Flashback

He slid down—too fast, it took skin off his palms—and when he got to the bottom his legs were too wobbly to hold him upright. Val collapsed on the cement there, his back to the building, and panted loudly for a moment. The panting sounded a little like sobs but—he decided—that wasn’t his fault.

He retrieved his Beretta from the pipe and just stood by the rubble of the broken pedestrian bridge for a while.

What next?

It had been the only question for a long time now and it seemed that Val Fox never had the answer.

I kill the Old Man and get out of here.

The thought seemed obscene to him, despite its familiarity. Always before it was a black-souled fantasy, something rising more out of the secrets that young Val had known—the fact of his mother lying to his father about her whereabouts that last year, the fact of his father’s maddening denseness when Val’s mother said she’d spent the long weekend at Laura McGilvrey’s when ten-year-old Val had known that she’d been with Mr. Cohen, the fact of his father’s total lack of tears in the long month after Val’s mother had died in that crash—all facts woven into the fantasy of his father having discovered the affair and having acted on the knowledge.

But Val had never believed his own black-souled fantasy. Not really. The dark dream that his father had also hurt Val’s mother had been nothing more than a focus for his rage at the reality of his father exiling him, a substitute fury at his father for sending Val away when he wanted and needed to be near the Old Man, a fantasy revenge aimed at his father for not weeping when Val’s ten-year-old heart had been torn to shreds.

But now, this absolutely damning grand jury evidence…

Val arched backwards over the railing of the broken bridge and screamed into the blue Colorado afternoon sky.

So what next?

Kill the Old Man and get out of Colorado.

No, wait, that was the wrong sequence…

First, get the $200 in old dollars from the Old Man, and find the guy here in Denver who’d get him the new NICC with the faked Teamster membership and…

Well, that’s fucked.

Killing his father in cold blood—a cop, ex-cop to be sure, but still part of that fucking fraternity that tended to take the killing of its own real seriously—and then hang around Denver two weeks or more to get his fake ID? Didn’t quite parse, did it, Valerino?

He fumbled in his pockets until he found the slip of paper with the NIC Card counterfeiter’s name scribbled on it. There were two names there, the other being that guy in Austin, Texas, who did the best work that Begay had ever seen…

But getting into the Republic of Texas would be harder than staying in Denver for two weeks without being caught after committing a public murder.

No plan of action made any sense at all.

Val had been watching a few cars pull off the street and drive into the security boxes on their way up into the parking garage. All the vehicles had tinted windows. Val couldn’t have made out the faces of the drivers from here if he’d had a pair of binoculars, which he didn’t. He could stand right next to the approach driveway in hopes of seeing the Old Man’s face as he drove up, but this was a sure way to get the cops called on his ass.

The cops were probably on their way anyway. That stunt with the climbing rope and breaking the skylight glass hadn’t brought an immediate mob—those who stayed home all day hidden in their condo cubies weren’t exactly the types who responded quickly to scary noises, especially since most of them were almost certainly under the flash and hadn’t heard a damned thing—but Val was sure that that scary Gunny G. and his security pals would be responding soon enough. Probably the only thing right now keeping that Gunny from calling the cops was that he seemed to be on the arm to the Old Man. He might phone Val’s father first before siccing the cops on anyone.

And thus warn the Old Man that I’m out here somewhere waiting for him, thought Val.

Time to get out of there.

Val had hobbled half a dozen steps west along the old river path before he realized that he could barely walk. His right ankle was cut worse than he’d noticed. There was a pool of blood where he’d been standing by the bridge and he was leaving red pools as he walked.

Fuck.

He sat down and rolled up his torn pant leg. It was a pretty deep slash—the kind you needed stitches for. The kind you went to the emergency room for.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

Val shucked off his jacket and flannel shirt, tugged his T-shirt over his head, and tore it into rags. He tied the cleanest strip as tightly around the wound as he could and then got dressed again.

He was filthy, his right pant leg was torn to shit and bloody from the cuff halfway to the knee, and his boots were so sodden with blood that he made squishy noises as he walked.

I’ll deal with it later.