But they didn’t.
His legs as shaky as his arms, Val walked to the southwest corner of the building where the fence began below, found a pipe that looked like it might bear his weight, maybe, clipped his carabiner-noose around it, and dropped the coiled mass to the definitely unyielding pavement way down there. Val closed his eyes and tried to stop shaking.
He knew he should wait until he got some arm strength back, but he didn’t know if he had the time to wait. So Val sat on the edge of the building—here on this side it was probably less than fifty feet to the concrete below —wrapped a coil of the rope around his wrist, and swung out until he could get his shaky legs and bleeding ankles around the rope again.
He slid down—too fast, it took skin off his palms—and when he got to the bottom his legs were too wobbly to hold him upright. Val collapsed on the cement there, his back to the building, and panted loudly for a moment. The panting sounded a little like sobs but—he decided—that wasn’t his fault.
He retrieved his Beretta from the pipe and just stood by the rubble of the broken pedestrian bridge for a while.
It had been the only question for a long time now and it seemed that Val Fox never had the answer.
The thought seemed obscene to him, despite its familiarity. Always before it was a black-souled fantasy, something rising more out of the secrets that young Val had known—the fact of his mother lying to his father about her whereabouts that last year, the fact of his father’s maddening denseness when Val’s mother said she’d spent the long weekend at Laura McGilvrey’s when ten-year-old Val had known that she’d been with Mr. Cohen, the fact of his father’s total lack of tears in the long month after Val’s mother had died in that crash—all facts woven into the fantasy of his father having discovered the affair and having acted on the knowledge.
But Val had never believed his own black-souled fantasy. Not really. The dark dream that his father had also hurt Val’s mother had been nothing more than a focus for his rage at the reality of his father exiling him, a substitute fury at his father for sending Val away when he wanted and needed to be near the Old Man, a fantasy revenge aimed at his father for not weeping when Val’s ten-year-old heart had been torn to shreds.
But now, this absolutely damning grand jury evidence…
Val arched backwards over the railing of the broken bridge and screamed into the blue Colorado afternoon sky.
Kill the Old Man and get out of Colorado.
No, wait, that was the wrong sequence…
First, get the $200 in old dollars from the Old Man, and find the guy here in Denver who’d get him the new NICC with the faked Teamster membership and…
Killing his father in cold blood—a cop, ex-cop to be sure, but still part of that fucking fraternity that tended to take the killing of its own real seriously—and
He fumbled in his pockets until he found the slip of paper with the NIC Card counterfeiter’s name scribbled on it. There were two names there, the other being that guy in Austin, Texas, who did the
But getting into the Republic of Texas would be harder than staying in Denver for two weeks without being caught after committing a public murder.
No plan of action made any sense at all.
Val had been watching a few cars pull off the street and drive into the security boxes on their way up into the parking garage. All the vehicles had tinted windows. Val couldn’t have made out the faces of the drivers from here if he’d had a pair of binoculars, which he didn’t. He could stand right next to the approach driveway in hopes of seeing the Old Man’s face as he drove up, but this was a sure way to get the cops called on his ass.
The cops were probably on their way anyway. That stunt with the climbing rope and breaking the skylight glass hadn’t brought an immediate mob—those who stayed home all day hidden in their condo cubies weren’t exactly the types who responded quickly to scary noises, especially since most of them were almost certainly under the flash and hadn’t heard a damned thing—but Val was sure that that scary Gunny G. and his security pals would be responding soon enough. Probably the only thing right now keeping that Gunny from calling the cops was that he seemed to be on the arm to the Old Man. He might phone Val’s father first before siccing the cops on anyone.
Time to get out of there.
Val had hobbled half a dozen steps west along the old river path before he realized that he could barely walk. His right ankle was cut worse than he’d noticed. There was a pool of blood where he’d been standing by the bridge and he was leaving red pools as he walked.
He sat down and rolled up his torn pant leg. It was a pretty deep slash—the kind you needed stitches for. The kind you went to the emergency room for.
Val shucked off his jacket and flannel shirt, tugged his T-shirt over his head, and tore it into rags. He tied the cleanest strip as tightly around the wound as he could and then got dressed again.
He was filthy, his right pant leg was torn to shit and bloody from the cuff halfway to the knee, and his boots were so sodden with blood that he made squishy noises as he walked.
Hobbling as fast as he could, trying not to let the pain and nausea make him puke, he turned left on South University Boulevard at the light since he didn’t want to head west past the Denver Country Club on First Avenue the way he and Leonard had come. Six or eight painful blocks south, he turned right—heading west—on East Exposition Avenue. He could see a park up ahead. Where there was a park, there’d be homeless people—and with the homeless, there’d be what he needed to steal in order to do what he had to do.
1.16
Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25
K.T. has outdone herself.
Nick, with Val riding shotgun beside him and Leonard in the backseat, is barreling due south on Highway
Endless grasslands unspool on either side of the white automobile roaring down the empty two-lane highway. They’ve long since outrun the puny Denver PD and Colorado Highway Patrol interceptors, and Nakamura’s hydrogen-powered skateboards never had a chance to catch up once they turned south from I-70. Val has been cheering and pumping his fist for forty miles now.
The almost-twenty-year-old Camaro is pouring out its Vortech-supercharged 603 horsepower and 518 pound- feet of torque. No plug-in electric motors here, just the raging 6.2-liter L99 V-8 engine gulping down gallons of rare high-octane gasoline.
The windshield and windows on the Camaro Vortech SS are just glassed-over gunslits and Val has already had the opportunity to use his as such. The hood of the highway patrol cruiser in pursuit had exploded upward from the shotgun blast and the car had spun into its own dust cloud. That had been the last of the pursuit before they
