“Whaddya wanta do with the climbing rope, Mr. B.?” called Gunny from the corner of the roof.
“I’ll get it later,” lied Nick.
His cubie was a total mess. Not only had it been tossed, clothes strewn everywhere, the contents of his dresser drawers dumped out and then the drawers themselves thrown around, but there was the usual paramedic mess of discarded plastic and paper wrappings from where Dr. Tak had done his initial work on Leonard.
Nick ignored the mess. All he could focus on was the scatter of colored dossiers.
Did Val read the grand jury stuff?
Of course he had.
Nick brushed the pile of folders off his desk with a furious sweep of his forearm. Would Val believe that I tried to kill his mother?
Of course he would. Nick was, after all, the same man who’d dumped his son with an elderly grandfather in Los Angeles and never come to visit him… who never found enough money to fly the son home to Denver for a visit… who only phoned a few times a year and who totally forgot that son’s sixteenth birthday. Why wouldn’t a so-called father like that conspire to kill a wife who’d been unfaithful to him?
Nick sat on the chair with his elbows on his knees, his hands gripping the sweaty sides of his head, and concentrated on trying to breathe.
For 4 percent of people with this problem, the first noticeable symptom is sudden death.
Yeah, and ain’t that a great practical joke on the 4 percent? Nick’s father had been careless to get himself killed when Nick was pretty young, but at least he’d paid attention to Nick when he was still alive and had the time. With no shade of melodrama whatsoever, Nick realized that he would never be able to make things up to Val, no matter how much time the two might have in the rest of their lives.
Almost certainly less than eight hours for me, thought Nick.
This flood of certainty washed over Nick again as a mere fact, no melodrama. If he couldn’t escape with Val and Leonard, if he couldn’t live in real life that lovely dream he’d had that morning just before waking, he was certain that the meeting with Mr. Nakamura would not end well for a certain ex-cop named Nick Bottom. It was as if he could already smell the decomposing stench of his own death…
“Shit,” said Nick. Slamming his cubie door shut, he stripped naked, throwing everything he’d been wearing, down to his boxer shorts, into the far corner of the room. Then he went into the bathroom and showered fast but hard, scrubbing until his skin almost bled. Even then, Nick could still detect the death stench of Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine.
The remembered NCAR smell was more subtle—a faint hint of chlorine and other chemicals, as when lying near a well-tended swimming pool—but just as terrifying.
Nick dressed quickly and carelessly—clean underwear, clean socks, a blue-plaid flannel shirt washed so many times that it was almost obscenely soft, clean chinos that weren’t as tight on him as they’d been two weeks earlier. He clipped the holster and Glock on his belt on the left side and velcroed the little holster with its tiny .32 on his right ankle.
Then he looked for Dara’s phone. It wasn’t there on the desk or bed.
Someone’s stolen it. The neighbors or some other residents came in and took it while Gunny G. and Dr. Tak were parading back and forth, the place unlocked and unwatched. Or maybe Val had taken it with him or come back to get it…
Nick forced himself to calm down. He’d have to borrow some of Dr. Tak’s tranquilizers from Leonard’s doggie bag if he kept flirting with hysteria this way.
Getting down on his hands and knees, Nick looked under the bed and under the desk, pawing through the mess. He found the old phone between the faux wood and the wall baseboard where someone had knocked it off the back of his desk.
Please God, tell me it’s not broken.
As usual, God did not deign to tell Nick Bottom anything.
The phone’s scratched screen lit up, but only to inform him that the long-term battery was too weak to run the old phone.
Nick again looked through all the junk removed from his room’s various drawers until he found the charger-adapter for his own phone. Nick and Dara had bought their phones at the same time; the charger fit both.
The files had closed and reencrypted at the power-down so Nick had to reenter the dream password.
Eight-to-five odds that the password won’t work for me.
But it did.
Nick went to the massive video files, hoping to see Dara. Even though he’d visited her for hours every night and day of his life for the past five and a half years—this past week excepted—his heart pounded wildly at the thought of seeing new video of her.
She wasn’t there.
But Danny Oz was. And Delroy Nigger Brown. And Derek Dean. And Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. And two dozen other talking heads, all familiar to Nick Bottom through the homicide investigation of Keigo Nakamura’s messy murder.
The missing last hours of Keigo’s documentary.
Nick didn’t even ask himself—yet—how Dara could have gotten a copy. Unless she was the murderer. He shut that problem out for now and flicked through the video-recorded interviews, too impatient to listen to them in their entirety, but jumping from interview subject to interview subject.
It was there. Something incredible was there.
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev talking about the laboratories in Nara in Japan where flashback had really been invented and the larger, newer laboratories outside Wuhan and Shantou and Nanjing in China that would be producing the Flashback-two. Noukhaev smiling and talking about distribution networks flowing from Japan and reaching everywhere—just as they had for fifteen years now.
Nick jumped from person to person, hearing Keigo’s distant voice asking the questions—only the answers were to be in his documentary—and while most of the questions and answers were like the billionaire’s son’s earlier recorded footage, there were new parts—hints—clues—which began to come together for Nick, even hearing only fragments and unrelated snippets.
This footage alone might help him understand what Keigo Nakamura had been doing with his goddamned documentary—if not who murdered him for it—before Nick’s meeting with Nakamura later this afternoon or evening.
Of course, Nick realized, if he was still here when it came time for that meeting, he probably would have lost everything anyway. The trick was not to solve Keigo Nakamura’s murder after six years of both it and Nick being lost in the cold file, the idea was to get his son and father-in-law and to get away.
Even if, unlike in his dream that morning, there was no place to get away to. The Republic of Texas didn’t take in wanted felons—and he would be such by the time he got to any border—much less wanted felons and their sons and fathers-in-law.
Nick closed out the video and used the second password—Kildare—to open the text files.
The first ones, made about two months before Keigo’s murder, made Nick stop breathing.
It was not a long or thick text file, despite the fact that it covered the last seven months of his wife’s life. She’d made only a few notes for him (or for herself?) in the weeks before and after Keigo’s death, and then almost none through the winter months until just the days before her own death.
Nick didn’t skip through these files as he had through the videos. He read them straight through…