Flashback

The three seconds’ worth of video image of Dara’s face across the street from Keigo’s apartment that night haunted Nick more than anything had since she’d died. He’d downloaded the video file into his phone and watched it a dozen times, using his wall-wide HD3D display in his cubie for the clearest image, and sometimes he was certain it was Dara; other times he was even more certain that it wasn’t—that it was a woman who didn’t even really look like Dara.

He’d also done three more fifteen-minute flashes of the phone conversation with her on the morning he’d told her about the Keigo murder, then flashed and reflashed an hour of the first time he’d seen her that next evening.

Did she seem false that evening? Did she seem to be hiding something from him?

Was he losing his mind?

Had he lost it long ago?

What everyone now called Six Flags Over the Jews was just to the left of the overpass where Speer Boulevard met I-25. Across the highway on the hill to the southwest of the sprawling complex loomed the Mile High Homeland Security Detention Center.

Nick had been vaguely curious why they called the amusement-park-turned-refugee-center Six Flags, since the company that ran the other Six Flags amusement parks only owned this one for about ten years right at the beginning of the century. For more than a century before that and for some years after the brief Six Flags era, the park had been called Elitch Gardens.

There were no gardens in sight now as Nick turned into the huge, empty parking area and followed concrete blast shields toward the first of several security checkpoints.

Nick knew about the old Elitch Gardens because of his grandfather. Nick’s father, who’d died when Nick was fifteen, had been a state patrol officer. Nick’s earliest memory of his old man was of his pistol, a large Smith & Wesson revolver. Nick’s father hadn’t died in a shootout (like Nick, he’d never fired his weapon in the line of duty), but in an accident on I-25 not two miles from where Nick’s wife, Dara, and her boss, Assistant District Attorney Harvey Cohen, had died. Nick’s father had pulled over to help a stranded motorist and a drunken sixteen-year-old driver had swerved onto the shoulder and killed him.

Nick’s grandfather had been a bus driver in the city and his great-grandfather had been a motorman on the old trolleys that connected Denver and its suburbs and nearby towns before cars forced them out. From Grandpa Nicholas, Nick had heard lovely tales of the old Elitch Gardens, whose motto for decades was Not to See Elitch’s Is Not to See Denver.

First opened in 1890, the original Elitch Gardens had been miles away from the downtown to the west, out at 38th Avenue and Tennyson Street in a suburb that was more like a separate village. That first Elitch Gardens, while growing, had kept its trees, extensive flower gardens, and shaded picnic areas where guests could eat lunches they’d packed for themselves. For forty years or so it had a zoo and for a century it boasted the Theater at the Gardens, first offering summer-stock performances and then, later in the twentieth century, visiting movie and TV stars. By the 1930s, Elitch’s had added the Trocadero Ballroom for dancing and visiting jazz groups and big bands and Nick’s grandfather had mentioned listening to An Evening at the Troc weekly national radio broadcast. Sometime in the 1950s the owners had added a Kiddieland with its little open-wheel race cars, two-seat rocket planes, and real floating “motorboats,” and although big amusement parks had catered almost exclusively to adults up until then, Elitch’s Kiddieland was a huge hit.

In 1994, Elitch’s had moved to its present location near the downtown and two years later had been purchased by the corporation that operated other Six Flags parks across America. The new owners abandoned grass and gardens for cement and concrete, Kiddieland and slow sky rides for ever more inverted-high-g screaming rides, and entrance prices that required a bank loan for a family. When Six Flags sold it sometime around 2006, the new company, although restoring the name Elitch Gardens, finished the job of destroying the last vestige of gardens and enjoyment for anyone other than the seriously adrenaline-addicted.

Nick knew all this detail because his grandfather and mother both had used Elitch’s as a metaphor for America in the last part of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first—abandoning shade and gardens and grace and affordable family fun for overpriced sun-glaring terror at six g’s inverted.

Well, thought Nick as he parked the car and walked toward the checkpoint across the cracked, heaving, and weed-strewn parking pavement, America had got all the terror it could ever have hoped for.