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.