Flashback

1.03 Cherry Creek—Friday, Sept. 10

The gelding rolled up the last ramp to the third and top floor of the Cherry Creek Mall Condos’ parking garage and died thirty feet short of the charging stations. Nick left it where it was, knowing that Mack or one of the boys would push it the rest of the way. The charging station in the Japanese Green Zone had taken fewer than forty minutes; here, with the mall’s old charging equipment, it would be twelve hours even for the partial charge. Nick didn’t care.

Sato had gotten through the two security checkpoints by handing over his NICC—the thin card was black rather than the usual diplomat’s or visiting alien’s green—and there’d been no problem. But Nick was looking forward to the last checkpoint at the armory check-room. If Sato thought his diplomatic status was going to allow him to carry a gun into the Cherry Creek Mall Condos interior, the security chief was in for a rude shock. The president of the United States couldn’t get a weapon into this complex if she hid it in her bra.

They were in the security airlock and Gunny G., the senior weapons expert and top security man for the mall, was behind the gun-check counter. Probably one of the guys at the security checkpoints had phoned him. An ex-marine, Gunny G. was of that indeterminate age beyond sixty but still fit and dangerous, and his square, tanned face under the crew cut seemed held together by old scars.

Nick handed over his Glock 9 and waited.

The former shopping mall didn’t have the Green Zone’s CMRI or layers of security, but the X-ray machine and ancient explosives-gunpowder sniffer in the entrance airlock had done their work. Nick could see the images of Sato and him glowing on Gunny’s screen to the left of the counter opening. Sato had some sort of oversized handgun in a shoulder holster in his left armpit, a small one in a belt holster around the curve of his left hip, a strap-on holster with a tiny semiautomatic on his right ankle, and a nasty-looking throwing knife on the belt above his right hip.

Before Gunny G. could growl his demands, Sato said, “Listen to this, please.” Risten. Prease.

The security chief passed across his NICC and when Gunny G. scanned it, he put his earbud and e-glasses on to access the encrypted information there. The former marine’s expression did not change, but when he handed Sato’s identity card back, he growled, “Go on in, Mr. Sato.” There was no attempt to disarm Sato.

Nick’s jaw actually dropped in surprise. He’d heard that expression for decades, but had never seen anyone’s jaw literally drop—much less experienced it himself.

The inner doors and gate opened and Sato stood to one side and made an “After you” gesture with his massive arm.

Nick led the way to his cubie. This section of town was obviously going through one of its daily brownouts and although generators kept the security doors, parking-area charging bays, security cameras, cubie doors, outside autoguns, and other essential equipment running, the lights were out above the second-floor mezzanine and the once-fancy skylight panels that ran the length of the ceiling were so caked with dust and grime that the light inside had paled to a sick, sad yellow. Most of the common-space ventilator fans were also out and since people propped their cubie doors open during the brownouts, the air was thick with the funk of several thousand people and their dirty bedding and cooking smells and cubie garbage.

Nick paused at the railing twenty feet above the old fountain that used to splash in front of the Saks Fifth Avenue store. The space was still home to some of the pricier windowless cubies in the complex, although it wasn’t overly inviting now, with its leaking trash bags heaped head-high outside the steel-shuttered entrance. He looked down at where the wild goose sculpture used to be.

The large, trapezoidal marble-sided fountain had long since been drained and filled in with soil so that some of the Saks-cubie residents could attempt to grow vegetables there, but a few steel cables still dropped from the high ceiling and one bronze goose remained. Originally, Nick remembered from the times he’d shopped here as a kid and young man, the sculpture had boasted a series of wild geese coming down in single file for a landing on the water—with the lowest goose, legs stiffly outstretched, seeming to throw up jets of spray to either side where its webbed feet contacted the surface of the water. How many geese had there been? Nick wondered. Six? Eight? More?

It would take flashback to find out and he wasn’t going to waste the drug on that. But now this one goose remained about ten feet above the makeshift garden, its broad bronze wings outstretched, its legs just beginning to deploy like stiff, web-footed landing gear.

Nick didn’t know why he paused here with Sato in tow… only that he always paused a second to stare at that lone remaining goose.

He shook his head angrily and led the way to the former Baby Gap and his home.

The residents of the other five cubies in the old commercial space were all home behind their partial walls and blankets since they were also on the dole and had nowhere to go during the long days. The old woman in the cubie next to Nick’s was snoring. The couple in the cubie opposite were screaming at each other, their two-year-old kid joining in and bringing the melded screams perilously close to the death frequency. The old soldier’s cubie was silent as always—Nick always waited for the stench that would tell everyone that the old man had finally hanged or shot himself in there—but the other two cubies had their TVs on and blaring. The Baby Gap acoustical ceiling had been twelve feet high; the thin cubie walls went up only eight feet.

Nick opened the door and let Sato enter his tiny space, his rage at this invasion of his privacy growing. But Mr. Nakamura had insisted that the security chief visit Nick’s home, and Nick would get the initial credit transfer only after the visit was complete.

Nick saw that he’d failed to make his bed that morning. The irony was that it had been an absurd little point of pride between Dara and him that he’d always made his bed, even before he met Dara, and if she hadn’t gotten to it on the mornings when they were both rushed to get to work, he would.

The unmade bed was all the more obvious since it took up almost a third of the space in Nick’s cubie.

Nick didn’t suggest that Sato sit down since a) he hadn’t invited him here and b) the only place to sit other than the unmade bed was the chair at the little desk on which Nick opened his phone’s virtual keyboard and that chair probably wasn’t sturdy enough to hold Sato. It was barely sturdy enough to hold Nick Bottom.

But the security chief showed no interest in sitting down. Crossing to the wall opposite Nick’s bed and the seventy-inch flatscreen display there, Sato activated the TV and passed his card through the set’s diskey slot.

Instantly three rows of faces, eighteen in all, appeared on the screen.

“You recognize these men and women?” asked Sato.

“Most of them. Some of them.” They’d all been familiar to Nick once, witnesses and suspects in Keigo Nakamura’s murder files, but flashback had the ironic side effect of dulling actual memory.

As if in response to this unspoken fact, Sato said, “Mr. Nakamura assumes that you will want to spend some hours reviewing their files and earlier interviews via the drug flashback before you begin your actual investigation. My strong recommendation is that you do such a flashback review for only one or two of these people at a time, so that the real-world investigation may begin and proceed as soon as possible. How many hours will you need for the flashback?”

Nick shrugged. “That homicide investigation took up four months of my life. If I were to review all of it under flashback, look back at all these people’s files and interviews, I’d be ready to start around Christmas.”

“That is, of course, totally unacceptable.”

“All right. When do you and Mr. Nakamura think I should be starting the foot leather part of the new investigation? A month from now? Two weeks?”

“Early tomorrow morning,” said Sato. “You are an expert at triggering flashback experiences. Choose critical memories to relive this afternoon and this evening, get a good night’s sleep, and I shall join you as you begin the reopened investigation in the morning.”

Nick opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the transfer of funds to his card.

Sato nodded for that card, passed it through his own phone’s diskey, and handed it back.

“You have the first month’s expenses now,” said Sato. “Including money for flashback purchase, of course, but also for transportation—you will need a new car, as Mr. Nakamura pointed out—and other incidentals. Obviously all expenditures will be tracked in real time from our end.”

Nick only nodded. But as Sato moved toward the door, Nick said, “Three of those eighteen are dead, you know.”

“Yes.”

“But you still want me to review them under flash and keep them as a focus of the investigation?”

“Yes.”

Nick shrugged again. “I’ll walk you out.”

The phrase sounded archaic even to Nick’s middle-aged ears. And he didn’t give a damn whether the security chief had trouble finding his way out of the mall. He only wanted to make sure he was really gone.

Surprisingly, Sato didn’t walk to any of the airlock exits. He crossed to the north mezzanine and the administrative corridor near the old Ralph Lauren store. Gunny G. and the black-armored security sergeant named Marx were there to meet him. The four men went through a door and up a flight of steps—the elevators weren’t working in the brownout—and out onto the roof. Nick knew this roof access; he had its entry code memorized and a hundred feet of Perlon-3 climbing rope, carabiners, and a rappel-harness in his cubie closet in case he ever had to leave the building quickly via the roof.

Now he squinted in the hazy light. Smoke was still rising many miles to the northwest.

The helicopter that came in to fetch Sato was one of the new silent ones that looked more like a dragonfly than any of the Homeland Security, police, and other choppers that Nick had known. The only noise as it touched down—Nick couldn’t have told anyone that the old mall had an infrared-marked heliport space on its roof—was the scrabble of gravel blowing across the grimy skylights and decommissioned solar panels.

Sato clambered in without saying a word to anyone and the Nakamura aircraft lifted off and flew due west.

On the way down the steps, Gunny G. said, “Some company you’re keeping these days, Nick.”

Nick grunted.

Nick didn’t have to leave the mall to get to his flashback dealer. Gary met him in the part of the subbasement that used to be the mall’s boiler room.

“Holy shit,” said the maintenance man when he saw the balance on Nick’s NICC. “How much of this you want to spend on the flash?”

“All of it,” said Nick. He handed the card to Gary and watched as the other man swiped it in his illicit, illegal, but quite effective black-market diskey.

“It’s going to take me some time to get that many vials together.”

“Ten minutes,” said Nick, who knew where Gary kept his supplies. “One minute more and I’ll do this buy on the street.”

“Easy, easy,” said Gary, making patting motions with his gnarled hands. “I’ll get it all up to you at your cubie in ten minutes. But they gonna be a lotta unhappy flashers in the building tonight.”

“Fuck ’em,” said Nick. “But don’t deliver to my cubie. I’ll meet you here in ten minutes.”

“You the buyer.”

“You’re damned right,” said Nick.

Gary was back in the boiler room in eight minutes and so was Nick. He’d dumped his card and phone in his cubie and showered and changed clothes and passed his old police bug detector over himself—just in case Sato had put a tracker on him—and come down to the basement carrying only his old olive-canvas messenger bag slung over one shoulder.

Even with the high number of twenty-hour vials Nick had specified, there were a lot of flashback vials coming out of Gary’s duffel. Nick stuffed them into his messenger bag, wrapping them quickly in the towels he’d packed to keep them from rattling.

When Gary was gone, Nick went through the seldom-used door down into the pipe conduits and crawlspaces beneath the boiler room. There was a deeper crawlspace here going to the older pipes, most out of use now, that ran to and from the mall from the outside, and this access panel was locked with a number keypad for which no one working in the mall probably still had the code. Nick tapped in the seven-digit code. He knew this not from his time living at the mall but from a case ten years ago when he and other detectives had searched this whole maze of Cherry Creek underground heating and sewage pipes for a serial killer who’d specialized in children.

Clicking the access panel shut behind him, Nick pulled a tiny flashlight from his messenger bag and moved in a crouching run fifty yards or so, avoiding the rusty and corroded pipes that all but filled the space. Whatever was in there now—and dripping and oozing from those pipes—was bad enough to keep the street people out of this particular stretch of the underground maze. It was hard to breathe there.

Nick reached the first junction of tunnels and turned left. The tunnel here was just as small and just as foul-smelling. Nick counted twenty paces and stopped where several smaller pipes ran dripping into the concrete wall. An old inspection panel there looked corroded shut but it slid screechingly upward when Nick pulled.

The watertight plastic bag was there where he’d put it years ago and where he’d checked on it from time to time since. Nick removed the .32 semiautomatic pistol from its nest of oily rags and dropped it into his messenger bag. The weapon had been a throw-down belonging to Detective K. T. Lincoln, his last partner. Nick kept the wad of old bills in its own freezer bag but removed the cheap, traceless Walmart immigrant phone and tested it. The long-duration batteries were still good. The thing still got a signal down here.

Squatting in the steaming reek of the tunnel, Nick tapped in a number.

“Mothman here,” said the Pakistani-accented voice.

“Moth, this is Dr. B. I need you to pick me up at the storm sewer opening under the old bridge over Cherry Creek in about five minutes.”

There followed only the briefest of pauses. For more than a dozen years, Mohammed “Mothman” al Mahdi had been one of Detective Nicholas Bottom’s best street informants. And “Dr. B.” had been Mothman’s highest-paying cop. Nick had often checked on Mothman’s presence in the years since he was booted off the force, usually bringing a gift when he visited the cabbie. More to the point, Mothman was still afraid of Nick Bottom—both physically and because Nick knew enough about the Moth’s past that he could drop a dime on him at any time.

“Be there in five, Dr. B.”

In the movies, storm drains were always the size of the ones in L.A. You could drive a truck in those drains. They had driven an entire motorized regiment of Jeeps and trucks into those drains in the midtwentieth-century movie Them that Nick and Dara had liked. But storm drains in Denver were slimy, narrow affairs, and Nick was crawling on his belly and elbows by the time he kicked out the rusted rebar drain cover and dropped the four feet to the abandoned walkway under the old Cherry Creek bridge.

Mothman’s bumblebee pedicab, imported from Calcutta when that city went to all electric cabs, was waiting just under the shadow of the bridge. Nick slid into the backseat.

“Grossven’s cave,” directed Nick.

Mothman nodded and pedaled. Nick sat back deeper on the soiled cushions, making sure his face was out of sight.

Mickey Grossven’s flashcave was less than two miles along the river to the south. The condos here had burned in the original reconquista fighting and never been torn down or repaired. Nick slapped five dollars in old bucks cash into the Mothman’s hand—it was two months’ income for the illegal immigrant—and said, “You haven’t seen me or heard from me. If anyone tracks me, I’ll come hunting for you, Mohammed.”

“Trust me, Dr. B.”

Nick was already gone, ducking from the pedicab to the hole in the basement wall. Down a urine-reeking corridor, then up two flights of stairs, then to a halt in a corridor that led nowhere. A blank brick wall and burned debris ahead.

Nick stood there until the night-vision and infrared cameras could get a good look at him.

The wall slid open and Nick entered a windowless warehouse space half the size of a city block. The only light came from chemical glowsticks set into mounds of melted wax on the floor. There were hundreds of low cots in the dark room, perhaps a thousand, with a twitching form on each cot. Bottles hung above each cot and IV drips ran to each form.

Grossven and his huge bouncer met him in the entry area.

“Detective Bottom?” said Grossven. “We don’t have a problem here, do we?”

Nick shook his head. “Not ‘Detective’ any longer, Mickey. I just need a cot and an IV.”

Grossven showed his almost toothless grin and gestured to the huge, dark space. “Cots is what we got. Cots and time. All the time in the world. How much time you want, Detective?”

“Six hundred hours’ worth.”

Grossven had no eyebrows so he showed his surprise with his eyes only. “It’s a good start. Cash or charge today, Detective?”

Nick gave him a fifty-dollar bill.

“Lawrence,” said Grossven and the gigantic bouncer in dragonscale body armor led Nick to a cot in an uncrowded corner and expertly got the IV going. Nick set his bag under the cot, sliding the .32 into his pocket but knowing that his money and flashback vials would be safe here. It was what the hibernation caves were for. Mickey wouldn’t have stayed alive for a month if he’d allowed his customers to be robbed, and he’d been in the cave business for more than a decade.

More than twenty hours under the flash at a time, Nick knew, led to kidney and bowel problems. No breaks from the flash also led to psychotic episodes when the mind, finally wakened, couldn’t sort one reality from another.

Nick didn’t give a damn about the psychotic problems—he already knew which reality he’d chosen—but he would accept the four-hour interruptions to walk a bit on the indoor track upstairs so his muscles wouldn’t atrophy and to use the restroom and eat some energy bars. Once every week or two, he’d use the group showers next door. Maybe.

Six hundred hours with Dara wasn’t enough—it wasn’t even a full month—but it would be a start.

Lying back on his cot, the IV feed loose enough that it wouldn’t get in the way in case he needed to reach for his pistol, Nick lifted the first twenty-hour vial, visualized his memory trigger point, broke the seal, and inhaled deeply.