sunken Cherry Creek riverside walking paths and bikepaths were huddled in their shanties and boxes under the street-level overpasses. A dull lightening of the sky in the east told Nick that it was almost dawn. How long had he been under? Just the flash of that Friday afternoon with Dara back in the Year of Clear Vision and into that evening and night. No more than eight hours.
Nick shut up when Sato turned west on Colfax.
The Jap was. Crossing over I-25, Sato turned south on Federal Boulevard and then east onto West 23rd Street, then south onto Bryant—a narrow, barricaded street running along the bluff’s edge above I-25 with ABSOLUTELY NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE signs to either side and above.
“No!” cried Nick but Sato ignored him, stopping just long enough to show his ID to the automatic station and then to drive through the CMRI-torus tunnel. Nick felt his atoms being shifted into a different spin dimension—twice now in twenty-four hours—and wondered if this amount of exposure was unhealthy.
Far below and to their left, I-25 disappeared. To prevent conventional explosives damage, regular traffic was routed off I-25 two miles in either direction and had to bounce through what Californians called surface streets through the railyard district. VIP cars had single north-and southbound lanes in blastproof tubes two hundred feet under the surface.
He almost laughed then at his own concern, given the black-dipped edifice that was filling the windshield. The next checkpoint had the slanted one-way spikes rising from the empty access street’s pavement, so once beyond that point there was literally no turning back.
“No,” Nick said again, dully.
“Yes,” said Sato. But he stopped the car.
The huge structure blotting out the cloudy sunrise in front of them had once been called Invesco Field at Mile High.
This “new” football stadium, opened in 2001, had replaced the old Mile High Stadium that had hosted football, soccer, and baseball games since 1948. The wavy top edge of the stadium had caused execs in Invesco, some long-defunct company that had seized naming rights for the new stadium in 2001, to sneeringly call the new home to the now equally defunct Denver Broncos “the Diaphragm.” The place was built to hold more than 76,000 football fans and around 50,000 doped-out screamers for the rock concerts that used to be staged there. On August 28, 2008, Invesco Field at Mile High—a clumsy name that no one except announcers under strict orders had used even then—had reached an apotheosis of sorts when more than 84,000 people had crowded in (and a billion or so more had been present via early high-def TV) to listen to candidate Barack Obama give his nomination acceptance speech as the last act to the spectacle that had been the 2008 Democratic Convention held nearby at the so-called Pepsi Center here in Denver.
Now Invesco, Pepsi, the Broncos, the NFL, public sporting events, and that iteration of the Democratic Party were all defunct, and so, of course, was the man nominated to the chant of Hope and Change that night more than twenty-eight years earlier.
No one who’d gone to those football games or attended the nominee’s media bacchanalia of an acceptance speech in those naive days would recognize Mile High Stadium today. The stadium, now the Department of Homeland Security Detention Center, looked as if it had been dipped in a hundred thousand gallons of 10W40- weight oil. This black foil-fabric, Nick knew, stretched across the top of the formerly roofless stadium, turning the 1.7 million square feet of space—rooms, corridors, ramps, steps, room for more than 76,000 seats, and hundreds of boxes and skyboxes—into a dimly lighted pit on even the brightest of days. The north entrance to the detention center was a concrete-lipped and steel-doored black cloaca large enough for two trucks to pass in opposite directions.
There was no light coming from the 150-foot-tall structure this dark morning.
No, that wasn’t quite true; over the black oval entrance to the DHSDC was a giant blue demon-horse, red veins standing out on its belly, its hooves of razor-sharp steel, its demonic eyes firing two laser beams from its distorted horse-demon face. The beams cut through the moving fog—or perhaps low wisps of clouds—and whipped back and forth until they converged on the Honda, then on Nick Bottom, and stopped.
“Tell me everything you know about the horse, Bottom-san,” Sato commanded softly.
But then Nick heard his own voice answering in dulled, stupid tones.
“Originally the stadium horse was Bucky the Bronco. Bucky was twenty-seven feet tall and was cast and enlarged from an original mold of Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, when Trigger was rearing up on his hind legs. Roy Rogers was a TV and movie cowboy around the middle of the last century. Roy allowed them to make the cast from his mold of Trigger before this version of the stadium was built only if the city and stadium owners promised that they wouldn’t name the new horse ‘Trigger.’ The people voted, I think it was in the nineteen-seventies, and named this bigger Trigger ‘Bucky the Bronco.’ ”
“But that’s not Bucky the Bronco,” Nick droned on, straining to use his handcuffed left hand to point to the blue demon-stallion above the entrance to the detention center. “That insane blue horse was a sculpture that a New Mexico artist named Luis Jimenez—he wasn’t much of an artist, mostly a guy who did fiberglass shells for spanic low-riders—made under commission to the Denver International Airport about forty years ago. The only reason this Jimenez won the bid was that the tens of millions of dollars set aside to buy art for the new airport had been turned into one big grab bag for minorities—spanics, blacks, Indians, you name it. Everybody but the Asians in Colorado. I guess they didn’t qualify as minorities. Too smart. Anyway, the mayor at the time was black and his wife headed the committee that handed out all the art projects and all that counted was that the winners were minorities, not real artists, certainly not
Nick turned his face away from Sato and banged his forehead against the passenger-side window. The red laser spots moved with him—now on his forearms, now on his chest.
“Please continue, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “Tell me
Nick tried to drown out the sound of his own voice by squeezing his forearms against his ears, but he could hear himself through bone conduction.
“This blue stallion is thirty-two feet tall, bigger than the original Bucky the Bronco. The people who live in the dead artist’s little town in Nuevo Mexico think the horse is accursed. It fell on the sculptor in his studio and killed him before he’d finished it. It was installed at DIA in 2008 and the contract stipulated that it had to be kept there for ten years, but as soon as that contract was up, the airport and city got rid of it. It shook up people arriving in Denver for the first time and all of us locals hated it. Homeland Security replaced Bucky the Bronco with this mad, haunted stallion and moved him to this entrance when they moved into Mile High about twelve years ago. The lasers serve a security function. But they’re going to blind me if one of these fucking beams gets me in the retina.”
“Is that all you know about the blue horse?” asked Sato.
“Yes!” screamed Nick. He shook his head wildly and strained more against the cuffs. Broad blood spatters joined the laser spots across the chest of his sweatshirt. “You fuck, you
“Of course,” said Sato. “If I gave you another chance at the investigation, Bottom-san, would you betray us again and abandon the investigation to go back under flashback at your earliest opportunity?”
“Yeah, of course I would,” said Nick. “You betcha, Mr. Moto.”
“Would you kill me if you got the chance, Bottom-san?”
“Yes, yes, absolutely,” screamed Nick. “Oh, you
“Do you honestly believe there is a chance that you can solve the mystery of Keigo Nakamura’s murder, Bottom-san?”
“Not a chance in hell,” Nick heard himself answer.
The security chief’s black gaze looked appraisingly at Nick, and Nick stared back. Finally he managed, “Why
