Flashback

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.”

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