Flashback

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-wheeled 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