Flashback

He’d phoned K.T. Lincoln a little after 2 a.m. Los Angeles time, after 3 a.m. in Denver. He’d bought the use- once disposable phone that afternoon at a street market on an elevated and abandoned slab of the I-5. There were a lot of guns for sale there. And a lot of Arabs selling them.

“Lincoln,” came the sleepy voice. And then, more angrily as she saw it wasn’t the department calling and that the caller was shielding his name, “Who the hell is this?”

“It’s me, K.T., Nick. Don’t hang up!”

Nick knew that if they… always the invisible, hovering, omnipotent and terrifying they… had tapped K.T.’s cell phone, he was really and irrevocably fucked. But, as he already knew but would confirm beyond any doubt a few hours later in his interview with Advisor Omura, the addicted entity known as Nick Bottom was already really and irrevocably fucked.

“What do you want, Nick?” The tone of anger was far worse now, cold and deadly.

“I want to stay alive and to have any chance at all of that, I need your help, K.T.”

“Feeling a little melodramatic tonight, are we, Nicholas?” She’d always known that her using “Nicholas” had amused him when they were partners. But could mere teasing be a good sign?

“I’m feeling surrounded and closed in on tonight, K.T., but that isn’t the point. I need your help if Val and I are going to get out of this alive.”

“Have you found Val?” At least her tone sounded interested. But how much of that, Nick wondered, was a cop’s interest in capturing a material witness and probable felon with an APB out on him?

“Not yet, but I think I will.” Nick took a deep breath. He was on a fire escape outside a flophouse-cum- flashback-cave in downtown L.A. He’d spent $10,000 new bucks on a cot and blanket that were crawling with lice and bedbugs. Nick had dozed some on the floor, his jacket balled up under his head for a pillow and the Glock in his hand, until it was time to make this call. It helped a little to think of all the winos, flash addicts, and street people snoring around him as the geese a Roman legion would spread around their bivouac area; at least they might make some noise if the stocky guys in black Kevlar and laser rangefinders came crashing in on rappel ropes after Nick.

“I need you to do things for me if Val and I are going to have any chance at all,” said Nick.

“Now it’s two things,” K.T. said sarcastically. But she’s still on the line. Given the grand jury dossiers she’d seen and photocopied, just the act of her continuing to listen was a miracle.

“First,” hurried Nick, “I need you to get a meeting set with me and Mayor Ortega for as early Saturday morning as you can make it. He’s supposed to be back from the junket tomorrow. I don’t know what strings you can pull to get a Saturday meeting set but…”

“Nick…”

“… but it’s essential that I get in to see him early Saturday,” Nick galloped on. “Or to make it safer for him, we can arrange to meet somewhere other than his office. In City Park, maybe, near the…”

“Nick!”

“What?”

“I don’t know where you are or why you’ve been out of the news loop, but Mannie Ortega’s dead.”

“Dead,” Nick repeated stupidly. He was glad he was already sitting down. Digging his heels in between the grating bars, Nick shoved backwards hard against the ancient steel of the fire escape, feeling each rusty bar of the balusters pressing deep into his back. “How?”

“Today… yesterday, I mean,” said K.T. “Thursday. In Washington. A suicide bomber in a Georgetown restaurant. One of the waiters with a vest. Some other mayors bought it, too—mayor of Minneapolis, mayor of Birmingham, mayor of…”

“All right,” interrupted Nick. “I should have known that they’d have to silence Ortega before I got back. Stupid of me to think they wouldn’t.”

There was a sort of snorting noise from K. T. Lincoln’s end of the connection. “They blew up Ortega and six other mayors because of you, Nick? That’s more than mere melodrama. Feeling a little paranoid tonight, are we?”

“Yeah, but am I paranoid enough,” said Nick, finishing their tired old joke. “They made a mistake in preparing that grand jury frame-up, K.T. You saw how elaborate the frame-up was… phone records altered, hotel credit-card invoices faked. Mannie Ortega couldn’t have done that on the city level even if he’d wanted to. Hell, the governor couldn’t have faked all that ‘evidence’ that they set up for the grand jury. It takes a lot more juice than that… juice on the Jap Advisor level. So they made a mistake in preparing that frame-up, a second mistake in keeping it in the records and not using it, and a third mistake in keeping it where you could… K.T., are you there?”

Silence.

Nick feared that he might have gone too far, sounding too much like the paranoid wife-killer that K.T. probably thought he might be, and that she might have hung up during his rant.

“K.T.?”

More silence. His last chance and he’d blown it due to his goddamned inability to keep his mouth shut when…

“I’m here, Nick.” The voice was flat, cold, giving him nothing but its existence.

“Thank Christ,” breathed Nick. “OK, forget the first favor. That just leaves one, K.T., but it’s a huge one.”

“What?”

Nick paused and looked out at the empty but not quite silent downtown Los Angeles streets. Flashes and tiny explosion sounds still came from far to the east. Small-arms fire sounded much closer.

“I need you to find something close to Max’s Pursuit Special out of impound…,” began Nick.

“Max’s… what the fuck are you talking about, Bottom?”

Nick gave her a minute to let the allusion sink in.

“Pursuit Special,” she said at last. “Are you drunk, Nick?”

“I wish I were, but I’m not. Remember how we used to check out the impound lot, trying to find the closest match to Max’s Pursuit Special?”

Silence on the other end again.

K.T. had come to the house to watch a double feature of the two Australian Mad Max movies starring a very young Mel Gibson, but really starring the black- on-black supercharger-modified GT351 version of the Australian 1973 Ford XB Falcon hardtop that Mad Max drove past, through, and around bad guys. Dara had absented herself from those movies—which they’d watched more than once when K.T. came over—but Officer Lincoln and Val and Nick had loved them. Occasionally Nick or K.T. would see some drug dealer’s car that vaguely resembled the erroneously labeled Last of the V-8 Interceptors from the ancient movies and drag the other over to the impound lot to admire it.

“You want the nitrous oxide tank, too?” asked K.T.

“I think that was Humungus’s vehicle,” said Nick. “But if you find one, I’ll take it.”

“You are nuts,” said K.T., and there followed a more ominous silence than the earlier ones.

“K.T.?”

“You realize what you’re asking me to do, Nick? Steal a car from impound for you? Have you been an ex-cop so long that you’ve forgotten that we tend to keep track of little things like that? Impounded cars and such?”

“All the heroin from the real French Connection was sto…,” began Nick.

“Oh, fuck the heroin from the French Connection case!” shouted K.T. “You’re talking about me getting thrown off the force here, Bottom. About me going to jail.”

“You’re too smart to…”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” said K.T. “If you… you and Val… were running away from these Vast Invisible Powers that you say framed you, where would you go that they couldn’t reach you?”

It was Nick’s turn to be silent.

“Oh, shit,” said K.T. after a moment. “The good ol’ Republic of Texas doesn’t take in addicts and felons, Nick. It’s almost impossible to get into that crazy country. You have to be a combination of James Bond and Albert