Flashback

1.14 Denver and Las Vegas, Nevada: Friday, Sept. 17—Sunday, Sept. 19

Denver was still standing when Nick got back on Friday evening. Most of Denver, at least. Some group had blown up the Denver branch of the U.S. Mint on West Colfax, near Civic Center Park.

Why the U.S. still had a mint, Nick had no idea. No one used coins any longer. So the destruction of that particular ancient landmark had been of interest only to the terrorists who built the bombs and to the five bored guards who’d been blown apart in the middle-of-the-night blasts. It was the sort of information that Nick and a million other Denverites had learned to file under Ignore and Forget.

What did get Nick’s attention immediately upon stepping naked out of the shower was a ten-minute-old text message from Detective First Grade, Lieutenant K. T. Lincoln: “Nick—Everything checked out okay. No worries. No need to see each other. Mami.”

The “Mami” was their old cop-partner code for “Must Arrange Meeting Immediately!” and also signified that all preceding sentences in the message meant the opposite of what they said. It was an I’m-under-some-duress code.

Something was very wrong.

Nick phoned her cell and got her message voice telling callers that she was on duty, so leave a message and she’d get back to them.

“Just back in town and checking in,” Nick said, working on the closest he could get to a bored tone of voice. “Glad everything’s okay. Call me when you get a chance. Oh, I broke my old phone and have a new number.” He gave her the number of the onetime phone he’d dug out of a duffel hidden behind the wallboards. After her return call, he’d pitch the thing.

Fifteen minutes later, K.T. phoned. “I’m supervising a stakeout and ESU thing over here on East Colfax. But it’s gotta be over before eleven-thirty because the ESU guys have to get their van back. I’ll meet you at midnight at that place where that guy did that thing that time.” She broke the connection. Nick was sure that she’d used a onetime as well.

Getting dressed, Nick checked the clock on his cubie’s TV. Just after 9 p.m. He had almost three hours to kill. He’d use some of that time speculating about just what the hell K.T. could have turned up that would call for such an urgent get-together.

Nick had been conscious by the time Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s people had dropped him off in front of the cathedral. Legs shaky, his insides quaking with anger, Nick had walked the short block to the Japanese consulate.

He’d assumed that Sato and the other Japs at the consulate would be so eager to hear what the don had said to him that the interrogation would go on all that afternoon and night, moving to sodium pentothal and other so-called truth drugs if Nick didn’t give them everything they wanted. But there was no interrogation.

Sato, his right arm looking slick-wet in the active sling, had come to Nick’s room, knocked, walked in, and said, “Did you learn anything important from Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev? Anything that could help our investigation?”

Biting the inside of his cheek, Nick had looked up at Sato and said, “I don’t think so.” That was a lie, but how much of a lie wasn’t quite clear yet.

Sato had just nodded and said, “It was worth a try.”

A few hours later, when Nick awoke from his nap but was still feeling drained and stupid, Sato invited him to dinner at Geronimo, a famous upscale restaurant that he and Dara had loved (and saved up to enjoy during their annual visits to Santa Fe). Without pondering why Hideki Sato would take him out to dinner at such an expensive spot, Nick accepted. He was hungry.

Geronimo was as Nick had remembered it—a small adobe building that had been a private home in 1750, its entrance area dominated by a large central fireplace with a mantel topped by both a huge floral display and a giant pair of moose antlers—but the restaurant itself was small. Since it was cool and raining out that evening and the porch dining area closed, the small interior seemed crowded. Luckily, given Sato’s girth, they were seated in a corner banquette all to themselves. The two men said little. Nick was finished with his first course—Fujisaki Asian pear salad with sweet cashews and cider honey vinaigrette—and was halfway through his main course of filet mignon “frites,” the hand-cut russet potato fries alone worth killing for, when the memory of his last time here with Dara struck him.

He felt his chest ache and his throat tighten and, like a fool, he had to set down his fork and sip water—Sato had ordered a bottle of Lokoya ’25 Mount Veeder Cabernet Sauvignon for the two of them at a price just slightly less than Nick’s last full year’s salary as a police detective—and pretend he’d bitten into something too spicy to hide his tears and flushed face. Nick’s strongest wish at that moment was that he could immediately go back to his room at the consulate and use one of the last one-hour vials of flashback he’d brought along to call back his dinner at this restaurant with Dara nine years ago. The ache and need was more than mere flashback withdrawal, it was an existential matter: he didn’t belong here and now, eating this fine food with this huge hulk of a Japanese assassin, he needed to be there, then, with his wife, sharing a wonderful meal with her while both of them looked forward to going back to their room at La Posada.

Nick sipped water and looked away until he’d blinked away the idiotic tears.

“Bottom-san,” Sato had said when both were eating again, “have you considered going to Texas?”

Nick could only stare at the big man. What the hell was this about?

“Texas doesn’t accept flashback addicts,” he said softly. The tables were very close together and Geronimo’s was a very quiet restaurant.

“Nor do they execute them as do my country, the Caliphate, and some others,” Sato said. “They only deport them if they refuse or are unable to drop their addiction. And the Republic of Texas does accept rehabilitated drug and flashback addicts.”

Nick set down his wineglass. “They say that getting into Texas is harder than getting into Harvard.”

Sato grunted that male grunt of his. What it signified still escaped Nick. “True, but Harvard University has little use for important life skills. The Republic of Texas does. You were an able law-enforcement officer, Bottom-san.”

It was Nick’s turn to grunt. “Was is the proper tense of that verb.” He squinted at the big security man—or Colonel Death assassin and daimyo, if he were to believe Noukhaev. “Why the hell do you care, Sato-san? Why would you—or Mr. Nakamura—want me in Texas?”

Sato sipped his wine and said nothing. Gesturing toward the emptied plates, he said, “I will be wanting dessert. You also, Bottom-san?”

“Me also,” said Nick. “I’m going to try some of that white chocolate mascarpone cheesecake.”

Sato grunted again, but the grunt sounded like approval to Nick’s wine-sotted ears.

The return trip to Denver had been totally uneventful, thanks mostly—Nick felt sure—to the two black Mercedeses that Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev had sent along as “escort.” Why Sato would trust them to serve that function, Nick had no idea, but with one black limousine eighty meters in front of them and the other eighty meters behind on the Interstate, no one bothered them, even though they’d seen dust clouds suggesting tracked vehicles both to the east and west of their highway.

Sato had ridden in the front passenger seat while “Willy” Mutsumi Ōta drove, “Bill” Daigorou Okada handled the topside gun, and “Toby” Shinta Ishii sat in the back in a fold-down chair opposite Nick. For the first hundred miles or so, Nick could not put the image of the back of the first M-ATV Oshkosh—all flames, the metal and plastic interior walls melting, with “Joe” Genshirou Itō’s headless body turning to ash and burned bone in seconds—out of his mind. But when they passed the ambush site north of Las Vegas, NM, he relaxed. Soon he’d taken off his helmet and set his sweaty head back against the webbing and closed his eyes.

What had Noukhaev been trying to tell him?

The last night at the Japanese consulate, Nick had spent six of the eight hours of his sleep period using the last of his flashback. Most of the time he’d spent with the now-familiar hours with Dara—the dialogues just after Keigo was murdered where she seemed to be trying to tell Nick something (and where Nick, absorbed in his own job and the murder case, and in himself, had paid no attention to her attempts).

But to tell him what?

That she’d been having an affair with Harvey Cohen? That seemed the most likely. But what could have brought Harvey and her to Santa Fe four days before Keigo’s murder? Obviously it had something to do with Keigo Nakamura and his little movie, but what? And what interest could District Attorney Mannie Ortega have had in Keigo? What could be so important that they’d send an ADA and his research assistant all the way to Santa Fe?

Nick would just have to ask Ortega—now Mayor Ortega—when he got back.

As for all that crap about selling New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California to the Global Caliphate…

Nick opened his eyes and, using the Oshkosh’s comm uplink, used his phone to log on to the Internet. Shinta Ishii was paying no attention to him. Nick slipped his earbuds in place, shifted the screen to display inside his sunglasses, and surfed.

He had argued to Don Noukhaev that the Islamists wouldn’t come to North America because these desert states overrun by the reconquistas lacked infrastructure.

But looking at the data, Nick realized that if the Islamic Global Caliphate had shown anything in its last quarter century of expansion, it was that it had no respect or use for local languages, cultures, laws, or—other than milking the European or Canadian welfare states dry—infrastructure. They brought language, culture, laws, and their religious infrastructure with them. And much of that infrastructure was from the Middle Ages: tribes, clans, honor killings, and a murderous religious literalism and intolerance that neither Christianity nor Judaism had practiced for six hundred years or more.

And the core of the expanding Islamic infrastructure, Nick was reminded as he flicked from page to page, was sharia for those people who lived within its confines, for both Muslim human beings and the only partially human (under sharia law) infidel Dhimmis alike, and outside of that, the House of War stood aimed like a poised and poisoned spear at all those unbelieving nations and cultures around it.

Nick went to the proper archives page and saw that the Caliphate now boasted more than 10,000 nuclear weapons, easily surpassing Japan’s 5,500.

It took him thirty seconds of searching to see that the United States, after its proud unilateral disarmament (in START agreements with Russia, but in competition only with itself) in the second decade of this century, now was reported to have 26 nuclear warheads on aircraft or missiles and another 124 in storage—none of them less than fifty years old, all unreliable and untested and largely undeliverable.

Nick surfed and saw the image so often shown on TV of the sickle—crescent moon” was the way proud Global Caliphate leaders always described it—of Muslim cultural and overt political dominance that spread from the Mideast through Eurasia and Eastern and Western Europe to the north, down and east through Africa in the south. The other crescents swept from Indonesia through much of the Pacific regions—coexisting with great tension alongside Nippon’s New Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The larger European crescent swept through what had been the United Kingdom and across the polar regions, the tip of the scythe now deeply embedded in Canada. The Canadians had been willing—almost eager—to “share the wealth” of their northern part of the continent. Their religious creed of state-enforced multiculturalism and diversity—long having replaced Christianity in Canada—had, in less than two generations, produced a single minority-driven theocratic culture which eliminated all diversity in its realms.

From what Nick was reading, the remnants of the white Canadian culture up there, despite still being numerically in the majority, more or less got by in isolated cantons—almost reservations. Even though Muslims constituted slightly less than 40 percent of the total population, sharia was now the primary law of Canada, and most of the whites there—both English-and French-speaking—had meekly accepted their roles as Dhimmis. They’d built the 3,800-mile border fence between Canada and the U.S.—erected to keep fleeing Americans out—in less than eighteen months.

Wherever the Caliphate rule had come in contact with the formerly pampered “First Nations”—the Indians and Eskimos treated with such extravagant political correctness in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries by the English-and French-speaking white Canadian majorities—those native peoples who wouldn’t convert had been eradicated by their new Muslim rulers, mostly through starvation via the simple act by their new provincial masters of shutting off food supplies.

The so-called First Nations had lost their skill of feeding themselves through hunting and fishing.

After die-ought-if, after the Day It All Hit The Fan, when the U.S. ceased to be a serious trading partner and world power, and especially after the surprise attack that Tehran had called Al-Qiyamah (the Resurrection, Day of Judgment, and Final Reckoning, three days that removed Israel from all maps) and then by the global Islamic triumphalism that swept across all of Western Europe in less than a decade, Canada had turned to the Caliphate for trade and military protection. It had no other choice. Just as it had no choice now about the heavy Islamic immigration that had already changed Canadian laws and culture forever.

And now Nuevo Mexico would have no choice but to sell its reconquista lands back to… to whom?

Nick slaved his phone to the outside monitor views.

North-central New Mexico was sliding by on either side of the M-ATV—overgrazed fields with no cattle left, empty ranches, abandoned small towns, abandoned rail lines, empty highways. Except for the damage done to the high-prairie environment by more than a hundred years of cattle overgrazing and the minor tread-tracks vandalism of modern mechanized armies on the move, this area was almost as pristine as it had been to the first white explorers more than two centuries earlier.

Why shouldn’t the Global Caliphate want this southern part of North America, even if they had to pay for it in a priced-to-sell second Louisiana Purchase? wondered Nick. It was the perfect place for a former desert people to colonize. And with the upper tip of the Islamic scimitar-crescent pressing down against the Canada–U.S. border to the north and now the lower tip thrusting up from Mexico against and into the cash-strapped and militarily impotent western states like Colorado, how long would it be until the two horns of the sharia crescent came together?

Nick had to ask himself the central questions—Do I care? Do I give the slightest shit if this part of the country goes to the jihadis? It isn’t even part of America any longer. Is there any reason in the world that I should give a damn if the Caliphate towelheads replace the Nuevo Mexico beaners as America’s nasty new neighbors to the south? Or even as our new masters in Colorado, for that matter, replacing the fucking Japanese looking down on us from their fucking mountaintops? The Mexicans are all about drugs and corruption, the Japanese all about… well, all about Japan. Why should I care if it’s a hajji bureaucrat rather than a Jap bureaucrat running things? They’d be more efficient than the Mexicans and more honest than the Japanese. Word on EuroTel, Sky Vision, Al Jazeera, and the CBC is that the life of Dhimmis in old Europe and Canada is pretty damned easy.

As long as the hajjis leave me alone to spend my days and nights with Dara, thought Nick, is there any reason I should care if their stupid crescent-moon-and-scimitar flag flies over Denver’s rotting gold-domed capitol?

Nick had taken off his sunglasses, removed his earbuds, shut down his phone, and set his head back in the webbing so that he could sleep the rest of the way home.

The place where that guy did that thing that time was all that was left of the old Tattered Cover bookstore out in the 2500 block of East Colfax Avenue. Colfax, which ran from the prairie to the east of Denver all the way through the rottenest parts of the city to the foothills of the Rockies in the west, was once called by Playboy—one of the early stroke magazines, now out of print for decades—as “the longest, wickedest street in America.” It was true that it was one of the longest main streets in the country, but cops knew that it was mostly East Colfax that was the wickedest, if one judged liquor stores, run-down taverns, prostitutes, pimps, and really bad poets as proof of wickedness.

The Tattered Cover had been a huge independent bookstore in its day, before print-and-paper books just got too expensive to publish and the general population just too illiterate to read books. The old store had been across the street from Nick’s Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums, but sometime in the first decade of this century, the bookstore had moved to this East Colfax location, where it quoted Longfellow in offering “sequestered nooks, and all the serenity of books.”

The sequestered nooks were still there, but the serenity of books had been missing for decades now. The newer TC, across Colfax Avenue from the huge flophouse for the homeless that had been the once-proud East High School, was now a combination of flashcave and all-night beer joint. Oddly enough, many of the flashback addicts who inhabited the sequestered nooks of the lower levels of the cluttered old bookstore had come there to read: after they’d lost or sold their old books, they used flashback to relive the experience of reading Moby-Dick or Lolita or Robin Hood or whatever the hell it was for the first time again, somewhere on a cot here in the rotting confines of the once-great independent bookstore. “It’s like that old zombie movie where the walking dead go back to the shopping malls,” Dara had once said. “Their rotting brains associate the malls with a sense of well-being… like these flashers gravitating back to a bookstore.”

“They’re paying a fortune to flash on reading entire books” had been Nick’s surly response. “How much of that expensive time do you think is spent reliving sitting on the can? For that amount of money, they could download quite a library.”

“They don’t want to download books and suck on yet another glass teat, as you would say, Nick, to read them,” Dara had said. That was about as vulgar as she ever got, but she was emotional about books. “They want to hold them and read them. And nobody publishes the holding-and-touching kind of books anymore.”

At any rate, TC was the place. Nick and K. T. Lincoln had been patrol officers when they’d responded to a call of a man with a gun. The Tattered Cover was still trying to keep itself going then by selling and trading moldy old used books, but some crazy-ass heroin addict had shown up waving a semiautomatic pistol and demanding that the store sell him a new book by some writer named Westlake who’d died more than a dozen years earlier. It seemed like a joke until the addict shot and killed the manager of the coffee shop and threatened to kill a hostage every half hour until the new and original and never-before-read Westlake novel was delivered to him.

It had been K.T. who’d gone in dressed as a FedEx delivery person carrying the new book in its parcel. In the end, she’d had to shoot and kill the addict, who’d been trying to unwrap the parcel with one hand while holding his pistol in the other.

Nick parked his gelding in the old parking structure next to the store, taking great care not to run over the scores of bundled, sleeping men and women on the slanted floors of the big garage—Kipling’s “sheeted dead.” Nick had put fifteen slugs into the hood, windshield, and tires of the old Government Motors wreck, but while he was traveling, Nakamura’s people had replaced the tires, windshield, and central drive battery and the thing was running as well as it ever had. The gasoline engine had been shot to shit, but it had been mostly dismantled for parts many years ago. Nick sort of liked it that Nakamura’s mechanics hadn’t patched the many bullet holes. Usually when parking in an inhabited parking garage, Nick set the blue bubble on the roof to warn looters that there’d be a problem if they tried to strip this particular car, but now he just let the bullet holes in the hood send that message.

The TC was its usual badly lit, smelly labyrinth. Nick bought a beer in what had been the old bookstore’s coffee shop and carried the bottle down a long twisting ramp to the lowest level, where there were tables and lights. Below that area were the flashcave cots and sleepers.

K.T. was waiting for him at their usual table. There was no one else—or at least no one conscious—in this part of the maze of old shelves, rotted carpets, and twenty-watt bulbs. Lieutenant Lincoln had set her battered briefcase on the chair next to her and there was a stack of folders in front of her.

When Nick sat down with a tired sigh, she said, “Are you packing, Nick?”

He almost laughed but then saw her eyes. “Of course I’m packing,” he said.

“Put it here on the table,” said K.T. “Just use the thumb and little finger of your left hand. Now.” She raised her right hand from beneath the table and let Nick see the 9mm Glock. It was aimed at his midsection.

Nick didn’t protest or ask questions. He wore his holster on his left side under his leather jacket, butt of the Glock forward for a cross-body draw, and K.T. knew that. He lifted the pistol out gingerly, just as she’d directed, and put it on the table in front of her. She whisked it out of sight, setting it on the chair next to her big briefcase, and hissed, “Scoot back.”

Nick scooted back.

“Get up real slow. Lift your jacket and do a full turn. Then show me your ankles.”

He did what she’d said, pulling each trouser leg up to show her that he’d brought no ankle gun.

“Sit down,” said K.T. “Stay scooted back there. Keep your hands spread open on your thighs where I can see them.”

He sat and spread his fingers as she’d directed. Somewhere in the dark flashcave down the ramp behind him, a man screamed in flashback terror or ecstasy.

“All right,” said K.T. “I’m going to be giving you three pieces of news. You may know all of it already. You may not. But you’re not going to do a damn thing when you hear each piece but sit there with your hands still on your thighs like that. Understand?”

“I understand,” said Nick. The Westlake-lover years ago had his pistol more or less aimed at K.T. when she’d pulled her piece from under her short FedEx delivery jacket and shot him five times before he could react. She might be a little slower now what with age and a desk job, but Nick wasn’t going to bet his life on it.

Still holding her Glock low with her right hand, K.T. extended her phone with her left hand. “Least bad piece of news first,” she said.

The faces of seven boys—each obviously dead, each obviously shot to death—flicked across the screen. The eighth boy’s face was Val’s.

Nick grunted and was halfway up out of his chair but the rising muzzle of K.T.’s Glock froze him in place. She silently gestured him back in his seat. Nick complied because of the gun, but more because of the photo of Val. It wasn’t a crime-scene shot of a dead boy like the others, but clearly something scanned from a high school virtual yearbook. Val wasn’t smiling in the photo, hadn’t dressed well for it, and his hair needed cutting, but the picture, unlike the others, wasn’t of a shooting victim. It kept Nick in his seat.

“What?” he managed after half a minute. “Tell me.”

“Word came in about two hours ago,” whispered K.T. “A flashgang of young punks tried to assassinate Daichi Omura in Los Angeles earlier this evening…”

“Omura the California Advisor?” Nick said stupidly. He felt as if his jaw and lips had been injected with Novocain.

“Yeah. The kids ambushed Advisor Omura and his retinue at some opening or the other in downtown L.A., the flashgang shooters firing from a storm sewer near the Disney Center.” K.T. paused to take a breath. The muzzle of her Glock never wavered. “The flashgang was carrying a lot of firepower—almost all of it illegal…”

Them, thought Nick. The giant ants and the army Jeeps and trucks trying to find the queen ant’s nest in the L.A. storm sewers. He and Val had loved that old movie.

“Advisor Omura wasn’t seriously hurt and some of his detail whisked him away in a limo while his security people and some L.A. cops returned fire and killed six of the flashgangers right there where the storm sewer opened onto the street,” said K.T. “The seventh kid was found dead a few hundred meters away in the tunnels, shot three times. Do you know him?” She flicked through the photos again and stopped on the death photo of a teenage boy, eyelids half lowered with only the whites showing, mouth open, front teeth broken off, two visible entrance wounds in his chest—some sort of interactive face on the blood-soaked T-shirt—and a terrible wound that had torn his throat open.

“No,” managed Nick. “I’ve never seen him before. You showed Val…”

K.T. waved away the question. “The L.A. juvenile-crime units say that Val ran with these boys… especially with this guy, Billy Coyne. Did Val ever mention him?”

“Coyne?” repeated Nick. He could taste vomit low in his throat. “Billy Coyne? No… wait, maybe. Yes, it’s possible. I’m not sure. Val never talked much about his friends out there. Is Val OK?”

“There’s an APB out on Val Fox, as he’s known at his school,” said K.T. “The LAPD haven’t been able to trace his phone. Neither he nor your father-in-law is at Leonard Fox’s address. We know he hasn’t tried to call you today or tonight on your phone, but have you been in touch with him some other way, Nick?”

Nick was thinking, absurdly, and with pain—I hate it that Val’s not using my last name.

“What? No!” he said, shaking his head. “Val hasn’t called and I’ve been meaning to phone him but… I mean, I missed his birthday the other week and… no, I haven’t been in touch with him. Is there any evidence that Val was in on this attack on Omura, or is it just a juvie-division hunch?”

“There must be some evidence,” said K.T. “Homeland Security has a national watch for Val. Right now they’re treating him as a material witness, but they and the FBI are serious about apprehending him.”

“Jesus,” whispered Nick. He looked K.T. in the eye. “You say this is the least bad news you have for me?”

K.T.’s brown eyes never seemed to blink. She was staring at Nick the way he’d seen her stare at perps they had to take down one way or the other. “What are you going to do, Nick?”

“What do you mean? Are you asking me to drop a dime on my son?”

“No,” said K.T. “I think you need to bring him in if he shows up in person. You still have cuffs, don’t you?”

It would have been wrong for Nick to have his DPD handcuffs, but he did indeed have some that had been part of his junior private detective kit when Nick had considered making money as a bounty hunter tracking down skippers who’d violated their bonds. He tried to envision slapping those cuffs on his son. He couldn’t. But Nick realized that he was visualizing Val as he’d been when he’d last seen him, not quite eleven years old, his face still rounded by baby fat. Even this recent high school photo showed a different person.

Nick said nothing.

“DHS and the FBI and local departments won’t mess around with him, Nick,” K.T. was saying. “It says on the APB that he’s armed and dangerous.”

“Who says he’s armed?”

“Galina Kschessinska,” said K.T.

“And who the fuck is Galina Kschessinska?”

“Formerly Mrs. Galina Coyne. The dead Billy Coyne’s mother. She once worked in an office that helped coordinate Advisor Omura’s travel and security in L.A.”

“So it was an inside job,” said Nick. “Why would Ms. Galina Kschessinska know if Val was armed or not?”

“She told the LAPD that her son had told her that he’d given a nine-millimeter Beretta to Val. The pistol had fifteen rounds in the magazine.”

And what’s teenager Billy Coyne doing handing out 9-mil Berettas and why hadn’t Ms. Kschessinska mentioned this to the cops before the massacre at the Disney Center? thought Nick. But he said nothing. If what the bitch said was true, then the “armed” part of the APB was appropriate. But the “dangerous”? Nick thought of how his son used to take his fielder’s mitt to bed with him, like a stuffed animal.

“They’re doing analysis on the two slugs taken out of Billy Coyne and the third one pried out of the tunnel wall behind him,” said K.T., her voice a monotone. “But CHP Assistant Chief Ambrose, who I spoke to tonight, said the one he’d seen that came out of the wall was nine millimeter.”

“CHP Assistant Chief Ambrose?” Nick repeated stupidly. “Dale Ambrose?”

“Yeah.” K.T. had lowered the Glock to the tabletop and covered it with a newspaper, but Nick knew that it was still aimed in his general direction. “You know him?”

“Yeah. No. I mean—the Old Man helped train Ambrose here in the Colorado State Patrol. I think they had sort of a mentor-sensei thing going. I know the Old Man thought that Ambrose was going to be a good trooper. Then, a few years before my father was killed, Ambrose moved out to California. Remember when I went out to L.A. about nine years ago to transport that child rapist-killer back? I spent some time with Ambrose then and he and I have called each other for some help on things. Last time I heard, he was an assistant chief in the CHP.”

“Maybe you should talk to him, then,” said K.T.

“Yeah.”

“Part of his job as assistant chief is to head up the CHP protection details for both the governor and the Advisor. It was Ambrose’s guys, along with Omura’s own Japanese security people, who exchanged fire with the kids.”

“But not with Val,” said Nick. “There’s no evidence yet that he was there.” His voice was hard-edged but hopeful.

K.T. shrugged. The APB on Val suggested that there was plenty of evidence to assume that Val had been in on the thing with his fellow flashgang members. With the state of DNA analysis these days, if Val had been in that tunnel and done so much as breathed, they’d have the evidence soon. Nick knew what K.T.’s shrug meant—The night is young.

Just the idea—fact—of Val being in an L.A. flashgang made Nick crazy. Denver’s flashgangs, committing crimes of violence just so they could relive them again under the flash, were made up of some of the sickest fucks Nick and K.T. had ever dealt with. And the L.A. flashgangs were said to be much worse than Denver’s.

Nick felt dizzy, almost as if he’d been tasered again.

“What else?” said Nick.

“You up to hearing the rest, partner?” asked K.T.

Nick blinked at the “partner.” Either Lieutenant Lincoln was being viciously sarcastic or she’d seen how hard the news about Val had hit him. Maybe it was a bit of both.

“Yeah. Tell me.”

K.T. slid a short stack of colored files toward him.

“You can read them without leaning or sliding closer,” she said softly. She’d covered her right hand and the Glock with some sort of open catalogue or brochure. “Use just your left hand to turn the pages. Don’t lift the whole file.”

“Jesus, K.T.,” Nick said disgustedly.

She didn’t respond.

Nick read, slowly turning pages with his left hand. When he was done he said nothing.

They were copied pages of a report stating that Dara Fox Bottom and Assistant District Attorney Harvey Cohen had shared motel and hotel rooms at least ten times in the five weeks previous to Keigo Nakamura’s murder six years ago. Along with the bald statements were copies of Harvey’s business credit-card statements and payment vouchers from the district attorney’s office.

“This is bullshit,” Nick said. He pushed the files back toward K.T.

“Keep them,” she said. “How do you know they’re bullshit?”

“This one voucher shows that Harvey and Dara shared a room at the Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe,” he said, tapping the green folder. “I happen to know that they didn’t. They had adjoining rooms there.”

Now K.T. blinked. “Dara told you this?”

“No, but I’ve been using flash recently to see times when she tried to tell me that something was going on—not between her and Harvey, I don’t think, but some special project that had them running around after Keigo Nakamura. Even down to Santa Fe.”

“The invoices say that they shared a room.”

“The invoices are bullshit,” repeated Nick. “I know. I talked to someone at the Inn of the Anasazi yesterday. A maid who’s been there about forty years and who remembers Dara being there six years ago. She liked Dara.”

K.T. shook her head. “I don’t get it. What were you doing in Santa Fe and how long have you known that there was a suspicion of Harvey and Dara sharing rooms together?”

Nick answered only the second question. “About thirty-six hours ago, Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev told me that Dara had stayed at the Inn of the Anasazi with Harvey six years ago, one day after Keigo Nakamura had interviewed him, just four days before Keigo was whacked. I was in the city, so I dropped by the hotel and asked around. The dipshit at the desk wouldn’t give me any information, despite me flashing my fake shield, but I found two old spanic maids who remembered Dara being there. The one old gal even remembered their room numbers—Harvey’s and Dara’s. Adjoining, but not the same room. Not even the same suite.”

“Why would a hotel maid remember someone’s room number after six years?” asked K.T. “Someone she only met once?”

“I told you,” said Nick. “The maid, whose name was Maria Consuela Zanetta Herrera, liked Dara. They chatted and discovered, Ms. Herrera told me, that they both had boys named Val… although Maria’s son’s name was short for Valentín. And her son was twenty-nine while she remembered Dara saying that her boy was only ten.”

“Sorry I doubted you,” said K.T. She didn’t sound sorry, only tired. “But, Nick, why would all these other hotel vouchers also be faked?”

“You haven’t told me where this crap came from,” he reminded her. “It almost looks like the kind of report you see submitted to or from a grand jury.”

“It is part of a grand jury report,” said his ex-partner. “Submitted to a grand jury but gathered during an internal investigation by the office of the district attorney in March, five and a half years ago. While Mannie Ortega was still DA.”

“An internal investigation?” muttered Nick. He’d rarely been so confused. “Two months after Dara and Harvey were killed in the accident on I-Twenty-five? An interdepartmental investigation and grand jury looking into whether one of the assistant DAs was having an affair with my wife? That makes no fucking sense. None at all.”

K.T. shook her head, as if in agreement. “The joint investigation wasn’t looking into whether Harvey and Dara were screwing behind your back, Nick. It was looking into who killed Harvey and Dara.”

“Who killed them?” whispered Nick. He was glad he was sitting down. As it was, he had to grab the sides of the old wooden chair to hold himself steady.

“I told you it got worse,” whispered K.T. “Can you take this last part? I’m serious.”

“Show me,” growled Nick. “Now.” His tone told her how serious he was.

She slid the rest of the colored dossiers across the table toward him.

Nick scooted his chair closer and hunched over the table, flipping photocopied pages and reading. If K.T. wanted to shoot him, let her shoot him. Instead, she pulled the Glock out from under the concealing catalogue and holstered it. Four white-stubbled men wandered by, talking about books and heading for the flashcave cots in the darkened room at the base of the ramp.

Nick was looking at more than two hundred pages of grand jury paperwork. The secret grand jury had been seated by then district attorney Manuel Ortega in late February of the year Dara had died—seated less than a full month after her death—and the thrust of the investigation seemed to be that ADA Harvey Cohen and his assistant Dara Fox Bottom, while working on a DA department project that was still classified, had begun a clandestine love affair.

That DPD Detective First Grade Nick Bottom had learned about the affair and arranged to have his wife and her lover killed.

Nick sat back, his mouth open. He felt like screaming or moaning but knew that neither would help. Lieutenant K. T. Lincoln was watching him very carefully.

“K.T… For more than five years l’ve tried to convince myself that Dara and Harvey died in a car accident. The facts stay the same. The old couple braked suddenly in front of them… the driver of the eighteen-wheeler behind them tried to stop, couldn’t… the driver died in the fire. And nobody knew anybody else, nobody was connected to anybody. That’s what all the reports said, remember?”

K.T. tapped the photo of the truck driver, her short fingernail making a sharp, ugly sound. “Do you recognize him, Nick?”

“Yeah, of course. Phillip James Johnson. I looked into it myself. He’d been a trucker for twelve years, no serious accidents, no safety violations. He just couldn’t…”

“The name and most of his paperwork history were bullshit,” said K.T. She slid another photo out of the heap. “Phillip Johnson was actually this man. Recognize him?”

It took the better part of a minute for Nick to do so. Even then he couldn’t believe it was the same man as the truck driver. He set the photos next to each other. The second photo was of a man sixty or seventy pounds lighter than Phillip James Johnson—different facial structure, even allowing for the fat, different nose, different chin, different hair color… hell, even the eye color was different.

“The DNA showed conclusively that Phillip James Johnson was actually your old CI, Ricardo ‘Swak’ Moretti.”

Nick kept looking. He’d used Moretti as a confidential informant when he’d still been a patrolman and a few times after he made detective. The petty crook’s nickname of Swak came from his involvement in insurance scams—especially highway and street swoop-and-squats where the mob enlisted the “victims” just as they did for slip-and-fall claims. Moretti had never become a made man, just the kind of scumbag always found bottom-feeding near the real mob, always running errands for punks and hit men, always dreaming of a real score. But as a confidential informant, Moretti had been unreliable in most instances—not even worth keeping on a small dole that came out of the patrolman’s or detective’s own pocket. Nick hadn’t talked to Swak Moretti in ten years. Longer.

He studied the photos again. Yes… it was possible. Something similar about the eye sockets and teeth—they hadn’t fixed the teeth—but…

“This guy’s undergone major plastic surgery,” Nick said aloud, rubbing his cheeks and hearing the stubble scrape. “Why? The mob would never pay for such a thing. Swak Moretti was a nobody. And if you’re paying a fortune in old bucks for cosmetic surgery, why make yourself fatter, with an uglier nose and bigger, dumber-looking ears? It doesn’t make sense. Plus, I read the original DNA identification, K.T. It showed the dead driver was Phillip James Johnson.”

“All good cover story,” said K.T. “Including the plastic surgery. Somebody was setting your old pal Swak up as a hit man, weren’t they?”

“It doesn’t make any…,” began Nick.

K.T. slid another stack of photocopies toward him. “We have phone records of you calling Moretti four times—twice in November of the year Keigo was killed, once in late December, a final time three days before the… accident… that killed Dara and Harvey.”

Nick’s head snapped back. “It didn’t happen. I never phoned him.”

K.T. touched the photo of the old couple who died when their Buick gelding had been struck first by Dara and Harvey’s car, then by the truck that had burst into flames. “Javier and Dulcinea Gutiérrez,” she said. “Their names were real. Only their citizenship status on their NICCs and local background histories were fake. They were brought in from Ciudad Juárez three weeks before the so-called accident. We have Swak Moretti’s phone records arranging that as well.”

“I never phoned Moretti,” repeated Nick.

K.T. gave him the same look that he’d given to so many cornered and lying-through-their-teeth perps.

“Look, Nick,” she said softly. “You’re the one, just this week, who begged me to look into this stuff. I said it was an accident. I said ‘Who volunteers for a swoop-and-squat where you’re going to die?’ You said… You owe me this favor, K.T. Look into it. So I did. Here it is.”

Nick rubbed his cheek and chin again. “It doesn’t make any sense. Even if Moretti was some sort of deep-cover hit man for the mob—and trust me, K.T., the asshole wasn’t smart enough to be a hit man for anyone. Even the Denver branch of the Mafia, as decrepit and decadent as it is, wouldn’t think of hiring him… much less pay for all those weird plastic surgeries to hide his identity. And why would they hide his identity anyway? Mob hits are two twenty-two-caliber slugs to the skull so they rattle around in there, drop the gun, walk away.”

“Unless someone really didn’t want this to be considered a hit, Nick.”

“Yeah, but the mob doesn’t work that way.”

“I agree,” said the lieutenant. “But you could have.”

Nick didn’t answer. He pawed through the dossiers. “This grand jury stuff is nuts. They have enough evidence here—fake though most of it is—to indict anyone. But there was no indictment. The grand jury was dissolved in April, five and a half years ago, K.T., and this stuff has been sitting around gathering dust since then. How’d you get all this?”

“I called in every favor I ever had and made some promises I hope I never have to deliver on,” she said tiredly. “You asked me to, Nick.” She shoved the entire stack of colored folders closer to him. “But you keep it. If you ever say I know anything about any of this, I’ll call you a motherfucking liar.”

“What am I going to do with this?” asked Nick, stacking the folders. They made a pile almost eight inches high.

“Who gives a shit, partner?”

Nick slammed his fist on the stack. “If Ortega had a grand jury seated and all this evidence piled up through his own department investigators and someone in Internal Affairs in our department, why didn’t he use it? Obviously there was no indictment. Not even a leak to the press. How can you gather so much evidence that one of your Major Crimes Unit’s top detectives is a rogue killer—murdering his own wife and an assistant district attorney—and then just sit on it? That’s obstruction of justice right there.”

“You’ll have to ask Ortega.”

“I will,” said Nick. “Tomorrow morning. In his office.”

K.T. shook her head. “The mayor’s in Washington with the governor and Senator Grimes. Something about more immigration reform or some such. Advisor Nakamura’s supposed to be meeting them there on Monday for testimony for some subcommittee.”

“I’ll go to Washington,” said Nick. He rubbed his tired eyes. What was he thinking? As always, he was forgetting about his son.

How many years had he put his son down the priority list? Lower than his flashback addiction. Before that, lower than his grieving for Dara. Before that, lower than his fucking job as a detective. Before that, lower than his love of his wife. Before that… had he ever put his son at or near the top of his priorities?

Nick had a rush of absolute certainty, as physical as a wave of nausea, that Val would tell him he, Val Bottom, had never been his father’s top priority.

“No,” said Nick. “I’m going to L.A. To get Val. To find my son and bring him back here. I’ll deal with Ortega later.”

K. T. Lincoln stood. “Whatever you do, whomever you do it to, don’t call me again, Nick. I never dug out those grand jury files. I didn’t meet you here tonight. The only time I’ve seen you in the last three years was at the Denver Diner last Tuesday—too many people saw me there for me to deny that, plus I had to give the diner’s number to Dispatch—but that’s also the last place I’ll ever see you. If anyone asks, I’ll say you wanted some money—I said no—and then we chewed the fat for a few minutes about old times, and I decided that our old times together hadn’t been all that hot. Good-bye, Nick.”

“Good-bye,” Nick said absently. He’d opened the accident investigation dossier and was looking at the diagrams and photos from the fire that had killed all five people, including his wife. “K.T… what kind of undercover hit man volunteers to die horribly in a truck fire of his own making? How does that…”

But K. T. Lincoln was gone and Nick was talking to himself in the dirty, poorly lighted space.

Sunday morning and the gray Sasayaki-tonbo whisper-dragonfly ’copter touched down on the flat roof of Nick’s Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums building. Or, rather, a Sasayaki-tonbo whisper-dragonfly ’copter landed there. This one was larger and fancier than the one Nick had flown in down to Raton Pass.

Hideki Sato jumped out and frisked Nick carefully. The ex-detective was carrying no weapon. Sato went through the small gym bag—no weapons there, either, although there were six extra magazines of 9mm ammo—and then removed the unsealed padded mailing envelope. Nick’s Glock 9 was in there, no clip, no round in the spout, and broken down.

“Just like you specified,” said Nick.

Sato sealed the envelope and said nothing. Taking the gym bag, he gestured for Nick to enter the helicopter. Above, the broad, strangely tufted rotors were idling.

There was an airlock-sized room, evidently a CMRI security screen so necessary in the decades since dedicated jihadis had discovered that they could pack their body cavities full of plastic explosive, and then another door to go through. Nick and Sato stepped into a small luxurious room—luxurious in a spare, shoji- and tatami- and flower-decorated sense—that might have been in Nakamura’s mansion up in Evergreen had it not been for the view out the broad, multilayered windows. Nakamura was sitting in a swiveling leather chair behind a lacquered desk by two of those windows.

Nick hadn’t seen the billionaire since he was interviewed and hired nine days earlier—it seemed much longer ago to him—and Hiroshi Nakamura seemed exactly the same, down to the carefully parted gray hair, the manicured nails, and the black suit and narrow black tie. There were other comfortable-looking chairs and a couch in the small space, but Nakamura didn’t ask Nick to sit. Sato also remained standing, far enough to one side to seem subordinate but close enough to act as a bodyguard if Nick were to lunge toward Nakamura. Sato’s polymorphic smart-cast was thin enough and flexible enough to fit under the right sleeve of his dark suit jacket.

“It is a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Bottom,” said Nakamura. “Mr. Sato has explained to me that you have a request. I am traveling to Washington, D.C., today and my private jet is scheduled to leave from Denver International Airport in fifteen minutes. I give you one and a half minutes to make your request.”

“My son’s in serious trouble in Los Angeles,” said Nick. “His life is in danger. I need to get to L.A. and don’t have the money for an airline ticket. No cars are getting through, and the truck convoys aren’t even allowing passengers going west. I don’t have enough money for that either.”

Mr. Nakamura cocked his head ever so slightly to one side. “I have not heard a request yet, Mr. Bottom.”

Nick took a breath. He had less than a minute left.

“Mr. Nakamura, you offered me fifteen thousand dollars—old dollars—if I solved your son’s murder. I’m close to solving it. I think I could name the killer right now, but I need a bit more confirmation. I was going to ask you for the price of an air ticket to L.A.—seven hundred old bucks now—in exchange for that fifteen thousand. But they’ve shut down all commercial, freight, and civil-aviation flights into and out of L.A.”

Nakamura waited. He did not glance at his Rolex, but there was a black-face clock with a second hand right there on the cabin’s bulkhead.

“Nakamura Enterprises have regular flights to Las Vegas,” said Nick. He felt sweat trickle down his ribs. “I checked. From Las Vegas I’d be able to book some sort of transport—private plane, Jeep, whatever—into Los Angeles to look for my son. So get me room on any of your cargo or courier flights, today if possible, and advance me, say, three hundred bucks—old dollars—so I can pay someone for that last leg of the trip, and I swear that I’ll tell you who murdered your son when I get back. You can keep the rest of the fifteen thousand.”

“Very generous of you, Mr. Bottom,” said Nakamura with only the slightest hint of a smile. “Why don’t you tell me right now who murdered my son, collect the full fifteen thousand, and thus pay your way to Los Angeles—perhaps in your own private aircraft?”

“I can’t prove it now,” said Nick. “I guarantee that when I show you who killed your son, you’ll demand your proof.”

“But instead of concluding the investigation,” said Nakamura, “you are asking to take time off—how long? A week? Two weeks? In order to aid your son in his flight from justice. I understand he is wanted for murder.”

“No, sir. The LAPD and Homeland Security just have a warrant out for Val as a possible material witness. Look, I’m going to get to L.A. one way or the other to search for my boy, Mr. Nakamura. You’d do the same if your son were still alive and needed your help. If you help me get there today, I’ll be back sooner and able to wrap up the investigation. I know what evidence I need to find, if my hunch about your son’s killer is correct… and I think it is. Help me save my son so I can close the investigation on your son’s murder.”

Nakamura looked at Sato, but the security man’s expression did not change. The billionaire’s wristwatch chimed softly. Nakamura steepled his fingers and looked at Nick.

“Mr. Bottom, do you know where John Wayne Airport is?”

“Yeah, it’s in Santa Ana or Irvine—near there—about forty miles south of L.A.”

“We have no cargo aircraft going there presently,” said Nakamura, “but next Friday, September twenty-fourth, a flight from Tokyo will be refueling there between five-thirty and seven p.m., Pacific Daylight Savings Time. You will be on that flight, with or without your son. Is this understood?”

Nick wasn’t sure he did understand. “You’re giving me a way home to Denver if I find Val? Next Friday?”

“Yes,” said the billionaire. “There is a Nakamura Enterprises cargo flight leaving Denver International Airport freight terminal at eleven a.m. today bound for Las Vegas, Nevada. I shall make a call. They will find room for you on the flight. It will not be comfortable but it will be a quick flight. This will give you until the Friday fueling stop at John Wayne Airport to find your son. If you find him earlier, or must… ah… leave the Los Angeles area, go to the freight terminal at John Wayne Airport at any time before Friday and you will receive food and shelter there until the Friday-evening flight. At that time—Friday—you must return and tell me what you know about my son’s death. Or even what you think you know.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” said Nick. He was trying not to weep but the effort made his throat and chest hurt. “About the money, Mr. Nakamura… the bribe money I’ll need to…”

“Mr. Sato has the contract ready, Mr. Bottom. Only your thumbprint and signature are necessary. We will advance you five hundred dollars today, old American dollars, in exchange for your waiving the fifteen-thousand-dollar payment if you solve my son’s murder. The five hundred dollars is not a gift. If you do not solve my son’s murder within the next two weeks, there will be… penalties.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nick, not giving a fig for any penalties.

Sato held out an AllPad with the contract on the screen. Nick ignored the words, thumbprinted it, and used the pad stylus to sign. Sato gestured. Nick fumbled out his NICC, which the security chief ran through the same AllPad.

When Nick got the card back, he saw that he had a new balance of $750,000 new bucks—$500 in old, real dollars.

“This has taken longer than you promised,” snapped Nakamura. “You may ride with us to Denver International Airport, Mr. Bottom. If you are ready.”

“I’m ready.”

“Not in here, Mr. Bottom. You may ride up front with the pilots. Mr. Sato will show you the way and hand you your luggage.”

The door—hatch was more like it—was only just large enough to allow Sato to squeeze through. The Sasayaki-tonbo dragonfly was airborne before Nick got strapped into his jump seat behind the pilots.

Nick found a pilot willing to fly him into L.A. within an hour of his landing in Las Vegas. Actually, the flight would be to the untowered civil-aviation field at Flabob in Rubidoux, out near Riverside just south of the Pomona Freeway east of the I-15.

That was close enough for Nick. He’d find his own way into the city, to Leonard’s apartment near Echo Park. He’d have a little more than $300,000 in new bucks left—plus his Glock 9.

But the pilot wouldn’t fly until after dark—actually, until almost midnight—since all flights into the city were illegal, so Nick had too many hours to kill in Las Vegas. The delay drove him crazy, but all the bootleg pilots flew only after dark, so he had no choice but to wait.

After dinner, toward sunset, Nick made his way to the high wall that surrounded modern Las Vegas. He decided to walk the six miles around the south end of the city along the top of the wall, then the other mile back to the airport. It would help him get rid of some of his nervous energy.

Just after sunset, Nick paused to look out at the hundreds, possibly thousands, of trucks and the tent city that had grown up in the desert beyond the southern edge of the city. He could hear motorcycles roar, gunshots, and shouts. Countless vehicle lights illuminated the hardpan out there and torches and bonfires roared in the tent cities that catered to the hard-assed independent truckers.

Nick knew that convoys headed west to L.A. had been shut down, but some convoys were still coming east from the city. Looking out at the lights and listening to the distant roars, he realized that if Leonard and Val had somehow bought their way onto one of those final convoys, they could be out there in the desert right now, part of that light and noise, less than a mile away.

Is Professor Leonard Fox savvy enough—connected enough—to get Val and himself out of town that way? thought Nick. And even if Leonard were that smart and connected, Nick would have no idea where to look for them.

No, getting into the battlefield hellhole that was Los Angeles was Nick’s best shot. Nick had no idea what the odds were of him getting out of L.A. alive—much less of actually finding Val and getting them both out, Leonard too if he wanted to leave—but he’d worry about that later.

Nick tore himself away from the sight of the torches and bonfires and truck lights. His loaded Glock holstered on his hip and his small duffel bag in hand, he continued walking east along the southern wall around Las Vegas, planning to get back to McCarran International Airport with at least two hours to kill before his pilot tried to get him and the little Cessna into Battlefield Los Angeles.