“What did William say this boy did when they were experimenting?”
“Oh, various excuses,” she slurred, waving her hands as she tried to light a real cigarette, plucking the No-C stick out and flinging it away angrily. “Standing guard. William said the boy always lost his nerve and stood apart, saying he was going to stand guard for the others. That sort of nonsense. The boy was not a true friend of William’s, no matter everything my dear boy tried to do for him. No matter what wonderful gifts William gave him.”
She looked up and Nick thought of shell-less oysters again as the mottled, mucusy gray eyes within their pools of makeup tried to focus on him. “But if he did indeed murder my son, I guess it ghosts… goes, that is… goes without saying that he was no real friend. This Hal Fox was probably always planning to betray and murder William.” She inhaled deeply, held it, and then exhaled smoke through her nose.
“No idea, then, where this boy might be?” asked Nick.
“Nothing more than what I’ve already told your colleagues, Detective… was it Detective Betham? Nick Betham?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Nick. He’d already checked out the various overpasses and other flashgang hangouts that Ms. Kschessinska had told the LAPD and CHP about. It hadn’t been easy going to those places either, since Leonard’s apartment and the entire neighborhood near Echo Park had been first reduced to rubble and then burned down in the fighting. Aryan B gangs numbering in the hundreds had blown the walls at the Dodger Stadium Homeland Security Detention Center, flooding that entire neighborhood with more terrorists, killers, and self-proclaimed jihadists. The area around Chávez Ravine was not a safe place to spend time this week.
Checking out the storm sewer system, including the area still a crime scene under the Disney Center, had also had its nasty surprises. But none that had given Nick a clue about Val’s current whereabouts.
He’d left Galina Kschessinska Coyne smoking, drinking, sobbing, and hiccupping. With the investigation into the attack on Advisor Omura being called off—due not only to the press of current events but to Omura’s own request that it be discontinued—it was doubtful that any authorities would come to visit Ms. Kschessinska again. Or at least, Nick thought as he let himself out, until some patrol officers, responding to complaints of a terrible smell, someday entered the apartment to find her corpse.
Do you wish any more pepper tuna or sunomono or nabeyaki udon or tako su, Bottom-san?” asked Sato. “Or sake?”
“No, no, no thank you,” said Nick. “Especially no thank you on the sake. I’ve had too much already.”
He was a little drunk. That would be fine if he were just going straight home to his cubie and bed after they landed in Denver in the next hour or so, but Nick wasn’t sure what Sato might have in mind.
“Sato-san,” he said, “tell me again when I’m going to see Mr. Nakamura?”
“You remember me saying, Bottom-san, that Nakamura-sama is scheduled to return to Denver tomorrow night. You are invited to come speak to Nakamura-sama as soon as he arrives home in the evening. He is most eager to hear what you have to say.”
To name Keigo Nakamura’s murderer, thought Nick. If I don’t know by then, I’m expendable. If I do have the murder figured out, I’ll be even more expendable.
“I brought these,” said Sato and set a nylon bag on the side of Nick’s table where it had just been cleared by the kimonoed flight attendants.
Suspicious, Nick unzipped the top. Ten vials of flashback cradled in foam, four of the vials obviously multihour flashes.
“Thanks,” said Nick, closing the bag and dropping it on the carpet next to his feet. It had been seven long days and nights since he’d last gone under the flash, but he found that the sight of the vials hadn’t excited him the way they had for the last half-dozen years. In fact, the thought of inhaling the stuff and going under its influence made him feel slightly nauseated.
“Sato,” he said softly, “I keep hearing from people who Keigo interviewed that the boy kept asking them about F-two… Flashback-two, that old legend. Is there something going on there?”
“Going on there, Bottom-san?”
“Is there something happening with F-two that I don’t know about?”
The big man shook his head in that Sato-way that involved his shoulders and entire upper body more than his massive neck. “There are rumors, Bottom-san, that this F-two has been sold on the streets of New York City and Atlanta, Georgia, in the last months, but as far as I can tell, they are only rumors. There are always rumors of the fantasy drug being available somewhere.”
“Yeah.” If any of the rumors had turned out to be real, Nick knew for a certainty, F-two would have been available everywhere in what was left of the country within a week. A nation addicted to its own past via flashback was ripe for the fantasy version of the drug. Since it hadn’t popped up everywhere, Flashback-two was still a myth. Part of Nick was sorry. Part of Nick was just… confused.
And very weary. He shouldn’t have drunk the sake.
Nick looked out the aircraft window. They’d passed beyond a region of clouds and the starlight and moonlight illuminated a convoluted western topography five miles below. When Nick had traveled by air as a young man, there had been more constellations of lights from small towns dotting even these barren stretches of the country at night, but those constellations had all but disappeared as the small towns in the west and elsewhere in what remained of the United States had fallen victim to the economy and other new realities. One’s instinct was to think of small towns as a better survival-center come catastrophe, but it had turned out that they were more brittle and less resilient than the big cities. Staring now at the solid darkness below, Nick imagined the millions who’d fled those now dark and silent towns over the past decade and a half—millions of the newly homeless who’d embraced at least a chance of survival in the battered big cities.
He dozed off while watching the tousled-gray bedspread of the western canyons, mountains, and deserts roll on darkly beneath them.
Why do you have him in custody?” Nick had asked Chief Ambrose as his father’s old friend and former student led Nick back through overcrowded holding cells to an isolated cell now holding only one man.
“His father and grandfather were both assassinated shortly after the fighting began,” said Ambrose, unlocking a door that led to the isolated cell. He paused to finish saying what he had to say before opening the door to the room. “Evidently they weren’t killed in the general fighting, but were assassinated… or so Roberto believes. His own reconquista unit had been cut off in the Culver City fighting and Roberto was sure that if he surrendered to the National Guard or state authorities or to any of the mercenary armies down from Mulholland, Beverly Hills, and the rest, they’d execute him as well. So he and the few surviving members of his unit found some CHP patrolmen to surrender to and we brought him to the Southern Division barracks’ lockup here in Glendale.”
Nick’s stolen Menlo was parked in the walled and razor-wire-protected visitors’ parking lot outside this North Central Avenue CHP headquarters. He just hoped that no trooper decided to run the plate numbers.
“Do you think he’ll talk to me?” asked Nick.
“Let’s find out,” said Dale Ambrose and swung open the door. The metal cell in the center of the larger room looked strange to Nick. Ambrose nodded and left.