Flashback

“But that’s not Bucky the Bronco,” Nick droned on, straining to use his handcuffed left hand to point to the blue demon-stallion above the entrance to the detention center. “That insane blue horse was a sculpture that a New Mexico artist named Luis Jiménez—he wasn’t much of an artist, mostly a guy who did fiberglass shells for spanic low-riders—made under commission to the Denver International Airport about forty years ago. The only reason this Jiménez won the bid was that the tens of millions of dollars set aside to buy art for the new airport had been turned into one big grab bag for minorities—spanics, blacks, Indians, you name it. Everybody but the Asians in Colorado. I guess they didn’t qualify as minorities. Too smart. Anyway, the mayor at the time was black and his wife headed the committee that handed out all the art projects and all that counted was that the winners were minorities, not real artists, certainly not good artists.”

Nick turned his face away from Sato and banged his forehead against the passenger-side window. The red laser spots moved with him—now on his forearms, now on his chest.

“Please continue, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “Tell me everything you know about this horse.”

Nick tried to drown out the sound of his own voice by squeezing his forearms against his ears, but he could hear himself through bone conduction.

“This blue stallion is thirty-two feet tall, bigger than the original Bucky the Bronco. The people who live in the dead artist’s little town in Nuevo Mexico think the horse is accursed. It fell on the sculptor in his studio and killed him before he’d finished it. It was installed at DIA in 2008 and the contract stipulated that it had to be kept there for ten years, but as soon as that contract was up, the airport and city got rid of it. It shook up people arriving in Denver for the first time and all of us locals hated it. Homeland Security replaced Bucky the Bronco with this mad, haunted stallion and moved him to this entrance when they moved into Mile High about twelve years ago. The lasers serve a security function. But they’re going to blind me if one of these fucking beams gets me in the retina.”

“Is that all you know about the blue horse?” asked Sato.

“Yes!” screamed Nick. He shook his head wildly and strained more against the cuffs. Broad blood spatters joined the laser spots across the chest of his sweatshirt. “You fuck, you fuck! That second needle in my thigh was Pfizer TruTel, wasn’t it?”

“Of course,” said Sato. “If I gave you another chance at the investigation, Bottom-san, would you betray us again and abandon the investigation to go back under flashback at your earliest opportunity?”

“Yeah, of course I would,” said Nick. “You betcha, Mr. Moto.”

“Would you kill me if you got the chance, Bottom-san?”

“Yes, yes, absolutely,” screamed Nick. “Oh, you fuck.”

“Do you honestly believe there is a chance that you can solve the mystery of Keigo Nakamura’s murder, Bottom-san?”

“Not a chance in hell,” Nick heard himself answer.

The security chief’s black gaze looked appraisingly at Nick, and Nick stared back. Finally he managed, “Why are you taking me to the DHSDC?”

Everyone in Colorado knew that a lot of people went into the black-oil cake of Mile High detention center, but almost no one came out.

Sato’s voice was as flat as ever. “Bottom-san, you betrayed one of the nine Federal Advisors to the United States of America. You violated your word and your contract. Perhaps you planned to assassinate Hiroshi Nakamura.”

“What?!?” screamed Nick, jerking at his restraints again until blood from his wrists spattered the windshield and dashboard.

Sato shrugged. “They will find the truth after sufficient interrogation.”

Nick could feel his eyes straining in their sockets, like the mad, blue stallion’s. Two wide red dots continued to move across his spattered chest like the bloody fingers of a blind lover. “You’re as crazy as that fucking horse, Sato. You want to disappear me into Homeland Security hell here so you can declare the reopened investigation a failure. Then your boss will give you permission to commit seppuku.”

Sato said nothing.

You can’t get away with this, Nick started to shout like some minor character in a cheap TV series but with the help of Pfizer TruTel it came out, “And you will get away with it. Nakamura’ll believe you and you’ll get to kill yourself to atone for your failure and I’ll rot here in the dark for fucking ever.”

Sato looked at him another long minute, then nodded to himself and held up his NICC. Both lasers from the blue stallion’s eyes flicked to the card, then one went back to Nick while the other continued to read the card.

Sato turned the Honda around on the wet street and drove back through the CMRI tunnel and down the lanes through the empty, littered gravel and wet stone wasteland where the parking lot and old neighborhood used to be around Mile High Stadium.