The Other Side: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  She came back over and slipped her arms around him. “Are you sure you can’t stay? I could make you some tea…we could share a nice hot shower, and then…” Her fingers worked at the top button of his coat.

  He covered her hand with his. “Denise, I have to go.” Briefly, he contemplated blocking her so she’d stop it, but he didn’t want to take the time or use the energy. They’d be gone soon. “Stay inside, keep the door locked, and don’t go out until I come back and tell you it’s safe. All right?”

  She nodded like a little girl, still holding on to him.

  “Edwina—will you stay with her?” Stone knew it was pointless, but he had to ask.

  Mortenson shook her head. “I’m coming with you. I want to know what’s going on. You owe me that, Alastair.”

  She was right—he did. She’d been through a lot of distressing events this weekend, and she deserved to see them through. “What size shoe do you wear?”

  She blinked at the sudden non sequitur. “Uh—six and a half. Why?”

  “Denise—what size shoe?”

  “Eight,” she said. “Sometimes seven and a half, but—”

  “Have you got something Dr. Mortenson can wear? Boots? Trainers? Anything better than these rubber things?”

  She didn’t seem to want to let him go, but reluctantly hurried off to her bedroom and returned with some high-top Chuck Taylors and a pair of hiking boots, along with some thick socks.

  Stone grinned. “Brilliant. Perfect. Thank you, Denise.” He took the hiking boots and socks and handed them to Mortenson. “Edwina, hurry, please.”

  While Mortenson donned the new footwear, Denise drifted back over to Stone. “You’ll come back?” she asked again.

  “I promise I will.” And if things go as I hope, you won’t even care.

  She threw her arms around him and stood on tiptoe, pulling him down for a deep, impassioned kiss.

  He didn’t fight it, but let her keep it up until Mortenson coughed. Then he pulled back and brushed Denise’s hair off her forehead. “Be safe. Remember what I said.”

  “I will. I want you so bad…”

  “Soon.”

  He extricated himself from her grip and got them out of there fast, closing the door behind him and stopping to catch his breath.

  “Are you going to be able to function, Alastair?” Mortenson asked, a trace of her old arch tones evident. “Do you need a moment to yourself?”

  He glared at her, but there was no rancor behind it. The whole situation was absurd. “Come on. We need to move fast, before Duncan and that lot all kill each other up at the Brunder place. If they haven’t already.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  “Holy…shit,” Verity breathed. “You’re saying Ames just…turned into Gary?”

  At that point, if Toro had decided to lunge across the desk and grab her, she wouldn’t have done a thing to stop him. She stared at him in shock.

  “Shouldn’t surprise you,” Toro said. “You know about that kinda shit, right?”

  “Well…yeah. But he’s not supposed to be able to do that.”

  “Trust me, honey—he did it. Surprised the fuck outta everybody who saw it. You were there, Petey—tell ’er.”

  One of the three seated along the wall nodded and shuddered. “Yeah. I saw it, and I wish I hadn’t. Like he said, it was like something outta a fuckin’ horror movie.”

  “V?” Jason spoke from his sentry point at the door. “You got any ideas?”

  She almost said she didn’t, but then a memory popped into her head, something Stone had told her a while ago, and she’d almost forgotten about it. “Wait a sec…hold on…”

  “What?” Toro demanded. They were all staring at her now.

  “What if he was a wild talent?”

  “A what?” Jason asked.

  “A wild talent! Jason—remember the guy Doc…our friend who knows about this stuff told us about, the one who could get through wards, but couldn’t do anything else?”

  “Uh…sort of, I guess.”

  She gripped her chair arms, her thoughts moving faster than her mouth. “It’s the only explanation I can think of—that Gary was a wild talent, and his trick was that he could…turn himself into somebody else.”

  “But what about his aura? You said—”

  “I know what I said. You can’t fake an aura. But that’s the thing about wild talents.” By this point, she’d almost forgotten Toro and his men were there. “They’re really limited, but within those limits they can sometimes do things you’re not supposed to be able to do. The Doc and I saw one when we were in Vegas together—he was really good with illusions, but that was all. But I never thought it was possible to completely change your aura.”

  Toro was watching her with narrowed eyes. “Sister, I don’t follow half of what you’re sayin’ here, but it sounds to me like this bastard could make himself look like somebody else?”

  “Yeah,” Verity said. “Not just look like somebody else. Actually become somebody else, down to the aura. He was a different size, probably had a different voice—I wonder if he didn’t even have different fingerprints.”

  “Holy fuck,” Jason said. “So we got a guy who could do a perfect disguise as another person, and he uses it to…”

  “Go off to Vegas twice a year so he could molest little kids without anybody having a chance of finding out,” Verity said in disgust. Suddenly, she wasn’t in all that big a hurry to secure justice for Gary Woods, or to take the information back to his grieving and unsuspecting widow. “Shit…”

  “So you’re sayin’ these guys have been around a while, but you can’t find ’em?” Jason asked Toro, his tone equally disgusted.

  The enforcer nodded. “Yeah. I even tried findin’ one o’ your kind—offerin’ a big payoff if they could help me track ’em down—but you guys ain’t easy to find, y’know? Can’t exactly put a want ad in the paper. Hell, I even tried gettin’ the cops involved, but it always ends up gettin’ dropped in some kinda black hole. Why do you think this town’s as fucked up as it is? The cops don’t give a shit about what goes on around here.”

  “We might know one who does,” Jason said. He turned to Verity. “V, he’s tellin’ the truth, as far as you can see?”

  “Yeah. He’s sure as hell disgusted about something. And everything he’s told us about Gary fits the facts as we know ’em.”

  Jason addressed Toro: “Mr. Toro, I don’t think we have an issue with each other anymore. I got no proof that you or any of your guys murdered Gary Woods. If anything, you killed David Ames, a guy who doesn’t even exist. And anyway, I’m just a trainee PI. I could hand over the info I’ve discovered to the cops, but like you said, it won’t do any good. All I’m obligated to do is provide the information I was hired to find to the person who hired me—his wife. Which I’m now gonna have to think long and hard about before I do. But bottom line is, if I put this gun down, are you or your guys gonna shoot us?”

  Toro waved him off. “Nah, kid. Like I said, nobody’s shootin’ nobody. It’d make a mess, and Benny’d kill me for stainin’ up his carpet.”

  “So what do we do, Jason?” Verity asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  She couldn’t stop the images: young girls and boys, their faces streaked with tears as leering older men with Gary Woods’s face loomed over them. “I want to take these bastards down. We can’t let ’em keep hurting kids.”

  Jason let out a loud breath. “I do too, V. But you heard Toro—they can’t even find where they’re operating.”

  “Yeah, but maybe we can.” In truth, she had no idea if that was so. She didn’t have the first clue about how to track down an underground child-sex ring, especially one under the control of what had to be a fairly formidable mage—or more than one. It didn’t m
atter, though—if she didn’t do something, the images and the guilt would never stop haunting her.

  She turned back to Toro. “Mr. Toro, were you serious about wanting to find these guys and stop them?”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  “Even if they might have people like me on their side? You know about the Hard Eights, right?”

  He snorted. “Yeah, ’course we know about ’em. Buncha fuckin’ nutcases.”

  “If we can find where these guys are operating, can we count on you for some muscle to back us up?”

  “V—” Jason began in a warning tone.

  “No, Jason. I’m doing this. If you don’t want to, that’s fine. I get it, if you don’t want to jeopardize your job. But if I can take these guys down, I’m gonna do it. And if Mr. Toro’s willing to help, I’m not gonna turn him down. So, are you in or out?” She met his gaze squarely.

  His expression was hard. “Oh, I’m in. No doubt about that. I just want to make sure we do this smart.”

  Verity smiled. “We’ll do it smart, don’t worry. So—Mr. Toro, can we count on you?”

  Toro’s expression would have looked at home on a shark preparing to zero in on a tasty seal. “Damn straight. You find ’em, and we’re in.”

  Jason was silent as they pulled out of the Palomar’s parking lot twenty minutes later. Verity kept glancing over at him; his aura was alight with unease. “Jason?”

  “What?”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  He didn’t reply, but just kept driving.

  She sighed. “Come on, big bro. You can’t hide from me. What’s on your mind?”

  For a moment, she thought he still wouldn’t answer. Finally, though, he spoke without looking at her. “Where do I start?”

  “Just…start somewhere.” She looked down at the slip of paper in her lap. It had two phone numbers scrawled on it, contact numbers for Mickey Toro. He’d told them to call if they found anything, and he’d send some guys in to back them up.

  He appeared to be driving aimlessly—or at least not heading toward any destination Verity could identify, like the Obsidian, the police station, or the Pussycat Club. He pulled off into a McDonald’s drive-thru. “I’m hungry. Let’s grab a burger.”

  “Jason—”

  “I just want to get a damn burger, okay? You want anything?”

  Clearly he wasn’t going to talk until he was good and ready. “Yeah. Get me one too, I guess, and a Coke.”

  When they had their food, he pulled into a space in a mostly deserted corner of the lot. He unwrapped his burger with care, took a big bite, and washed it down with soda. “I don’t like any of this,” he said into the darkness.

  “What do you mean?” She thought she knew exactly what he meant, but she wanted to hear it from him.

  He sighed loudly. “This was supposed to be a straightforward case. Guy turns up dead, we figure out who killed him, report it back to his wife, collect paycheck, call it a day. But now we’re up to our asses in magic, gangsters, the Mob, a fucking child-sex ring—which, I might add, our nice straightforward dead guy who’s really two dead guys was up to his ass in—and a police force that’s so corrupt I’m not even sure I want to let Roper in on this, in case he accidentally or on purpose tips off the wrong people and this whole damn thing goes up in smoke.” He chomped another bite from his burger, chewed and swallowed. “And now my little sister wants to mount some kind of magical commando raid backed up by the Mob.”

  Verity stared out the window, watching other customers return to their cars with bags of food and drive off. “Jason—I told you. If you don’t want to get involved—”

  “But that’s the thing, V. I do want to get involved.” He did turn toward her now, and his expression was fierce. “I have to get involved. Yeah, you’re right—this has so many ways it could screw up my future that I’ve stopped counting them, starting with the fact that we both fucking know Toro tortured and killed Gary, so we’re purposely working with a murderer.”

  When she started to speak, he held up a hand. “But none of that matters. They’re kids, V. Little kids. What kind of sick fucks—” He shook his head and trailed off, going back to attacking his dinner. “Maybe I just wish a little bit that we could do it the right way. You know, the way we’d do it in a sane world. Track down the information, figure out where these bastards’ operation is, then call the cops and let them round ’em up and handle it.”

  “This isn’t a sane world, Jason,” Verity said softly. She worried about her brother sometimes: at his core, Jason was a sheepdog. A lion. A protector of the innocent. A cop, in other words. She had no doubt he would charge into any dangerous situation with both eyes open if somebody needed help. It was one of the things she’d admired about him since she was a little girl, back when he used to stand up for her to neighborhood bullies even when they teased him about it.

  But the problem was, for all his courage and drive to do the right thing, not to mention his several years’ worth of association with her and Stone and all the magical craziness they’d dealt with, he still essentially longed for the world to go back to being normal, for things to make sense, and for problems to be solvable in the ways he’d always been taught they were. Sure, he’d accepted the magical world far better than most mundanes would, and even made his contributions, which were a lot more of a big deal to Verity than he wanted to believe they were. But this case, more than anything they’d dealt with before, was pulling his worldview in uncomfortable directions.

  She just hoped it wasn’t on its way to coming unraveled.

  He didn’t answer her right away, but focused on finishing his burger and draining his cup of soda. He gathered both into the bag, got out of the car to toss them, then dropped heavily back into the driver’s seat. “I know it’s not a sane world. I know this is probably not even the craziest thing I’m gonna have to do this year. It just takes a little time to process, you know?”

  “Jason—” She wished she could help him. Hell, she felt in over her head too. She wished she could grab his cell phone and call Stone to come and help them—or storm into the Obsidian and recruit Harrison to rain his avenging fury down on the place until nothing was left but a smoking crater. But that wasn’t going to happen. Stone was off where she couldn’t reach him, and who the hell knew where Harrison had gone—or, if she was completely honest with herself, who knew whether he’d even consider their mission worth his time? She had no idea.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We’re gonna find these guys, we’re gonna take ’em down, and we’re gonna help whatever kids they’ve got there and make it so they can’t mess with any others. That’s not negotiable.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not. But I haven’t got the faintest idea where to start.”

  “Maybe I do,” Jason said. He pulled out his wallet and removed a slip of paper—the one he’d sneaked out of David’s—Gary’s—suitcase back at the Oasis. “Let’s call Xavier.”

  They knew they’d have to be careful about their next steps. If the mysterious Xavier was connected with the people they were looking for—and they were fairly sure he was, since Gary had hidden the number and his visits to Vegas seemed quite single-purpose in nature—they had to make sure they didn’t tip him off by saying the wrong thing, or calling from a number that could be traced back to somewhere that would make them suspicious.

  “I’m pretty sure wherever it is, it’s somewhere in Hard Eights territory,” Jason said. They were back at their suite at the Obsidian, so they could be sure they wouldn’t be overheard or jumped by the Hard Eights.

  “Toro thinks so too. That’s why they dumped Gary behind the club,” Verity agreed. “But that’s a big area. We can’t just go cruising around looking. Even if we didn’t look suspicious, they’d still recognize that red Mustang of yours.”

 
“Good point. Maybe that’s where Nakamura can help us.”

  “You want to let him in on this?”

  “Why not?” he asked. “Hey, if he can find Harrison and get him involved, this would be a lot easier, right? But even if he can’t, maybe he can lend us a car.”

  As it happened, Nakamura still claimed not to know how to reach Harrison, and Verity believed him. They met him in his office this time and told him the brief story of what they’d unearthed.

  He listened impassively, with only a bit of tightness in his jaw indicating his anger. “I truly wish I could give you more help,” he said when they finished. “But aside from Mr. Harrison, we are not…equipped here for dealing with that sort of thing. I can certainly lend you a car that would be difficult to trace. But aside from that…” he spread his hands. “I would advise you to take this to the police, but I understand why that isn’t feasible.”

  “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” Verity said. She and Jason had already agreed not to contact Roper, at least not until the matter was fully in hand. “So you don’t know anything about the guy who’s supposedly running this place? The one who’s supposed to be a mage? I thought Mr. Harrison kept tabs on other mages in town.”

  “He does—when he’s here,” Nakamura said. “He has been spending very little time at the Obsidian over the last couple of years, and when he does return, it’s generally for less than a day.”

  “Wonder what he’s up to,” Verity murmured, but at that particular moment she didn’t really care. He wasn’t here to help, so she didn’t need to think about him anymore. “Anyway, we should get going. Wish us luck, okay?”