Nearing the gate, Danny Oz said, “Please give my best to your wife, Dara, Mr. Bottom.”
Nick whirled. “What?”
“Oh, didn’t I mention it? I met her six years ago. A delightful woman. Please give her my warmest regards.”
The 9mm Glock was in Nick’s hand in an instant, the muzzle pressed against Danny Oz’s temple as Nick slammed into the frail poet, shoving him up against a metal stanchion, Nick’s forearm tight and heavy across Oz’s throat. “What the fuck are you talking about? Where did you meet her? How?”
The pistol had gotten the old poet’s attention, but Nick could see something like eagerness in the man’s eyes. He wanted Nick to pull the trigger. That was fine with Nick.
“I… met her… I… can’t talk… with your… forearm…”
Nick let up the pressure on his forearm slightly and increased the pressure on the muzzle of the Glock. The circle of steel had broken the parchment-brittle skin on the dying man’s forehead.
“Talk,” said Nick.
“I met Mrs. Bottom on the day that Keigo Nakamura interviewed me,” said Oz. “She was here about an hour and I introduced myself and…”
“My wife was here with Keigo Nakamura?” Nick thumbed the hammer back.
“No, no… at least I don’t believe so. She and a man were standing back with the crowd but apart from it slightly, watching the interview—which was done quite publicly, you understand, so the old merry-go-round would be in the background of the shot.”
“Who was the man with her?”
“I have no idea.”
“What did he look like?”
“Short, heavy, early middle age, almost bald. He carried a beat-up old briefcase and had a mustache and wore old-fashioned glasses. The kind without the rims.”
Nick knew who that was—Harvey Cohen, the assistant district attorney for whom Dara had worked as executive assistant. But why the hell were those two here at Six Flags Over the Jews on the day that Keigo Nakamura interviewed Oz?
“Did you see the woman you thought was my wife talking to Keigo or his people?”
“No,” said Oz.
“What did she say to you when you introduced yourself?”
“Just how interesting the interview had been, how nice the day was for October… small talk. But when she said that her name was Dara Fox-Bottom, we discussed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She said that her husband was a detective for the Denver Police Department.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you mention meeting her when I interviewed you six years ago?” demanded Nick, pressing the muzzle of the Glock even deeper into Oz’s bleeding forehead.
“It didn’t seem appropriate then,” gasped Oz, still having trouble breathing even though Nick had let up most of the pressure from his forearm. “There was that woman detective with you when you interviewed me… I mean, I didn’t think there was anything wrong about your wife being here during a workday with that short, balding gentleman, but since I was a suspect in Keigo Nakamura’s murder, I thought it best then not to mention it.”
“Why mention her now, then?” demanded Nick. His finger was on the trigger, not the trigger guard.
“Because of our conversation today… about Bottom’s dream,” said Oz. “Shoot me if you’re going to shoot me, Mr. Bottom. But otherwise let me go.”
A minute later, Nick did. There was nothing else to find out. It was starting to rain when Nick turned his back on the dying Jew and on all the other dying Jews and left the camp.
Out in the parking lot next to Nick’s gelding, Hideki Sato was waiting. Nick ignored the security man and got in his car, slammed the door shut, and thumbed the ignition.
Nothing. The gauges showed a flat charge. The car was totally dead, even though the batteries should have given him another dozen miles or so today.
“Fuck,” screamed Nick Bottom. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
He was out of the car and clicking off the safety of the Glock. Sato stepped back behind his own vehicle.
Nick put five shots through the hood into the batteries and long-emasculated engine, six shots through the windshield, and four more shots into the front tires and hood again. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
He kept squeezing the trigger but the hammer fell on an empty chamber.
Four guards came running from the entrance gate, their visors down and automatic weapons raised. Sato held up his badge and waved them away. Nick turned the Glock toward Sato but the slide was back, magazine empty.
Sato was looking at Nick’s gelding. The car was emitting some sort of murdered-battery ticking from under the hood and there came a dying hiss from the deflating tires.
“I have always wanted to do that to a car,” said Sato. He turned to Nick. “Having a bad day, are we?”
1.08
The People’s Republic of Boulder—Monday, Sept. 13
The motionless line of giant wind turbines ran along the entire visible span of the Continental Divide, from Wyoming in the north to beyond Pikes Peak a hundred and sixty miles south. The abandoned turbine-towers looked to Nick Bottom like nothing so much as a dilapidated, unpainted picket fence with each rusted picket post rising almost four hundred feet into the Colorado sky. A picket fence or—perhaps—a cage.
Growing up, Nick had loved looking at the high peaks and the snowcapped skyline of these peaks but in the past decades he’d learned to avoid looking west. Some scientist had estimated that the “greening” of the nation’s power system with wind turbines killed more than four billion migrating and night-flying birds a year. Nick always imagined huge heaps of bird carcasses at the base of these flaked and rusting turbines… back when they still worked.
The turbines had never generated enough power to earn their maintenance and upkeep, and the visible network of power cables laid across the snowfields and hard-rock face of the high peaks reminded Nick of the varicose veins on the mottled legs of a dying old man. The former EU had abandoned most of its uneconomical wind turbines just as the U.S., under its visionary new administrations, was pouring the last of its fortune into “green” technologies. The People’s Republic of Boulder now bought its actual power from one of the standardized-for-manufacture HTGC (high-temperature gas-cooled) reactors on the plains west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, but the city-republic’s official stance was that it still relied only on “green” power.
Nick wouldn’t have gone to the People’s Republic this afternoon to keep his appointment with Keigo interview subject Derek Dean if he’d had a choice. Given that choice, Nick would have gone back to his Cherry Creek cubie and spent hours flashing on conversations with Dara around the time of the first Oz interview six years ago. Perhaps he’d missed something she’d said at the time that would explain…
He didn’t have a choice.
Sato was driving and insisting on keeping the appointment. More than that, Sato had Nick’s next stash of flash in the backseat of the car and wasn’t going to release it to Nick until after the goddamned useless interview.
So Nick sat dumbly, not conversing with Sato, numbed by what Danny Oz had said about Dara being there during the Keigo interview, and stared at the approaching white metal cage bars of the once-proud Continental Divide.
The line of cars at the customs entrance for those heading northwest along Highway 36 to the People’s Republic was at least forty-five minutes long.