by R. L. King
Cody Huff watched him go. “What a prick.”
Stone couldn’t argue with that. “He does have a…unique perspective.”
“The frustrating thing is, he really doesn’t.” Huff took a big bite of fried chicken and washed it down with wine. “Lot of guys in Hollywood are like that. Too damn many of ’em. And if you want to get anywhere, you gotta kiss their asses. Fucking pathetic, if you ask me.” He waved the chicken leg. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad to have the job. It’s a great crew, mostly. But…yeah. I can’t say there haven’t been times I’ve wanted to smack Larry a good one right in those capped teeth of his.”
Stone suspected Huff’s current glass of wine hadn’t been his first, so he wisely confined his response to a sympathetic nod.
“Oh, and don’t believe any of that bullshit about making you a star.” He leaned in to a conspiratorial distance, further confirming Stone’s speculations about how much he’d had to drink. “Just between you and me, he’s kinda got a hard-on for you.”
“I beg your pardon?” Stone blinked in surprise.
Huff waved his chicken leg dismissively. “No, no, not like that. I just mean—well, c’mon, let’s face it—most college professors don’t look like Doctor Who and Neil Gaiman got together and had a baby. Most of ’em look a lot more like—” he hooked a surreptitious thumb in Mortenson’s direction. “—well, more like her. And that don’t get ratings, y’know? So when he saw you, and heard you—he kinda flipped out. You know he’s talkin’ about tryin’ to convince you to consult on some of the other upcoming episodes? No shit, I heard he was talkin’ to the network guys about it last week.”
Lovely. He wondered if Huff realized he’d just contradicted himself. “Well, that’s not going to happen. I don’t care how many extravagant donations he can funnel toward my department. I’m doing this as a favor to Dr. Mortenson, nothing more. And I’ll thank you not to insult my colleague.”
“Hey, I’m not insulting her. I’m sure she’s a smart lady and knows tons about the occult.” He shrugged in rueful resignation. “But looks like hers don’t get you very far in the industry. Hell, look at me,” he added, punctuating his words with another healthy swallow of wine. “Why do you think Bryce is the star of the show, and I’m the dumbass assistant who always blunders into trouble?” He leaned forward. “If you want my honest opinion, I think Bryce is a little jealous of Larry’s interest in you. He doesn’t like anybody competing with him for the spotlight, and he’s afraid that’s what you’re gonna do.”
Stone glanced around the room, looking for a graceful way to extricate himself from this increasingly uncomfortable conversation, but saw none. “Yes, well…if that’s so, you can assure him I’ve no intention of doing anything of the sort. I’m an academic, not an actor. Neither I nor Dr. Mortenson have any interest beyond providing a bit of scholarly commentary for your episode.”
Huff let out a loud sigh and finished his wine. His expression suggested that he might have finally noticed he’d said more than he’d intended to. “Yeah. Anyway, I should get going too. I gotta go over some script stuff with Bryce and Celina tonight. Take care of yourself, Doc.” He pushed back his chair and left the restaurant, mostly in a straight line.
“Wow,” Randy Yates said. “That was…awkward.”
“Indeed.” Stone had almost forgotten Yates was there. He leaned back and stretched his legs out under the table. “This must be quite an adjustment for you, Mr. Yates, dealing with all this chaos in your little town.”
“Randy, please. And yeah, it’s…a little crazy. But it’s good for business, and that’s what counts.”
Stone didn’t miss Yates’s sideways glance in the general direction of the Brunder place when he said it. “You mentioned that you were writing a book about the history of the area. I wonder if I might ask you a few questions. Part of the reason I’m doing this is in the hope of gathering some data for a potential paper, so my interests might not be completely in line with Mr. Duncan’s.”
“Yeah, sure. Always happy to talk about my pet subject.” He tossed his napkin on his plate. “Have you seen the caverns here yet? They’re under the winery—used to be part of a mine. They use ’em for storing and aging the wine.”
That sounded intriguing—or at least more interesting than sitting in the dining room with the dwindling crowd from the TV crew. He glanced over at Mortenson and Celina, who were still chatting away. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“So, no pressure,” Jason said.
They were back in the Mustang, headed toward downtown after their meeting with Roper. Verity watched the scenery as it rolled by: dingy strip clubs, pawn shops, and bars punctuated by vacant lots. On nearly every street corner, at least one homeless person huddled in a shapeless coat, or several washed-up-looking prostitutes tried to catch the attention of passing drivers. No tourists here. Without its signature neon, the whole area looked as gray as old laundry.
“Yeah, it sounds like we’re not gonna get much help from the cops. That could be good, though, in a way.”
“How?”
“If the police department is full of Evil, I’d rather stay away from them as much as possible. And if we have to end up using magic to find Gary, less explanations.”
“True,” Jason admitted, but he didn’t sound convinced.
They’d decided their next step should be to examine the crime scene and see if Verity could pick up anything from the area. Because it had only been a short time since Woods had died, and his death had been violent, she thought it might be possible to get at least something. The fact that he’d been moved from the site of the actual murder might make it more difficult, though. She examined the map in her lap. “Not far now. We should probably park the car in a lot somewhere and walk.”
“Can you do that spell Al does to make people not notice his car?”
“Yeah, but I’m not very good at it yet. I might be able to get us a half-hour, maybe an hour at most, and I’ll have to drop it if I have to do anything that takes much energy.”
“If we take that long, or you’re throwing around real magic, something’s gone wrong.”
“Okay, but don’t blame me if we come back and all the wheels are missing.”
They found a space one street over, and Verity paused a moment to scan the area to make sure nobody was paying too much attention to them before casting the spell.
“There,” she said, zipping up her jacket. She’d brought her old black biker jacket this time, rather than the nicer one Jason had given her—in Vegas, she felt looking tough was more important than looking mature. “Let’s go. Meter’s running.”
Nobody bothered them as they walked the two blocks to the address Roper had given them. They’d left the map in the car too—few things made someone look more like an easy mark than stopping to peer at a map at every street crossing.
“Nice area,” Verity commented, looking around. They were now three blocks away from Fremont Street, and with each successive block, the scenery grew more dire. Out here there were more weed-choked vacant lots, a lot more graffiti (Verity looked for Forgotten symbols, but didn’t see any), and the businesses—some open, some abandoned—all had bars on the windows.
She didn’t want to keep magical sight up constantly and tire herself out, but she switched back and forth every few seconds to check for anyone who might be thinking about bothering them. It was close to four o’clock now, which meant they had another hour or so of daylight.
It didn’t take them long to find the strip joint called The Pussycat Club. A sign above the door included the club’s name as well as a crude caricature of a naked woman with cat ears; on either side of the door were signs with 24 HR LIVE NUDE GIRLS in vertical script. The door was closed at the moment, and no one entered or left as they watched.
Jason pointed to a t
rash-strewn alley behind the building. “Over here.”
They paused a moment at the alley’s mouth, taking in the area. The building on the other side was vacant, its façade sprayed with graffiti. A bearded homeless man lay in the doorway, curled up in a sleeping bag and clutching a bottle in a paper bag. He appeared to be asleep. The alley smelled like diesel, rotten garbage, and urine.
It was easy to determine which dumpster Roper had been referring to, since the alley had only one, halfway down the wall on the Pussycat Club side. Garbage overflowed its confines and spilled out around it.
“I wonder if they’ve even picked any of this up since they found Gary,” Verity said, eyeing it with disgust.
“They must have at least dumped it out,” Jason said. “They found David Ames’s ID, remember.”
“Unless somebody just tossed it on top of him. Anyway, keep a lookout and let me do this, okay? It shouldn’t take too long.”
“Yeah.” Jason took up a position leaning against the opposite wall, where he could keep Verity and both ends of the alley in view. “I won’t say hurry up, but—hurry up, y’know?”
“Nah, I want to spend the next hour smelling piss and rotten meat.”
“Hey, I’m not judging. But I’d like to get out of here before it gets dark.”
Verity turned around to face the dumpster. She closed her eyes, taking deep breaths to clear her mind and help her enter the state of meditation Stone had taught her and Edna had refined to fit her magical style. Gradually, the dumpster’s stench and the mild chill in the air melted away. She opened her eyes and reached out with magical sight, scanning the area.
It didn’t take her long to spot something. It wasn’t much and it wasn’t strong, but a definite hint of magical energy hovered around the top part of the dumpster. Not just the remnants of a dead man’s aura, but actual magic. She squinted, narrowing her focus to try to get more, but it danced away like smoke.
Just let it flow…She could almost hear Edna’s voice speaking in her mind. Don’t force it. Let it tell you what it wants to tell you.
She relaxed, realizing she’d been holding her shoulders tight and her posture tense. Come on, Gary. Tell me your story.
The energy was still faint. Nothing could be done about that—he hadn’t been killed here, and enough time had passed that even the energy from a violent murder wouldn’t be strong at a secondary crime scene. But just before it danced away again, she once more got the sensation of not one bit of energy, but two. It reminded her of what she’d seen when she’d done the tracking ritual. Had Gary been with someone else when he died—perhaps this David Ames? And what about the magical energy she’d spotted? Had David been a mage? She wished she could follow it, but as soon as she widened her scan to include the area around the dumpster, the energy faded away.
She studied the area for a few more moments, then shifted back to normal sight and let her breath out.
“Did you find anything?” Jason demanded, pushing himself off the wall.
“Maybe.” She paused to gather her thoughts. “There’s definitely magic involved somewhere. And I got the same kind of thing I got when I was looking for Gary before—the feeling that another person was there.”
“David? The guy with the ID?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
Jason considered. “Hmm…what if Gary was gay, and he came to Vegas to see David because he didn’t want his wife finding out?”
Verity nodded. “That was my thought too. That could possibly explain the intertwined auras.” She’d never used magical sight to look at two people having sex before—could the effect be similar to what she’d seen? It was another thing she wished she could ask Stone, but what were the odds he’d ever seen anything like that? Even with his greater experience—both magical and sexual—it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you did in polite company. “But anyway, like I said, magic was involved somehow. I’m wondering if David isn’t a mage. I think we need to hunt him down and ask him some questions, don’t you?”
“How are we gonna do that? Can you track him?”
“Doubt it—especially not without something that belongs to him, and I doubt we’re gonna convince Roper to give us that ID. Plus, if he’s a mage, he’ll be a lot harder to track even if we did have it.”
Jason nodded. “Okay, then. I guess we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
“Starting where?”
He nodded at The Pussycat Club. “How do you feel about cheap strip clubs?”
She grinned. “You take me to the nicest places, big bro.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Yates hadn’t been kidding: he led Stone out back and across a courtyard to another building, where a pair of heavy wooden doors stood closed. “This will be part of the tour when they’re up and running—it’s really cool down here.” He opened one of the doors—they weren’t locked—and hit a switch inside.
A series of hanging lanterns along the ceiling flared to life, revealing a gently sloping rock floor leading down into what looked like a large natural cave. A collection of coveralls hung just inside the door, with rubber boots in a neat row below them. Racks of wooden barrels stacked three high lined both sides of a wide walkway, and as Stone followed Yates downward, he noticed passageways branching off to both sides featuring more barrels. Between the racks, framed images depicting scenes from the town’s Gold Rush and logging days had been hung along the stone walls.
“You said this used to be part of a mine?” Stone asked, taking it all in with interest.
“Yeah. There are plenty of old mines all over the Gold Country. They didn’t just find gold by panning for it, even though that’s the romantic image. Most of ’em have been closed, though. The government shut ’em all down during World War II, but most were already tapped out by that point anyway. Every once in a while somebody will find the entrance to one—kids usually—and get lost. Sometimes they don’t get found,” Yates added soberly.
Stone took the opportunity to wander down a couple of the branched, cask-lined hallways, scanning the area with magical sight. Nothing showed up beyond Yates’s strong, yellow-green aura. “Is this all there was of it?”
“Not even close. Fred Duchesne—he’s the owner of the Shangri-La—had the rest of it closed down and bricked over for safety.” He grinned. “Come over here, and I’ll show you something that won’t be part of the tour, if you promise you won’t tell anybody.”
Intrigued, Stone followed him to the back wall of the cave, which, like the rest, was lined with racks of casks that rose up taller than he was.
In the center between two of the racks was what looked like the end of a much larger cask, standing almost seven feet tall. Yates pointed to it. “Notice this one is much bigger, and isn’t labelled?”
Stone hadn’t paid much attention to it until then, assuming it was some sort of long-term storage barrel. But now that it was pointed out to him, he saw that all the smaller barrels had various notations stenciled on their ends, but this big one didn’t. “What’s different about it, other than the size, obviously?”
With a flourish, Yates pushed what looked like a round wooden plug in the barrel’s hole. It recessed a bit under his hand, then he let go and motioned for Stone to take a few steps back.
The end of the cask swung open into the cavern like the door to an oversized hobbit hole, revealing a dark tunnel beyond. “Cool, huh?” Yates said.
“Very,” Stone agreed. “How far in does it go?”
Yates retrieved a flashlight from the edge of one of the racks and switched it on, shining the beam into the tunnel. The space extended only a few feet before a solid-looking brick wall cut off further progress. “Fred didn’t want anyone being tempted to go back there, so he had it bricked off. But from what I hear, it’s a branch of what used to be a whole network of mi
nes around the edges of the town. He figures if he wants to expand production, he can knock out the wall and add more racks, then brick it up further down.”
Stone shifted to magical sight, scanning the area. For a moment, he didn’t see anything, probably due to Yates’s light, but when the beam moved away he thought he got a faint hint of something. Interesting… He made a mental note to see about sneaking back here later to get a better look.
“Anyway,” Yates was saying, waving him out of the cavern so he could close the door. “You said you had some questions?”
“Yes. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m not terribly interested in whatever so-called ‘ghosts’ are haunting your bed-and-breakfast. I’d much rather know about the curse the town is supposed to be under. Have you found anything about that in your research?”
“Surprisingly little,” Yates said. “You have to understand—my book is more focused on the economic impact of the Gold Rush on the whole area. Pretty dry stuff. I can tell you what little I know from talking to people around here, though.”
“Please do, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Yates closed the door, settling it back into place with a snap, and led him over to one of the photos further down the wall. Stone recognized a much more complete-looking version of the Brunder mansion in the background, with several figures standing in front of it. In the center, obviously the focus of the image, were a portly, smug-looking older man in a classic “robber baron”-style suit, and a young, dark-haired woman in a dress that was probably quite stylish for the era. Around them were several men whose clothing suggested they were probably local miners.
