Stalked by Brian Freeman Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t want it to wind up with the police.”
    Serena didn’t like this. It smelled bad. “Do you have any idea who the blackmailer is?”
    “No. He’s just a voice on the phone.”
    “How did he get the information he has on you?”
    “I don’t know that either. I have some suspicions, but it doesn’t matter now.”
    “You’re sure he’s not bluffing?” Serena asked.
    “He told me things on the phone. It’s no bluff.”
    Serena hesitated. There was a part of her that wanted to tell Dan to forget it, but she couldn’t resist the adrenaline rush. This was the kind of hands-on street work she wanted as a PI. Something that made her feel like a cop again. The money was good, too. “Hourly rate plus thirty percent,” she said.
    “Now who’s the blackmailer?” Dan asked. He smiled, put a hand on Serena’s knee, and squeezed with his fingertips.
    “Is it a deal?” she asked.
    “Yes, fine.”
    “Good.” Serena took his hand off her knee and twisted his wrist until his smile evaporated. “One other thing,” she told him pleasantly. “Touch me again, and I’ll snap off your fingers like the icicles on my roof.”
    She let go.
    “Stride must have his hands full with you,” Dan said, massaging away the pain.
    “Call me when you know about the drop,” Serena said. She picked up the envelope of cash, slid it into her pocket, and left the office.
    Downstairs, she stopped again in the park near the statue of the centurion. Something about his empty granite eyes troubled her, and she felt the oppressive weight of the gray clouds overhead. She told herself again that it was nothing, but as she stood there, the feeling came back.
    The same feeling that had followed her for weeks.
     
     
     

Chapter 6
     
     
    He knew she could feel him staring at her, the way an antelope senses a tiger stalking from the camouflage of the bush. Invisible and deadly.
    When he lifted the binoculars, her body leaped into focus, and it was as if he were standing next to her, breathing on her neck. As he watched her, she shivered. Her head wheeled in his direction, and through the binoculars, he got a chill of pleasure to have their eyes meet. His penis twitched inside his jeans, nudging its way down his leg, growing swollen and stiff.
    “Ah, fuck,” he murmured, relishing the sensation. It was especially sweet since he had spent ten years watching his manhood wither away. The guards taunted him that prison would make him shrivel up like a salted slug, and they were right. The more years he spent behind bars, the more his penis shrank. Nothing aroused him. He would beat off in his cell at night, but after a while, he could barely coax a hard-on out of his cock. He’d spit on it or rub it with soap, but it would just lay there, so tiny that his giant hand couldn’t even pull it out from his groin.
    But his organ had risen again that night in the abandoned house in Alabama during the hurricane. As he watched the cop drown in the basement, blood had surged between his legs, making him rigid. A spontaneous erection, ripe with power.
    Four months had passed since a National Guard helicopter rescued him from the roof of the farmhouse. He wore clothes he had found in an upstairs bedroom, and he had shredded his inmate’s fatigues and let them float away with all the other debris in the water. By the time the storm died away, the land around the house was a lake. The squad car was gone, and so was Deet’s body. He was just a trapped homeowner who hadn’t evacuated soon enough.
    They took him to a shelter in Birmingham along with hundreds of other refugees, but he ran away that night, stole a car, and headed north. He didn’t want to take any chance that he would be found out, or that the authorities at Holman would figure out he was on the loose. As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. He jacked a laptop and kept an eye on the Internet by hacking into wireless connections as he made his way out of the South. Several days