Flashback

1.20

Texline, Republic of Texas—Saturday, Sept. 25

It was the pain that finally made Nick open his eyes.

He was astounded that he could open his eyes. Had Sato waited until he regained consciousness to carry out the executions? Had that been part of Nakamura’s orders? Was Nick supposed to watch his son and father-in-law be shot before he received the merciful bullet to the brain?

His head hurt so much when he opened his eyes that he felt as if he’d already been shot in the head. He tried squinting through the headache and through a strange pain from his left leg.

The first thing he noticed was that he wasn’t lying among the rotting corpses at the edge of Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine. It was dark outside and he was in a lighted, open-sided tent. Lying on a cot with clean sheets under him. There was something on his face… a clear oxygen mask. Nick clawed it off with his free hand.

His free hand. He wasn’t flex-cuffed anymore. His left leg was in a cast and he wasn’t wearing his chinos.

Nick tried turning his head to the side to see what was around him, but the motion made lights flash behind his eyes again and made him too dizzy. He closed his eyes.

“You’re awake,” said a woman’s voice.

Nick managed to squint again without inducing the vertigo. He tried to sit up. A woman wearing some sort of gray-shirted uniform with a round shoulder badge and a red-cross armband pushed him back into the pillows. “Try not to move too much, Mr. Bottom. You have a concussion as well as a broken leg and a lot of bruises and contusions. Captain McReady will be right in to talk to you.”

Nick could turn his head to his left as long as he kept his eyes shut while he moved it. There were some empty cots to his left and outside the first-aid tent he could see it was full-dark night. Overhead electric lights illuminated some old Humvees parked along a wire fence, some new armored personnel carriers with the single white star and thirteen red-and-white stripes of the Republic of Texas flag on them, and beyond the vehicles—in an open area lit with searchlights and within a circle of green and red landing lights that pulsed in syncopation with the pounding of his headache—sat Nakamura’s three whisper-dragonfly ’copters, rotors still. Men in various uniforms stood around talking. Nick didn’t see any of the black-garbed ninjas.

He closed his eyes and turned his head all the way to the right.

Next to him was an empty cot and beyond that a cot with Leonard lying unconscious under a blanket. There were two IVs going into the old man now, but Nick could see that he was breathing. Snoring softly, actually.

He looked for Val, but the other cots in the first-aid tent were empty. Where’s my son?

“Mr. Bottom?”

Nick found that if he opened his left eye wider than his right, he could focus on things without total vertigo. The man standing over him looked to be in his sixties, had a rich white mustache, wore the same gray uniform as the female nurse or medic with the same shoulder badge with a white star in a blue-and-white circle, carried a long-barreled sidearm in an old-fashioned holster, and was wearing a big Stetson.

“I’m Captain McReady, Mr. Bottom,” said the man, removing the big hat. There was a line in his gray hair, the kind of line that Nick imagined only a Stetson could carve over decades of wear. “Greg B. McReady, the ‘B’ standing for nothing at all, captain in Company C of the Texas Ranger Division, Department of Public Safety. This here is the Texas Army border station at Texline, along the New Mexico border just southwest of the Oklahoma Panhandle. We’re glad you made it here, Mr. Bottom.”

“My son…,” croaked Nick. He tried to push himself up on one elbow.

“Val’s okay,” said Captain McReady. “A bunch of bruises, but he was the first to get over the taser shock. He was waiting here, watching over you and his grandpa for quite a while, but we convinced him to go get some chow. He’s in the mess tent next door but should be back soon.”

“My father-in-law,” managed Nick. He raised his right hand and gestured. “Going… to live?”

“Oh, yes,” said the white-mustached Ranger. “Professor Fox is just sleeping. He was awake for a while. We know of his medical condition—the aortic stenosis—from Colonel Sato, and we’ll be discussing surgical options with the good professor over the next day or two.”

“Sato,” hissed Nick. He still had the taste of the assassin’s flesh in his mouth and he wanted more. He wanted his heart.

McReady set a wrinkled, liver-spotted, but very strong hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Easy, son. We know what happened. It should have been handled better, but there wasn’t enough time for finesse. Colonel Sato wanted to be here to talk to you when you woke, but we were afraid that you’d kill him before he could explain.”

“Kill him,” repeated Nick. It wasn’t a question. He remembered the killer crushing Dara’s phone and thought of how he must have planned Dara’s and Harvey’s deaths.

Yes, he would kill Sato if he could. In fact, nothing on earth could stop him.

“What’s wrong with my leg?” he said stupidly.

“You broke one of the lower bones there in the scuffle on the dragonfly,” said Captain McReady. “Clean break. We set it while you were out. It should heal quickly enough.”

“When… is it?” asked Nick.

“Same night, son,” said the Ranger. “A little before midnight on the twenty-fifth of September. A Saturday. A busy one for you, from the looks of it.”

Sato and Val walked into the tent together. Sato had a bandage on his neck and stitches on his cheek and forehead. Nick risked the vertigo to look around to see if there was anything sharp—a scalpel, a dinner knife, a bottle he could break, anything. There wasn’t. His eyes went to the big pistol in Captain McReady’s holster.

“Take it easy, friend,” said the old Ranger. He pushed Nick back into his pillow, stood, and stepped back.

“Bottom-san,” said Sato. He sat on the empty cot to Nick’s right and the cot frame groaned under his weight.

“Whoa, Dad, did you see Grandpa knee that ninja’s cojones up into his mouth?” cried Val. The boy was still chewing on the remains of a sandwich. “I mean, who knew old Leonard had it in him?”

Dad? thought Nick. That was a word he was sure he’d never hear again, even if— somehow, impossibly—both he and his son survived. Off to Nick’s right, Leonard continued to snore softly, either oblivious to the praise or faking unconsciousness again so he could listen without commenting.

“We need to talk, Bottom-san.” Sato’s voice was very soft.

Nick noticed more stitches and bandages on Sato. Two of the fingers on his left hand were in a splint. The big man’s black shirt was partially open and it looked as if his ribs had been taped as well.

“Fuck you,” breathed Nick. He was only sorry that he’d been so groggy that he’d stupidly looked at Ranger Captain McReady’s horse pistol before grabbing it.

“No, Dad, it’s okay. Colonel Sato…,” began Val.

“Killed your mother,” said Nick, his tone low and lethal. “Stay out of this, Val.”

The boy blinked in surprise and took two steps back.

“No, Bottom-san,” said Sato. The big man shook his head back and forth in that weird way he had that involved his whole upper body. “I did not kill or arrange to kill your wife and Assistant District Attorney Cohen. This I swear to you on my honor.”

“Your honor!” laughed Nick. The laugh hurt his head so much that he almost blacked out. “Your honor,” he repeated. “The honor of a man who killed his own daughter in cold blood. Shot her between the eyes with a twenty-two-caliber slug so the bullet would bounce around in her skull and do the most damage.”

“Hai,” grunted Sato. “I admitted that I killed my beloved Kumiko. She—as her mother before her—was the light of my life. And I extinguished that light by my own hand. You see, it was a form of jigai—a woman samurai’s form of ritual seppuku that does not involve disembowelment—and my darling Kumiko was indeed a samurai.”

“Your daughter didn’t commit suicide, Sato,” snapped Nick. “You killed her. You shot and murdered her, along with Keigo, a boy who trusted you completely.”