Flashback

passed through Springfield, Colorado, just north of the grasslands. Leonard is busy in the backseat double-checking unfolded paper maps, even though both Betty and the Camaro’s nav system are providing minute-by-minute information.

“When we get to the town of Campo ten miles ahead,” calls Leonard over the engine howl and roar of the Nitto Extreme Drag NT55R rear tires, “it’ll be about ninety-eight miles to the border station at Texhoma.”

“How many people in Campo?” shouts Nick. He finds it hard to believe that there’s a town out here in the endlessly undulating grasslands.

“A hundred and fifty,” shouts Leonard.

“One hundred thirty-eight,” answers Betty.

“One… hundred… forty… one,” says the Camaro’s mildly retarded nav system.

“Dad!” cries Val. “There’s some sort of helicopter coming in behind us. But I don’t hear it, just see it.”

“That’s a Sasayaki-tonbo,” says Nick, proud to share his knowledge of such things. He has had to concentrate hard on the driving the past hour and more. At more than 130 m.p.h., a chuckhole or jackrabbit could mean disaster. “It means ‘dragonfly’ in Japanese.”

“What do you want me to do?” shouts Val as he opens the sunroof, shucks off his shoulder harness, and stands, holding the RPG that Nick’s brought in his duffel of weapons.

“Just a warning shot across the bow,” shouts Nick over the roar of air that’s joined the engine and tire noise. “Sato might be in it. I don’t want to kill him.”

“Roger that,” shouts Val and takes aim and launches a rocket. The dark back-exhaust of the rocket scorches the white hood of the Camaro.

The rocket misses the nose of the dragonfly ’copter as planned, but it does catch the tip of one of the huge, intricately warped rotors. The big but elegant machine corkscrews to the right, out of sight over a grassy hill.

“Did you see it hit?” calls Nick as Val sets the spent RPG in back, closes the sunroof, and straps himself back in. They’re approaching Campo at 140 miles per hour.

“It’s all right,” says Leonard from the back. “It autorotated down and just landed hard in a big cloud of dust. No one hurt.”

Val high-fives his father, who quickly returns his hand to the steering wheel.

“Turn right onto Main Street and the highway marked four-twelve, two-eighty-seven, sixty-four, three, fifty-six in front of the town hall in Boise City,” says Leonard, leaning forward between the father and son.

“Why does one highway have so many numbers in Oklahoma?” laughs Val.

“What they lack in actual number of roads, they make up for in numbers for them,” says Nick and is surprised when both his son and father-in-law laugh.

Then they are in Texhoma, Oklahoma, population 909 according to Leonard, 896 according to Betty, not- enough-data according to the Camaro’s nav, 364 miles and less than three and a half hours’ Camaro SS driving time from Denver.

And then they are approaching the Republic of Texas border station.

“Jeez,” says Val, “they’re on horses.”

Nick turns right at the flagpole with the flag showing a single white star on the triangular field of blue. The red and white stripes look familiar. The Texas cavalry is escorting them through the opened gates that cut through the two high fences and intervening minefields.

Nick’s amazed to see a familiar building just beyond the open border gates. “I thought the Alamo was much farther south,” he says softly. The Camaro’s big V-8 is just rumbling softly now.

“A lot of people make that mistake,” says Leonard, who is leaning forward to shake Nick’s hand. When Nick offers his hand to Val, the boy hugs him instead.

Nick came awake gasping and with tears running down his cheeks.

Flashback addicts rarely dreamed at all. Now that real dreams, as opposed to flashback trips, were coming back to him, he was astonished at how powerful they were. Why would anyone trade such things for chemically induced reruns of fragments of a life? Why had he?

He was up and showered and shaved and planned to be dressed, armed, and out of the condo complex by 6:30 a.m. His ribs hurt worse today under the tape-corset, but he didn’t care. Looking in the mirror after he’d shaved, Nick saw that something was different.

He’d managed to lose quite a bit of weight for two weeks on a case, and his cheekbones were sharper, his features more gaunt, but that wasn’t the primary change. His eyes. His eyes were different. More clear. For almost six years now, he’d stared at himself and at everything else out of the cave-stare of either wanting and needing flashback more than anything else in the world or staring at the world through the glaze of a heavy flashback hangover. His eyes were different now.

Can they stay that way? Nick shivered and finished getting dressed.

At weapons-check, he signed out his 9mm Glock for the clip-on crossdraw holster at his belt and a tiny .32- caliber pocket gun for his rarely worn ankle holster. The .32 had been his throw-down for all the years he’d been a patrolman and homicide detective—numbers filed off, grip taped, no traceable history on it—but he’d never fired his service weapon in anger, much less come close to having to use a throw-down for himself or his partner. He trusted the short-barreled .32 to be accurate at distances of five feet or less.

Before leaving for the day, Nick took security chief Gunny G. aside, showed him the photos of Val and Leonard, and paid the ex-marine $50 in old bucks—more than a third of what Nick had left after paying the pilot to get him to Los Angeles and a fortune by anyone’s standards—with more promised if Gunny were to take care of the two until Nick got back. Or if he didn’t get back.

“The FBI and Homeland Security were here last week asking about the boy, Mr. B.,” said Gunny G.

“I know,” said Nick, handing the fortune in hard cash to the white-scarred ex-marine. “But I swear to you that it’s only because they wanted to question my son as a material witness to something he wasn’t involved in. And even that’s been dropped. You won’t get in trouble helping them, I promise you that, Gunny. And there’s another twenty-five in it for you after you do help them get settled ’til I get back—and keep anyone from bothering them.”

“I’d do that for you no matter what, Mr. B.,” said the security man as he pocketed the cash.

Nick scribbled a hasty note—he had little hope that Val and his grandfather would show up today, but the remnants of the dream he’d had made him a little more optimistic than usual—and then he was out the parking garage door and into his vibrating, wheezing gelding. It was hard to drive that volt-bucket after the dream-memory of real V-8 power and freedom. The charge indicator’s happy face showed that he had a range of thirty-one miles today, if a major part of it was downhill.

“K.T.! ”

The police lieutenant spun, crouched, and had almost cleared the Glock from its holster before she froze.

“Nick Bottom. What the fuck do you want?”

“And a good morning to you, too, Lieutenant Lincoln.”

K.T. lived on Capitol Hill in one of the big old nineteenth-century homes in that once-prestigious neighborhood that had been converted to a dozen or more cubie rentals late in the last century or early in this one. It had been a high-crime neighborhood for more than six decades now, but this only gave the cops who wanted to live there a better deal. The residents of K.T.’s building who could afford cars kept them in an oversized detached garage down this long driveway and that’s where he’d planned to intercept his old partner.

“What are you doing in your uniform, Detective?” asked Nick. Seeing K.T. in her patrol blacks, gunbelt, visible shield, baton and all, reminded him of their early years together.

“There’s been a little unpleasantness in Los Angeles this past week,” said K.T., straightening. “Or perhaps you’ve been too busy playing Philip Marlowe to notice.”

“I’ve heard rumors,” said Nick. “So?”

“So the reconquista armies and militias out there got their collective asses kicked, there are more than a million and a half spanic residents of East L.A. running south for their lives, and word is that