I can’t hear you. Don’t worry about it. You never could count, anyway. You always were a stupid cunt.”
Dom slowly pushed the edge of the curtain aside with her revolver barrel and peeked out. A tiny man stood over Bones’ unconscious body, peering down at him. He couldn’t have been much more than a metre tall. With a stubby arm he was gripping Bones’ face by the chin, shaking him back and forth. He had a head of silver hair, but he didn’t look like he was past his mid-twenties. One beady eye was missing, replaced by some kind of old-tech computer panel that she didn’t recognise. He wore a grey shirt that was much too big for him, the sleeves rolled up. A dozen wires dangled from his left forearm, each ending in a different coloured socket.
This had to be the augment Bones mentioned, Dom realised. But what in the name of Man was he doing?
The augment seemed to grow bored of playing with Bones’ slack face. He stood and scurried over to the body of the woman.
“And Daz,” he said. “Look at you, Daz. You were much too pretty for that place. Now I think you’d fit right in. Hey, remember that time you had Greg hold me down in my cell while you took your knife to my thighs? Ah, the fun we had together. I’m going to miss you, Daz, really I am. I just hope you’re up there somewhere looking down on me, listening to me right now. I hope you’re screaming. I hope you know I won.”
He patted what was left of her cheek and stepped away from her. He spread his lips in a grin. Metal teeth glinted from his sunken gums. With his remaining eye he scanned the church. Then his gaze came to rest on the alcove Dom was hiding in.
“Come on, stalker,” he called. “Do I look like I’m much of a threat? You’re not going to spend the whole day hiding there, are you?”
Dom pushed the curtain aside. She raised her revolver and aimed at the augment.
He put his hands in his pockets and grinned at her. “Jesus fucking Christ, you look even dumber than I imagined. Do you have a brain in there or is it just muscle all the way through?”
She took a step forward, silent.
“Speak up,” he said. “You can speak, can’t you?” He spoke louder and slower. “Speak? Words? Do you un-der-stand me?”
“If one more word comes out of your mouth that isn’t telling me who you are and what you’re doing here, sir, I’ll cut you down and leave you here with your friends.”
The augment raised his hands in triumph. “God in Heaven, the noble savage speaks!”
Dom fanned back the hammer of her revolver.
“Calm yourself, Tarzan,” he said. “They call me Knox. ‘They’ being this lot.” He gestured at the crumpled bodies of the convicts. “And I’m here for one reason. I’m going to help you find Roy Williams.”
She decocked her gun. “Keep talking.”
6
When Eddie first met Cassandra Diaz, she put a gun to his head and demanded his wallet.
It was six days after he’d abandoned his home station of Ophelia to escape his family’s shame. After his dear father was arrested for embezzling from the university he lectured at, Eddie had used the last of his family’s influence and liquid assets to procure himself a travel pass. He went to the spaceport and got on the first ship that would take him. It was headed for the asteroid mining colony of Fractured Jaw, so that was where he got off. It seemed a good a place as any to start a new life.
After spending half the day trying to convince a mine foreman that his pretty little delicate sixteen-year-old hands were capable of operating an electrodrill, he was on his way back to the shithole single-room apartment he’d rented. He’d taken a shortcut down a catwalk through a maintenance tunnel. Condensation dripped from the pipes overhead.
He never heard her approach, not until he felt the barrel pressed against his head and her soft whisper in his ear. “The wallet, rich boy. Quickly.”
He hadn’t yet developed the knack of dressing like the locals. Between his clothes and his clean skin and the lack of electricity burns on his arms, anyone on the colony could pick him as a rich off-worlder from a kilometre away. They thought that made him weak. But the rich of Ophelia enjoyed a great deal of leisure time. Time they could spend on other practical pursuits.
Pursuits that included knife fighting.
Eddie reached into his pocket and passed his wallet backwards over his shoulder. The woman snatched it from his hands. The gun left the back of his head. And Eddie spun, a knife slipping into his other hand from where he’d kept it up his sleeve.
He got barely a glimpse of her before he slashed. It wasn’t a slash meant to cut; it was directed at her gun hand to make her recoil. And recoil she did. He snarled and planted his feet and launched himself at her, getting inside her outstretched gun arm. She backed up into the wall of pipes behind her. Trapped. He pressed the blade against her throat while he pinned her gun arm against the pipes.
“Bad day,” he said to her. “I’m not in a good mood. Drop the gun.”
She let the gun fall. He was close enough that he could feel her breath against his lips. She was a few years older than him, maybe in her early twenties. Cute rather than beautiful. Upturned nose, close-cropped curls. Her hair was dyed a white blond, but he could see the deep red roots coming through. She sneered at him to cover her fear.
“Good,” he said. “The wallet as well. Drop it.”
She dropped it. “Are we done?”
Her voice had a surprisingly melodious quality. It didn’t match the harshness of her eyes.
“Now your wallet,” he said. “Hand it over.”
Her eyes widened. “I don’t have one.”
“Nice try.” He pressed the blade against her throat a little harder. “Want to answer again?”
“What does a rich boy want with my wallet?”
“No such thing as too much money.”
Her narrow lips quirked into a lopsided smirk. “How broke are you?”
“A little less broke now.”
“You’re pretty fast,” she said.
“So it would seem.”
“How old are you, boy?”
“Old enough, girl. I haven’t seen that wallet yet.”
“I have an alternative proposition.”
“Those are big words for a street rat. Are you sure you know what they mean?”
Her green eyes sparkled above her sneer. “You’re all alone here, aren’t you?”
He said nothing.
“This is a small colony,” she said. “I’d know if a whole family of rich snots moved in. The administrators keep tight control over anyone who might be a threat to their jobs.”
“Get to the point before I get bored and open your throat to shut you up.”
“Let me keep my money and maybe I can offer you the chance to make more money. Real money. And if you do good on that, maybe I can offer you something else. I run a crew here.”
“A gang, you mean.”
“If you want to call it that. There’s a bunch of gangs on Fractured Jaw. Most of them powerful, most of them leeching off the mining trade, the unions. And we leech off them. There’s only a dozen of us. All of us orphans or runaways. I can take you back with me. I can introduce you. If they like you, if you can prove yourself, maybe you can join us.”
He grinned. “You really think I’m stupid, don’t you? You think I’m going to walk into a room full of your friends and assume they won’t just stick me the instant I get through the door.”
“If we wanted you dead, you already would be. Marco’s had a gun trained on you since you asked me for my wallet.”
Eddie glanced to the side and saw a pair of eyes in the darkness. Below them was the gunmetal glint of a pistol.
“Shit,” Eddie said. He released the woman and tucked the knife back into his sleeve. She massaged her wrist where he’d been gripping her.
“Don’t forget your wallet,” she said, poi
nting with her eyes.
He hesitated, eyeing her and the gunman carefully, then slowly reached down and picked up the wallet. His gaze drifted to the fallen gun, but the woman picked it up before he could make a move for it.
“Nice gun for a street rat,” he said.
She examined it with disdain, shrugged, and tucked it into the back of her trousers. “It shoots.”
She turned and strolled away in the direction of the gunman. The shadowy figure’s eyes stared at Eddie. Eddie stared back.
The woman paused just before the shadow swallowed her. She turned her head. “Name’s Cassandra.”
“That’s swell.”
She smiled. A real smile this time.
“Are you coming?” she asked.
He said nothing.
Cassandra shrugged. “If you’ve got somewhere better to be…? Come on, Marco.”
Marco’s eyes disappeared. A moment later, Cassandra started walking again. She disappeared out of sight. But he could hear her footsteps in the corridor.
Eddie listened to them as they grew quieter. He licked his lips. He said, “Shit.”
And he followed her into the darkness.
Eddie paused in his recount of his first meeting with Cassandra. Meryl the black-haired beauty curled against Eddie in her red-tinted hotel room, their flesh pressed together. “You fell in love with her?”
“Like a rock. We were pulling jobs together within a week, ripping off the syndicates and filling our pockets with cash from Fractured Jaw’s corrupt administrators. Within two weeks her gang had accepted me as one of their own. By the third week we were sleeping together.”
He flashed back to a moment not unlike this one. They were in an abandoned apartment building, not a hotel room, and he was young and stupid and bursting with feeling. But just like now there was the skin of a woman beside him, the scent of their sex hanging in the air. He pictured Cassandra reading aloud from a lurid dime novel on weathered paper as his fingers slid deep inside her, slick and hot. His education on Ophelia had stressed the value of good literature, classics from before the fall of the Gypsy Gates, thick tomes that promised to expand his mind and make him worthy—of what, he was never quite sure. It wasn’t until he abandoned all that and found Cassandra that he learned of these other stories, stories written in the language of the working class, stories that were wild and violent and sexual and yet somehow truer than anything he’d read before. He felt like he’d spent his entire youth cut off from the universe, contained within some tiny bubble that had never fit quite right. And now he’d finally found the truth, here in this dark apartment on Fractured Jaw with this girl who was four years his senior, this girl full of harshly learnt wisdom.
“What happened?” Meryl asked.
“Ambush. Revenge. We were mosquitoes buzzing around the colony’s syndicates, siphoning off what we could. We were nothing but an annoyance to them. But I guess you get annoyed enough, you want to squish that mosquito. A police raid hit us in our hideout. I say us, but that’s not right. I wasn’t there. I was out on a job. I was on my way back when I saw it. The police lining up the gang against the side of the building. I could see right away that something was wrong. I knew the law. I knew police procedure. But those kids, they didn’t know shit.”
“They weren’t cops,” Meryl said.
Eddie shook his head. “Syndicate members in stolen uniforms. They pulled out their guns and filled the kids full of holes. Just a roar, just five seconds, then it was over. They were all dead.”
No. Not all. Cassandra. If she’d survived the attack, why hadn’t she contacted him? Had she assumed he was dead like he’d assumed she was?
Forget it. None of it mattered. She was alive. He made his decision. He had to find her and get her off Temperance. It was all that mattered.
He sat up, gently pushing Meryl off him. He’d wasted too much time already. He’d enjoyed himself with Meryl. He needed it, after the boy in the hat, the boy with the hole in his throat. And the shock of that vid screen. But Meryl wasn’t Cassandra.
Lady Luck Gentlemen’s Club. That’s where Cassandra was. That’s where he’d find her.
“You’re going?” Meryl asked as he stood and kicked through the clothes strewn across the carpet.
“Have to. Sorry. I have to find her. Enjoy your brothels.” He picked up her dress and tossed it aside.
“Looking for these?” she said.
He turned and found her twirling his underwear on her finger.
He extended his hand. She snatched the underwear out of his grasp and grinned impishly at him.
“Once more. I enjoyed myself. I think I could do with a little more warming up before you leave.”
She had stamina, he had to give her that. He sat on the bed, took her face in his hands, and kissed her full on the lips.
Her eyelids fluttered open as their lips parted.
“A goodbye kiss?” she said.
“Sorry. Any other day….”
“But not today.” She nodded and reluctantly passed him his underwear. “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”
“Maybe.”
He dressed quickly, her eyes on him.
“You won’t find her, you know,” Meryl said.
He pulled on his shoes. “And how’s that?”
“You know why people come to this city. If she’s alive, if she’s here, she’s not the woman you once knew. It’ll all end in tears.”
He stood, took her hand, and kissed it.
“Everything always does.”
Eddie stared at the burned-out husk of Lady Luck Gentlemen’s Club on the corner of Valentine and Wilcox. The neon sign above the door had survived, but not much else. He could see footprints in the blackened debris. The place had burned up months ago. He hadn’t even been close.
The downer pill he’d picked up at a pharmacy on the way fizzed under his tongue. Calm was returning to him once more, focussing his mind. He let the drug flow through his blood, envelop his heart, slow its beats. His hands no longer shook, his neck no longer felt stiff.
But he could still feel the whisper of Cassandra Diaz’s breath on his ear.
High heels clacked on the street behind him. “You’re a little late, honey.”
He glanced back. A tall man wearing a sleek dress and stiletto heels stood beside him, royal blue lips wrapped around a cigarette.
“Late for what?” Eddie said.
The cross-dressing prostitute gave him a smile. Unlike the rest of him, it was a reserved smile, quiet and conservative. “Late for Lady Luck. I knew the woman who owned the place. She ran into some debt when her mother took ill. The only money she had was tied up in the club. Temperance was already preparing for its demise. No one would buy a club on a dying station. So she came up with a Plan B.”
“Insurance fraud,” Eddie said, staring at the burned building.
“You got it, honey. And why not? What’s a little casual insurance fraud between friends?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So she hired a couple of toughs to come in splash a bit of liquid ship fuel around. Lit a match and whoosh.” The prostitute spread his hands. “Up it went. I don’t know how, but the insurance company bought it. Probably couldn’t be bothered fighting it. The place wasn’t worth much anyway.”
“You sure seem to know an awful lot about it, Jack.”
“Like I said, I knew the woman.” He took a long drag of his cigarette. “You got any more Bluen?”
“Huh?”
“I saw you popping one before.”
The downer continued to bubble in Eddie’s mouth. “You must have good eyesight to recognise a pill from all the way over there.”
The cross-dresser shrugged. “What can I say? Do you have any more?”
“Keep talking and we’ll see.”
“What’s to tell? She got the money. Bought a forged travel pass. Hired passage off the station. The Feds scanned them as they were leaving and her pass didn’t check out. That’s what the for
gers never tell you. If any Fed takes more than a casual look at your pass, they’ll see it’s forged. And they won’t react kindly.”
“Arrested?”
“Didn’t get the chance. She wasn’t the only one with a forged pass on board. The pilot tried to run the Fed blockade. The Feds locked weapons and blew them out of the sky. And that was that.”
Eddie nodded. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“I never said she was my friend.”
“I’m looking for someone who used to work here. A dancer.”
“I might recognise her. Do you have a picture?”
Eddie shook his head. “Her name was Cassandra. But I thinks she went by ‘Daisy’.”
He thought about it. “Sorry, honey. A lot of dancers come and go from these sorts of places. She might not even be on the station anymore.”
“Maybe not. But I have to try to find her.”
The prostitute dropped his cigarette and crushed it under his stiletto heel. “Why? Does she owe you something?”
“No. She owes me nothing and I owe her nothing. But if I can find her, I will. I couldn’t tell you why, Jack. That’s just the way it is.”
The man was quiet for a moment. Eddie studied the building’s burnt facade. Music drifted out of the handful of strip clubs up and down the street. There’d be records on Lady Luck somewhere: ownership, tax, booze licences, all that. There’d be names and addresses. But he had no way to access any of that. He was nothing but a stalker, a concerned citizen with a gun and some flimsy legal justifications for hunting fugitives. Neither the Feds nor the local administrators would give a shit about his ex-girlfriend.
Finally, the cross-dresser spoke. “Most of the people who worked here are long gone. But I know one woman. A girl who ran the bar.”
“You know where she is?”
“Sure. But I don’t want to bring her any trouble.”
“There won’t be any trouble. I just need to talk to her. I just want to know what she knows about my friend.”
He nodded. “I’m going to die on this station. A couple of weeks, they say. I’m scared.”
Stalker's Luck (Solitude Saga Book 1) Page 5