Flashback

2.05 Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25

Val’s plan was to use his gun to make someone in Washington Park give him their phone so that he could call the Old Man and set up the meeting—the plan was to steal some homeless person’s phone—but as it turned out, the people he met in the park were happy to loan their phone to him. After they’d made him a good, hot lunch and given him a blanket and pillow and let him sleep a few hours.

There were various homeless in the park but the two Val ran into first were an older black couple who he soon learned were named Harold and Dottie Davison. They were older than the Old Man but younger than Leonard, somewhere in that hard-to-estimate age for Val, in their midsixties, maybe. Harold’s short, curly hair and long sideburns had a tinge of gray. Thinking that they’d be easy to intimidate, Val approached them with his hand in his jacket and fingers on the butt of the 9mm Beretta.

They immediately welcomed him and introduced themselves. Dottie made a huge fuss out of the cut on Val’s ankle and made him sit down on the stump outside their little tent while she bustled around in a makeshift medical kit, finding iodine and other antiseptic, folding back the leg of his jeans and cleaning his wound, saying that it should have stitches, and then cleaning it and wrapping it in clean, white, tight bandages.

When that was done, Val was on the verge of demanding their phone when Dottie said, “You must be hungry, boy. Look at you, I bet you haven’t eaten since breakfast or before. Lucky for you, we have some bean with bacon soup going on this very campfire and a clean bowl and spoon waiting for you.”

Val loved bean with bacon soup. His mother used to make it for him on weekends and days he was home from school. Just the out-of-the-can Campbell’s kind, but it was salty and tasty of bacon and he’d loved it. He’d never had it in all the years he was living with Leonard.

Dottie Davison had also made fresh, hot biscuits, which Val couldn’t seem to get enough of.

The couple ate some soup with him—Val had the sense that they’d already eaten but were keeping him company to be polite—and asked him some questions. Trying to keep the answers vague, Val told them about how he’d come into town on a truck convoy with his grandfather.

“Where is your grandfather now, Val?” asked Harold.

Kicking himself for giving out so much information—at least he hadn’t told them he’d come from L.A.—Val said, “Oh, visiting some relatives. I’m supposed to hook up with him later. That’s why I needed to borrow a phone. To let him know where I am.” Wanting to change the subject, Val looked around between mouthfuls of soup and biscuits and said, “This tent village is full of families. It looks a lot friendlier than the Hungarian Freedom Park and others Leonard—my grandfather—and I walked by today.”

He told the couple about the men who’d followed them, obviously intent on robbing them. But Val didn’t mention that he’d chased them away by showing a gun.

Dottie waved her hand. “Oh, those parks along Speer Boulevard are terrible places. Terrible. They’re all just single men—the New Bonus Army, they call themselves—and I doubt if one of them is above theft or rape. The city of Denver pays them a weekly stipend so that they don’t create a riot. It’s blackmail and it’s not right.”

Val grunted and ate.

As if to shift to a happier topic, Dottie Davison said, “Did you walk past the old Denver Country Club and see all those blue tents?”

“Yeah, I think I did notice that,” said Val, helping himself to another fresh biscuit.

“Very strange,” said the woman. “There have been thousands of Japanese soldiers camping there for two months now. They never come out. No one knows why Japanese soldiers would be here in Denver… while our own boys not much older than you are over in China fighting for them.”

“Japanese?” said Val. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dottie. “We have a Japanese lady here with her children and grandchildren—she’d married a nice American marine on Okinawa and came back with him years ago, but he died—and she tells us that she heard those soldiers talking, the sergeants or officers or whoever they are shouting at the troops, and they were all speaking Japanese.”

“Weird,” said Val.

“Oh, they have tanks in there and other sort of armored… things… and those airplanes with the wings that fold up and down and that fly like helicopters.”

“Ospreys,” said Harold. “They’re called Ospreys.”

“Weird,” Val said again.

When he was finished, Val sat there feeling full and sleepy and a little stupid, sure of what he had to do, but not sure of how to do it. He needed to tell the Old Man to bring as much money as he could—Val needed that $200 old bucks for the fake NICC—and then he needed a private place to do it.

To shoot my father, came the phrase from the more honest part of Val’s exhausted and overloaded mind.

His first plan had been to steal a phone, tell the Old Man to meet him with the money, take the money, and just shoot him here in the park. Nobody need know he’d ever been here.

Except… when Harold and Dottie had asked his name, he’d given it to them. He’d even mentioned Leonard by name. He’d done everything but give them his goddamned fingerprints.

So it would have to happen somewhere else.

“You look worn out, son,” said Harold. “These are both clean. Why don’t you lie down a spell there in the shade of the vestibule awning? It’s getting hot out here in the sun.”

The older man gave Val a pillow with a clean pillowcase—how could they keep things clean and ironed-looking living homeless out here in the park? Val wondered—and a thin, gray blanket.

“No, I’m good,” mumbled Val, but the shaded area in the grassy vestibule area just outside their oversized tent did look cool. He lay down for just a minute so he could think through what he had to do and what sequence he had to do it in. The breeze came up and he folded the blanket over himself.

Val awoke hours later—he had no watch but it seemed to be almost dusk—and cursed himself. He was such a fuck-up.

“I guess you were tired after all,” said Dottie, who had something heating up on the grill over their campfire. Whatever it was, it smelled good.

Val threw off the blanket. For a second upon awakening, he’d forgotten the pages of indictment in the colored folders he’d found hidden in his old man’s cubie—forgotten the fact that his father had conspired to have his mother killed. Any thought of hunger disappeared as that obscene revelation came back to him like black goo flowing out of a backed-up sewer pipe.

“Can I borrow your phone to make a call?” he asked the woman. “It’s a local call. I don’t have the money right now, but I’ll pay you back later.”

“Phooey on paying back,” laughed Dottie. “We all get a chance to pay back in different ways, to different folks. Here’s the phone, Val.”

He carried it fifty feet away until he could speak privately. For some reason he didn’t expect the Old Man to answer and was mentally preparing the message he was going to leave, so when he heard his father pick up and say his own name, Val panicked and clicked the phone shut.

He took a minute to regain his composure. Val realized how screwed up he was these days. The first thing he’d been tempted to shout when he heard the Old Man’s voice was, “You didn’t call me on my birthday!”

Stay frosty, Val my man, he told himself. Oddly, he heard the words being spoken in Billy Coyne’s mocking voice.

Val hit redial. But when he heard his father’s voice again, he began shouting and babbling—just telling the Old Man to come to this side of the park to pick him up—and it was only after he’d broken the connection that Val realized that he’d forgotten to tell Nick Bottom to bring at least $200 old bucks in cash.

All right… all right. You can’t do it here at the park anyway, so you get in the car and make him drive to an ATM and do it after he gets the cash out.

But do it where?

An hour. The Old Man had told him it would take him a fucking hour to come a few blocks to get him. Here he was, hurt and bleeding—or at least he would be if it hadn’t been for Harold and Dottie’s bandages and antiseptic and aspirin and hot meal—and the fucking Old Man couldn’t even bother to come to get him right away.

Maybe he knows it’s a trap. He must’ve seen all the grand jury stuff thrown around his cubie and Leonard’s probably told him how pissed I am.

And what was that the Old Man had said about Leonard having a heart attack? That didn’t make any sense. His grandfather had been fine when Val had left him a few hours earlier. The Old Man must be lying… but why that lie?

And if Leonard had suffered a heart attack—Val was pretty sure that the Old Man had said a sort of heart attack, whatever the fuck that meant—Val didn’t know what he could do about it. It was too bad, but Leonard was old. And Val had known for a while now that his grandfather had been hurting, some kind of chest pains, no matter how hard old Leonard had tried to hide it from him. Nobody lives forever.

Nothing I can do about it, thought Val. But he realized at once that if he killed his father, there’d be no one left to take care of Leonard. That Gunny G. character would almost certainly throw a dying old man out of that shitty mall-turned-cubies fortress, whether Leonard was dying or not.

Not my fucking problem, thought Val. That had been the shout-mantra of his—Billy Coyne’s, really—flashgang. Not… my… fucking… problem.

Dottie Davison wanted to feed him another meal, but Val gave the overly friendly old couple their phone back, thanked them awkwardly for the use of the pillow and blanket, and said he had to be going. He said his grandfather was going to pick him up down the street a ways.

Harold still tried to talk him into staying a while but Val shook his head, turned his back, and walked around the lake toward the trees and larger tent village of the homeless on the other side until he was out of sight of the old couple. He kept his hand on the butt of the Beretta in his belt.

He finally saw the rusty old G.M. gelding the Old Man had described. There’d been several beaters come driving through this west side of the park, but Val could tell by how slowly this one was going, and by the weird bullet holes in the hood—even with the low sunlight reflecting and making it impossible for Val to see through the windshield—that it had to be the Old Man. Hunting for him. Not knowing what was really waiting for him.

At the last minute, Val ducked behind some pine trees and let the car go slowly past.

Chickenshit!

But it wasn’t just fear, Val knew as he crouched behind the trees and waited for his Old Man to make another slow circuit of the park loop back to him.

He just wasn’t sure that he could get in the car and show the gun and force his father to take him to an ATM and all that crap and then do what he had to do. He hadn’t been able to talk to the Old Man on the phone, he hated him so much… how could he sit in a car with him for ten minutes?

Plus, the Old Man was a cop. Or had been before he became a hopeless flash addict. He used to be fast. The Old Man had seen people—punks—brandishing guns at him before and had handled the situation. The front seat of that piece-a-shit car would be a cramped space. A cop might know how to get a gun away from someone in the passenger seat without getting shot himself.

Val realized that he was losing his nerve.

Just shoot him. Just walk up to the car and shoot him. And fuck the money.

He realized that the whole thing about becoming a free trucker was bullshit. He didn’t even know how to drive a car. He’d never learn how to drive a truck with all its gears—just backing one of those rigs up with the trailer attached was a nightmare. And he’d never get $300,000 in new bucks to pay for that fake NICC. It was all bullshit.

Just shoot him. He murdered Mom. Walk up to the car when he comes back around and shoot him.

The old G.M. gelding rattled around the parkway loop north of the lake again and headed south toward Val and the homeless tent village.

Val pulled the Beretta from his belt, worked the slide to chamber a round, and held the weapon behind his back. He took five steps out of the pine trees to stand next to the road.

He could see the Old Man’s face this time and saw the jerk of his head as his father saw him. The car brake-screeched to a stop.

Val realized that he was on the wrong side of the road. To get a clean shot, he should have been on the east side, the driver’s side. The Old Man would know something was weird if Val walked around the front or back of the car to get closer to the driver’s-side window.

As if understanding Val’s problem, the Old Man touched a button and the passenger-side window clunked down.

Val walked right up to the car and—holding the suddenly heavy Beretta in both hands—aimed the muzzle at the Old Man’s blandly staring face. Stiff-armed, not shaking, Val extended the pistol inside the window until it was less than three feet from its target.

Doitnow doitnow doitnow don’twait doitnow…

Nick Bottom didn’t seem to be surprised. He said softly, “I’m wearing Kevlar-three under my shirt, Val. You’ll have to aim for my head… the face.”

Val blinked. The Old Man was trying to mess with his head.

Squeeze the trigger!! Doitnow… doitnow… don’twait… doitnow…

Val’s finger was off the trigger guard and on the trigger, exerting pressure.

“The safety’s still on, kid,” said the Old Man in the same tone he’d used to help Val learn how to balance his bicycle.

Val didn’t believe his father but looked anyway. It was true. The safety lever was down, the red dot covered. Fuck!! Fumbling with both hands, he got the safety lever up until the red dot was visible.

The Old Man could have floored the gelding and gotten away in those seconds, but he hadn’t done a thing. His left arm over the steering wheel, his right hand empty and visible on the beat-up old console between the seats, the Old Man just looked at Val.

He knows he deserves to die for killing Mom, thought Val. He came here knowing what I had to do. He’s guilty as hell.

Val’s finger was on the trigger again when he saw movement in the backseat. His arms still extended stiffly, the pistol aimed at the middle of the Old Man’s forehead, Val flicked a glance left.

Leonard was lying across the backseat nestled in a clumsy nest of pillows. The old man’s mouth was open and his eyes were closed. A bottle with some sort of clear liquid in it had been wired to the hook above the left-side car door where dry cleaning was usually hung and an IV line ran to Leonard’s bare and bruised left arm.

“What the fuck?” said Val.

The Old Man turned his head to look back at Leonard. “He’s all right. Or rather, he’s a mess from that attack I told you about. It’s called aortic stenosis and means that one of the valves of his heart is pretty messed up. Unless he gets a surgical valve replacement, your grandfather’s future looks pretty dim. But he’s okay right now. Dr. Tak gave him a sedative so he’d sleep awhile.”

Val didn’t ask who Dr. Tak was. He shook his head, although he wasn’t sure what he was denying. The Old Man’s attempt to distract him, maybe. Val peered down the iron sights at his father’s face.

Now!

Val knew he could do it. He remembered the muffled blast and kick of the Beretta as he’d fired it through the ski mask in his hand. He remembered Coyne saying “Ugh!” and dropping the flashlight. He remembered the round hole in the T-shirt just above Vladimir Putin’s pale face blobbing out into a red butterfly and continuing to grow and Coyne smirking at Val and saying “You shot me.”

Val remembered shooting the other boy in the throat and remembered the sound of Billy’s teeth snapping off as Coyne’s open mouth hit the cement floor of the tunnel. He remembered killing the animated T-shirt Putin AI by putting a third bullet between the Russian’s two beady little eyes.

That’s what he had to do now.

Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull!

Val realized that he was panting and weeping at the same time. His arms were shaking.

The Old Man leaned forward, but not to grab the gun. He opened the passenger-side door.

Val pulled the pistol back from the window as the door opened. The muzzle was aimed up under his own chin now and his finger was still on the trigger with the safety off.

“Get in,” said Nick. “Be careful with that thing.” He did reach for the pistol now, but only to push the safety lever back down. He didn’t take the gun away from Val as the boy collapsed into the passenger seat.

Nick pulled out of the park onto South Downing Street and drove north.

“I know what you read in my cubie,” he said, “but I didn’t kill your mother, Val. I could never have hurt your mother. I think that down deep, you know that.”

Val was shaking and concentrating on not throwing up in the car. The air from the open window helped a little bit.

“You’re the one I hurt,” continued Nick. “I’ve spent the last five and a half years with Dara under flashback and I completely fucked up every responsibility I had toward you. Sorry doesn’t come close to covering it, but I am sorry, Val.”

Val felt the hatred surge up into his chest again. He could have shot his father in the head at that moment—the rage would have allowed it—but his arms were totally without strength. He couldn’t lift the heavy Beretta if his life depended on it.

Approaching Speer Boulevard, there was a tremendous roar and both Val and the Old Man looked up as a massive Osprey III VTOL roared overhead, its wings and turboprops shifting into level flight. Canvas covering the high Denver Country Club fence that ran hundreds of meters along the street there vibrated and tried to tear free of the wire.

“What the fuck?” said Nick.

“Japs,” muttered Val. “Dottie and Harold Davison said that there are thousands of Jap soldiers in the old country club here.”

Nick didn’t ask who Dottie and Harold Davison were. Watching the Osprey fly off to the west, he said softly, “It’s illegal for the Japanese to bring troops into this country.”

Val shrugged. “Can we go to the old neighborhood?” he asked. Maybe, he thought, if he could just see the old house, the memory of his mother standing on the porch waiting for him the way she did every day he walked home from school would help him lift this pistol, aim it, and squeeze the trigger.

“We don’t have enough charge,” said Nick, turning west onto Speer Boulevard. “I have about nine miles left on this piece of crap and it’s four miles to Six Flags Over the Jews.”

“Six Flags…,” repeated Val, looking at the Old Man. Had his father gone completely nuts?

“K.T.’s left us a car there… a real car,” said Nick. “At least I hope to God she has. You remember K. T. Lincoln? My old partner?”

Val remembered her… a dangerous lady, from a young kid’s perspective. But his mother had liked K.T. for reasons young Val hadn’t understood.

“Anyway,” said Nick, “the same people who worked so hard to create that grand jury frame-up you read about are out to get me right now. They might hurt you and Leonard if you don’t get out of town. This gelding’ll be lucky to get up the street to Six Flags where the car’s waiting, but once we get there, you take the car K.T.’s parked there and get Leonard the hell out of town.”

“I don’t know how to drive,” said Val.

Nick barked a bitter laugh. “Leonard told me before he got his sedative that you wanted to get an NIC Teamsters Card so you could drive big rigs.”

“It was all bullshit,” muttered Val. “Everything is bullshit.”

“I won’t argue there,” said Nick. “Leonard said you had some NICC counterfeiter guy’s name and address. Show it to me.”

Feeling as drugged as his grandfather, Val poked through his jacket pockets—filled with extra magazines and loose rounds for the useless Beretta—and found the card. He handed it to Nick.

“Yeah, I know this guy,” said Nick. “K.T. and I sent him up for five years when you were a baby. He lives deep in reconquista turf now. You’d have a hard time getting there today.”

“I don’t have the money anyway,” said Val. They were passing the Hungarian Freedom Park with its Bonus Army of single homeless guys. There were police cars and vans parked along the curb and a lot of uniformed cops in riot gear. It all seemed a million miles away to Val. “I’d need two hundred bucks for the new card… old bucks.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have it to give to you,” said Nick. “A few days ago I did. But I blew it on bribes and on paying a pilot to fly me from Las Vegas to L.A.”

Val stared. “L.A.? Why did you go there?”

“To find you.”

“Bullshit,” barked Val.

“All right, it’s bullshit,” said Nick. “I blew it all on gambling in Las Vegas. I don’t care what you think. But I couldn’t give you the two hundred now even if I had it.”

“Why not?”

“I’d use it as a down payment in getting Leonard this valve replacement surgery. He needs it to live and Medicare won’t get around to paying for it until he’s been dead for a decade or two.”

As if hearing his name, Leonard stirred and groaned in the backseat.

Val looked at his grandfather and his own chest hurt.

“In a dream I had last night,” said Nick, “the three of us were hightailing it to Texhoma, Oklahoma, in an old Chevy Camaro SS with a supercharged V-8.”

“What the fuck is in Texhoma, Oklahoma?”

“A border-station crossing into the Republic of Texas.”

“They’d pay for Leonard’s surgery in Texas?”

Nick shot a glance at the boy. “No, but they’d have it available if we could pay for it. And I’d find a way to.”

“I hear that Texas doesn’t let in useless people,” said Val. “Especially useless people who are flashback addicts.”

Nick didn’t respond to that.

After a moment, Val said, “So the car that your friend… K.T… is leaving for us at Six Flags is an old gas-burning V-8 Camaro?”

“Probably not,” said Nick. “I just wanted the fastest car in the DPD impound lot. Remember Mad Max’s Last of the V-8 Interceptors?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” lied Val.

Nick shrugged. They were approaching the overpass crossing I-25 and he turned left toward the abandoned towers and roller-coaster steel of the old Elitch Gardens. The gelding told him that it had 3½ miles of charge left in it.

There was one vehicle parked away from the others, facing the wrong way, in the parking lot. Nick stopped near it and whispered, “Ah, Jesus Christ, no.”

He checked on Leonard and got out of the gelding. A moment later, Val did the same, still carrying his pistol.

Nick pulled a little box from the left rear wheel well. Folded around the ignition key fob was a note in K.T.’s handwriting—The impound lot’s almost empty and I could never get anything out of it today. This is my personal vehicle. Good luck.”

Nick and Val stood looking at the blue Menlo Park all-battery mini-van. On a good day, these things had a range of around 100 miles.

“At least it’s a lighter blue,” muttered Nick. Val had no idea what the Old Man was talking about.

Nick had just offered the keys to Val and was about to say something when four desert-camouflage tan M-ATVs roared across the parking lot and screeched to a stop around them. A dozen Japanese men in black ballistic cloth SWAT armor, all carrying automatic weapons, boiled out of the big vehicles and aimed their weapons at Val and Nick.

Val started to bring his Beretta up and the Old Man grabbed his wrist, squeezing hard until he dropped the gun. Nick himself made no motion toward a weapon.

A bulky Jap also in ballistic black came down the rear ramp of the closest Oshkosh M-ATV and looked silently as one of the younger men frisked Nick and took a 9mm Glock from his belt and a .32-caliber pistol from an ankle holster. Another ninja, who’d picked up the Beretta, now frisked Val and relieved him of all the pistol magazines and loose rounds. Two other men in black were easily lifting Leonard—still sleeping—out of the back of the gelding. A third man held the IV bottle.

The two ninjas who’d frisked Val and Nick nodded to the big man as other men with automatic weapons began herding the father and son into the back of the big M-ATV.

“Bottom-san,” said the man in black, “it is time.”