Nick looked at her without blinking. When he did speak, his voice was firm, emotionless. “What real life, K.T.?”
She closed her eyes for a second, then turned to leave but paused, speaking over her shoulder. “Be careful at Coors Field this afternoon. The department has info that this Hideki Sato you chose as your sniper-second is one of these zaibatsu assassins we were talking about.”
“Good,” said Nick. “Then he should be able to shoot straight. Call me as soon as you have something and we’ll meet again.”
Lieutenant Lincoln walked out of the diner with the same confident, aggressive strides she’d used to enter.
No visitor went into Coors Field armed, so Nick spent more than a half hour donning the Kevlar-Plus armor that went under his street clothes and up and over his neck and head like an overlappingly scaled and lightweight metal-ballistic-cloth balaclava. Nick’s face was exposed, so an inmate could always shoot him there—and there were guns as well as shivs, cleavers, spears, spikes, saps, and full-scale combat knives in the prison called Coors Field—but the K-Plus would turn away most blades and other cutting edges and, with luck, allow his sniper-second to step in.
But a long blade in the eye socket, struck in with lightning speed and an inmate’s Body Nazi–exercised and honed muscle, would serve as well as any bullet. These hard cases in Coors Field were the fittest and strongest men in the state of Colorado.
“Only men here?” asked Sato. Warden Bill Polansky and head guard and chief of the sniper squad Paul Campos were there watching Nick armor up. Polansky was the kind of quiet but solid midlevel administrator who, if he were in public education, would either be superintendent by the time he was forty-five or ready to blow his brains out.
Campos—with his head of silver, short-cropped curls and deep-water tan—was a man who’d blow any other man’s brains out before his own. And he’d do the job not happily but with absolute efficiency.
“Only men,” said Warden Polansky. “We have no indoor cells here except the emergency isolation holding cells under the stands. Women are housed in the nearby ex–Pepsi Center.”
“I used to watch the Nuggets and Avalanche play there,” Campos said. “And I heard Bruce Springsteen there once. Are you familiar with the rifle, Mr. Sato?”
Sato grunted and nodded.
Busy fitting the body armor over his genitals, Nick looked at the unloaded rifle that Sato was hefting. It was a basic M40A6 bolt-action sniper rifle of the sort the U.S. Marines still used. Nick could see that it had a five-round detachable box magazine. The range in Coors Field was relatively short—about one hundred eighty meters maximum—so it made sense that the prison snipers used the lighter 7.62 × 51mm former NATO cartridges rather than heavy, armor-piercing .50-caliber models.
Campos tapped the scope. “A modified Schmidt and Bender 3 – 12 × 50 Police Marksman II L with illuminated reticle. Daytime scope. You’ll probably be shooting into shadow under the second deck—that’s where D. Nigger Brown lives—but this will gather enough light to give you a clear shot, even if it gets cloudy.” Campos paused. “Have you used this particular weapon before, sir?”
“Yes, I have,” said Sato. He set the long gun down on its bipod on the table.
“We don’t want anyone dead,” Warden Polansky said tiredly just as Nick was pulling the K-Plus balaclava over his head. “Colorado abolished the death penalty years ago and never got around to reinstating it. So every prisoner you shoot creates a lot of paperwork for all of us. Actually, there’s more paperwork if a prisoner dies than if the visitor is killed.”
Sato nodded. Nick stared out through the eyeholes of his new headgear. His ears were covered but microphone pickups conveyed both external sounds and kept him in radio touch with Sato and others in the old press box. There was a 3D mini-cam and dual pickup microphones on the headpiece, so Sato and the others could monitor everything he was seeing and hearing… unless one of the inmates cut his head off and stashed it somewhere.
Nick started pulling on his outer clothes. The K-Plus gloves would be the last thing he put on.
Warden Polansky came over to Nick, turned on the cameras and mikes, stepped back, and folded his arms. He was scowling. “We want to accommodate Advisor Nakamura, Mr. Bottom, but is interrogating this particular prisoner really worth all this hassle?”
“Probably not,” said Nick. Fully dressed, he flexed his arms and fingers and moved his head around. He felt as if someone had sheathed him in metal-and-plastic shrinkwrap. The sweat was already pooling up under the K-Plus armor. “Let’s go,” he said.
Nick came out through the door in the centerfield wall and began the long walk across the playing field. Delroy Brown’s hovel was on the first level behind home plate, halfway up. Being a mere drug dealer in for a mere three-year fall, Brown wouldn’t warrant such a prime location, but he’d been in often and for more serious offenses and he had friends here.
Nick didn’t look over his shoulder but he knew Sato was up there behind the reflective, bulletproof glass of what used to be the second-level outfield VIP restaurant. Now it was a sniper’s roost.
In the early days of Coors Field’s use as an outdoor prison, the entire playing field was kept free for exercise purposes. Now outfield and infield—both grassless—were filled with blanket tents, cardboard and scrap-tin shacks, and junk-heap hovels. Those who lived down here were the newbies and nobodies, since their cobbled-together cubies suffered the full force of the weather. Coors Field had never had a roof, retractable or otherwise. The black prisoners had pride of place, owning all the covered area behind home plate and spreading to beyond both the first-and third-base-side dugouts. Whites owned the covered left-field areas on both the first and second tiers. Spanics had both tiers of right field and an uncovered part of the centerfield stands once called the Rockpile. It was still called the Rockpile by its inhabitants.
The expensive enclosed luxury boxes were now windowless hovels for the VIP prisoners—they paid the guards and warden a fortune for them—and the third-tier seats were a melange of shacks and tents for eccentrics and aging prisoners who just wanted to be left the fuck alone.
There was a sort of trail from the centerfield-wall door through the hovels to home plate and Nick kept to it. Sullen eyes glared out from under tents and cardboard shacks, but no one came close to him here. The understood shooting zone for visitors was six feet.
It was a long walk and the K-Plus armor made Nick’s body heat build up until he almost felt faint.
He knew the drilclass="underline" if one or more inmates attack you with edged weapons, roll up in a ball, cover your face with your K-Plus hands, and let your sniper-second handle things while the inmates stab away at you. Then, when the attackers are all down, get up and run like hell for the nearest exit.
Only the nearest exit was now some four hundred feet away across the entire infield and outfield.
Nick paused about where home plate used to be and peered up into the stands. The backstop and net were right where they used to be before this felon-inhabited state began parking its captured felons here. The reality of the place surprised him since he was so used to seeing the digital version in the Rockies games he followed during the summer. Most people had thought that the death of public gatherings would be the death of professional sports, but televised 3D digital-virtual games, in all sports, were more popular than the original live versions. One reason was probably the better players: the new Colorado Rockies team boasted such players as Dante Bichette, Larry Walker, Andrés Galarraga, and Vinny Castilla, who had all played for the team more than forty years earlier. The only rule now in major league baseball was that the virtual player on the roster must have played with that team sometime in the past (and could only be digitally resurrected to play on one team), thus the joyous return of the Brooklyn Dodgers with Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, and the rest. Those Dodgers faced a New York Yankees lineup that included Derek Jeter, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris (tuned to his best year), Lou Gehrig, Dwight Gooden, and Babe Ruth.