… sometimes I just want to leave Nick a note—real name Kumiko Catherine Catton —and see what happens. But I can’t…
… just reading her transcripts makes me miss and love my own father more, as weird as he is. I have to give him a call tonight, wish him Happy New Year at least…
… what Ortega says just isn’t acceptable to me. Harvey’s going to go along with it. He tells me that all this sneaking around has almost cost him his marriage already and that his kids don’t recognize him when he come home, but down deep I think he agrees with me that we can’t end it like this. Not like this. I’m supposed to sneak away to spend time with Harvey tomorrow at the Denver motel where we keep the stuff and he insists it’s the last time for us there, but I won’t accept that. I’ve told him I won’t. I told him that I’d go to Nick with the whole sad, sick story unless we found a way to carry on…
Nick wiped tears from his eyes and read it through. To the last fragmented, incomplete entry, made by a woman who didn’t know she was going to die the next day.
How many of us do? wondered Nick. Know we’re going to die the next day.
Or this evening?
When his phone rang, Nick almost jumped out of his skin. He’d been watching the videos and reading Dara’s notes for forty-five minutes. Poor Leonard must think that he’d been forgotten down there at Dr. Tak’s.
“Nick Bottom,” he answered but there was no one there and the caller ID was blocked in that way that prepaid phones worked.
Well, realized Nick, setting his phone back in his jacket pocket, Leonard had been forgotten. This data on Dara’s old phone changed everything, all right. Nick felt the old gears begin to work the way they’d used to for him, in Major Crimes Unit and before… the pieces coming together, the full picture of the puzzle being assembled.
It was all there. He wiped away more tears and cursed himself for a blind fool.
It had always been there. All of it. Dara had tried to tell him without telling him. And he’d been too full of his own ambition and self-centered game of playing cop twenty-four hours a day to really listen to her, to really look at her.
The first thing he had to do, even before fetching Leonard, was to e-mail the full contents of Dara’s text notes and the video to all the people he trusted in this world.
After two minutes of thinking in the silence, he came up with five names. Then, after more hard thinking, two more, including CHP Chief Dale Ambrose. K.T. was on the list… but it also had to go to people with better connections, people beyond the reach of those who’d reached Nakamura and Harvey Cohen and Dara Fox Bottom and probably Delroy Nigger Brown by now.
The eighth name, incredibly, was that of West Coast Advisor Daichi Omura.
Do you let the murderer know, however indirectly, that you know he or she is the murderer? Nick had played that game before, for various reasons, and it had worked.
Sometimes.
But he wasn’t sure here if he’d be getting the word to…
His phone rang and vibrated again and Nick jumped again.
“Nick Bottom.”
There was a silence on the line but the connection was there. Again, no caller ID.
“Hello?”
“Come pick me up,” came a voice that it took Nick’s buzzing mind ten seconds to identify as his son’s.
“Val?”
“Come pick me up, as soon as you can.”
“Val, where are you? Are you all right? Val, your grandfather… Leonard’s had a sort of heart attack. He’s going to make it for now, but he needs to be taken care of. Do you need medical attention? Val?”
“Come pick me up.” There was something more than stress or pain in his son’s strangely aged and altered voice. Rage? Something beyond rage?
“I will,” said Nick. “Where are you?”
“You know Washington Park?”
“Sure, it’s only a few minutes from here.”
“Drive on Marion Parkway on the west side of the lake… the big lake, Smith Lake, I think it’s called… past the tent and shack village there.”
“All right,” said Nick. “Where will you be…”
“What will you be driving?”
“A rusty-looking G.M. gelding with bullet holes in it.”
“Can you be here in fifteen minutes?”
“Are you hurt badly, Val? Or in trouble with someone there? Just say ‘yeah’ if you can’t speak freely.”
“How soon can you be here?”
Nick took a breath. His phone and cubie Internet hookups might be tapped. Probably were. He’d use Gunny G.’s fancy encrypted computer set up in the security shack to e-mail the video and text diaries out to his eight people. That might take a few minutes to do right. Then he’d have to get Leonard into the car with whatever clothes, IV tubes, or other medical things he needed.
He could go to the Six Flags Over the Jews parking lot to get the getaway car before picking up Val, so they could head straight for I-70 and out of town, but it might be better to pick the boy up sooner rather than later. Val sounded weird.
“Give me an hour, Val. I’ll look on the west side of Smith Lake in Washington Park and we’ll…”
The line went dead. Val had broken the connection.
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.”
r /> 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.