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    Hard-Boiled Immortal
    Hard-Boiled Immortal
    Hard-Boiled Immortal
    Ebook68 pages1 hour

    Hard-Boiled Immortal

    By Gene Doucette

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    I knew she was bad news the minute she walked into the bar.

    She was a redhead. I always had a thing for redheads. One in particular, actually. She was dead, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t holding my breath for a second or two every time I saw another girl with red hair.

    This one was very much alive, and once she walked in she was also the life of the room. Men I’d been serving drinks to for years, who smiled so little if you told me they had no teeth I would’ve believed it, lit up like a kid meeting the world’s cutest bunny.

    The girl’s name was Lucy and she was there to see a buddy of mine, who we’ll call Al. That wasn’t his name, but Al turned out to be kind of important, and this story is kind of embarrassing for him, so even though he’s not around any more let’s stick with Al.

    The redhead was either going to get him killed, or she was going to get me killed. I could tell right away. Call it gut instinct if you want, but I’m alive today because I know what bad news looks like as soon as I see it.

    Also, she was a succubus.
    --Adam the immortal

    The year was 1942, there was a war on, and Adam was having a lot of trouble avoiding the attention of some important people. The kind of people with guns, and ways to make a fella disappear. He was caught somewhere between the mob and the government, and the only way out involved a red-haired dame he was pretty sure he couldn't trust.

    In Hard-Boiled Immortal, the second adventure in The Immortal Chronicles Adam has to figure out how to survive wartime from the quiet corner of a bar in Chicago... if he can.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGene Doucette
    Release dateJan 6, 2015
    ISBN9781311963031
    Hard-Boiled Immortal
    Author

    Gene Doucette

    GENE DOUCETTE is the author of more than twenty sci-fi and fantasy titles, including The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens, the Immortal series, Fixer and Fixer Redux, Unfiction, and the Tandemstar books. Gene lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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      Book preview

      Hard-Boiled Immortal - Gene Doucette

      Hard-Boiled Immortal

      Hard-Boiled Immortal

      The Immortal Chronicles Volume 2

      Gene Doucette

      Contents

      Copyright

      Epigraph

      Hard-Boiled Immortal

      Also by Gene Doucette

      About the Author

      Hard-Boiled Immortal

      By Gene Doucette

      GeneDoucette.me

      Copyright © 2014 Gene Doucette

      All rights reserved

      Cover by Kim Killion, Hot Damn Designs

      This book may not be reproduced by any means including but not limited to photocopy, digital, auditory, and/or in print.

      The Immortal Chronicles is an ongoing series of novellas written by Adam, the immortal narrator of Immortal, Hellenic Immortal and Immortal at the Edge of the World.

      More information on all books by Gene Doucette can be found at the end of this volume.

      Hard-Boiled Immortal

      Iknew she was bad news the minute she walked into the bar.

      She was a redhead. I always had a thing for redheads. One in particular, actually. She was dead, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t holding my breath for a second or two every time I saw another girl with red hair.

      This one was very much alive, and once she walked in she was also the life of the room. Men I’d been serving drinks to for years, who smiled so little if you told me they had no teeth I would’ve believed it, lit up like a kid meeting the world’s cutest bunny.

      The girl’s name was Lucy and she was there to see a buddy of mine, who we’ll call Al. That wasn’t his name, but Al turned out to be kind of important, and this story is kind of embarrassing for him, so even though he’s not around any more let’s stick with Al.

      The redhead was either going to get him killed, or she was going to get me killed. I could tell right away. Call it gut instinct if you want, but I’m alive today because I know what bad news looks like as soon as I see it.

      Also, she was a succubus.

      The year was 1942, and there was a war going on.

      I don’t like wars. I try to stay out of them whenever I can, and I give that same advice to other people as often as possible. I’ve even introduced myself that way a couple of times: hi, I’m whatever-my-name-is-in-this-era, nice to meet you and stay out of wars.

      The people who most need to hear this advice almost never do.

      Sometimes it’s impossible to stay out of a war, though, and there are a couple of reasons for that. For one thing, there have been so many it’s almost impossible to move around without stumbling across one from time to time. It’s hard to appreciate—from a modern perspective—how very often war broke out, especially if you were trying to make a living anywhere in Europe or Asia. I’m pretty sure whoever said war was politics by other means had it exactly backwards.

      Another reason it’s sometimes impossible to stay out of war is every now and then the war is too big to stay out of. Like when they started calling them world wars. This is not to say there were places in the world unaffected by the first or second Big One, just that it was hard to get to those places, and it was difficult to know where those places might be in advance of the actual wars.

      Chicago wasn’t such a place. I’d been in the Windy City on and off for twenty years, mostly because it was a decent place to drink. That was especially true during Prohibition, when you needed a city that was big enough and mean enough to support a decent collection of speakeasies if you wanted to get drunk in America and you weren’t a Kennedy or a Capone. You’re welcome to ponder the merits of trying to get drunk in the States when the States clearly preferred it if everyone got drunk elsewhere, and to be honest I don’t know why I stayed either. Maybe I just didn’t have the energy to move somewhere else.

      Or it might have been that I stayed in Chicago because I had lost something there. The last time I saw the aforementioned redhead—the apparently dead one—she’d been on the far end of a dance floor in an illegal establishment that burned to the ground about ten minutes later. That was how I had arrived at the conclusion that she was no longer alive. It was a shame, because I’d only been looking for her for about ten thousand years, and you hate to see that sort of perseverance go to waste.

      So I may have stuck around in Chicago as long as I did to see if I was wrong. Sure, I was pretty positive she didn’t make it out of that fire, but I never saw a body. Plus, it was a great excuse to spend all my spare time checking out redheads and hanging out in clubs.

      But by ’42 I’d had enough of the wild life and had settled down into a monogamous relationship with a bar called Jimmy’s. Jimmy was an old prick

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