wouldn’t fit.
“Sorry, power seat, but hasn’t worked for a while,” mumbled Nick as Sato’s mass filled all the space between the seat back and the dashboard. “Been meaning to fix that stuck harness as well.” The seat belt harness extended about twenty inches, which barely reached Sato’s shoulder, and would not extend farther.
“Do you have airbag?” asked the security chief.
“Ahh…,” said Nick and then remembered that the car had been CMRI’d on its way in. Sato must know that all the ancient hybrid’s airbags were missing. Nick had sold them years ago.
Sato fiddled with the unmoving power seat controls for a minute and then, just as Nick got out to come around to add his own useless fiddling, Sato planted his feet on the floorboards, gave out a sumo-wrestler’s grunt- growl, and straightened his legs.
The stalled power seat screeched back as far as it could go, the bearings almost tearing off their railings, until the back of the half-reclined seat was almost touching the rear seat.
Sato gave another weight lifter’s grunt and pulled down on the stuck shoulder harness with all his might.
Something in the mechanism tore and three yards of seat belt hung loose. Still half reclined, two feet farther back than the driver, Sato clicked the harness into the buckle.
Nick came back around and drove off. He would have rolled up the windows to shut out the DS agents’ laughter, but it was already far too hot in the little car and the air-conditioning wasn’t working with the batteries this low.
The low batteries were a problem.
Nick had popped his phone back in the dashboard slot and its nav function told him that the distance to the Cherry Creek Mall by the shortest route—reversing the way he’d come via Speer Boulevard, to 6, to I-70, and then the Evergreen exit to the Green Zone—was 29.81 miles. The DS guys had charged the gelding with their garage’s high-speed 240-volt charger, but the phone and car readouts both said that the old batteries only had enough charge to travel 24.35 miles, even factoring in the downhill stretch on I-70 dropping out of the foothills.
The last thing that Nick Bottom wanted on this particular Friday was to be stuck with Mr. Hideki Sato somewhere on Speer Boulevard—probably in
The gelding hummed, hissed, and rattled its way out of the Green Zone toward I-70.
Sato’s position, lying almost flat in the broken and fully reclined passenger seat and so far back that it seemed that Nick was a chauffeur up front and Sato the passenger in the rear seat, looked absurd, but the hefty security chief didn’t seem bothered by it. Sato folded his callused hands over his belly and looked up and out at the trees and sky.
Glancing at the sky, Nick said, “Mr. Sato, how did you get the video of me using the flashback on that cul-de- sac? Some of the shots looked to be from a handheld camera from about ten feet away.”
“They were,” said the security chief.
Nick tried to accelerate down the ramp onto the Interstate, but the gelding wasn’t in the mood to accelerate—even heading downhill. At least there wasn’t much traffic to merge into coming east on I-70. At one time, a time Nick could still remember clearly, a family could get on I-70 and drive 1,034 miles without ever leaving the Interstate except to pump gas—merging with I-15 about 500 miles from Denver in the Utah high desert and mountain country and staying on it the rest of the way to L.A.—ending up at the Pacific Ocean at the Santa Monica Pier.
Now an adventurous driver could get in his car and drive 98 miles west from Denver on I-70 to where state and federal protection ended at Vail. Beyond Vail, there be dragons.
“How did you get one of your people to within ten feet of my car with a camera?” asked Nick.
“Stealth suit,” said Sato. The short but absurdly solid man seemed totally relaxed.
Nick stopped himself from replying. Stealth suits were the stuff of agencies like the former CIA, long since disbanded, and of sci-fi action movies. How could the expense of a stealth suit possibly be justified just to follow Nicholas Bottom to an interview? Even if they’d badly wanted the footage to embarrass him as they did during the interview—why a stealth suit? And how’d they get the operative
Sato was almost certainly joking. But Nick, who still had a cop’s ability to pick up most of the subtle physical and auditory signals that someone was lying (with some inner-city types the signal was simple—the perp’s lips were moving), just couldn’t get any reading on Sato. Except for the security chief’s occasional and deliberate flashes of contempt, disdain, and amusement toward Nick, there was nothing. Beneath that Japanese layer of what Occidentals like Nick thought of as Asian inscrutability, Security Chief Sato wore another—probably professional— mask.
“The aerial video,” persisted Nick. “All MUAVs?”
“Not all miniature,” Sato said softly. “And one was a satellite feed.”
Nick laughed out loud. Sato didn’t join in the laugh or crack a smile.
Sato continued lying there like a tipped-over Buddha, his fingers interlaced over his broad but heavily muscled belly.
Nick braked lightly on the 6 percent I-70 grade down the mountain toward Denver, slowing the crawling car to an even more glacial pace, hoping against hope that the regenerative braking would add enough juice to the dying li-ion batteries to get him home. Even other old clunkers honked and roared past. The hydrogen vehicles in the far-left VIP lane were blurs.
He changed the subject in an attempt to keep Sato talking.
“How did you translate ‘gelding’ to your boss?”
“As a male horse whose testicles have been removed. This is correct, yes?”
“Yes,” said Nick. “But don’t you have geldings—old hybrids with the gasoline engines removed—in Japan?”
“Not legal in Japan,” said Sato. “Cars in Japan are inspected every year and must meet all modern standards. Few automobiles there are more than three years old. Hydrogen-powered vehicles are—how do you say it?—the norm in Japan.”
Still braking, watching his meters while trying to keep both his batteries and the conversation alive, Nick said, “Mr. Nakamura doesn’t seem to like old movies.”
Sato made that deep noise in his throat and chest. Nick had no idea how to interpret that. Different topic needed.
“You know,” said Nick, “this liaison idea isn’t going to work.”
“Riaison?” repeated Sato.
Nick didn’t smirk but he wondered if he’d brought up this conversation strand just to get Sato to mispronounce the word.
“The idea Mr. Nakamura brought up of you following me everywhere, reporting on everything I see and hear, being part of the investigation with me. It won’t work.”
“Why not, Mr. Bottom?”
“You know damn well why not,” snapped Nick. He was approaching the bottom of the hill, emerging onto the high, mostly flat prairie that stretched east past Denver some eight hundred miles or so to the Mississippi River, and he’d have to decide in a few minutes whether to continue a little north and then due east on I-70 to the Mousetrap and a short stretch of I-25 south to Speer Boulevard, with no stops, or angle right to go back on Highway 6 to Speer the way he’d come. The 6 route was a little shorter, I-70 perhaps a little easier on the dying batteries.
“My witnesses and suspects won’t talk with a Jap listening,” continued Nick. “Sorry, Japanese person. You know what I mean.”
