K.T. started to hand it back to him as if the box had the plague.
Nick held his palms out and shook his head. “I was joking. It’s barely strong enough to stick to the car. Left rear wheel well.”
“All right,” she said and turned again to leave. “But I’m not promising anything…”
Nick touched her shoulder again but gently this time. “K.T.?”
She glared back at him, but not with the real fury he’d seen before. “What?”
“Whether you find a car for us or not, if today doesn’t turn out well for me… and I have a hunch…” He shook his head and started over. “If something happens to me, and Val and his grandfather show up, can you look out for them for me? Find a safe place for them until…”
She stared at him and there was real pain in her dark eyes. She said nothing. Nor did she walk away.
“You’ve met Leonard,” Nick hurried on. “He’s a good man but he’s… you know… been an academic his whole life. If he got Val out of L.A. safely, he’s probably already exceeded his real-world survival capabilities and Leonard is already almost seventy-five years old…” He shut up. He couldn’t find the right words.
“You’re asking me to watch over Val if Nakamura or someone kills you today,” said K.T.
Nick nodded stupidly, his eyes full and his throat tight.
“Oh, Nick, Nick…,” K.T. said sadly and turned on her heel and walked away from him toward the distant wall of garage doors.
Nick knew that this was a yes. Or at least he took it as one.
HE PULLED THE GELDING into a thirty-minute parking area near the capitol at the top of the hill and looked down from south of the flaking gold capitol dome toward the valley where the Coors Field prison and Mile High DHS Detention Center straddled the junction of Cherry Creek and the Platte River. He lowered his driver’s-side window and shut the batteries off.
What next? For the first time in the two weeks since Nakamura hired him, he had a few hours to and for himself. In twelve hours or less—probably less, maybe a lot less—he’d be summoned to appear in front of that billionaire again to either announce he was sure who’d killed Keigo Nakamura or admit that he’d failed. Either way, he thought, Nakamura’s response wasn’t going to be gentle.
Nick Bottom hated puzzles. He’d hated them since he was a kid. But he had always been eerily good at figuring them out. It had been the ratiocination part of police work that had boosted him through the uniformed ranks to first grade so quickly and got him up into the rarefied air of Major Crimes detective work in his youthful midthirties.
But now…
Now what? He was sure that he had all the facts he needed to come up with a solution to this crime, but even the goddamn facts kept shifting and blurring. Nick felt like a blind artist trying to sculpt with a heap of marbles. For the most part he was where he and his investigative team had been six winters ago when they’d decided that while it could have been one of the witnesses who snuffed Keigo and, perhaps as an afterthought, Keigo’s girlfriend Keli Bracque—the poet Danny Oz, who had the logically weak but strong-enough-for-murder-in-the-real-world motive of his general smoldering anger and incipient insanity; the thief and drug dealer Delroy Nigger Brown, maybe because of something he said while he was high and being interviewed by Keigo which he didn’t want shown in the finished documentary; the addict and dealer Derek Dean, who was currently rotting in full-time flash immersion up at the People’s Republic of Boulder’s Naropa Institute, possibly killing Keigo just for the flashback fun of it; or Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev for a dozen reasons, half of which he’d teased Nick about when they’d met in Santa Fe—the best chance was that it had been a hit team from Japan, ninja assassins from one of the eight keiretsu or zaibatsu (actually seven kereitsu and zaibatsu not counting Nakamura’s) and seven daimyos who headed those clan-company confederations. Seven deadly daimyos, including kindly old bald-as-an-egg Daichi Omura, whom Nick, in his fatigue and posttraumatic stress after his fun five days in L.A., had honored every way short of kissing the Jap runt’s ass… seven deadly daimyos, each of whom was egomaniacally sure that his nation’s and the entire world’s survival depended upon him, that one man, becoming Shogun. Seven deadly daimyos each willing to kill a thousand Keigo Nakamuras and Keigo-ish sex-slave girlfriends to see that his Shogunate dreams of power came true.
This is where Nick and K. T. Lincoln had ended up in their investigation six winters ago, and this is where most tracks, new and old, seemed to lead again.
Almost, thought Nick. Not quite.
Denver from the capitol hill didn’t look like a city about to explode in racial and ethnic violence. Some of the leaves in the tree-filled park below the capitol were beginning to change color. The temperature was perfect—low seventies—and the sunlight had that clear, pure, crystalline, late-September quality that made residents of Colorado want to live there forever. (Or at least until the arrival of shitty springs with no spring weather, offering up winter until June’s heat.)
Nick tried to clear his mind of any thoughts about the case as he stared at the city buildings below. It used to help when he just let his subconscious weave threads together without any deliberate herding of facts.
Nestled in the little patches of park below was the city library, thrown up by some hotshot postmodern architect in the 1990s. The cuteness of the tower that looked sort of like a pencil—or maybe a crayon—had worn off before the last century was over. Beyond the library was the main part of the art museum, made to look “modern” but more than sixty years old now, Nick thought, which still looked like some tiled and parapeted castle huddling against its neighbors. Its windows were tiny, oddly shaped, and scattered almost at random around the building.
Nick remembered his mother, who’d loved art, taking him to the museum when he was a little kid and pointing to the windows and telling him, “The man who designed this building in the early nineteen-seventies, Nicky, made these windows in the shape they are—and put them where they are—to frame beautiful views of the mountains and foothills as if they were paintings on the walls, too. Clever, don’t you think? But what the architect didn’t take time to think out was that newer, taller buildings would pop up all around and hide those views… making these windows-as-frames silly.”
Leonard had once talked to Nick, after a few drinks, about some scholarly mentor of his who’d called such inevitabilities the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. As if a college professor had to explain to a cop and a son of a cop anything about the tyranny of unintended consequences.
Across the street from the old modernist art museum where his mother used to take him was the newer postmodernist annex to the art museum. Nick actually remembered the name of that architect—Daniel Libeskind. The titanium-and-glass structure was all shards and points and angles, looking like a smashed chandelier or shattered Christmas-tree star. That building had gone up in the first decade of this century and Nick remembered all the self-congratulatory whoop-de-do about the structure—how it put Denver back on America’s architectural map (as if that would matter at all in the dark decades after the Day It All Hit The Fan)—but the leaping up and down in joy had abated somewhat when the city had discovered that a) the inside of a broken Christmas decoration was a lousy place to try to show art and b) every angle and surface that could leak did leak and always would.
Wait, some of this bullshit I was remembering could help. What was it?
He ran his little Molly Bloom batch of free associations backwards like an old reel-to-reel tape, the way he’d taught himself to do, and found it.
The picture-frame windows on the old windows were useless because of the new buildings that had grown up to block the views.
He was still trying to solve this case using the old frames that were out of date. Something he’d stumbled over in the past week—some new thing that had grown up to block the old view—held the answer. It was there. He just couldn’t see it yet.
Nick turned on the fine four-wheele
d G.M. appliance, checked the smiley-face and leaf-sprouting interfaces to make sure the gelding had actually started, noted that even though he’d hardly driven the thing it now had only nineteen miles left in its daily charge, and let the piece-a-shit glide down the hill toward the west.
THERE WERE ONLY A dozen or so cars in the Six Flags Over the Jews parking lot. Nick knew that it was ridiculous to check for his Camaro SS escape vehicle—K.T. would have needed the Star Trek transporter teleportation doohickey to beam one here from the impound lot in this short of a time—but he looked anyway. No vehicles parked the wrong way or by themselves to the south.
He found Danny Oz smoking a cigarette—regular, not cannabis—and drinking coffee in a mostly empty mess tent under the rusting Tower of Doom. Oz didn’t seem surprised by the early-morning repeat visit.
“Coffee, Mr. Bottom?” asked Oz, gesturing toward the big urn on a counter. “It’s terrible but strong.”
“No, thanks.”
“You’ve thought of more questions.” Oz had been writing with a pencil in a small book of blank pages, but he set that aside.
“Not really,” said Nick. “At least not officially in terms of the investigation. That’s over.”
“Oh, did you find Keigo Nakamura’s killer?”
“I’m not sure,” said Nick, knowing how absurd that sounded. No matter. It was true. “I just had some free time and I wondered, Mr. Oz…”
“Danny.”
“I wondered, Danny, how you might describe Keigo’s demeanor and attitude when he interviewed you.”
Oz was silent for a minute and Nick was sure that he hadn’t understood the question—Nick wasn’t sure that he understood what he’d been asking. He was about to rephrase it when the Israeli poet spoke.
“That’s interesting, Mr. Bottom. I did notice something about Mr. Keigo’s demeanor and mood that day.”
“What?” said Nick. “Depressed? Worried? Apprehensive?”
“Triumphant,” said Oz.
Nick had been ready to write in his little notebook but now he lowered his pencil. “Triumphant?”
Danny Oz frowned and sipped his coffee. “That’s not quite the correct word, Mr. Bottom. I’m thinking of the Hebrew word menatzeiach, which probably most closely translates as ‘victorious.’ For no good reason other than my years of observing human beings as a poet, I had the distinct impression that Keigo Nakamura thought that he was on the brink of some triumph… some victory. A victory of epic… one might say ‘biblical’ proportions.”
“He was close to finishing his documentary on us Americans and flashback,” said Nick. “Is that the kind of triumph you might have detected?”
“Perhaps.” Oz was silent a long moment. “But I felt it was more a sense of having been victorious in some great struggle.”
“What kind of struggle? Personal? Bigger than personal? Something on his father’s scale of success or failure?”
“I have no idea,” said Oz and shrugged. “We’re in the area of totally subjective impressions here, Mr. Bottom. But I’d take a wild guess and say the young man felt victorious in some battle that had been both personal and larger than the mere personal to him. Corporate, perhaps, or political. But definitely something larger than himself.”
Nick sighed. “All right. Speaking of totally subjective impressions, I have two questions for you that don’t really relate to the investigation at all.”
“About your wife?” Oz asked softly. He rubbed his neck as if still feeling Nick’s forearm there. There was still a red spot on the poet’s left temple where the muzzle of Nick’s Glock had broken the skin.
“No, not about Dara,” managed Nick. He opened his mouth to apologize and then shut it without speaking. “Just a question. If you could have saved Israel from destruction by killing a single person—one human being—would you have done it?”
Danny Oz blinked several times. The pained expression on his face showed that the question was not only unfair but impossible to answer. Still, he answered.
“Mr. Bottom, the Talmud taught us—and I’m sure I’ve bollixed up this verse since I haven’t studied the Sanhedrin part of the Talmud since I was a boy, but I’ll try to quote—‘ For this reason was man created alone, to teach thee that whosoever destroys a single soul… scripture imputes… I think the word is ‘guilt’… to him as though he had destroyed a complete world; and whosoever preserves a single soul, scripture ascribes merit to him… or maybe the passage said ‘righteousness,’ I’m not sure… as though he had preserved a complete world.’ ”
“So you wouldn’t have killed someone to save Israel?” said Nick.
Danny Oz looked Nick in the eye and the former thousand-yard stare was completely absent from his gaze. And from Nick’s.
“I don’t know, Mr. Bottom. God forgive me, I simply don’t know.”
“One last question,” said Nick. “If you had the chance to return to Israel now, would you do it?”
Oz snorted derisively. He drank the last of his cold coffee and lit a new cigarette. “There is no Israel, Mr. Bottom. Only a radioactive wasteland inhabited by Arabs.”
“It’s not all radioactive,” said Nick. “And what if someone removed the new Arab settlers who came in after the bombings?”
Oz laughed again. It was a hollow, sad sound. “Remove them? Sure. Who would do that, Mr. Bottom? The United Nations?”
The UN, always a dependable ally of the Arab bloc and of Palestinians at the end of the twentieth century, was now—except for its Japanese-run “peacekeeper” operation in China—a full-fledged subsidiary of the Islamic Global Caliphate. The irony, as Nick saw it, was that even after six million Jews had been murdered and the state of Israel destroyed, the so-called Palestinians were denied their nation-in-radioactive-rubble by Shi’ite Iran and the competing and ever-wary and ever-jealous Sunni Arab states.
“No,” said Nick. “Cleared out by someone else. Would you go?”
“I have prostate cancer and other radiation-induced cancers,” said Oz. “I’m dying.”
“We’re all dying,” said Nick. “Would you go back to Israel if other Jews joined you there?”
Danny Oz looked Nick in the eye again and—once more—there was the new clarity to his gaze. “I’d go in a minute, Mr. Bottom. In a minute.”
Nick came out to the parking lot knowing that he’d learned almost nothing that could help him when he would have to stand before Mr. Nakamura in a few hours and be commanded to tell the billionaire who’d killed his son.
But I learned something important, thought Nick. He just wasn’t sure what it was.
The three Oshkosh M-ATVs roared in and blocked his vehicle before he got the doors to his car unlocked.
Mutsumi ta, Daigorou Okada, and Shinta Ishii—Nick’s fellow survivors from the Santa Fe trip—jumped out of the lead vehicle. Each was dressed for urban combat but not for war: SWAT Kevlar and black boots, even their black ball caps made of ballistic cloth. And each held an automatic weapon at port arms.
Nick didn’t move a muscle.
Sato moved his mass out the rear hatch of the M-ATV, nodded at his three ninjas, and said, “Bottom-san, will you come with us, please?”
Oh shit, thought Nick. Too soon. Too early. I’m not ready. He wondered once again how many billions of men and women had died with equally unworthy final thoughts.
He licked his lips. “Mr. Nakamura’s back?”
“Not yet,” rumbled Sato. “But Mr. Nakamura did direct us to show you some things before your meeting with him later today. Please come with us.”
“Do I have a choice?” said Nick.
“Please come with us, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “We shall return you to your vehicle here in an hour or less.”
Keeping his hands away from his Glock, making no sudden movements, Nick went up the rear ramp into the idling M-ATV.
THE RIDE WAS SHORT, less than two miles, and ended at a grassy sward of what had once been a long park on the east bank of the Platte River in
front of a series of high-rise condos that had gone up around the turn of the century. Sato, Sato’s three ninjas, and Nick exited the lead M-ATV and moved to one of Nakamura’s dragonfly ’copters—the less luxurious one that Nick had flown in down to Raton Pass a week earlier. A dozen more of Sato’s people from the other M-ATVs, all in ballistic black and Kevlar, had set up a perimeter around the machine. Mutsumi ta—whom Nick had once thought of as Willy—gestured and Nick clambered into the open door of the dragonfly. Sato put on a headset with microphone, waited until everyone else was belted or clipped in, spoke a few unheard Japanese syllables into the mike, and the Sasayaki-tonbo fluttered silently, hovered, pitched to one side, and flew east above Denver’s downtown.
They’d left the side doors open and Nick looked out at his own reflection in the gold-tinted glass of the fifty-one-story former Wells Fargo building, the modest skyscraper that Denver residents had called the cash register building for decades because of its distinctive shape at the top. Buildings continued to flash beneath them and then, suddenly, they were beyond Denver and flying southeast over farms and high prairie.
This had been the reality of Denver for many decades now, Nick knew. To the north and south and west, suburbs extended the city beyond the horizon. But to the east there had always been this startling line—city and then a few farms where irrigation worked and high prairie beyond that stretching toward Kansas. Nick didn’t ask where they were headed and his only guess was a very dark one.
He smelled their destination before he saw it and in smelling it, Nick knew his guess had been correct.
The dragonfly landed, everyone unbelted, and the ninja guards hopped down, gesturing politely for Nick to join them. Nick lifted his shirt front and put it over his mouth and nose. It was that or throw up.
“Do you know where you are, Bottom-san?” asked Sato, stepping close to Nick and close to the edge of a reeking chasm.
Nick nodded. He didn’t want to talk because he didn’t want the staggering stench to get into his mouth.