The Other Side: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  Rage. Anger…and then confusion.

  It did, Sarah. You know it. Your father never would have killed you—otherwise he wouldn’t have kept you prisoner. He’d have killed you with Zeke. He only wanted to keep you prisoner until the child was born. Horrible, yes—but you and the child would have survived if not for your own desire for vengeance!

  The heat was rising around him, and Riley was screaming as he frantically scrabbled toward the ruined staircase.

  Sarah! You know I’m right! He took another chance, sharpening his focus on the Sarah-thing—and his hunch was rewarded as he spotted another figure, tiny but distinct, swirling around her. Sarah! You’ve got to pass on. For your child’s sake if not your own! Do you want your mad vengeance to imprison your child here forever? Is that what you want for the only thing you have left of Zeke?

  Denial. Confusion.

  Realization. Horror.

  Sudden, overwhelming guilt.

  “Stone, I can’t get out!” Riley screamed, and coughed. “Come on!”

  For a second, just a second, the swirling figure resolved itself again, this time fully. Instead of mist, a translucent young woman stood in front of Stone, her face sad now instead of enraged. A tiny baby clutched at her. She looked at Stone with pleading eyes.

  Go, he said gently. Take your rest. Both of you. You don’t have to fight anymore.

  The figure regarded him a moment longer. Then she nodded, just once, and she and the baby faded away.

  A second later, the flowing red fog began to recede as well, settling back into the grave as if someone had run the film in reverse.

  “Stooooonnnnne!” Riley shrieked.

  Stone vaulted out of the circle and over to Riley in two long strides. The flames were still focused on the pile of boxes in the middle of the floor, but were licking up high enough they threatened the basement’s ceiling any moment. Black smoke swirled. Stone crouched next to Riley. “Grab onto me and hang on!” he snapped. “Do not let go!”

  “What are you—”

  “Do it!”

  Riley, in full-blown panic now, flung his arms around Stone’s neck and locked his hands together in a crushing grip.

  Stone barely noticed the pain, focusing fully on the levitation spell. He and the screaming Riley lifted off the ground and floated upward through the still-open door. The figures were gone now, so they had a straight shot up and out.

  The smoke hadn’t reached up here yet, but they had no time to pause. He darted his gaze back and forth, identifying the nearest exit. Down the hall to his left, the wide-open front door swung wildly in the wind.

  He didn’t drop the spell—no amount of adrenaline at this point would have given him enough strength to physically carry Riley far enough to get them both out. Instead, he redirected them in a straight shot toward the opening.

  They popped out of the house and kept going, Riley still maintaining his death grip around Stone’s neck. As soon as they cleared the door Stone threw a shield around them, but still didn’t drop the levitation. If the house blew, they’d need to be as far away as they could.

  Fifty feet out, his strength finally failed. The levitation spell fizzled, pitching the two of them face-first into the graveled street, but he managed to keep the shield up. He had to keep the shield up. Otherwise—

  Barely conscious now, fighting to maintain the shield over himself and Riley, Stone heard a series of deafening BOOMs behind him as the fire finally reached the dynamite. He twisted a little to look back over his shoulder in time to see the Brunder mansion explode and erupt into wild flame. A second later the shock wave hit, tumbling them forward, followed almost instantly by a rain of debris.

  As awareness finally left him and the spell failed, his last, wild thought was one of mad amusement: I doubt George Landry will be going through with that donation to the department after all.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Verity awakened to streaming sunlight. Groaning, she dragged her arm up to cover her eyes. Her arm seemed to weigh fifty pounds, and her head felt like someone had run it through a meat grinder sideways.

  “V? You awake?”

  Jason! She sat up fast and immediately regretted it, but she didn’t care. There he was, sitting in a chair next to the bed where she lay. “You’re alive!”

  “Yeah. Thanks to you, from what they tell me. You okay?”

  “I—feel like somebody ran over my head with a truck.” She put her hand to her forehead as images flooded back to her and she stiffened. “Jason—the kids! Mathias! What—where are we? What happened?”

  She started to scramble out of bed, but he gently pushed her back. “Calm down. Everything’s fine. The kids are fine—well, as fine as they can be, all things considered. They’re safe now, anyway.”

  She looked around at her surroundings. It wasn’t a hospital room, as she’d feared, but a hotel room. It wasn’t the one at their suite at the Obsidian, though. She’d never seen this room before. “Where are we? Where’s Toro and the others? The cops—”

  “Shh…calm down. We’re in a place Toro’s people run. He got us out of there before they tipped off the cops. He said we can stay here till we feel like leaving.” He looked troubled, and Verity thought she knew why—now that the whole thing was over, the idea of taking any kind of charity from a murderer and mobster wouldn’t sit well with him. “What happened to Mathias?”

  Jason didn’t answer right away, and he didn’t meet her gaze.

  “He didn’t get away, did he?” Her insides clenched at the thought—after everything they’d been through, if that piece of shit had managed to weasel out of their hands—

  “No. He didn’t get away.”

  “Well—what then?” When he still didn’t answer, she grabbed his arm. “Jason—?”

  “He’s dead, V.”

  More thoughts flooded back—reaching out to grab his aura, his scream, her scream—“He’s dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well—I can’t really say I’m sorry about that. If anybody deserved it, it’s him. Those kids—” She shuddered, and wondered how many of them would spend years in therapy, or worse, because of what Mathias and those like him had done to them.

  “What did you do to him, V?” Jason’s tone was soft and inflectionless.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It had to be you. Nobody else there could have done it. He was gonna make Toro shoot me—I was barely awake, but I remember that. Then you started pleading with Mathias and suddenly he screamed, grabbed his head, and keeled over. Then you screamed and fell over too. When I finally came to my senses I found Toro bending over you, trying to get you to wake up, and Mathias was dead. I didn’t see you cast any magic, and nobody had shot him. What did you do to him?”

  “I—” She paused to consider her words, to consider what she’d done. “I don’t know, exactly,” she said at last. “That’s the truth. I know what I was trying to do, but…I don’t exactly know how it worked out.”

  “What were you trying to do?”

  “Make him stop.” Her head was feeling better now, so she sat up the rest of the way and leaned back against the pillows. “To make him stop so he wouldn’t make Toro shoot you. That’s all I cared about. I had to do something. I couldn’t let him kill you. I couldn’t—” She began to shake as the enormity of what she’d done came crashing down her. “I…I used the magic Edna taught me—healing magic—to hurt somebody, Jason. To—kill somebody.”

  He stared at her. “How the hell did you do that?”

  Slowly, with deliberate care, she pushed the covers aside and got up. She still wore her T-shirt and jeans; her leather jacket was over a nearby chair, and her boots at its foot. She couldn’t stand the way he was looking at her, so she turned away from him and slipped into her jacket, then bent to put
her boots on. “We should go. We’re not being held here, are we?”

  “No. V—”

  “Not now, Jason. Please…not now. So we can go?”

  “Yeah,” he said. His voice was ragged. “Toro said we could go whenever we wanted. You slept the rest of the night—it’s after noon now. He said his people would take care of everything so we didn’t need to be involved.”

  She wondered if that was what she wanted—but she also knew they didn’t have a choice. If they got involved—if they even called Roper about it—they’d have to answer too many uncomfortable questions, and they’d probably never escape the web of lies they’d have to weave. Better to just slip out with the knowledge that they’d done what they’d come here to do: they’d found why Gary Woods had been in Las Vegas. They’d found his killer, though he’d never be brought to justice for his crime. They’d tracked and broken a hidden child-prostitution ring that the cops and even the Mob couldn’t touch, and saved a bunch of children—current and future—from a horrific fate.

  She should feel good, right?

  She finished tying her boots and stood, shoving down the lightheadedness still hovering around her. “Let’s get the hell out of here, okay? I want to go home.”

  “Yeah. Me too.” He gave her an odd, troubled, sideways glance, but didn’t say anything else as they left the room.

  Mickey Toro met them downstairs—apparently he’d set one of his men to keep an eye on the elevator and alert him when they showed up. “Hey,” he said, looking Verity up and down. “You feelin’ okay? I wanted to have my guys take you to the hospital, but your brother said you just had to sleep it off.”

  “I’m okay,” she said without looking at him. “Thanks for getting us out of there.”

  “No problem. Figured you didn’t wanna get in the middle of that clusterfuck, y’know? Listen,” he added, “I know you prob’ly want to get the hell outta Vegas and I don’t blame ya. But I just wanted to tell you before you go—my guys rounded up the rest of those lowlifes, the ones we didn’t already take out, and left ’em as a little present for the cops. They didn’t want to—hell, I didn’t want to—but it’s easier that way. We don’t need the hassle if they decide to come after us for murder. We even got some of the customers who tried sneaking down the elevator like rats when the shit hit the fan. So that operation’s dead in the water.” He gripped Verity’s shoulder. “We got you to thank for that, kid. Ain’t none of us were ever gonna find that place.”

  “Yeah…” Verity mumbled, and shrugged off his hand. All at once, she had no desire to talk to Toro or any of his people. No doubt after this was over they’d go back to their usual extortion, prostitution, loansharking, and all the other illegal activities that made up their little crime empire, under the blind eye of a mostly-corrupt LVPD that didn’t give a damn about what they did. But that was supposed to all be okay, because Mickey Toro had a soft spot for kids. She felt like she might be sick. “Listen—I’m still feeling like shit. I just want to get out of here. That a problem?”

  “No, no. No problem.” He waved them toward the door. “We got your car outta there too. It’s waitin’ for you in the parking lot. You two are on your way.” He dropped his volume so only she and Jason could hear him. “Unless you wanna think about stayin’ in town and workin’ for me. I could use somebody with your talents, even if you didn’t get a chance to plug that fuckin’ pervert before he stroked out. Too much coke, I’m gonna guess.”

  Verity’s gorge rose, and she had to settle for shaking her head.

  “Yeah, probably. And no thanks on the offer,” Jason said. “Take care, Mr. Toro.” He gripped Verity’s arm and hustled her away.

  She staggered along with him, trying hard not to puke on Toro’s carpet.

  “What are you gonna tell Gary’s wife?”

  They were back in the Mustang, headed out into the desert after a quick stop at the Obsidian to pick up their stuff and swap cars. Nakamura hadn’t been available, so they’d left a message on his voicemail thanking him for his help and then got out of there.

  Verity, feeling somewhat better, had been sitting with her face pressed against the passenger window, sipping a Coke Jason had gotten for her when he gassed up the car. Now she turned toward him when she’d asked her question, the first time she’d spoken since they’d left the Obsidian.

  Jason shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t know how much of this is ever gonna make it to the papers. My guess is most of it won’t, so she won’t get the real story there.”

  She nodded. “But she hired you to find out what happened. Are you gonna lie to her?” She couldn’t decide which way she wanted it to go—on the one hand, scum like Gary Woods didn’t deserve to have his crimes whitewashed and forgotten. He’d done terrible things, and he should have to atone for them, even posthumously. On the other, would anything be gained by revealing the truth to his widow so she could tear herself up wondering if she might have noticed something, if she’d only been less trusting? And what about his two children? She felt sick all over again thinking about them, about their little friends. He’d been their soccer coach. What if he’d—

  She shuddered. “I don’t know what to do, Jason. He shouldn’t just…get away with it. They shouldn’t just mourn him as their loving husband and dad who got killed by accident for wandering into a bad part of town. They should know. But…”

  He gripped her arm. “I know, V. I know. No easy answers. Anyway, we got a long drive ahead of us. Plenty of time to think it over.”

  “What if you don’t come up with anything by the time we get back?”

  “I guess I’ll worry about that if it happens. Maybe I’ll tell Fran about it—the parts I can tell her—and see what she thinks we should do.”

  She nodded, leaning back against the window. After nearly a minute of silence, she asked tentatively, “We good?”

  He glanced at her. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

  “Just…I saw the way you looked at me, when I first woke up. When I first told you what I…did.” She stared at her hands in her lap. “Jason…I don’t like what I did, but…I’d do it again if I had to…to save you, or the Doc, or Edna…Does that make me a bad person?”

  Jason didn’t answer right away; for a while, only the soft background sound of a some classic-rock song Verity didn’t recognize hung in the air between them.

  “No,” he said at last. “Not by me, anyway. I’d have killed him to save you, without a second thought. Just because I’d do it with a gun and you did it with magic doesn’t change anything. But…” He paused again. “The way you did it…it’s…Are you gonna tell Al? Or Edna?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes on the road. The day was sunny and relatively hot for December; the desert stretched out in front of them, wide and open, with shimmering water-puddle mirages up ahead. Finally he sighed, turned up the radio, and switched it to a hard-rock station. “Fran’s not gonna believe half this shit. But we did solve the case. So I guess that’s something.”

  “I guess it is.”

  She subsided back into silence, and barely said anything for the remainder of the trip home.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Stone was on his back on a surface that was too hard to be a mattress, but too soft to be a floor. He opened his eyes to find himself staring up at a wood-beamed ceiling. Odd—last thing he remembered, he was flinging himself and Riley out into the rain and taking a header into the street.

  The explosion—

  He sat up quickly and swayed, his head awash with pain and dizziness.

  “Hey, hey, sweetie,” a female voice admonished. “Lie back down.”

  It was the plump makeup artist from the trailer. She looked concerned as she hurried over.

  Stone didn’t lie back down. After the initial pounding from the sudden cha
nge in elevation passed, his head calmed sufficiently to convince him he wouldn’t faint.

  He took a look around. He was in the living room of a small house. Weak, gray light streamed in through a window—must be morning, then, at least. It didn’t look like it was raining at the moment.

  A sleeping bag was spread out beneath him, with a sofa pillow under his head. He pushed back the blanket over him to see that he still wore his jeans, though someone had removed his boots. They’d made an effort to clean him up, and bandages covered the slashes on his chest and the wound on his shoulder.

  “What time is it?” he asked the woman. “Where are the others?”

  “Now, now, please, Dr. Stone—stay down. You need to rest.”

  “I haven’t got time to rest. Where are the others? What’s happened?”

  “That’s gonna take a while,” said another voice. Cody Huff came in and dropped down on the sofa next to Stone’s spot on the floor. The sofa had been made up as another bed, but whoever its occupant had been was gone now. Huff offered Stone a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

  The sight of food made him ravenous, as he remembered he hadn’t eaten since yesterday. “Thanks,” he said, taking both and devouring the sandwich in huge bites.

  Huff looked exhausted and unshaven, with deep dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes were damp and streaked with dirt and smoke. Stone wondered how he himself must look. “Tell me what’s happened,” he said between bites.

  “I can tell you some of it. I think maybe you might have to tell me some of it, though.”

  “What time is it? How long have I been out?”

  “Several hours. It’s around eleven now. Once everybody came to their senses, the ones who were still able to move around went looking for the others. They found you and Bryce face-down in the middle of the street out in front of the Brunder place—or what was left of it anyway. Which isn’t much.”