Flashback

he had this afternoon and evening anyway?

Not enough to dull your passion later tonight, thought the watching Nick.

“What story?” asks Nick in the real time of the summer Friday night from sixteen years and one month earlier.

“The story about your uncle Wally buying you that little telescope in Chicago and how it was the most precious thing you ever owned.”

Nick snaps a glance at Dara, but she’s smiling, not mocking, and now she takes his free hand in hers again. He shifts the beer to his left hand.

“Well… it was…,” he says lamely. “The most precious thing I owned, I mean. For years.”

“I know,” Dara is whispering. “Tell me the part about how you tried to see the stars from the tenement landing in Chicago.”

“It wasn’t a tenement, kiddo.” Nick sips the rest of his beer and vows to make it his last one for the evening. “Uncle Wally’s apartment in Chicago was just a… you know… apartment in a neighborhood that had gone from Irish to Polish to mostly black.”

“But you’d been visiting your uncle for two weeks…,” prompts Dara.

Nick smiles. “I’d been visiting my uncle for two weeks—he was a cookie salesman, formerly an A and P manager, and my old man sent me to Chicago for two weeks every summer. I loved it.”

“So you’d been visiting your uncle for two weeks,” repeats Dara, smiling.

Nick makes a fist and hits her lightly on the knee. Then he takes her hand back. “So I’d been visiting for almost all of my two weeks and we used to go walking on Madison Street in the evening, a few blocks from his little third-floor apartment, and every time we’d walk past what I thought was this camera and electronics store—it was really a pawnshop—I’d ask to stop so we could admire this little telescope in the window. Not a real astronomical telescope, you understand, just the little kind that the captain of a ship would have used centuries ago, with tiny black tripod legs…”

“So on your last night in Chicago,” Dara prompts again.

“Hey! You going to let me tell this or what?”

She sets her head against his shoulder.

“So on my last night in Chicago—it turned out to be the last time I ever saw my uncle, the only member of my family I knew outside my old man and mother, because Wally died of a massive coronary two months after I went back to Denver that summer—anyway, my last night in Chicago, after Wally and I had washed and dried the dishes—he was a bachelor, you know—and I was in the dining room packing my clothes into my little bag on the daybed where I slept, Wally called me out to the landing and…”

“Voila!” says Dara, sounding truly happy.

“Voila. The telescope. I couldn’t believe it. It was the coolest thing that anyone’d ever bought me, and it wasn’t even close to my birthday or Christmas or anything. So we set it up on its little tripod legs on a chair propped on top of a garbage can there on the rear third-floor landing and I tried to find some stars or planets to look at, I was nuts about space at that age…”

“Which was?” asks Dara, her voice muffled against his arm.

“Age? About nine, I guess. Anyway, the city lights blocked out most of the stars, but we found one bright one shining through the murk. I later figured out it was Sirius. And Jupiter, too. It was bright that night.”

“Way back in the nineteen-nineties,” murmurs Dara. “Who knew they had modern stuff like telescopes way back then?”

“You’re just jealous,” says Nick. It’s a running joke between them. Dara is a decade younger, born in the 1990s. Nick enjoys reminding her of all the neat things she missed in that decade. Like Ronald Reagan’s swan song? Bill Clinton’s blow job? she’d ask innocently. But they both sometimes find it odd that he was already sneaking peeks at porn on the Internet in the year she was born.

“I love the Uncle Wally telescope story,” says Dara, rubbing her forehead against his shoulder as a cat would. Nick suspects that she has another headache.

“And I love…,” begins Nick.

“Me?”

“The Friday Night Creature Feature on TCM,” finishes Nick, standing and pulling her next to him. “And it’s gonna start streaming in three minutes.”

She laughs but sets her entire body against him, her hand soft against his left hip where his holster and gun usually sit. The helicopters have gone, their noise replaced by more distant and less urgent sirens and sounds.

Nick tosses the beer can in the recyclable bin by the door and sets both arms around her, pulling her tight to his chest. The top of her head doesn’t even come up to his chin. Her late-pregnancy-full breasts feel strange against him after so many thousands of hugs in the past two years. Nick realizes, not for the first or thousandth time, how young she is. And how lucky he is.

“Do me one favor,” whispers Dara.

You’ll like this favor, thought Nick from where he floated, feeling his wife against him but also paying attention to the ambient sounds and movements he hadn’t consciously noted that night sixteen years and one month earlier. The sudden breeze that moved the high branches of those miserable Siberian elms, just waiting to dump their countless leaves in the yard for raking and bagging in a month or two. The Bakers’ TV blaring too loudly again from two houses away. The cat moving like a four-legged tightrope walker along the high fence back by the alley…

“I want you to…”

“… get up, Bottom-san. Get up now. Wake up, damn you.”

Somehow Dara is no longer hugging Nick but lifting him off the ground, shaking him fiercely. Nick can feel the bulk of her pregnancy against him as she shakes him.

Someone jammed a needle into his thigh.

“Hey, watch it, kiddo!” shouted Nick, pulling away from Dara in shock.

Dara lifted him higher, shook him harder. No.

Nick reached for his gun. It wasn’t there.

Someone tore the IV needle out of his arm. Another needle was jammed into the same thigh as before. Nick felt the ice-water-in-the-veins shock of T4B2T counterflash throughout his body and he screamed.

“Mickey! Lawrence!”

Mickey was nowhere to be seen in the glowstick gloom. Lawrence the bouncer was down, his massive, armored body out cold and facedown and filling the narrow aisle between cots.

Dara against him, hugging him in the summer night…

Nick fought to slide back into flashback reality but the pain in his arm and thigh and the T4B2T in his veins kept him up, out, and away from her. He cried out again.

“Shut up,” said Sato. The security chief was carrying him over his shoulder through the darkened warehouse as easily as Nick used to carry his son to bed when Val was a toddler. A few flashers came up and out of their fugue to peer angrily at the intrusion—being left alone and undisturbed was what flashcaves were about— but most slept and twitched on, oblivious.

Where was Mickey? Didn’t he and Lawrence the bouncer keep a shotgun handy for just this sort of invasion?

Nick’s arms and legs were tingling painfully from the T4B2T, fizzing inside like limbs that had fallen asleep for hours, so Nick couldn’t use them yet—couldn’t kick, couldn’t even make a fist.

The September night air was chilly and there was a light drizzle. Nick realized that it was dark outside as Sato carried him down the alley, out of the alley to a side street with cars parked along the rain-filled gutter. Was it the same night? How long had he been under?

Sato beeped open the front passenger-side door of an old Honda electric, dumped Nick into the front seat, and then quickly handcuffed Nick’s right hand, running the short cuff chain through a naked steel bolt in the overhead door frame before he clicked the left cuff tight.

The pain scouring through his awakening arms and hands made Nick feel like he was being crucified. He screamed again just as Sato slammed the door shut and walked around to the driver’s side.

Nick shouted and Sato ignored him as he drove the Honda up Speer Boulevard in a cold rain that was coming down more heavily by the minute. The streets were almost empty. Even the thousands of homeless along the