Free Hold Your Breath 01 - Stone Devil Duke by K.J. Jackson Page A

end from her hackney perch was an inescapable part of finding the murderers, and she hated the sort of fares she was inevitably forced to pick up in that part of town. The drunkest of the drunks. The stench from within, and the cleaning that had to be done once a drunk spilled his night’s supper on the floor of the carriage was disgusting. And it seemed to happen to her at least every other night.
    Aggie dropped her fares at the Horn’s Rooster, lucky to be rid of them so quickly, and nicked Sunshine along. Her favorite horse since seventeen, Sunshine was a key component in her plan, for Sunshine, without fail, obeyed every command of Aggie’s. She had not realized how indispensable that bit of foresight had been until the previous night. In the country, Sunshine usually accompanied Aggie when she went out to practice her shot, so the horse was used to the sudden cracks of gunfire.
    Trotting the white speckled horse down one of the rank streets of the east side, Aggie felt the first drops of more rain. She rolled her eyes as she adjusted the hood of her cloak.
    At that moment, two men stumbled out in front of Aggie from a well-known brothel. Their rich clothes hung haphazardly about them, and their bawdy laughter filled the already loud street.
    One of them was obviously very intoxicated, bent over, head hanging low, and struggling to keep upright as he staggered across the street. The other man seemed a bit more sober, helping his friend. The semi-sober man hailed her. They blocked her path and gave her no choice but to stop.
    Aggie tensed, as always, when she took on a new fare. Her left hand held the reins, while she slipped off her glove and hovered her right hand over one of the pistols hidden in the depths of her dark cloak. Caution was key; there had been several times when she had barely escaped being mugged—or worse—from an unscrupulous patron.
    T hese two men seemed benign. Aside from their unkempt clothing, they were obviously men of society. She looked down, suspicion evident, at the two men.
    “Evening, hack,” the semi-sober man said , high spirits in his voice. “It would seem my friend here needs a bit of help gaining transportation home. I would take him myself, of course, but I have not exactly finished of my pleasures here tonight.” He nodded back over his shoulder.
    The drunk friend started bellowing a raunchy song, aimed at the cobblestones. Words incoherent, it sounded more reminiscent of a howling dog than an actual tune.
    “ Yuss, sir,” Aggie said in a low, slurred tone. She produced a pathetic cough for effect. “Jus ees long as he don’t spackle in me coach.”
    The man laughed as he shoved his still bellowing friend into the carriage. “No, I reckon he will be fine, at least until he makes his residence.”
    The man gave Aggie the address and a few coins, and quickly stepped back into the brothel. She could hear raucous music and high-pitched laughter blaring into the night when the door opened.
    She hesitated at the sound, thinking of her own innocence when she had first started charading as a hack driver. She knew the streets in the better parts of London well enough, but had to memorize maps of the areas she had never dared go into before, imagining that she would have to search hardest in those areas to find her father’s killers.
    But nothing had prepared her for the poverty or the lack of morals she now saw on a near-nightly basis. It had taken her severa l trips to a certain red-bricked building to realize that she was dropping off her fares, all men, at a brothel.
    It hadn’t been until the third trip that Aggie had actually registered the fact that there were a peculiar number of scantily-clad women milling about the front steps and lounging on one of the two well-lit balconies. That was where she had gotten her first proposition as a man. She’d passed on the offer, head tucked down.
    She recognized such buildings now, and knew what they were for, but that didn’t