Flashback

Nick turns right at the flagpole with the flag showing a single white star on the triangular field of blue. The red and white stripes look familiar. The Texas cavalry is escorting them through the opened gates that cut through the two high fences and intervening minefields.

Nick’s amazed to see a familiar building just beyond the open border gates. “I thought the Alamo was much farther south,” he says softly. The Camaro’s big V-8 is just rumbling softly now.

“A lot of people make that mistake,” says Leonard, who is leaning forward to shake Nick’s hand. When Nick offers his hand to Val, the boy hugs him instead.

Nick came awake gasping and with tears running down his cheeks.

Flashback addicts rarely dreamed at all. Now that real dreams, as opposed to flashback trips, were coming back to him, he was astonished at how powerful they were. Why would anyone trade such things for chemically induced reruns of fragments of a life? Why had he?

He was up and showered and shaved and planned to be dressed, armed, and out of the condo complex by 6:30 a.m. His ribs hurt worse today under the tape-corset, but he didn’t care. Looking in the mirror after he’d shaved, Nick saw that something was different.

He’d managed to lose quite a bit of weight for two weeks on a case, and his cheekbones were sharper, his features more gaunt, but that wasn’t the primary change. His eyes. His eyes were different. More clear. For almost six years now, he’d stared at himself and at everything else out of the cave-stare of either wanting and needing flashback more than anything else in the world or staring at the world through the glaze of a heavy flashback hangover. His eyes were different now.

Can they stay that way? Nick shivered and finished getting dressed.

At weapons-check, he signed out his 9mm Glock for the clip-on crossdraw holster at his belt and a tiny .32-caliber pocket gun for his rarely worn ankle holster. The .32 had been his throw-down for all the years he’d been a patrolman and homicide detective—numbers filed off, grip taped, no traceable history on it—but he’d never fired his service weapon in anger, much less come close to having to use a throw-down for himself or his partner. He trusted the short-barreled .32 to be accurate at distances of five feet or less.

Before leaving for the day, Nick took security chief Gunny G. aside, showed him the photos of Val and Leonard, and paid the ex-marine $50 in old bucks—more than a third of what Nick had left after paying the pilot to get him to Los Angeles and a fortune by anyone’s standards—with more promised if Gunny were to take care of the two until Nick got back. Or if he didn’t get back.

“The FBI and Homeland Security were here last week asking about the boy, Mr. B.,” said Gunny G.

“I know,” said Nick, handing the fortune in hard cash to the white-scarred ex-marine. “But I swear to you that it’s only because they wanted to question my son as a material witness to something he wasn’t involved in. And even that’s been dropped. You won’t get in trouble helping them, I promise you that, Gunny. And there’s another twenty-five in it for you after you do help them get settled ’til I get back—and keep anyone from bothering them.”

“I’d do that for you no matter what, Mr. B.,” said the security man as he pocketed the cash.

Nick scribbled a hasty note—he had little hope that Val and his grandfather would show up today, but the remnants of the dream he’d had made him a little more optimistic than usual—and then he was out the parking garage door and into his vibrating, wheezing gelding. It was hard to drive that volt-bucket after the dream-memory of real V-8 power and freedom. The charge indicator’s happy face showed that he had a range of thirty-one miles today, if a major part of it was downhill.

“K.T.! ”

The police lieutenant spun, crouched, and had almost cleared the Glock from its holster before she froze.

“Nick Bottom. What the fuck do you want?”

“And a good morning to you, too, Lieutenant Lincoln.”

K.T. lived on Capitol Hill in one of the big old nineteenth-century homes in that once-prestigious neighborhood that had been converted to a dozen or more cubie rentals late in the last century or early in this one. It had been a high-crime neighborhood for more than six decades now, but this only gave the cops who wanted to live there a better deal. The residents of K.T.’s building who could afford cars kept them in an oversized detached garage down this long driveway and that’s where he’d planned to intercept his old partner.

“What are you doing in your uniform, Detective?” asked Nick. Seeing K.T. in her patrol blacks, gunbelt, visible shield, baton and all, reminded him of their early years together.

“There’s been a little unpleasantness in Los Angeles this past week,” said K.T., straightening. “Or perhaps you’ve been too busy playing Philip Marlowe to notice.”

“I’ve heard rumors,” said Nick. “So?”