The grin stayed on Coyne’s smug face so Val shut up. He realized that his arms were still crossed. He wasn’t buying any of Coyne’s bullshit. And he hadn’t liked having the muzzle of a loaded gun aimed at him. He wasn’t going to forget that.
As if sensing Val’s hostility, the flashgang’s leader set his hand on Val’s shoulder. His voice was soft, reasonable. “You’re absolutely right, Valerino. City security and State Department Security and DHS security and Omura’s own ninja guys will all make sure that all windows in nearby buildings will be sealed against snipers, all rooftops checked, all unauthorized vehicles hauled away, and all sewers—those carrying Toohey’s shit and those for storms—will be sealed up…”
Coyne waited several beats like the son of a movie actor he was, his gaze moving from face to face—even to Cruncher’s ruined face—and then he said, “But this storm sewer opening outside the Disney Pavilion is already sealed up. Has been for years and years. All the computer files say it’s a permanent weld-job, but it ain’t. It’s an old rusty iron door made out of panels with a steel grate inside. We can cut through the grate ahead of time. And…”
Coyne looked around the faces again, drawing it out.
“… and I’ve got the fucking key for the iron panels.”
Six of the seven other boys started babbling and jostling one another.
“They’ll never see us,” said Coyne. “We’ll shoot the Jap VIP from the sewer opening, just cut him down like a weed, and be gone before his security can turn around. We lock the iron panels behind us. By the time they get down into the sewers, we’re a mile away through the whatchamacallit—labyrinth—of those old storm sewers, already out on the streets and blending with the crowds. I even know where to dump the guns on the way so they’ll never be found.”
The babbling and jostling stopped and all eight boys just looked at one another. Even Cruncher quit mopping his bleeding mouth.
“Holy shit,” Val whispered at last. “It might work. Holy shit.”
“We’ll flash on this for years,” said Coyne.
“Holy shit,” repeated Val.
“Holy shit and amen,” Coyne said, blessing everyone with his fingers like he was the new pope who’d taken over for the dead one.
“Yurodivy!” said the thinly smiling, smirking, full-face T-shirt image of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. “You are all… holy fools.”
1.05
LoDo, Denver—Saturday, Sept. 11
Sato didn’t take the handcuffs off as he drove north to 20th Street and then east above I-25 again and down into the part of Denver called LoDo. Nick’s wrists were already torn and bloody; the jouncing of the heavy—obviously armored—turd-brown Honda electric tore more flesh off his wrists and made Nick grind his molars rather than cry out again.
He’d wanted to kill Sato before this. Now he vowed to torture the Jap before he killed him.
LoDo was the cute name developers back in the 1980s—or maybe the ’70s—gave to the old Lower Downtown warehouse district of Denver that squatted between the real downtown and the South Platte River. In the 1800s the area had been the site for whorehouses, saloons, saddleries, warehouses, and more saloons. By the middle of the 1900s even the saloons and whorehouses had gone out of business, leaving one saddle-seller, a few working warehouses, a lot of empty warehouses, and hundreds upon hundreds of winos, drug addicts, and street people. In the last decades of the twentieth century, urban renewal—and the city revitalizing itself toward the river—had chased the winos and addicts out to be replaced by upscale eateries and even more upscale condos with brick walls and exposed rafters. By the time the classic-looking Coors Field ballpark opened in 1995, LoDo was in full resurgence. It didn’t begin its decline until after It All Hit The Fan, but by the Year of Clear Vision, LoDo was well on its way to its current state of boasting mostly whorehouses, a few saloons, abandoned condos haunted by flashback and other addicts, whorehouses, and more whorehouses.
Keigo Nakamura had died in a room on the third floor of a three-story building on Wazee Street, a long dark street with two-story whorehouses, saloons, and warehouses on one side and three-story warehouses, saloons, and whorehouses on the other side.
It was full light—or at least as light as it was going to get on this chilly, rainy September morning—when Sato parked the Honda at the curb outside the three-story building that looked exactly like all the other three-story buildings on the south side of Wazee Street. As the security chief came around to unlock the cuffs, Nick considered jumping Sato… then rejected the idea. He was too worn out by the night of flashing, the injections of T4B2T and TruTel, and from the sheer adrenaline of terror.
It would have to be another time.
Sato unlocked the cuffs and, seizing both of Nick’s bleeding wrists in one gigantic hand, pulled an aerosol can from his suit pocket.
Mace! thought Nick and squeezed his eyes shut.
Sato sprayed something cold onto Nick’s lacerated wrists. For a few seconds the pain was so terrible that Nick gasped loudly despite himself. Then… nothing. No pain at all. When Sato released his grip, Nick flexed his fingers. Everything worked fine and despite all the blood on his sweatshirt and the dash and windshield, the lacerations were superficial.
Sato grabbed Nick under the arm, lifted him out of the car, and plopped him down on the curb, steering him toward the old building. Shapes—sleeping flash addicts or winos, Nick assumed—stirred and stood in the dark entrance under the overhang.
Two men stepped out of the shadows but they weren’t winos or addicts. They were well-dressed young Japanese men. Sato nodded to them and one of the athletic-looking young men unlocked the double lock on the door.
“Coming to the crime scene six years after the crime,” said Nick, his voice shaking slightly from the cold and from the roil of fury inside him. “You think seeing this empty building after all this time is going to tell me anything?”
Sato’s only reply was to switch on the lights.
Nick had been to this crime-scene building numerous times five years and eleven months ago, even though he hadn’t been the responding homicide detective first on the scene, and he remembered the totally trashed mess of a site it was: three large rooms filled with couches and chairs and screens and a small kitchen on the first floor, furniture turned over everywhere, flashback vials crushed underfoot, lamps broken in the stampede of the witnesses to get out before the cops arrived that night, even wads of dirty clothing and the occasional used condom in corners.
No longer.
The furniture had been repaired and returned, the lamps were back in place and working, and although every surface was cluttered with dishes and glasses—a huge buffet had been set out down here on the first floor that night as a movie wrap party for Keigo’s Japanese assistants, the interview subjects, and others involved in his documentary film—all three rooms and the kitchen were now clean and in a fairly orderly early-party-stage clutter again.
“I don’t get it,” said Nick.
Sato handed him a pair of stylish wrap-around tactical glasses.
Even before activating them, Nick noticed how tremendously light they were. The DPD tactical glasses had always seemed to weigh a pound or more and gave their users headaches after ten minutes. Not these glasses. They were as light as regular sunglasses and, being wrap-around, filled his entire field of vision. The DPD glasses had always been an island of virtual sight with a vertigo-inducing reality seeping in all around.