Flashback

Mr. Nakamura ignored this. After a moment he said, “Our holistic contract has been transferred to your phone, Mr. Bottom. You can study it at your leisure. Your virtual signature will activate the contract and Mr. Sato will then transfer the money for initial expenses to your NICC. In the meantime, will you be so kind as to give Mr. Sato a ride back to Denver?”

“Why the hell should I do that?” said Nick.

“You will not see me again until this investigation is finished, Mr. Bottom, but you will be seeing much of Mr. Sato. He will be my full-time liaison with you for this investigation. Today I wish him to experience your vehicle and see your residence.”

“Experience my vehicle?” laughed Nick. “See my residence? What on earth for?”

“Mr. Sato has never seen a Baby Gap store,” said Hiroshi Nakamura. “It would amuse him to do so. This concludes our business, Mr. Bottom. Good day.”

The billionaire bowed almost infinitesimally, the bow all but invisible in its shallow curtness.

Nick Bottom did not bow. He turned on his heel and walked back toward the genkan entranceway and shoe-storage area, feeling the soft tatami under his exposed big toe every step of the way.

Hideki Sato followed close behind him without making any noise at all.

1.01 Los Angeles—Friday, Sept. 10

Val reclined in a V where rusted steel met pigeon-shit-stained concrete under a crumbling overpass high over an abandoned stretch of the 101 not far from what was left of Union Station. Val loved this place not only for its relative coolness, as in lower temperature here in the shade, but also for its coolness. He liked to think that the steel-trussed and concrete ledges such as the one he and the guys were resting on now were the buttresses of some abandoned Gothic cathedral and he was the hunchback up here with the gargoyles. Charles Laughton, maybe. Val’s love of old movies was, he thought, probably the only thing he’d gotten from his old man before the bastard abandoned him.

The other guys in his little flashgang were coming out of flash now, their twitches and droolings changing to yawns, stretches, and shouts.

“All right!” screamed Coyne. He was as close to a leader as this raggedy-ass band of mewly white kids had ever managed.

“Fuckin’ A all right!” echoed Gene D. The tall, acned boy was absentmindedly rubbing his crotch as he came fully up and out from under, evidently trying to finish after the flash what he’d failed to achieve during the actual rape.

“Do her again, Ben!” cried Sully. His tats not only ran up and down the more muscled sixteen-year-old’s arms but turned his face into a Maori war mask.

Monk, Toohey, the Cruncher, and Dinjin twitched up and out of their repeated thirty-minute flashes and remained silent except for their yawns, belches, and farts. These four were all a year or two younger than Val and the other three older boys (but the Cruncher—Calvin—was by far the tallest and heaviest and stupidest of the eight). None of their attempts at sex had lasted even a minute before their premature whateveryoucallems, so Val wondered—What have these morons been flashing on for the other twenty-nine minutes? The stripping-her-naked part? The running-away part? Or did they just flash on their Magic Moment thirty times in a row, like a disc with a stuck Blu-ray beam?

The group had been flashing and reflashing on the rape of a spanic virgin girl a little more than an hour earlier. The plan—Coyne’s plan, mostly—had been to snatch one of the cute little fourth-grade spanic girls on her way to school and gang-bust her cherry. “One of those sweet little virgins with just an ant trail of hair above her gash,” as Coyne had so artfully put it. “Something we can flash on and get off on for weeks.”

But they hadn’t nabbed a sweet little fourth-grader. All those sweet little spanic girls were being driven to school by armed dads and older brothers, rumbling down the surface streets in their hybrid low-riders with the virgins peering out through the gunslit windows of the backseats. In the end, they’d just grabbed Hand Job Maria, the retarded ninth-grader who went to their own high school. HJM might have technically been a virgin—there had been some blood when Coyne had gone first—but the sight of her naked, the rolls of fat hanging down over her cheap underpants, her pasty white lump of a face with the vacant eyes staring up, her tits large but already old-looking, stretchmarked, and drooping—had excited Val in a sick-making way, but had also made him say he’d be lookout during the actual rape.

He’d flashed when the others did here under the high overpass, but only a ten-minute return to his fourth-birthday party back in Denver. Val tended to go back to that party the way he’d read about schizophrenics repeatedly burning their arms with cigarettes in order to remind themselves they were still alive.