Flashback

problem if they tried to strip this particular car, but now he just let the bullet holes in the hood send that message.

The TC was its usual badly lit, smelly labyrinth. Nick bought a beer in what had been the old bookstore’s coffee shop and carried the bottle down a long twisting ramp to the lowest level, where there were tables and lights. Below that area were the flashcave cots and sleepers.

K.T. was waiting for him at their usual table. There was no one else—or at least no one conscious—in this part of the maze of old shelves, rotted carpets, and twenty-watt bulbs. Lieutenant Lincoln had set her battered briefcase on the chair next to her and there was a stack of folders in front of her.

When Nick sat down with a tired sigh, she said, “Are you packing, Nick?”

He almost laughed but then saw her eyes. “Of course I’m packing,” he said.

“Put it here on the table,” said K.T. “Just use the thumb and little finger of your left hand. Now.” She raised her right hand from beneath the table and let Nick see the 9mm Glock. It was aimed at his midsection.

Nick didn’t protest or ask questions. He wore his holster on his left side under his leather jacket, butt of the Glock forward for a cross-body draw, and K.T. knew that. He lifted the pistol out gingerly, just as she’d directed, and put it on the table in front of her. She whisked it out of sight, setting it on the chair next to her big briefcase, and hissed, “Scoot back.”

Nick scooted back.

“Get up real slow. Lift your jacket and do a full turn. Then show me your ankles.”

He did what she’d said, pulling each trouser leg up to show her that he’d brought no ankle gun.

“Sit down,” said K.T. “Stay scooted back there. Keep your hands spread open on your thighs where I can see them.”

He sat and spread his fingers as she’d directed. Somewhere in the dark flashcave down the ramp behind him, a man screamed in flashback terror or ecstasy.

“All right,” said K.T. “I’m going to be giving you three pieces of news. You may know all of it already. You may not. But you’re not going to do a damn thing when you hear each piece but sit there with your hands still on your thighs like that. Understand?”

“I understand,” said Nick. The Westlake-lover years ago had his pistol more or less aimed at K.T. when she’d pulled her piece from under her short FedEx delivery jacket and shot him five times before he could react. She might be a little slower now what with age and a desk job, but Nick wasn’t going to bet his life on it.

Still holding her Glock low with her right hand, K.T. extended her phone with her left hand. “Least bad piece of news first,” she said.

The faces of seven boys—each obviously dead, each obviously shot to death— flicked across the screen. The eighth boy’s face was Val’s.

Nick grunted and was halfway up out of his chair but the rising muzzle of K.T.’s Glock froze him in place. She silently gestured him back in his seat. Nick complied because of the gun, but more because of the photo of Val. It wasn’t a crime-scene shot of a dead boy like the others, but clearly something scanned from a high school virtual yearbook. Val wasn’t smiling in the photo, hadn’t dressed well for it, and his hair needed cutting, but the picture, unlike the others, wasn’t of a shooting victim. It kept Nick in his seat.

“What?” he managed after half a minute. “Tell me.”

“Word came in about two hours ago,” whispered K.T. “A flashgang of young punks tried to assassinate Daichi Omura in Los Angeles earlier this evening…”

“Omura the California Advisor?” Nick said stupidly. He felt as if his jaw and lips had been injected with Novocain.

“Yeah. The kids ambushed Advisor Omura and his retinue at some opening or the other in downtown L.A., the flashgang shooters firing from a storm sewer near the Disney Center.” K.T. paused to take a breath. The muzzle of her Glock never wavered. “The flashgang was carrying a lot of firepower—almost all of it illegal…”

Them, thought Nick. The giant ants and the army Jeeps and trucks trying to find the queen ant’s nest in the L.A. storm sewers. He and Val had loved that old movie.

“Advisor Omura wasn’t seriously hurt and some of his detail whisked him away in a limo while his security people and some L.A. cops returned fire and killed six of the flashgangers right there where the storm sewer opened onto the street,” said K.T. “The seventh kid was found dead a few hundred meters away in the tunnels, shot three times. Do you know him?” She flicked through the photos again and stopped on the death photo of a teenage boy, eyelids half lowered with only the whites showing, mouth open, front teeth broken off, two visible entrance wounds in his chest—some sort of interactive face on the blood-soaked T-shirt—and a terrible wound that had torn his throat open.

“No,” managed Nick. “I’ve never seen him before. You showed Val…”

K.T. waved away the question. “The L.A. juvenile-crime units say that Val ran with these boys… especially with this guy, Billy Coyne. Did Val ever mention him?”

“Coyne?” repeated Nick. He could taste vomit low in his throat. “Billy Coyne? No… wait, maybe. Yes, it’s possible. I’m not sure. Val never talked much about his friends out there. Is Val OK?”

“There’s an APB out on Val Fox, as he’s known at his school,” said K.T. “The LAPD haven’t been able to trace his phone. Neither he nor your father-in-law is at Leonard Fox’s address. We know he hasn’t tried to call you today or tonight on your phone, but have you been in touch with him some other way, Nick?”

Nick was thinking, absurdly, and with pain—I hate it that Val’s not using my last name.

“What? No!” he said, shaking his head. “Val hasn’t called and I’ve been meaning to phone him but… I mean, I missed his birthday the other week and… no, I haven’t been in touch with him. Is there any evidence that Val was in on this attack on Omura, or is it just a juvie-division hunch?”

“There must be some evidence,” said K.T. “Homeland Security has a national watch for Val. Right now they’re treating him as a material witness, but they and the FBI are serious about apprehending him.”

“Jesus,” whispered Nick. He looked K.T. in the eye. “You say this is the least bad news you have for me?”

K.T.’s brown eyes never seemed to blink. She was staring at Nick the way he’d seen her stare at perps they had to take down one way or the other. “What are you going to do, Nick?”

“What do you mean? Are you asking me to drop a dime on my son?”

“No,” said K.T. “I think you need to bring him in if he shows up in person. You still have cuffs, don’t you?”

It would have been wrong for Nick to have his DPD handcuffs, but he did indeed have some that had been part of his junior private detective kit when Nick had considered making money as a bounty hunter tracking down skippers who’d violated their bonds. He tried to envision slapping those cuffs on his son. He couldn’t. But Nick realized that he was visualizing Val as he’d been when he’d last seen him, not quite eleven years old, his face still rounded by baby fat. Even this recent high school photo showed a different person.

Nick said nothing.

“DHS and the FBI and local departments won’t mess around with him, Nick,” K.T. was saying. “It says on the APB that he’s armed and dangerous.”

“Who says he’s armed?”

“Galina Kschessinska,” said K.T.

“And who the fuck is Galina Kschessinska?”

“Formerly Mrs. Galina Coyne. The dead Billy Coyne’s mother. She once worked in an office that helped coordinate Advisor Omura’s travel and security in L.A.”

“So it was an inside job,” said Nick. “Why would Ms. Galina Kschessinska know if Val was armed or not?”

“She told the LAPD that her son had told her that he’d given a nine-millimeter Beretta to Val. The pistol had fifteen rounds in the magazine.”

And what’s teenager Billy Coyne doing handing out 9-mil Berettas and why hadn’t Ms. Kschessinska mentioned this to the cops before the massacre at the Disney Center? thought Nick. But he said nothing. If what the bitch said was true, then the “armed” part of the APB was appropriate. But the