Flashback

The problem was that nothing around him—not Speer Boulevard with its overhanging trees, not the thrumming traffic in the two peasant lanes or the skateboard-low humming hydrogen-car traffic in the VIP lane, not the hundreds of makeshift shacks along the trickling course of Cherry Creek sunken between the bikepaths fifteen feet below the level of the street—seemed real. This had been the case for at least five years now but it seemed worse this month. The flashback hours with Dara were real; this nonsense interlude with Sato or improvising bad lines with the bit players in this poorly written, poorly lit, poorly acted play was certainly not real.

But what was confusing Nick Bottom now was his multiple use of flashback. He’d used it to review the interview with Danny Oz almost six years ago. He’d used it, as he had every day for the past five and a half years, to spend time with his dead wife.

But he’d also used hours of the drug to try to find out where Dara might have been on the night that Keigo Nakamura was killed.

He’d been out on a stakeout on Santa Fe Drive that night, down on the edge of the reconquista no-man’s-land there, sitting in the backseat of an unmarked patrol car as the two detectives up front watched the home of a local warlord who, they knew, was moving guns and drugs into the city. As a Major Crimes day-shift detective, Nick Bottom had had no business in the backseat of that particular unmarked car on that particular stakeout on that particular night, but in that first year after his promotion he’d had the stupid idea that he could do his white-collar downtown detective work while still staying fully in touch with the mean streets and their denizens, both crook and cop.

He couldn’t. It had been a stupid idea.

The two detectives sitting in the front seat that night—Cummings, the detective third grade with seven years in as a patrol officer but less than a year’s experience as detective, and Coleman, a twenty-five-year veteran in the DPD and nine years a detective first grade (the same grade as Nick)—had let him know that night that he was as useless and unwelcome as the proverbial tit on an equally proverbial boar.

Nick had been there anyway, shivering in the chill—they’d shut off the batteries to conserve power—and breathing in the well-known stakeout smell of sweat and old-car vinyl and coffee breath and the occasional silent but deadly fart from the front seat. God help him, he’d loved it the years he worked the street.

The flashback reliving of that hour had reminded Nick that he’d phoned Dara a little before midnight. He’d meant to phone earlier, but he’d been out at a corner all-night bodega getting coffee for Coleman and Cummings then. As it was, she didn’t pick up. It had surprised Nick, but it hadn’t worried him. When he was working on the street, she always left her phone on. That afternoon—he remembered this only through the flashback reliving of the hour around midnight—he’d told her he’d be working late, but he hadn’t told her that he’d be on the street. She often turned her phone off when she knew he was safe doing office work at Central Division.

That night, Nick now remembered, he’d gotten about three hours’ sleep on the couch at DPD CD and had been wakened when the call came in from the division commander, turning the Keigo murder case over to him and his partner, K. T. Lincoln. The word was that the responding detectives didn’t have boots high enough for this sort of politically charged case. Nick was still a department golden boy then; K. T. Lincoln brought some nice racial, gender, and sexual-orientation balance to the whole thing. (The commander admitted that he would have assigned a Japanese detective to the case, if they’d had a Jap with a gold shield, which they didn’t. In fact, the commander confessed, the entire Denver Police Department had only one officer of Japanese descent, and she was a rookie patrol officer taking her lumps and learning over in the Five Corners area. Nick Bottom and K. T. Lincoln would have to do.)

Nick had used a fifteen-minute vial of flashback reliving his call to Dara that morning. She’d been strangely unexcited about his news, even though closing the case could have meant a huge boost in his career. As assistant to a Denver ADA, she knew about such things. She sounded tired, even drugged. When Nick mentioned that he’d tried to call her around midnight the night before, there’d been a pause—more noticeable to the second-Nick reliving the moment via flashback than to the caffeine-jazzed real-time Nick that morning—and she’d said she’d taken a pill and turned off the phone and gone to bed early.