Flashback

Daichi Omura entered alone and Nick got to his feet, forcing himself not to wince from either his damaged ribs or the surprisingly painful gouge through the back of his left calf. A CHP medic at Dale Ambrose’s Glendale barracks had put an elastic corset-plus-tape thing on Nick for the cracked ribs, told him that the corset really wouldn’t help all that much, congratulated him on just cracking and not fully breaking the ribs, and then dressed the leg wound. Now Nick hurt more than before the medical treatment.

Omura was wearing a black gym suit and running shoes. Where Hiroshi Nakamura had been tall for a Japanese man, Daichi Omura couldn’t have been an inch over five feet. Where Advisor Nakamura had been vital in his mid or late sixties, Omura seemed far more lively and animated in his early eighties. Omura had no hair; his head was not only as bald as an egg, but gave the sense of ovoid perfection that only an egg and a very, very few human beings’ skulls could project. That perfect, tanned egg had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes.

Where Nick had once noted to himself, in his cop’s way, that Hiroshi Nakamura smiled the way a politician smiled—profoundly, whitely, perfectly, and totally superficially—a few minutes with Daichi Omura gave Nick the sense that this man could swap stories after a few drinks and laugh sincerely at his own jokes as well as at others’.

Advisor Nakamura had struck Nick as someone who had studied the subtleties of how to project wealth, power and destiny; Advisor Omura impressed Nick the way he’d always imagined Franklin Delano Roosevelt affecting people around him—as someone born to wealth and power, who wore them as comfortably as he wore patched old tweed jackets and dirty running shoes, as a man who laughed at the very idea of destiny even as he accepted his own as he would any other duty. But—Nick suspected—he accepted all of that duty and destiny joyously, even the tragic parts.

Nick knew this was a hell of a lot of impressions to file away in thirty seconds of looking at a short old man; maybe a function of fatigue and flashback withdrawal. He was trying to replace addiction with half-assed profundity, but he didn’t think it was going to work.

“Would you like a drink, Mr. Bottom?” asked Omura. “I would. I drank some water after my pathetic little two-mile run, but I could use a real drink now. It’s only four p.m., but we could pretend we’re in New York.”

“Whatever you’re having, sir.”

“You don’t have to say ‘sir’ to me, Mr. Bottom. May I call you Nick?”

“Yes, Omura-sama.”

The old man had walked over to a small assortment of liquor bottles on a marble counter near the north wall of books, but now he paused. “You’ve learned the honorific we Japanese use toward people we respect. Especially our elders. I appreciate that, Nick.” He began pouring Scotch in two glasses, not asking Nick if he wanted ice and not providing any from the small ice bucket. “Did you refer to your employer as Nakamura-sama?”

“No, I never have,” Nick said truthfully.

“Good,” said Omura and handed Nick his glass and took his seat on a sofa opposite. He waved Nick to his seat on the facing sofa.

“We have several important things we need to discuss, Nick,” said Omura. “Where do you think we should start?”

“I presume you’ll want to discuss the charges of my son’s involvement in the attack on you at the Disney Center on seventeen September, Omura-sama.”

The old man shook his head. “It’s not one of the truly important things we need to discuss today, Nick, but I certainly understand why you’d want to get it out of the way. Do you think your son, Val, was involved in that attempt to murder me a week ago today?”

Nick had sipped the single-malt Scotch. He noticed only distantly that it was strong and infinitely subtle, obviously twenty-five years old or older and of a quality he’d never encountered before. None of that mattered as he used the few seconds of subterfuge in tasting the Scotch to mask his wild mental scrambling to find the best response to Omura’s question. Something told Nick—based on no empirical evidence yet whatsoever—that this old man probably possessed the most earthquake-proof bullshit detector of any man or woman Nick had ever met.

“I’ve become convinced that my son ran with that particular flashgang that attacked you, Omura-sama,” Nick said slowly, carefully. “But from things said by people—and from everything I know about my son’s character—I don’t believe Val was involved in the actual firing at you that night. My best guess is that he ran from it… that he never had any intention of harming you.”

“My forensics people are all but certain that a bullet from your son’s weapon killed the Coyne boy, in the tunnels but some distance from their ambush site. No… what’s the English words… no slugs from that weapon were found among all the other bullets and flechettes recovered at the site of the ambush itself. You’re a detective. What is your opinion of that, Nick?”