DPD and nine years a detective first grade (the same grade as Nick)—had let him know that night that he was as useless and unwelcome as the proverbial tit on an equally proverbial boar.
Nick had been there anyway, shivering in the chill—they’d shut off the batteries to conserve power—and breathing in the well-known stakeout smell of sweat and old-car vinyl and coffee breath and the occasional silent but deadly fart from the front seat. God help him, he’d loved it the years he worked the street.
The flashback reliving of that hour had reminded Nick that he’d phoned Dara a little before midnight. He’d meant to phone earlier, but he’d been out at a corner all-night bodega getting coffee for Coleman and Cummings then. As it was, she didn’t pick up. It had surprised Nick, but it hadn’t worried him. When he was working on the street, she always left her phone on. That afternoon—he remembered this only through the flashback reliving of the hour around midnight—he’d told her he’d be working late, but he hadn’t told her that he’d be on the street. She often turned her phone off when she knew he was safe doing office work at Central Division.
That night, Nick now remembered, he’d gotten about three hours’ sleep on the couch at DPD CD and had been wakened when the call came in from the division commander, turning the Keigo murder case over to him and his partner, K. T. Lincoln. The word was that the responding detectives didn’t have boots high enough for this sort of politically charged case. Nick was still a department golden boy then; K. T. Lincoln brought some nice racial, gender, and sexual-orientation balance to the whole thing. (The commander admitted that he would have assigned a Japanese detective to the case, if they’d had a Jap with a gold shield, which they didn’t. In fact, the commander confessed, the entire Denver Police Department had only one officer of Japanese descent, and she was a rookie patrol officer taking her lumps and learning over in the Five Corners area. Nick Bottom and K. T. Lincoln would have to do.)
Nick had used a fifteen-minute vial of flashback reliving his call to Dara that morning. She’d been strangely unexcited about his news, even though closing the case could have meant a huge boost in his career. As assistant to a Denver ADA, she knew about such things. She sounded tired, even drugged. When Nick mentioned that he’d tried to call her around midnight the night before, there’d been a pause—more noticeable to the second-Nick reliving the moment via flashback than to the caffeine-jazzed real-time Nick that morning—and she’d said she’d taken a pill and turned off the phone and gone to bed early.
The three seconds’ worth of video image of Dara’s face across the street from Keigo’s apartment that night haunted Nick more than anything had since she’d died. He’d downloaded the video file into his phone and watched it a dozen times, using his wall-wide HD3D display in his cubie for the clearest image, and sometimes he was certain it was Dara; other times he was even more certain that it wasn’t—that it was a woman who didn’t even really
He’d also done three more fifteen-minute flashes of the phone conversation with her on the morning he’d told her about the Keigo murder, then flashed and reflashed an hour of the first time he’d seen her that next evening.
Did she seem false that evening? Did she seem to be hiding something from him?
Was he losing his mind?
Had he lost it long ago?
What everyone now called Six Flags Over the Jews was just to the left of the overpass where Speer Boulevard met I-25. Across the highway on the hill to the southwest of the sprawling complex loomed the Mile High Homeland Security Detention Center.
Nick had been vaguely curious why they called the amusement-park-turned-refugee-center Six Flags, since the company that ran the other Six Flags amusement parks only owned this one for about ten years right at the beginning of the century. For more than a century before that and for some years after the brief Six Flags era, the park had been called Elitch Gardens.
There were no gardens in sight now as Nick turned into the huge, empty parking area and followed concrete blast shields toward the first of several security checkpoints.
Nick knew about the old Elitch Gardens because of his grandfather. Nick’s father, who’d died when Nick was fifteen, had been a state patrol officer. Nick’s earliest memory of his old man was of his pistol, a large Smith & Wesson revolver. Nick’s father hadn’t died in a shootout (like Nick, he’d never fired his weapon in the line of duty), but in an accident on I-25 not two miles from where Nick’s wife, Dara, and her boss, Assistant District Attorney Harvey Cohen, had died. Nick’s father had pulled over to help a stranded motorist and a drunken sixteen-year-old driver had swerved onto the shoulder and killed him.
Nick’s grandfather had been a bus driver in the city and his great-grandfather had been a motorman on the old trolleys that connected Denver and its suburbs and nearby towns before cars forced them out. From Grandpa Nicholas, Nick had heard lovely tales of the old Elitch Gardens, whose motto for decades was
First opened in 1890, the original Elitch Gardens had been miles away from the downtown to the west, out at 38th Avenue and Tennyson Street in a suburb that was more like a separate village. That first Elitch Gardens, while growing, had kept its trees, extensive flower gardens, and shaded picnic areas where guests could eat lunches they’d packed for themselves. For forty years or so it had a zoo and for a century it boasted the Theater at the Gardens, first offering summer-stock performances and then, later in the twentieth century, visiting movie and TV stars. By the 1930s, Elitch’s had added the Trocadero Ballroom for dancing and visiting jazz groups and big bands and Nick’s grandfather had mentioned listening to
In 1994, Elitch’s had moved to its present location near the downtown and two years later had been purchased by the corporation that operated other Six Flags parks across America. The new owners abandoned grass and gardens for cement and concrete, Kiddieland and slow sky rides for ever more inverted-high-g screaming rides, and entrance prices that required a bank loan for a family. When Six Flags sold it sometime around 2006, the new company, although restoring the name Elitch Gardens, finished the job of destroying the last vestige of gardens and enjoyment for anyone other than the seriously adrenaline-addicted.
Nick knew all this detail because his grandfather and mother both had used Elitch’s as a metaphor for America in the last part of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first—abandoning shade and gardens and grace and affordable family fun for overpriced sun-glaring terror at six g’s inverted.
Well, thought Nick as he parked the car and walked toward the checkpoint across the cracked, heaving, and weed-strewn parking pavement, America had got all the terror it could ever have hoped for.
The security people at the entrance checkpoint were ex-DPD and remembered Nick and treated him well, and the magical black card that Nakamura had recently sent to him via Sato settled all other issues. One of the guards phoned ahead to alert Danny Oz to be ready for a visitor and even led Nick through the thick maze of hovels, tents, abandoned amusement park rides, and open-air kiosks.
“It looks like they have everything right in here,” said Nick, just to make conversation.
“Oh, yeah,” said the guard, a retired patrolman named Charlie Duquane, “the camp’s pretty self-sufficient. They have their own doctors and dentists and psychiatrists and a decent medical clinic. They’ve even got six synagogues.”
“What’s the resident count?”
“Around twenty-six thousand,” said Charlie. “Give or take a couple a hundred.”
The resident count six years ago had been a little over thirty-two thousand. Nick knew that many of the Israeli refugees were older and cancer was rampant in all the camps. Almost none were released into the general population.
He met with the poet in an otherwise empty mess tent under the rusting steel coils and pillars of some upside-down high-speed scream ride.
The hand behind the handshake was listless, clammy, bony, and weak. Nick had just seen Danny Oz in his flashback preparation and in the 3D crime-scene re-creation back at Keigo Nakamura’s LoDo apartment complex and there was no doubt that the man had aged horribly in the past six years. Oz had been thin and graying and
