Stalked by Brian Freeman Page B

on.”
    He waited as Dan stewed. Targets like Dan were the easy ones. They’d chew glass rather than risk public embarrassment. Or jail.
    “What did you have in mind?” Dan asked finally.
    He smiled. “Let’s wrap up the first deal, and then I’ll check in with you again. I’d hate to see your big move to Washington get tanked.”
    “Give me the details,” Dan snapped.
    “Call Serena,” he instructed. “Tell her to be at the Park Hill Cemetery off Vermillion Road at ten o’clock tonight. Alone. With the money.”
    “Why there?”
    “Let’s just say I like the idea of being surrounded by dead people.” He thought about the river stench of the rising waters in Alabama and added, “The truth is, Dan, I’m a ghost.”
     
     
     

Chapter 13
     
     
    Stride felt sorry for the guy from Byte Patrol, who was seated in front of the store computer at Lauren Erickson’s dress shop, Silk. The store manager, Sonia Bezac, jabbed her razor-sharp nail dangerously close to his eyes and wouldn’t have thought twice about digging in and gouging one out. The techie had a giant physique that made his neon purple T-shirt look as if it had shrunk in the wash, but Sonia may as well have been wearing black leather and cracking a whip.
    “This is the third time in a month I’ve had you in here,” she snapped at him. “Each time you tell me it’s fixed, and each time the fucking machine freezes up again.”
    The tech shrugged his craggy shoulders, and his neck disappeared. “Have you tried rebooting?”
    Sonia threw her hands in the air. She was tall and extremely thin, with a narrow face, prominent chin, and a slightly drooping nose. With her hands over her head, and her red hair blazing like sunshine, she looked as if she were rearing back to fire off a lightning bolt. “Rebooting? Do I look like an idiot? Don’t you think I would turn the goddamn thing off and on eighteen times before calling you?”
    “I have to ask,” the man said.
    “Don’t ask. Just get busy. I need my files back.”
    She swung away and expelled her breath loudly as if she were spitting out a gristly piece of steak. The techie caught Stride’s eye and winked at him.
    Sonia stopped dead when she saw Stride standing in the middle of the dress shop, watching her. He knew he looked out of place, the way any man would, surrounded by glittering evening gowns and cocktail dresses. He could see himself reflected in half a dozen mirrors. He wasn’t sure how he would feel, seeing Sonia again, and it didn’t help when she immediately stalked up to him, cocked her head to one side, and kissed him on the lips.
    “Soft lips,” she said to him. “Thirty years later, and I still remember that.”
    He had dated Sonia exactly once, when he was a junior in high school. Stride was wild with grief because his father had just died, and Sonia was on a quest to rob as many teenage boys as she could of their virginity. She smuggled a bottle of Stoli out of her parents’ house, and the two of them spent three hours in a parking lot near Gooseberry Falls, drinking shots until they were sick. They undressed each other through a fog of alcohol but wound up vomiting on the highway shoulder before they had sex. Neither of them was in the mood after that.
    A month later, Stride met Cindy, and he never went out with Sonia again. He had bumped into her in the city off and on over the course of three decades. Sonia wound up marrying a urologist named Delmar Bezac, and Stride remembered Cindy joking about whether Delmar or Sonia had seen more penises in their days.
    “It’s hazy to me, Sonia,” he told her. “All I remember is a cold night and warm vodka. Or was it a warm night and cold vodka?”
    Sonia dabbed her lips, as if checking her lipstick to make sure she wasn’t smudged. “I bet you remember more than that.”
    “No comment.”
    “You became a cop. I see you in the papers all the time. You know what they say. Cops carry big guns.”
    Stride ignored that.