Except for a headache that felt like the world’s worst hangover, Nick had to admit that he felt more refreshed.
The problem was that nothing around him—not Speer Boulevard with its overhanging trees, not the thrumming traffic in the two peasant lanes or the skateboard-low humming hydrogen-car traffic in the VIP lane, not the hundreds of makeshift shacks along the trickling course of Cherry Creek sunken between the bikepaths fifteen feet below the level of the street—seemed real. This had been the case for at least five years now but it seemed worse this month. The flashback hours with Dara were real; this nonsense interlude with Sato or improvising bad lines with the bit players in this poorly written, poorly lit, poorly acted play was certainly not real.
But what was confusing Nick Bottom now was his multiple use of flashback. He’d used it to review the interview with Danny Oz almost six years ago. He’d used it, as he had every day for the past five and a half years, to spend time with his dead wife.
But he’d also used hours of the drug to try to find out where Dara might have been on the night that Keigo Nakamura was killed.
He’d been out on a stakeout on Santa Fe Drive that night, down on the edge of the reconquista no-man’s-land there, sitting in the backseat of an unmarked patrol car as the two detectives up front watched the home of a local warlord who, they knew, was moving guns and drugs into the city. As a Major Crimes day-shift detective, Nick Bottom had had no business in the backseat of that particular unmarked car on that particular stakeout on that particular night, but in that first year after his promotion he’d had the stupid idea that he could do his white-collar downtown detective work while still staying fully in touch with the mean streets and their denizens, both crook and cop.
He couldn’t. It had been a stupid idea.
The two detectives sitting in the front seat that night—Cummings, the detective third grade with seven years in as a patrol officer but less than a year’s experience as detective, and Coleman, a twenty-five-year veteran in the DPD and nine years a detective first grade (the same grade as Nick)—had let him know that night that he was as useless and unwelcome as the proverbial tit on an equally proverbial boar.
Nick had been there anyway, shivering in the chill—they’d shut off the batteries to conserve power—and breathing in the well-known stakeout smell of sweat and old-car vinyl and coffee breath and the occasional silent but deadly fart from the front seat. God help him, he’d loved it the years he worked the street.
The flashback reliving of that hour had reminded Nick that he’d phoned Dara a little before midnight. He’d meant to phone earlier, but he’d been out at a corner all-night bodega getting coffee for Coleman and Cummings then. As it was, she didn’t pick up. It had surprised Nick, but it hadn’t worried him. When he was working on the street, she always left her phone on. That afternoon—he remembered this only through the flashback reliving of the hour around midnight—he’d told her he’d be working late, but he hadn’t told her that he’d be on the street. She often turned her phone off when she knew he was safe doing office work at Central Division.
That night, Nick now remembered, he’d gotten about three hours’ sleep on the couch at DPD CD and had been wakened when the call came in from the division commander, turning the Keigo murder case over to him and his partner, K. T. Lincoln. The word was that the responding detectives didn’t have boots high enough for this sort of politically charged case. Nick was still a department golden boy then; K. T. Lincoln brought some nice racial, gender, and sexual-orientation balance to the whole thing. (The commander admitted that he would have assigned a Japanese detective to the case, if they’d had a Jap with a gold shield, which they didn’t. In fact, the commander confessed, the entire Denver Police Department had only one officer of Japanese descent, and she was a rookie patrol officer taking her lumps and learning over in the Five Corners area. Nick Bottom and K. T. Lincoln would have to do.)
Nick had used a fifteen-minute vial of flashback reliving his call to Dara that morning. She’d been strangely unexcited about his news, even though closing the case could have meant a huge boost in his career. As assistant to a Denver ADA, she knew about such things. She sounded tired, even drugged. When Nick mentioned that he’d tried to call her around midnight the night before, there’d been a pause—more noticeable to the second-Nick reliving the moment via flashback than to the caffeine-jazzed real-time Nick that morning—and she’d said she’d taken a pill and turned off the phone and gone to bed early.
The three seconds’ worth of video image of Dara’s face across the street from Keigo’s apartment that night haunted Nick more than anything had since she’d died. He’d downloaded the video file into his phone and watched it a dozen times, using his wall-wide HD3D display in his cubie for the clearest image, and sometimes he was certain it was Dara; other times he was even more certain that it wasn’t—that it was a woman who didn’t even really look like Dara.
He’d also done three more fifteen-minute flashes of the phone conversation with her on the morning he’d told her about the Keigo murder, then flashed and reflashed an hour of the first time he’d seen her that next evening.
Did she seem false that evening? Did she seem to be hiding something from him?
Was he losing his mind?
Had he lost it long ago?
What everyone now called Six Flags Over the Jews was just to the left of the overpass where Speer Boulevard met I-25. Across the highway on the hill to the southwest of the sprawling complex loomed the Mile High Homeland Security Detention Center.
Nick had been vaguely curious why they called the amusement-park-turned-refugee-center Six Flags, since the company that ran the other Six Flags amusement parks only owned this one for about ten years right at the beginning of the century. For more than a century before that and for some years after the brief Six Flags era, the park had been called Elitch Gardens.
There were no gardens in sight now as Nick turned into the huge, empty parking area and followed concrete blast shields toward the first of several security checkpoints.
Nick knew about the old Elitch Gardens because of his grandfather. Nick’s father, who’d died when Nick was fifteen, had been a state patrol officer. Nick’s earliest memory of his old man was of his pistol, a large Smith & Wesson revolver. Nick’s father hadn’t died in a shootout (like Nick, he’d never fired his weapon in the line of duty), but in an accident on I-25 not two miles from where Nick’s wife, Dara, and her boss, Assistant District Attorney Harvey Cohen, had died. Nick’s father had pulled over to help a stranded motorist and a drunken sixteen-year-old driver had swerved onto the shoulder and killed him.
Nick’s grandfather had been a bus driver in the city and his great-grandfather had been a motorman on the old trolleys that connected Denver and its suburbs and nearby towns before cars forced them out. From Grandpa Nicholas, Nick had heard lovely tales of the old Elitch Gardens, whose motto for decades was Not to See Elitch’s Is Not to See Denver.
First opened in 1890, the original Elitch Gardens had been miles away from the downtown to the west, out at 38th Avenue and Tennyson Street in a suburb that was more like a separate village. That first Elitch Gardens, while growing, had kept its trees, extensive flower gardens, and shaded picnic areas where guests could eat lunches they’d packed for themselves. For forty years or so it had a zoo and for a century it boasted the Theater at the Gardens, first offering summer-stock performances and then, later in the twentieth century, visiting movie and TV stars. By the 1930s, Elitch’s had added the Trocadero Ballroom for dancing and visiting jazz groups and big bands and Nick’s grandfather had mentioned listening to An Evening at the Troc weekly national radio broadcast. Sometime in the 1950s the owners had added a Kiddieland with its little open-wheel race cars, two-seat rocket planes, and real floating “motorboats,” and although big amusement parks had catered almost exclusively to adults up until then, Elitch’s Kiddieland was a huge hit.