The Other Side: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  He glanced at his watch. “It’s about eight-thirty. I was hoping Roper would call back by now—we don’t have a lot to go on until he does. Unless—what was the other idea you had, that you wanted to wait till it was light out?”

  “I wanted to go see about talking to the Forgotten. We could go tonight, if you want—I’m fine with it. I just thought it might be safer if we waited.”

  “No, you’re right,” he said reluctantly. “Wandering around in the Underground in the dark is a stupid idea. But…”

  “What?”

  “They do hang out downtown, panhandling and stuff. Maybe if we check around along Fremont Street, we might find somebody to ask.”

  “Not bad, big bro. Somebody might think you were a detective or something.” She grinned.

  “Shut up, assistant, or I’ll dock your pay.”

  “You don’t pay me, remember?” She was relieved that he seemed to be over his annoyance at her for withholding information. “So, downtown?”

  “Yeah. Let’s stop off at the room first. I want to pick up my gun. If we’re gonna get jumped again, I want to be a little better protected.”

  The instant Verity entered their hotel room behind Jason, she knew something was wrong. She didn’t know how she knew, but she’d learned to trust her hunches.

  “Wait,” she said, touching Jason’s shoulder.

  He stopped instantly. “What?”

  Shifting to magical sight, she took a quick sweep of the room, looking for the telltale auras of anyone who might be hiding inside. “Check the bathroom.”

  Jason stood aside, pushed open the door, and flipped the light switch, but the bathroom looked just as they’d left it. “You sure? Maybe it’s just a—”

  Verity froze as her sweep fell on something faintly glowing on the pillow of her bed. It was far too small to be a person. It had the rough shape of an animal with legs, but animal auras were pale green. Whatever this thing was, the vestiges of a red-orange aura hovered around it. “Turn on the room light,” she said, afraid she already knew what sort of thing it might be.

  “Did you see something?” Jason switched on the room’s overhead light, looking confused. “I don’t see anything wrong. What are you—”

  She didn’t answer; she was already walking slowly toward her bed. “Oh, God…” she muttered.

  He came up next to her and stared. “Fuck….”

  Lying in the middle of Verity’s pillow like the world’s most grotesque teddy bear was a severed hand. A small puddle of blood surrounded the stump, which gleamed shiny and red in the light. The skin looked like it had been brown in life, the dusky gray overtones and the way the fingers curled made it look more like something out a nightmare than something that had once been part of a human being.

  “Fuck…” Jason said again. He moved closer, leaning in to get a better look, but didn’t touch the bed. “It’s a woman’s hand…”

  “Yeah…” That was as obvious as the fact that the woman had dark skin. The way the fingers were curled she couldn’t see the nails, but the bone structure was too slim to be from a man.

  Jason whirled. “Damn, I’m slipping!” he snapped. He moved quickly around the rest of the room, looking in closets, under the beds, and behind the drapes, and then hurried to the closet and checked the safe. “My gun’s still here,” he said in relief.

  Verity was still staring at the hand. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. “Jason… somebody was in our room. And…” She gestured at the bloody hand. “You think it was the same guys who attacked us?”

  “Or somebody connected to them,” Jason said grimly. “Looks like they’re trying to warn us off.” He picked up the phone. “I’m gonna call Roper. We can’t just leave this here.”

  Verity wasn’t thrilled about getting the police involved (nor about sitting here in this room continuing to stare at a severed hand until they arrived), but there was no helping it. She waited while he made the call, brightening when he did manage to reach Sergeant Roper.

  “He’s coming himself,” Jason said when he hung up. “He said he’s got some info for us anyway. So now I guess we wait. Try not to touch anything you haven’t already touched.”

  “Yeah…great.” She got up and engaged the room’s security lock, then went over and looked out the window. Magic or no magic, the thought of someone entering their locked space, possibly poking through their personal belongings, felt like a violation. She pictured the five guys who’d jumped them outside the Pussycat Club pawing through her bag, then standing over her bed and carefully removing their grisly message—

  Sudden nausea gripped her as she made a connection. “Holy shit…Jason…”

  “What? You okay, V? You just went green.”

  She swallowed and gestured feebly toward the hand. “I…I think I know who this belongs to.”

  “Who?” he asked, surprised.

  “The stripper. At the Pussycat Club. The one who…talked to me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Unlike the restaurant, the area near the cluster of trailers in front of the Brunder place was a beehive of activity, with crewpeople and others scurrying around setting up lights and doing last-minute checks on their equipment. Randy and Mary Yates stood off to the side along with Bob Mott, all of them deep in conversation with Kelly Petrucci, who held a clipboard. It wasn’t raining at the moment, though the overcast sky threatened to open up any time.

  Stone passed a small group of townspeople milling around and chatting under a pavilion in front of the trailer. They looked as if they were waiting for something, and as he watched, the door opened, a woman in a green sweater and jeans came out, and a man in a plaid shirt detached himself from the crowd and headed inside. It was only then he remembered that Duncan had invited them to “share their stories” about anything spooky they’d seen around the town. He wondered if any of them would make it on the show.

  Unfortunately, though, this meant Duncan was probably busy inside the trailer. He’d have to talk to him later. At the moment, none of the show’s stars were visible.

  Stone headed to the motorhome, where a sign reading Hair/Makeup/Wardrobe had been taped to the door. He knocked and stepped inside. “Hello?”

  A harried-looking woman with shoulder-length auburn hair looked up from a clipboard and glanced at her watch. “Ah. Dr. Stone. Right on time. Dr. Mortenson is already here. I’m Rita, Larry’s assistant. Just head to the back and they’ll get you all set up.”

  The inside of the motorhome had been heavily modified. Not that Stone was overly familiar with the inside configurations of typical RVs, but this one looked nothing like the ill-fated beast in which he, Jason, Verity, and her girlfriend at the time had embarked on their trip to Burning Man a couple summers ago. For one thing, all the typical amenities—kitchenette, galley table, bed space—had been gutted in favor of partitioned spaces devoted to various activities. Stone moved through a tiny office (where Rita had been), a wardrobe space with a rack of various clothing, and finally to the back end where a makeup chair had been set up in front of a large lighted mirror.

  Mortenson sat in the chair, a drape clasped around her neck and covering her upper body. Another woman, this one plump, blonde, and a little older than Rita, moved around her applying makeup. “Have a seat, sweetie,” the woman said cheerfully without looking up. “You’re next.”

  Stone did as he was told, moving a stack of scripts and old magazines off the area’s only other chair.

  “I thought you’d be here before I got here,” Mortenson said, sounding like a bad ventriloquist as she attempted to speak while moving her lips as little as possible. The makeup artist was doing a good job on her, using dramatic eyeshadow and subtle shading to make her plain, round face look subtly mysterious and exotic.

  “Forgot something in my room.” He picked up one of
the old magazines and leafed through it while he waited his turn.

  Finally, the makeup artist finished her work and removed the drape around Mortenson’s shoulders with a flourish. “There you go, hon. You’re all set. Just make sure you don’t get wet if it’s raining. And no crying,” she added with a chuckle. “Umbrellas by the door if you need one.” As Mortenson got up, thanked her, and left, she waved Stone toward the chair. “Okay, your turn.”

  Stone slipped off his coat and tossed it over the guest chair, then took his place in front of the woman. “Go easy on the eyeshadow, will you?”

  She grinned. “No problem, sweetie. I’ll make you look great. Not that you don’t already.” She swung the drape around him and snapped it closed. “Just relax. I promise—makeup isn’t scary. Have you ever done any acting?”

  “Not since my University days.” He settled back and tried to relax while she selected various creams and foundations and matched them to his skin tones, but his mind kept going back to the ominous red glow from the cave at the winery. “Say, do you happen to know when Mr. Duncan will be free today? I need to have a brief chat with him.”

  “Today? Not likely. On shooting days he runs around like a crazy man. We’re a small production, so everybody kind of has to do double duty so we can keep the costs down. And Mr. Duncan is…well, he’s a hands-on kind of guy.”

  “Meaning he flits about getting involved in everyone’s job whether they want him to or not?”

  “Now, I didn’t say that, sweetie,” she said with an admonitory finger-shake and a twinkle in her eye. She chose a sponge, opened a little bottle, and began patting foundation on his face. “But I won’t deny it, either.”

  Stone’s makeup didn’t take as long as Mortenson’s since it wasn’t nearly as elaborate. He amused himself watching the makeup woman’s straw-colored aura—it appeared from its bright bounciness that she quite enjoyed her job—but blinked when thought he saw something past her. He leaned forward a little in his chair.

  “Sit back, sweetie,” she said, gently pushing his shoulder. “If you don’t hold still I might poke you in the eye, and that wouldn’t make either one of us happy.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” He settled back, but sharpened the focus of his sight to filter out the aura hovering right next to him and examine the area over by where he’d left his coat.

  There it was again—the red energy.

  It was extremely faint here, which was why he hadn’t noticed it before—so faint that each time he blinked, it disappeared for a moment until he got his focus back. Unlike what he’d seen back at the winery, this energy didn’t have any particular feel to it. It was just there, ethereal and wispy, like steam that wafted away in seconds.

  But even so, it was here, all the way up by the Brunder place. Had he just not noticed it before, or had it seeped out of the winery and worked its way here since yesterday?

  What the hell was going on?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Sergeant Roper arrived twenty minutes later, a pair of uniformed cops and a crime-scene investigator in tow. He looked grim as he surveyed the grotesque scene on Verity’s bed. “You found this when you got back tonight?”

  “Yeah,” Jason said.

  “You touch anything?”

  “Just the doors and the light switches. And the safe, to check on my gun. At least they didn’t get that.”

  The cop wrote something down in his notebook, then nodded toward the door. “Let’s talk outside and let these guys work.”

  By this time, a small group of curious onlookers had gathered in the hallway outside the room. Roper shooed them back and took Jason and Verity down to the end of the hall, where they ducked into an ice-machine alcove.

  “Okay,” he said, “tell me the whole story.”

  Jason told him, starting with their trip to the dumpster where Gary Woods was found, and continuing through their chats with the bartender and the strippers at the Pussycat Club.

  “I think that hand might belong to one of the strippers,” Verity said. She still felt queasy; it wasn’t due to the bloody hand, though, as much as to the uncomfortable feeling that she’d talked to this woman, interacted with her, and that what happened could very well have been because of that. She described the woman to Roper, remembering that she’d said she had a young daughter. What would happen to her if her mother had disappeared? “Maybe she’s still alive—you should check the hospitals.”

  In truth, she was pretty sure the woman was still alive, at least for now. The aura on the hand wouldn’t have been as strong if she was dead. Verity could probably use it to trace the stripper with ease—if they’d let her near it, which of course they wouldn’t.

  “Already on that,” Roper said. “Anything else happen?”

  “Yeah,” Jason said. “After we left the Pussycat Club, we got jumped by some guys. We…got away from them, but I’m sure it was connected. Somebody didn’t want us talking to anybody about Gary’s murder.”

  “How many guys?”

  “Five.”

  Roper stared at him. “Five guys? And you got away from them?”

  “Yeah. We were pretty motivated. Fortunately our car wasn’t far away.”

  “We think those guys, or somebody connected with them, might be the ones who got into our room,” Verity said. “One of the ones who attacked us had a tattoo on his chest, of some kind of eagle or falcon holding a pair of dice showing fours. Have you heard of that?”

  Roper’s eyes widened, and he sucked air noisily through his teeth. “Yeah, I know of them. Nasty bastards. Gang called the Hard Eights. Skinheads. I don’t know what you guys did to piss them off, but you gotta be careful.”

  “Tell us about ’em,” Jason said. “What do they do?”

  “Muscle, mostly. Rumor is they do enforcement work for some of Vegas’s nastier shadowy types when they’re not causin’ their own mayhem.”

  “Shadowy types? You mean like the Mob?”

  “Which one?” Roper asked, shrugging. “Vegas isn’t like in the movies, with Bugsy Siegel and the Rat Pack runnin’ the show with their tommy guns and fedoras. Every rock you turn up around here has some different group of nasties under it. They’ve got the town carved up like a Christmas turkey.” He made a couple more notes. “I’ll look into it—see which of ’em operates around that area. But like I told you, I’m not gonna be able to devote a lot of time to this. I’ve got three even more urgent cases on my desk, and my captain’s breathin’ down my neck to make some progress on ’em.”

  “What about the stripper?” Verity asked. “What if she’s still alive?”

  “If she is, she’ll turn up,” Roper said. “I’ll put out the word to hospitals…and morgues, in case she’s not.” He fixed them with a hard stare. “Listen, you two—I don’t know if this business is related to this guy you’re looking for, but my advice would be to pack it up and go home. The Hard Eights aren’t a group you want to get on the wrong side of—especially if you’ve pissed off whoever they’re workin’ for. I know this is your first case and you want to solve it, but I also know Fran—she’s not gonna hold it against you if you call this one a day. You two are in over your heads.”

  It was fair advice, given that Roper knew nothing about their “advantages.” He no doubt thought of them as a couple of greenhorns fresh off the bus, and it would only be a matter of time before their luck ran out.

  “We’ll think about it,” Jason said. “But in the meantime, if you could let us know if you find anything about Gary, David Ames, or why the Hard Eights or their bosses are so interested in this case, we’d appreciate it.” He nodded back toward the room, where the small crowd had now grown to about a dozen, and one of the uniformed cops had moved out to hold them back. “When can we get back in there and get our stuff?”

  “Gonna be a while,” Roper said. �
��You’ll want to talk to the front desk about gettin’ another room. If they give you trouble, tell ’em to call me.”

  “That’s okay,” Verity said firmly. “We’ve got someplace else we can stay.” She flashed Jason a challenging look as if to say go ahead, try to tell me we’re not going back to the Obsidian now, but he merely responded with a sober nod. Pride was one thing, but the situation had changed. The Hard Eights—or whoever had broken into their room—would have a much harder time repeating the process at the Obsidian.

  It was another two hours before Jason and Verity got the okay to take their stuff out of the room, and it was only that soon because Roper vouched for them. The police insisted on checking Jason’s gun to determine whether it had been fired recently (it hadn’t—he kept it assiduously clean, and hadn’t fired it since the last time he’d been to the range a month ago) and stood by while the two of them checked their belongings to verify nothing had been taken or added, but eventually collected their contact information and gave them permission to leave.

  Verity, meanwhile, had called the Obsidian using Jason’s cell phone to ask if Nakamura’s offer was still open. Nakamura himself wasn’t available, but the desk clerk informed them he’d left word that a room was available for them free of charge if they wanted it. Verity assured the clerk they did, and soon after they were on the road with their gear stowed in the Mustang’s trunk.

  “You okay, V?” Jason said as they drove, glancing over at her when she hadn’t spoken in a while.

  “Just…thinking about that stripper at the Pussycat Club. I feel like it’s my fault she got hurt. I never even found out her name, and now somebody’s chopped her hand off just because she talked to me.”