“Because she would have wanted you to,” said Noukhaev.
Nick sat up straight in his uncomfortable metal chair. She would have wanted him to?
“Who’s ‘she,’ Noukhaev?”
“Your wife, Nick Bottom,” said the don, flicking ashes with a relaxed move of his hairy wrist. “The lovely lady named Dara.”
Nick was on his feet, his hands balled into his fists. On his feet but swaying slightly. “How do you know my wife’s name?” Stupid thing to say, Nick realized at once. Noukhaev must have multiple dossiers on him, compiled as soon as Nakamura had hired him. He shook his head and tried again.
“What’s my wife got to do with anything? Why bring her into this?” Nick put a fist onto the desktop to help steady himself. The don had remained seated.
“Your wife, Dara Fox Bottom, was a beautiful woman,” Noukhaev said in low tones. “She sat right there… in the same chair that you just vacated…”
Nick swiveled awkwardly to look down at his empty chair. When he turned back to Noukhaev, he had to set both fists, knuckles first, onto the don’s desk to keep from falling.
“Dara here? Why? When?”
“The day after Keigo Nakamura interviewed me,” said Noukhaev. “Four days before the young Mr. Nakamura was murdered in Denver. He and his retinue had already flown home by the time your wife met with me.”
“Met with you… why?” managed Nick.
The room was spinning now. The water, thought Nick. No, not the water. Noukhaev had drunk the water. Something in the glass that interacted with the water. Something slower-acting than the fucking taser, but just as sure.
“The man she came to Santa Fe with and stayed with at the Inn of the Anasazi while they were here,” Noukhaev was saying from a thousand miles away, his voice rattling and echoing down the quickly closing tunnel. “That assistant district attorney Harvey Cohen. He was a man of little or no imagination. But your lovely wife, Nick Bottom… your lovely wife, Dara, she was…”
Whatever his lovely wife Dara was, had been, Nick never heard it from Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev.
Nick had already begun the long slide down the dark tunnel into blackness.
1.14
Denver and Las Vegas, Nevada: Friday, Sept. 17—Sunday, Sept. 19
Denver was still standing when Nick got back on Friday evening. Most of Denver, at least. Some group had blown up the Denver branch of the U.S. Mint on West Colfax, near Civic Center Park.
Why the U.S. still had a mint, Nick had no idea. No one used coins any longer. So the destruction of that particular ancient landmark had been of interest only to the terrorists who built the bombs and to the five bored guards who’d been blown apart in the middle-of-the-night blasts. It was the sort of information that Nick and a million other Denverites had learned to file under Ignore and Forget.
What did get Nick’s attention immediately upon stepping naked out of the shower was a ten-minute-old text message from Detective First Grade, Lieutenant K. T. Lincoln: “Nick—Everything checked out okay. No worries. No need to see each other. Mami.”
The “Mami” was their old cop-partner code for “Must Arrange Meeting Immediately!” and also signified that all preceding sentences in the message meant the opposite of what they said. It was an I’m-under-some-duress code.
Something was very wrong.
Nick phoned her cell and got her message voice telling callers that she was on duty, so leave a message and she’d get back to them.
“Just back in town and checking in,” Nick said, working on the closest he could get to a bored tone of voice. “Glad everything’s okay. Call me when you get a chance. Oh, I broke my old phone and have a new number.” He gave her the number of the onetime phone he’d dug out of a duffel hidden behind the wallboards. After her return call, he’d pitch the thing.
Fifteen minutes later, K.T. phoned. “I’m supervising a stakeout and ESU thing over here on East Colfax. But it’s gotta be over before eleven-thirty because the ESU guys have to get their van back. I’ll meet you at midnight at that place where that guy did that thing that time.” She broke the connection. Nick was sure that she’d used a onetime as well.
Getting dressed, Nick checked the clock on his cubie’s TV. Just after 9 p.m. He had almost three hours to kill. He’d use some of that time speculating about just what the hell K.T. could have turned up that would call for such an urgent get-together.
Nick had been conscious by the time Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s people had dropped him off in front of the cathedral. Legs shaky, his insides quaking with anger, Nick had walked the short block to the Japanese consulate.
He’d assumed that Sato and the other Japs at the consulate would be so eager to hear what the don had said to him that the interrogation would go on all that afternoon and night, moving to sodium pentothal and other so-called truth drugs if Nick didn’t give them everything they wanted. But there was no interrogation.
Sato, his right arm looking slick-wet in the active sling, had come to Nick’s room, knocked, walked in, and said, “Did you learn anything important from Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev? Anything that could help our investigation?”
Biting the inside of his cheek, Nick had looked up at Sato and said, “I don’t think so.” That was a lie, but how much of a lie wasn’t quite clear yet.
Sato had just nodded and said, “It was worth a try.”
A few hours later, when Nick awoke from his nap but was still feeling drained and stupid, Sato invited him to dinner at Geronimo, a famous upscale restaurant that he and Dara had loved (and saved up to enjoy during their annual visits to Santa Fe). Without pondering why Hideki Sato would take him out to dinner at such an expensive spot, Nick accepted. He was hungry.
Geronimo was as Nick had remembered it—a small adobe building that had been a private home in 1750, its entrance area dominated by a large central fireplace with a mantel topped by both a huge floral display and a giant pair of moose antlers—but the restaurant itself was small. Since it was cool and raining out that evening and the porch dining area closed, the small interior seemed crowded. Luckily, given Sato’s girth, they were seated in a corner banquette all to themselves. The two men said little. Nick was finished with his first course—Fujisaki Asian pear salad with sweet cashews and cider honey vinaigrette—and was halfway through his main course of filet mignon “frites,” the hand-cut russet potato fries alone worth killing for, when the memory of his last time here with Dara struck him.
He felt his chest ache and his throat tighten and, like a fool, he had to set down his fork and sip water—Sato had ordered a bottle of Lokoya ’25 Mount Veeder Cabernet Sauvignon for the two of them at a price just slightly less than Nick’s last full year’s salary as a police detective—and pretend he’d bitten into something too spicy to hide his tears and flushed face. Nick’s strongest wish at that moment was that he could immediately go back to his room at the consulate and use one of the last one-hour vials of flashback he’d brought along to call back his dinner at this restaurant with Dara nine years ago. The ache and need was more than mere flashback withdrawal, it was an existential matter: he didn’t belong here and now, eating this fine food with this huge hulk of a Japanese assassin, he needed to be there, then, with his wife, sharing a wonderful meal with her while both of them looked forward to going back to their room at La Posada.