right.
Even before the thought was complete, he was blinded by a flashlight beam directly in his eyes.
He still started to raise his hands in surrender when Billy Coyne’s voice from behind the circle of blinding light said, “I always knew you were a total pussy, Val.”
Incredibly, absurdly, Val’s terrified but not panicked mind flashed on the old James Bond and Bourne and Kurtz movies that he and the Old Man used to watch. “
“I’m gonna flash on this tomorrow when I’m flying to Moscow with my mother—in first class, asshole,” said Coyne, his voice still high and weird and adrenaline-driven as it had been back at the gunslits, “and I’m gonna get off thinking about how a hundred barbed flechettes just tore your fucking wimp body to…”
Val fired the Beretta through the bunched-up ski mask that concealed it.
Coyne said, “Ugh,” and dropped the flashlight, which hit on its metal side and did not shatter. The beam of light rolled in a slow circle.
Val threw himself to the right, trying to stay out of the beam of light. It was too fast, but it crossed him and kept going.
Val dropped to one knee, braced his right arm, and aimed the pistol low.
The flashlight beam came to a stop on Coyne on his knees, using the big OAO Izhmash as a sort of crutch to keep himself upright. Coyne was staring at his own chest where, just above and to the right of Vladimir Putin’s pale brow, a small red circle was beginning to blotch wider and spread.
Coyne looked up with a stupid, smirking grin. “You shot me.” He sounded almost amused. He began struggling with the bulky flechette sweeper.
Val didn’t think that Coyne had the strength to lift and aim the thing, but he didn’t care to wait and see if he was wrong. He shot Coyne again, in the throat this time.
Coyne’s head snapped back as his neck exploded, then the boy fell forward into the circle of the flashlight beam. The sound of his teeth snapping off as he hit the cement face-first, jaw wide open, would stay with Val always.
More shouts from behind and below.
Val was panting as if he’d run a hundred-yard dash. He felt a queer numbness spreading through him and doubted if he could walk now, much less run the distance he had to. He grabbed the flashlight and had started to turn away when a voice from Coyne’s corpse said, “
Val whirled and crouched, Beretta extended. Coyne lay still on his face. The pool of blood continued widening.
Approaching warily, Val set his sneaker to Coyne’s right shoulder and rolled him over.
Coyne’s eyes were wide and sightless, his mouth with the shattered front teeth opened wide. The throat below the bloodied jaw was shredded. The second shot had almost decapitated the boy.
Vladimir Putin sneered up at Val, the thin-lipped little mouth snarling, “
Knowing he was wasting a bullet and not caring, Val shot Vladimir Putin directly between his beady little eyes.
The AI stopped talking.
Voices from just beneath the standpipe now. Perhaps they hadn’t seen the vertical access. Val prayed they hadn’t. He had a few seconds to get around the first bend.
Flashlight in his left hand and Beretta in his right, Val ran. And ran.
1.09
Denver and Coors Field—Tuesday, Sept. 14
No one in the Denver Police Department when Nick was there ever blurred female detective K. T. Lincoln’s initials to sound like the soft, feminine “Katie.” At least not to her face. When talking to Detective Lincoln on a first-name basis, it was always “K… T” with a certain pause of respect, if not outright fear, separating the hard- edged consonants. It was rumored that no one, not even the captain or commissioner or those in Human Resources who handled her paperwork, had a clue as to what the K or T stood for. Behind her back, of course, there were plenty of foul and sexist variations. She tended to scare men and—as Nick had quickly discovered when he was her partner—the more insecure the men, the more quickly they frightened.
Detective First Grade K. T. Lincoln had never scared Nick Bottom, but it was probably because the two had worked together so well.
But now, seeing the scowl on her face as she came striding toward the booth near the back of the Denver Diner where Nick sat waiting, he felt some of that insecurity and fear. The absolute certainty that this hard- featured, frizzy-haired, six-foot-two scowling woman of color was packing a 9mm Glock on her hip never helped ameliorate that particular stab of anxiety.
“I’ve got some coffee coming for you,” said Nick as she slid into the booth opposite him. They used to catch breakfast here often after a night shift at Denver Center. Dara had never minded, nor had K.T.’s partner.
It had been almost five and a half years since Nick had seen or talked to K.T. She’d been promoted to lieutenant and made squad commander since then… a position that Nick himself might be filling if it hadn’t been for his flashback addiction. And his total screwing of the proverbial pooch on every front.
“I don’t want any coffee,” K.T. said coldly. “And the answer to what you’re going to ask me is no. Now, is there anything else, Mr. Bottom? I have an early meeting with Delvecchio’s Emergency Service Unit guys. I need to shove off.”
“I won’t be your sniper-second at Coors Field this afternoon,” the lieutenant said. Although Nick had never once come on to K. T. Lincoln, he’d always seen her as an attractive woman despite her size, rugged features, and short wild hair. Nick had once told Dara that he was able to imagine K.T. being descended from Abraham Lincoln—if the former president had mated with a beautiful black woman with K.T.’s cafe-au-lait complexion and chicory-bitter personality. Like President Lincoln (despite the inevitable rumors by second-rate history writers desperately seeking a new angle on the most-written-about president in U.S. history), K. T. Lincoln preferred women in matters of romance.
But it was her deeply recessed, dark, and strangely Lincolnesque—and only sometimes sympathetic—brown eyes that were the main similarity between the sainted president and the scowling and silent squad commander.
“How’d you know I was going into Coors?” asked Nick.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” said K.T. “Everybody in the department’s been watching you make an asshole of yourself working for Nakamura. You think you’re going to get special permission from the governor on down to see Oz, Dean, Delroy Nigger Brown, and the rest of these chumps—everything being greased from the Advisor’s office—and not have us know what you’re doing? Come back to Planet Earth, Bottom.”
“What happened to ‘Nick’?” asked Nick.
“He died at the bottom of a flashback addict’s sniffer vial,” snapped K.T.
Stung, Nick said, “I have a sniper-second for Coors.”
“One of Nakamura’s thugs,” she said. “Good. You don’t need me, then. If there won’t be anything else…” She started scooting out of the booth.
The waitress accidentally blocked K.T.’s exit for a moment, bringing both their coffees and Nick’s big
