Читаем Flashback полностью

He wasn’t sure as he tried to focus his memory whether to spend one of her birthday nights with her—she always loved to celebrate her birthday with him—or perhaps an hour from just after they were married, or perhaps even before they married, when they took those long walks together. He panicked even as he tried to focus in the second he had to inhale.

For the next hour, Leonard had to relive a painful root canal from his late fifties. The dentist had been brusque, rough, and unsympathetic. The anesthesia hadn’t seemed to work well. Leonard’s lifelong fear of choking had added to the pain and anxiety. His pain and fear then added to his pain and fear now reliving the hour. But there was no turning back with flashback, he knew. Once started, the vial amount of a relived experience would not be changed, escaped, or denied.

It serves me right, he thought as the hour of horror moved slowly, glacially, through the night. It’s my own fault. I deserve this punishment for stealing the boy’s flashback and for trying to escape reality by communing with my dead. We should respect our dead through memory, not through pharmaceuticals. I deserve this.

Yes, thought Leonard with a wincing smile, he felt very much the Jew this night.

Dropped off a little before 11 a.m. near Union Station just off I-25 in the LoDo section of Denver, Val and Leonard began walking. They had spent only eight days with the caravan, but it had felt like much longer to Leonard and it felt strange to him now not to be continuing on with the truckers. He felt somewhat abandoned and he imagined Val did as well.

Both of them were tired and grumpy but his grandson’s usual surliness seemed to be tempered by excitement. Before the boy remembered that he didn’t communicate important things to his grandfather, he’d blurted out Henry Big Horse Begay’s promise to take Val with him if the boy had acquired a counterfeit NICC by the time Begay was scheduled to return on October 27. Val showed Leonard the slip of paper with the Denver card counterfeiter’s name, address, and phone number. There was a second man’s name and number and a street address scrawled beneath the first one.

“That’s the best NICC guy that Begay knows, period, supposedly does cards that no one can tell from the real things, but he’s not even in the country. He lives in Austin or someplace like that in Texas, so I don’t know why he gave me that name. I need to find two hundred old bucks and see this guy on South Broadway here in Denver.” Val hurried to take the folded card back.

Leonard didn’t have to point out that the old-dollar equivalent of $300,000 in new bucks was as far away as the pale scythe of moon that still hung above the mountains in the blue sky.

The day was warm for late September, almost summer-like, and the blue sky was cloudless. The leaves on the few trees along the streets in this old section of town looked as tired and dusty as the two pedestrians, but hadn’t yet begun to change color. Leonard remembered autumn days like this when he’d lived in nearby Boulder, the aspen leaves getting brittle enough to rattle in the breezes, the blue skies darkening toward that unmatchable blue of a Colorado October, and the thin air free from even the slightest hint of the humidity that so often hung over Los Angeles.

The two plodded to Blake Street and then turned right and walked three short blocks to Speer Boulevard. They argued about what to do next. Val wanted to see his old house and neighborhood near Cheesman Park, but that was miles east of here and certainly a dead end. Nick had sold that house and moved out just after he’d sent Val to Los Angeles more than five years ago. Even the neighbors Val had known as a boy were probably gone… either gone, Leonard pointed out, or already alerted by the FBI or Homeland Security to be on the lookout for Val.

“We should walk to the Cherry Creek Mall Condos, where your father lives,” said Leonard as they turned left onto the so-called Cherry Creek Trail.

“The FBI will be watching there too,” said Val.

“Yes,” said Leonard. “But with luck your father will shelter us from them.”

The old man and boy walked southeast a couple of blocks to a point just beyond Larimer Street where the pedestrian walkway ducked under North Speer Boulevard and ran along the banks of Cherry Creek to a point at which the river meandered between the lanes of the busy divided boulevard.

It was about four miles to his son-in-law’s condominium complex and after the first mile or so, Leonard wasn’t sure he was going to make it. He collapsed onto a bench by the walkway and Val fidgeted nearby.

Перейти на страницу:

Похожие книги