Flashback

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 only 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”…