Leonard stared at the older man. He had no idea what Emilio was talking about.
“That is how the Nuevo Mexico reconquista warriors view the remaining gringo and Asian parts of Los Angeles, my friend,” said Emilio. “There will be much blood shed. And soon. And if your grandson had anything to do with the rape of Maria Hernandez, he will not live long enough even to see the shedding of this blood throughout the City of Angels. Get out if you can, Leonard. Take your grandson. Go.”
1.04
Denver—Saturday, Sept. 11
YOU GOING TO sit out there drinking beer and looking at the stars all night or come in to bed?”
Dara’s voice drifts out through the screen door to the tiny veranda where Nick sits looking up through the gaps in the old Siberian elms toward the tiny patch of visible late-summer sky. The night is rich with insect sounds, TV and stereo noises from the surrounding houses, and the occasional scream of sirens from distant Colfax Avenue.
“Third choice,” says Nick. “You come out and sit on my lap while I teach you some of the constellations.”
“I’m too fat to sit on anyone’s lap,” says Dara but she comes out through the squeaky screen door.
She is fat… for Dara… late in her eighth month of pregnancy and showing it. She’s carrying another can of Coors but hands it to Nick. She’s been very careful during her pregnancy.
Nick pats his lap but she kisses him on the forehead and sits in the old metal lawn chair next to him. She looks up and says softly, “I don’t see many stars, much less any constellations.”
“You have to let your eyes adapt to the dark awhile, kiddo.”
“Not very dark here with all the city lights, is it? Wouldn’t you like to live in the country—the mountains somewhere—where the stars are clear and so you could buy that astronomical telescope you’ve been ogling in your catalogue?”
“We’d go nuts in the country,” says Nick, pulling the tab off the cold beer and setting the tab next to him on the chair rather than dropping it in the dark. He’s proud of how neat their little backyard and veranda are. “Besides, city cops have to live in the city. It’s the law.” He sips and says, “But yes, I’d love to have a telescope and the dark skies of some high valley, say up by Estes Park. There’s always the glow from the Front Range, but surrounding peaks or high foothills to the east could block out a lot of that.”
“Maybe Santa Claus will remember you want a telescope,” Dara says. She’s still looking at the sky. A police helicopter is tacking back and forth over the rooftops.
Nick shakes his head adamantly. “No. Too expensive. There are a hundred things we can use that amount of money for that are more important… if I get the overtime this fall to earn the money.”
“You will,” Dara says sadly. He knows she hates it when he works weekends and late nights, even though the union-earned overtime pay is so important to them. But this weekend—it’s Friday night—this weekend Nick is free and will spend it with her.
Wishing his former self would quit looking at the goddamned stars and would turn his head to look again at Dara in the soft light coming out through the kitchen windows and screen door—even while knowing to the second when the former-Nick will do that—Nick realized why he so often chose this particular weekend when Dara was so pregnant to revisit whenever he had a forty-eight-hour vial. There will be sex, of sorts (and very sweet in its preconjugal heavy-petting way), but that was not the reason. It was just the simplicity of their time together that particular weekend, only weeks before Val was born and things changed so much, and the fact that every summer night during this relived time, Nick will go to sleep with his head resting on Dara’s swollen breasts.
“You would have been happier as an astronomer, Nicholas.” Dara’s voice is sleepy, relaxed. It stirs Nick as it always has.
“You mean you’d be happier if I were an astronomer rather than a cop.” He sips his beer and looks for Aldebaran. A slight breeze stirs the leaves of their elms and the larger leaves of their neighbor’s linden trees. Their not-yet-brittle sound is part of the late-summer night.
“Well,” says Dara, “if you were an astronomer, we’d be living on a mountaintop somewhere, maybe in Hawaii, and far away from all this.” Nick turns…
Exactly when Nick knew he would.
… and looks at his wife and sets his large hand on her much-larger abdomen.
“I don’t think you’d want to be living on top of a volcano in Hawaii when your due date gets here, kiddo, with the closest hospital and obstetrician two miles lower and an island away.”
Nick regrets the words as soon as he’s said them. Dara’s concern about the pregnancy, after the three miscarriages, is matched or exceeded only by his own worrying.
It’ll be all right, thought the Nick floating both inside and above this moment. He faintly sensed—or imagined he sensed—his other flashback-selves thinking much the same thing at the same instant, although usually the flashback “viewer” could not register the presence of himself on previous visits. Certainly he couldn’t overhear his other flashback-self’s thoughts the way he could feel and share the then-Nick’s thoughts and emotions.
“I’m a good cop, Dara,” says Nick, embarrassed by what he said about the hospital and obstetrician, but defensive all the same. “A really good cop.”
Dara puts her small hand atop his large one on her belly. “You probably would have been a good astronomer, my Nicholas. A really good astronomer. But the stars are objects of beauty which inspire wonder…”
“Like you, sweetums,” jokes Nick, trying to derail her from what he’s sure she’s going to say.
“… which inspire wonder,” repeats Dara firmly, not wanting to joke around. “While the objects of your profession—the perps, the addicts, the witnesses, too many of the other cops, even some of the victims and lawyers and jurists—just inspire disgust and cynicism and despair. You should have realized when you got out of college that you’re too sensitive to be a cop, Nick. You enjoy surface parts of it—the irony mixed with adrenaline, I think, and some of the other cops, and being a good cop yourself—but underneath, it all eats at you like battery acid. It always will.”
Nick removes his hand and sips his beer. The helicopter has been joined by a second one and the two move across the area north of the botanic gardens in a searchlight grid pattern. The searchlights change from looking like two blind men’s white canes thrashing in the dark to an inverted, mini-version of searchlights in World War II Berlin or London. All that’s lacking, Nick thinks, is a B-17 or Heinkel bomber caught in the converging beams. The searchlights and aircraft’s navigation lights occlude the stars and the noise from the two choppers echoes from the brick homes and trees all down their street and along the alley lined with tiny, sagging, century-old garages from the 1920s.
Nick resents the machines’ intrusion. Besides taking the entire weekend off, he’s had the almost unheard-of Friday afternoon off and spent it—
—And shared it with the older Nick hovering, hearing, feeling, experiencing
—mowing the yard in the heat and clipping hedges and the drooping branches of his neighbor’s untended trees and fixing the hinges of the ancient garage’s doors and puttering around the house near Dara. She’s also had the rare Friday off—she works as an executive assistant in the assistant district attorney’s office—and she’s spent the day catching up on house stuff and baby-preparation stuff while Nick mows, fixes, mends, and generally gets in her way. He’s wearing his oldest, most comfortable chinos and short-sleeved denim shirt and the sneakers pollocked with white paint from their recent painting of what will be the baby’s room and Dara’s wearing a light blue maternity top and old capri pants, both so passed down that she’d never go out the front door with them on.
But several times that afternoon she’s come out the back door carrying a glass of cold lemonade and—once, surprisingly, perfectly—fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies for her sweaty husband.
It’s the o
nly afternoon or evening in weeks that Nick hasn’t carried a pistol in a holster on his left hip.
Nick Bottom loves their home and neighborhood and, he knows, so does Dara. This part of the city southwest of the Denver Botanic Gardens and south of Cheesman Park consists of a mixture of tall, brick, Denver-square homes mixed with small brick bungalows like the one Nick and Dara had just barely been able to purchase four years earlier thanks to the police credit union.
The neighborhood is also relatively safe thanks to cops, since even though the area had been tipping over to gangs and crime after the first waves of the recession a decade earlier, some of the biggest foreclosed-on homes turning into crack houses and warrens for illegal immigrants from the Mideast, older cops and detectives on the DPD had begun moving into the area in the second decade of the new century. That had brought more cops with their young families, and more stability. Even in the modern era—Dara’s pregnancy year is being called the Year of Clear Vision by the new administration in Washington—an era in which almost every civilian carries a handgun, the presence of scores of cops and their families has had a calming effect on this neighborhood.
And since cops and their families have always had the bad habit—shared in a mirror-image way by the Mafia—of hanging out in their spare time almost exclusively with other cops and their families, it’s added a real sense of community to the neighborhood for Nick. This last May there were more than sixty people at Nick and Dara’s annual Memorial Day cookout and backyard croquet tournament. A patrolman named Jerry Connors, whom Nick has known for years and who shares Nick’s and Dara’s love of old movies, had digitally projected movies onto a sheet on the side of his garage on Saturday nights and half the off-duty precinct can be found there on lawn chairs in Jerry’s backyard, drinking beer and waiting for the goofs and continuity errors—like the kid extra in the background in a Mount Rushmore cafeteria scene from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest who sticks his fingers in both ears before Eva Marie Saint reaches for the semiauto in her purse to shoot Cary Grant—that Jerry loves to tell everyone about before the movies begin.
And Jerry also asks the pertinent philosophical questions for the cops and other neighbors in their lawn chairs to ponder during each film, such as—Are James Mason and his number-one spy guy, Martin Landau, gay and hot for each other, or what? I mean, listen to Landau-as-Leonard’s little speech about his woman’s intuition and Mason saying “Why, Leonard, I do believe you’re jealous”…
Nick hopes their neighborhood will be a good place for their son or daughter to grow up. (He and Dara sometimes think that they’re the only expectant parents in the city—maybe in the state or nation—who’ve repeatedly turned down the ultrasound, gene-scan, and other modern ways of knowing their kid’s gender before birth.)
“Aren’t you going to tell me your story?” says Dara.
Nick has to blink his way up and out of his I-love-my-house-and-neighborhood reverie. How many beers has he had this afternoon and evening anyway?
Not enough to dull your passion later tonight, thought the watching Nick.
“What story?” asks Nick in the real time of the summer Friday night from sixteen years and one month earlier.
“The story about your uncle Wally buying you that little telescope in Chicago and how it was the most precious thing you ever owned.”
Nick snaps a glance at Dara, but she’s smiling, not mocking, and now she takes his free hand in hers again. He shifts the beer to his left hand.
“Well… it was…,” he says lamely. “The most precious thing I owned, I mean. For years.”
“I know,” Dara is whispering. “Tell me the part about how you tried to see the stars from the tenement landing in Chicago.”
“It wasn’t a tenement, kiddo.” Nick sips the rest of his beer and vows to make it his last one for the evening. “Uncle Wally’s apartment in Chicago was just a… you know… apartment in a neighborhood that had gone from Irish to Polish to mostly black.”
“But you’d been visiting your uncle for two weeks…,” prompts Dara.
Nick smiles. “I’d been visiting my uncle for two weeks—he was a cookie salesman, formerly an A and P manager, and my old man sent me to Chicago for two weeks every summer. I loved it.”
“So you’d been visiting your uncle for two weeks,” repeats Dara, smiling.
Nick makes a fist and hits her lightly on the knee. Then he takes her hand back. “So I’d been visiting for almost all of my two weeks and we used to go walking on Madison Street in the evening, a few blocks from his little third-floor apartment, and every time we’d walk past what I thought was this camera and electronics store—it was really a pawnshop—I’d ask to stop so we could admire this little telescope in the window. Not a real astronomical telescope, you understand, just the little kind that the captain of a ship would have used centuries ago, with tiny black tripod legs…”
“So on your last night in Chicago,” Dara prompts again.
“Hey! You going to let me tell this or what?”
She sets her head against his shoulder.
“So on my last night in Chicago—it turned out to be the last time I ever saw my uncle, the only member of my family I knew outside my old man and mother, because Wally died of a massive coronary two months after I went back to Denver that summer—anyway, my last night in Chicago, after Wally and I had washed and dried the dishes—he was a bachelor, you know—and I was in the dining room packing my clothes into my little bag on the daybed where I slept, Wally called me out to the landing and…”
“Voilà!” says Dara, sounding truly happy.
“Voilà. The telescope. I couldn’t believe it. It was the coolest thing that anyone’d ever bought me, and it wasn’t even close to my birthday or Christmas or anything. So we set it up on its little tripod legs on a chair propped on top of a garbage can there on the rear third-floor landing and I tried to find some stars or planets to look at, I was nuts about space at that age…”
“Which was?” asks Dara, her voice muffled against his arm.
“Age? About nine, I guess. Anyway, the city lights blocked out most of the stars, but we found one bright one shining through the murk. I later figured out it was Sirius. And Jupiter, too. It was bright that night.”
“Way back in the nineteen-nineties,” murmurs Dara. “Who knew they had modern stuff like telescopes way back then?”
“You’re just jealous,” says Nick. It’s a running joke between them. Dara is a decade younger, born in the 1990s. Nick enjoys reminding her of all the neat things she missed in that decade. Like Ronald Reagan’s swan song? Bill Clinton’s blow job? she’d ask innocently. But they both sometimes find it odd that he was already sneaking peeks at porn on the Internet in the year she was born.
“I love the Uncle Wally telescope story,” says Dara, rubbing her forehead against his shoulder as a cat would. Nick suspects that she has another headache.
“And I love…,” begins Nick.
“Me?”
“The Friday Night Creature Feature on TCM,” finishes Nick, standing and pulling her next to him. “And it’s gonna start streaming in three minutes.”
She laughs but sets her entire body against him, her hand soft against his left hip where his holster and gun usually sit. The helicopters have gone, their noise replaced by more distant and less urgent sirens and sounds.
Nick tosses the beer can in the recyclable bin by the door and sets both arms around her, pulling her tight to his chest. The top of her head doesn’t even come up to his chin. Her late-pregnancy-full breasts feel strange against him after so many thousands of hugs in the past two years. Nick realizes, not for the first or thousandth time, how young she is. And how lucky he is.
“Do me one favor,” whispers Dara.
You’ll like this favor, thought Nick from where he floated, feeling his wife against him but also paying attention to the ambient sounds and movements he hadn’t consciously noted that night sixteen years and one month earlier. The sudden br
eeze that moved the high branches of those miserable Siberian elms, just waiting to dump their countless leaves in the yard for raking and bagging in a month or two. The Bakers’ TV blaring too loudly again from two houses away. The cat moving like a four-legged tightrope walker along the high fence back by the alley…
“I want you to…”
“… get up, Bottom-san. Get up now. Wake up, damn you.”
Somehow Dara is no longer hugging Nick but lifting him off the ground, shaking him fiercely. Nick can feel the bulk of her pregnancy against him as she shakes him.
Someone jammed a needle into his thigh.
“Hey, watch it, kiddo!” shouted Nick, pulling away from Dara in shock.
Dara lifted him higher, shook him harder. No.
Nick reached for his gun. It wasn’t there.
Someone tore the IV needle out of his arm. Another needle was jammed into the same thigh as before. Nick felt the ice-water-in-the-veins shock of T4B2T counterflash throughout his body and he screamed.
“Mickey! Lawrence!”
Mickey was nowhere to be seen in the glowstick gloom. Lawrence the bouncer was down, his massive, armored body out cold and facedown and filling the narrow aisle between cots.
Dara against him, hugging him in the summer night…
Nick fought to slide back into flashback reality but the pain in his arm and thigh and the T4B2T in his veins kept him up, out, and away from her. He cried out again.
“Shut up,” said Sato. The security chief was carrying him over his shoulder through the darkened warehouse as easily as Nick used to carry his son to bed when Val was a toddler. A few flashers came up and out of their fugue to peer angrily at the intrusion—being left alone and undisturbed was what flashcaves were about—but most slept and twitched on, oblivious.
Where was Mickey? Didn’t he and Lawrence the bouncer keep a shotgun handy for just this sort of invasion?
Nick’s arms and legs were tingling painfully from the T4B2T, fizzing inside like limbs that had fallen asleep for hours, so Nick couldn’t use them yet—couldn’t kick, couldn’t even make a fist.