Flashback

own food for the trip.”

“Great,” said Val. “I’ll go pack the few clothes I want to take. And a couple of books, I guess. Nothing else.”

Leonard still couldn’t believe it was going to be this simple. “You don’t have to go to school tomorrow,” he said. “And we can’t let anyone know we’re leaving, Val. Someone might try to stop us.”

“Yeah,” said the sixteen-year-old, his eyes slightly unfocused as if he were thinking about something else. “But no, I’ll go to school. I need to clean a few things out of my locker. But I’ll be home by nine tomorrow.”

“No later than nine!” said Leonard. He was afraid of what the boy might be doing with his friends on that final evening.

“No later than nine, Grandpa. I promise.”

Leonard could only blink. When was the last time that Val had called him Grandpa? He couldn’t recall.

FRIDAY

Leonard spent the day sick with worry. The two duffels, packed full of food bars, canteens, fresh fruit, and a few clothes and books, sat near the kitchen door as if to mock the old man.

He’d started to phone Nick Bottom to tell him that they were coming and then put it off. He’d wait until they were actually on the road.

I don’t believe this was his actual thought. He’d believe it when they crossed the California line into Nevada.

Val came home a few minutes after eight o’clock. The boy’s clothes were filthy with mud and there was blood on his forehead and shirt. His eyes were wide.

“Leonard, give me your phone!”

“What? What’s wrong? What happened?”

“Give me your fucking phone!”

Leonard handed the phone to the crazed boy, wondering whom he was going to call and with what news. But Val smashed the phone under the heel of his heavy boot—once, twice, as many times as it took for the components to spill out. The boy grabbed the chip and ran out the door.

Leonard was too surprised to chase after him.

Val was back in three minutes. “I tossed it onto the back of a truck headed west,” he panted.

“Val, sit down. You’re bleeding.”

The boy shook his head. “Not my blood, Grandpa. Turn on the TV.”

The Los Angeles News Channel was in the middle of a special bulletin.

“… of a terrorist attack at the rededication of the Disney Center for the Performing Arts earlier this evening. Shots were fired at Advisor Daichi Omura, but the Advisor was not injured. We repeat, Advisor Omura was not injured during the terrorist attack, although two of his bodyguards were killed along with at least five of the terrorists. We have video now of…”

Leonard could no longer hear the announcer’s words. Or, rather, he could no longer make sense of them.

There on the screen were the dead faces of several of the terrorists. They were all boys. Their faces were blood-streaked, their dead eyes open and staring. The camera paused on the last dead face.

It was the face of young William Coyne.

Leonard turned in horror toward his grandson. “What have you done?”

Val had both duffels and was shoving one against his grandfather’s chest. “We gotta go, Leonard. Now.”

“No, we have to call the authorities… straighten this out…”

Val shook him with a strength that Leonard never would have imagined in the boy. “There’s nothing to straighten out, old man. If they catch me, they’ll kill me. Do you understand? We have to go! ”

“The rendezvous at the railyard’s not until midnight…,” mumbled Leonard. His extremities were tingling and he felt dizzy. He realized that he was in shock.

“It doesn’t matter,” gasped Val as he splashed water from the kitchen sink onto his face, wiping the blood away with the small towel hanging on the washing machine. “We’ll hide there until it’s time. But we have to go… now!”

“The lights…,” said Leonard as Val dragged him out the back door.

Val said nothing as he tugged his grandfather to the bicycles and the old man and the boy began pedaling madly down the unlit alley.

1.07 Six Flags Over the Jews—Monday, Sept. 13

There was a man crucified above the iron gates of the Denver Country Club but it didn’t slow Nick down in his Monday-morning commute up Speer Boulevard to Six Flags Over the Jews. The phone news had no identity on the crucified man and there was no announcement yet on the reason for his crucifixion. Traffic moved briskly and Nick had to flog the gelding to keep up, getting only the briefest glimpse to his left of various emergency vehicles around the entrance and cops on ladders. The once -expensive and -exclusive country club hadn’t been a country club for some years now and the golf course and tennis courts were covered with several hundred windowless blue tents of the sort the UN liked to bring in to Third World countries after tsunamis or plague. No one that Nick knew was aware of the purpose for these tents here at the club—or, for that matter, which country or corporation owned the country club these days—and no one seemed to care, including Nick.

He’d used all the flashback Sato had given him and slept all Sunday afternoon and Sunday night. This sort of full-systems crash happened often with heavy flashback users; the drug’s effect seemed like sleep, down to the rapid eye movements, but it wasn’t sleep. At least not the kind of deep sleep the human brain required. So once every couple of weeks, flashback users crashed and slept for twenty-four hours or more.

Except for a headache that felt like the world’s worst hangover, Nick had to admit that he felt more refreshed.

The problem was that nothing around him—not Speer Boulevard with its overhanging trees, not the thrumming traffic in the two peasant lanes or the skateboard-low humming hydrogen-car traffic in the VIP lane, not the hundreds of makeshift shacks along the trickling course of Cherry Creek sunken between the bikepaths fifteen feet below the level of the street—seemed real. This had been the case for at least five years now but it seemed worse this month. The flashback hours with Dara were real; this nonsense interlude with Sato or improvising bad lines with the bit players in this poorly written, poorly lit, poorly acted play was certainly not real.

But what was confusing Nick Bottom now was his multiple use of flashback. He’d used it to review the interview with Danny Oz almost six years ago. He’d used it, as he had every day for the past five and a half years, to spend time with his dead wife.

But he’d also used hours of the drug to try to find out where Dara might have been on the night that Keigo Nakamura was killed.

He’d been out on a stakeout on Santa Fe Drive that night, down on the edge of the reconquista no-man’s-land there, sitting in the backseat of an unmarked patrol car as the two detectives up front watched the home of a local warlord who, they knew, was moving guns and drugs into the city. As a Major Crimes day-shift detective, Nick Bottom had had no business in the backseat of that particular unmarked car on that particular stakeout on that particular night, but in that first year after his promotion he’d had the stupid idea that he could do his white-collar downtown detective work while still staying fully in touch with the mean streets and their denizens, both crook and cop.

He couldn’t. It had been a stupid idea.

The two detectives sitting in the front seat that night—Cummings, the detective third grade with seven years in as a patrol officer but less than a year’s experience as detective, and Coleman, a twenty-five-year veteran in the