Flashback

He removed the two items there and rolled onto his back.

The leather mitt—darker and tattered, the leather laces replaced and rewoven a dozen times and the webbing torn—smelled almost the same. The leather had a deeper, more knowledgeable smell now. He held the glove, too small to get his hand fully into, over his face.

Total pussy, he told himself. This was one of the reasons he kept his bedroom door locked. And, truth be told, he felt the same guilt with these two talismans as he did when he downloaded porn from a stroke site. But different… different.

He set the old mitt next to him on the pillow.

The other object was an old blue phone. His mother’s. He’d taken it and hidden it away the day after her funeral and although his old man had eventually gotten around to searching for the thing, he hadn’t searched very hard.

The phone was useless as a phone since its phone and access functions had been cancelled by the Old Man and shut off by Verizon shortly after his mother’s death. But there were invaluable things still on it.

Val tapped an earbud into his right ear and thumbed the controls. His mother had used the voice-memo function for three years before the accident that killed her and he knew his favorite dates by heart. One of them from September six years ago was a list of possible gifts for him… for Val’s tenth birthday. There were similar notes from that last Christmas just two weeks before the accident.

But the voice memos didn’t have to relate to Val to be wonderful. The notes to herself could be about dental appointments or school conferences… it didn’t matter. Just the sound of her voice allowed him to fall asleep on these nights when he couldn’t sleep. Usually she sounded busy, distracted, rushed at work, sometimes even annoyed, but still… the sound of his mother’s voice touched something in the core of him.

There was a text section to the phone, of course, and large files there the last seven months of her life, but they were encrypted and after a few lazy attempts to break the cipher, Val left those text files alone. It might be a diary she’d been keeping, but whatever it was, his mother had wanted to keep it private. If his parents’ marriage was in trouble or if it were some other grown-up angst that she’d used an encryption file to keep anyone from overhearing, Val thought it was none of his business.

He just wanted to hear her voice.

You are such a pussy, Val Bottom. Less than a year away from getting drafted into the army or marines, and here you are…

Val ignored that voice and listened to his mother’s, his cheek and nose against the flattened baseball mitt.

Even with tomorrow and the Omura thing hanging over him like a black-garbed ghost, the soft voice and the leather smell cleared his mind and allowed him to fall asleep within ten minutes.

His last waking thought was I have to pack these two things at the bottom of my duffel tomorrow where Leonard won’t find them…

“You motherfucker!”

“Motherfucker yourself, Coyne,” said Val. “And fuck you too.”

Val was ten minutes late for their rendezvous at the Cigna Hospital entrance to the storm sewers. He almost hadn’t come at all but—in the end—knew that he’d always doubt his own courage if he didn’t show up.

“We were just leaving without you, Bottom-wipe,” snarled Coyne. The leader was wearing a leather jacket open to show a squinting, scowling Putin. Coyne already had his ski mask on, although the balaclava was rolled up high on his head.

“Did you bring your gun, Bottom-wipe?” asked Gene D. with a high, almost hysterical-sounding giggle.

Val slapped the taller boy across his cheek with a flick of two fingers.

“Hey!” screamed Gene D.

Coyne laughed. “I get to call Bottom-wipe here Bottom-wipe. Nobody else does. Zip up your fly, pimple-head.”

Gene D. looked down and the other boys laughed too loudly. Everyone sounded like they were wound too tight.

“Got your flashlight?” asked Coyne. He was carrying the bulky OAO Izhmash right here in the open behind the hospital medical-waste Dumpster. It was twilight, but not really dark yet. Anyone driving into the parking lot could see it.

Val held his flashlight up.

“Let’s go,” said Coyne.

Dinjin banged the storm sewer cover open and one by one they slid down into the dank and dark passageway. Coyne led the way as they walked the half mile or so to the downtown through the labyrinth of twists and turns they’d memorized rather than marked. No one spoke as their flashlight beams danced across the moldy, heavily tagged concrete walls. Once in the tunnels near the Cigna entrance, flashback vials crunched underfoot and the floor of the tunnel—dusty and dry—showed a litter of toilet paper, old mattresses, and used condoms that the boys fastidiously avoided.

Val was amazed that all eight of them had shown up. Did the younger kids like Toohey, Cruncher, Monk, and Dinjin have any sense of what they were getting into?

Did the older kids—Sully, Gene D., even Coyne?

Did he himself have a clue? wondered Val. If he did, why was he here?

They reached the Performing Arts Center outlet sooner than Val wanted.

“Turn off your flashlights,” hissed Coyne. “Pull your ski masks down.”

“It’s another ten minutes before…,” began Sully.

“Shut up and do it,” said Coyne.

The boys pulled their balaclavas down. Val hated the smell and feel of wet wool against his face. At first it seemed like absolute darkness—Val could see nothing at all and a sudden panic made his bowels go watery—but then the light through the rain slits in the closed metal panels filtered in and their eyes began to adapt, at least to the point where they could see one another’s dark shapes standing there. Val sensed someone next to him— Monk?—and felt the other boy’s arms and body trembling hard with terror or anxiety.

Coyne shoved and pulled until all eight of them were piled in as close to the rebar grating and steel panels as they could get. By straining their heads and necks forward through the grate, they could get a glimpse outside through the six tiny slits. The youngest boys took turns at their two slits.

When Val peeped through he thought his heart was going to race itself to death. There were already people and automobiles out there, although the prime parking spot just ten or twelve feet from the storm sewer was still open and empty. The sound of voices, traffic, shouts from the reporters and photographers, and a general crowd buzz seemed to be all around them despite the barriers of concrete and steel. All the other times they’d been here, all the hours they’d spent cutting away parts of the rebar grating and making sure the key Coyne had would actually unlock the swinging cover panels, 2nd Street had been empty and the bit of late-night traffic on Grand Avenue had sounded far away.

Now it was all here.

What the hell had they been thinking? Val knew that it had been a boy’s fantasy up to this point—playing pirates in a cave with real guns—but this was real.

“Coyne,” Val whispered. “We can’t…”

Coyne hit Val in the face with his closed fist. Val went down heavily, the Beretta still in his belt. He felt the strange, squarish muzzle of the OAO Izhmash flechette-spewer pressing painfully into his cheek. “Shut the fuck UP, asshole,” hissed Coyne. “Or I fucking swear I’ll do you here, now, rather than later.”

Flechette guns, Val knew, made little noise, not much more than a whooshing sound. Coyne might risk the noise to… no, Val realized with a sickening lurch of absolute certainty, Coyne was going to risk being heard by killing Val right here and now. With that flood of certainty came the twin realization that Coyne had always planned to kill Val here, this night. Maybe Coyne planned to kill all of the flashgang members before the shooting was over.

Val’s Beretta was in his waistband, under his hooded sweatshirt and flannel shirt, and before he could fumble