Sins of the Father
Read Sins of the Father Online
Authors: Christa Faust
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Media Tie-In, #Science Fiction, #Action & Adventure
Contents
Also Available from Titan Books
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM CHRISTA FAUST AND TITAN BOOKS
FRINGE
THE ZODIAC PARADOX
THE BURNING MAN
FRINGE: SINS OF THE FATHER
Print edition ISBN: 9781781163139
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781163146
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: August 2014
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2014 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
FRINGE and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Cover images courtesy of Warner Bros.
Additional cover images © Dreamstime.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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LONDON 2008
Richard McCoy nursed an overpriced lager in an appropriately generic Red Lion pub in Charing Cross. It had sprung up in the last month to take advantage of increased tourist trade, and had all the trappings one would expect from an “authentic” English pub—wood paneling, darts in the corner, a long bar with row upon row of taps, and a fat, balding barkeep behind it. He’d read somewhere that Red Lion was the most popular pub name in all of England. Something like six hundred of the damn things throughout the country.
In his early fifties, McCoy had thinning salt-and-pepper hair and an aquiline profile that might have once been described as regal, but now just seemed pinched and bitter. His tall frame was slump-shouldered and defeated, with an unfortunate paunchiness around the middle that would probably tighten up if he laid off the lager and put a little more effort into exercise.
But he just couldn’t be bothered.
He had just come off a performance of an atrocious dinner theater production of
HMS Pinafore
at the nearby Charing Cross Hotel, where he’d had the pleasure of entertaining a room full of gluttonous tourists as “the Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, First Lord of the Admiralty,” who sang such unforgettable songs as “When I Was A Lad,” “For I Hold That On The Sea,” and the ever-popular, “Here, Take Her, Sir.”
He’d never felt more broken in his entire life.
“Pour us another,” he said to the barkeep, banging his empty pint glass on a bar that was disgustingly devoid of water rings.
A pub should be grotty, lived-in
, he thought bitterly,
not like this mass-produced, plastic tourist trap. A pub should be like a woman, experienced, real, slightly used.
The barkeep placed a fresh glass in front of him, wearing the same sour look he’d worn since McCoy had walked in. McCoy wondered if maybe the man was as plastic as the rest of the place. He couldn’t even remember what his lager was. Some pretentious micro-brew passed through the kidneys of a monkey in the Venezuelan rainforest, no doubt.
He drank it, anyway.
How had it come to this? From a stint with the Globe theater twenty years ago, where his Romeo and Lear were raved about internationally, to doing three shows weekly of Gilbert and Sullivan for a room full of fat housewives who wouldn’t know talent if it reared up from the depths and bit them on their enormous, pimpled asses.
But he knew the answer to that question. He was drinking it.
“Excuse me,” someone said behind him. American accent. Woman. McCoy cocked his head to the side, only just realizing that he’d somehow managed to slump down onto the bar. How many lagers had he had? No more than two, certainly. Maybe three.
“Are you Richard McCoy? The actor?”
Somewhere in the back of his alcohol-shrouded brain something like self-respect asserted itself, and he sat up straighter on the barstool, stifling a burp.
The woman wasn’t quite forty, trim and attractive with blond hair, a blue silk scarf around her neck and—he couldn’t help but notice—rather ample breasts. She had a quirky, sardonic smile and trouble in her eyes. At least it looked like trouble to him.
His kind of woman. Experienced, real, slightly used.
“I am,” he said as clearly and regally as he could, silently tacking on a “Who wants to know?” He owed money to more than a few unsavory types, and just because this American woman didn’t look the sort to truck with those types, it didn’t mean she wasn’t a spotter for some leg-breaker lurking out in the alley.
“I
knew
it,” the woman said, so delighted that she bounced in a thoroughly distracting way. “I saw you when you were in San Diego, touring with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Oh, ten, fifteen years ago? You were
wonderful
.”
McCoy thought back on that time.
“
Twelfth Night
,” he said. “Yes, I remember. And it was a few more years than fifteen.”
“You haven’t aged a day,” she said, and he laughed.
“Kind of you to say so—”
“Miranda,” she said. “Miranda Stallings.” She put her hand out, and he grasped it in his own meaty paw, bringing it to his lips and giving it the gentlest of kisses.
“Miranda,” he said, smiling at her giggle. “A beautiful name. From
The Tempest
. I played Prospero once, you know. Here in London. Oh, so many years ago. I’d say there’s a sight more gray in my hair since you saw me on the stage last.”
“Oh, I like the gray,” she said. “It’s very refined.”
“Thank you very much, Miranda,” he said. “You take years off just by saying so. Please, allow me to buy you a drink. What would you like?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to trouble you, Mr. McCoy.”
“Please, call me Richard.”
“Okay,” she said after a pause. “Richard. What should I get? I’m not much of a drinker.”
That was the best news McCoy had heard all day.
* * *
A few cosmopolitans later and McCoy had sweet-talked Miranda into allowing him to accompany her to her hotel, the nearby Corinthia on Whitehall. She had been part of a tour group, she said, who had left that morning to head to Bath. She’d fallen in love with London, and wasn’t interested in going to see some stodgy Roman ruins.
“They’re not coming back for another three days,” she said, sliding the key card for her room, getting it into the slot the third time. She leaned into him, unsteady on her feet, eyes bright.
“That sounds very lonely,” he said.
“It is,” she said, giggling. “Very.”
McCoy gave a low whistle as they stepped inside. Miranda’s suite was enormous, an expensive room in an already expensive hotel. Well appointed, with soft blue carpet, chrome-and-glass lamps, and modern, sleek furnishings. He made a beeline for the minibar, figuring she could afford a few tiny bottles of expensive vodka on her hotel bill.
He stopped when he saw a device sitting on the table next to the bar. It was a small black box with an odd knob on the top and two ribbon cables, each ending in a flat plate with three small, sharp prongs. McCoy picked up the device, and turned it over in his hands.
“What’s this, some sort of sex toy?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound
too
hopeful. He touched his finger to one of the prongs. Too sharp for his taste. Americans were all into weird sex stuff—came from all that pent-up repression in the Bible Belt. But even so, this seemed a bit extreme.