This work of fiction would never have been born without the love and support of the amazing people in my life.
Hopefully, this is only the beginning.
Thank you.
CHAPTER I
The sun spilled blood red light over the city, disrupted by metallic railways and mechanical discord.
Today her name is Eva Parker. The real Eva was travelling from Mississippi to New Mexico for a job interview. Alyson assumed that it was for a textile manufacturer, based on Eva’s college degree and the name of the company.
It didn’t make any difference to Alyson that the real Eva Parker didn’t have much money. Eva’s physical details were close to her own. Alyson knew that Eva would be driving until morning, and didn’t feel any guilt about borrowing her savings given her own destination. While Eva had a nice cushy hotel booked for her by Marks Auto Interior, Alyson was destined for a lesser hovel, where she was sure to find truckers and hookers on all sides of her room.
Eva proved to be the best that Alyson could manage. Tuesdays were always the slowest for good in-and-out traffic in Houston. Big business types didn’t come into town until late in the week. The richest names in the city kept to their towers along the Oct, counting their money, and watching the trains pass their fiftieth floor windows. The weekends were easy enough; reroute a couple to a nicer place than they were scheduled for their honeymoon while spending their relatives’ expense accounts on her own stay at a quaint bed and breakfast. Perhaps she’d tail along with the millionaires to the Broadway Walk and delay their flights until Sunday. They would have plenty to explain to their wives, but that wasn’t Alyson’s problem.
Alyson chuckled to herself, and considered how absurd it would be to have to have a chat with one of their trophy wives. She’d never met anyone whom she’d exploited, and never intended to. Their ghosts were spread around the city, the country, the world. If fate brought her face to face with one of those plastic surgery disasters, or even Tiffany Kennedy’s grandmother, who paid for two weeks in the Holiday Inn for Alyson after she’d sliced her arm open on a fire escape, she would be more than a little surprised.
After all, Alyson didn’t know anyone who planted ghosts like she did. She’d perfected her technique over six years of constant practice, watching it evolve with the changing security measures that suffocated her once fluid and rapid network manipulation code.
She packed her backpack with her computer, and slid her mobile into her wristband. She had four miles to walk in three hours, and dreaded the walk. She adjusted the straps a bit, turned on the warm steel ventilation duct, and jumped onto the stone tiled roof beneath her, continuing into the building. Once inside, she tucked a rebellious curl of brown hair behind her ear. She pried her shirt from her body, feeling cool relief cross her chest in the air conditioned corridor.
Alyson cursed the Southern Pines Motel for their lack of a laundry room. The climate hadn’t done her any favors in a week, and her poor prospects for having a safe, quiet place to sleep had been equally dismal. She couldn’t stand the stink from her other set of clothes, and her current attire was running short of time. She knew that she couldn’t keep washing her clothes in the bathroom sink.
It’s better than the streets, she reminded herself. The mantra rang in her mind, dripping with ambivalence.
She emerged into downtown, and gazed at her watch. The sun hung high in the sky as she turned, and started for the outskirts of the city, watching for a cab, with Eva Parker’s ID and Four Nations bank accounts ready for check-in.