Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) by Adrian McKinty Page B

smarter than them.
    The cars. The fading light. The airplanes. Men yelling. A fat June night. An urban symphony. A heavy overcoat of emptiness. I drift on an air bed over the ocean of eternity. On the infinite nothingness of a black sky.
    The list of a diesel engine. The air horn of a freight train. Vehicles. Voices. A TV in another room. A breathing city. We are clawed by the past. I have read up on the history of this town. I think of the Spanish, the gold rush, of hard-faced Denver men throwing the bodies of the Indian women and children into Sand Creek. I think of Oscar Wilde at Denver’s Union Station. The golden spike. Walt Whitman’s beard. A father’s tears.
    A beautiful girl in an orange sari, beaming from a photograph.
    Everything eased….
    Later.
    Denver ketch.
    The purest heroin I’ve ever had. Enough to make you become an addict. Lying there. Floating. Remembering the poet Novalis. “Inward goes the way full of mystery.” I don’t even have to take heroin now. Now I’m out of Ireland. I don’t even have to take it. I could be free of it. It has served its purpose. It’s been my shield. Like the beard, like the skinny stoop and the broken voice.
    No reason now. Yeah, I’ll stop, quit. Solve the murder. Save myself. Yes. Thoughts. Coming down from a deep high. Heroin doesn’t end like anesthesia. The world slides you out.
    Not today, though.
    John shook me.
    “Up, you bastard.”
    “What time is it, you dick?”
    “Ten o’clock,” he explained.
    “In the morning?”
    “Night.”
    “Jesus Christ, what did I tell you about jet lag?”
    “I’m hungry, I wanted to see if you wanted to go out and get something to eat. Besides, it’s America, we want to get out there, see stuff, do things, you know.”
    “Yeah, but John, you’re supposed to sleep through the night, adapt to a new time zone.”
    “Were you going to sleep on the bathroom floor in your underpants all night?”
    “No.”
    “Come on, then. I’m going to get something to eat. Are you coming or not?”
    We dressed and went downstairs. The man behind the desk was watching baseball on a portable TV.
    “Is there somewhere we could get something to eat around here?” John asked.
    “White Spot Diner, three blocks south,” the man said, not looking up.
    The diner. A waitress, ashen skin, dyed blond hair, a smoker, forties, exhausted, beaten down by the day and life. We looked at the menu. There were at least a dozen things we had never heard of: sloppy joes, meat loaf, submarine sandwiches, huevos rancheros; so we plumped for cheeseburgers and french fries, which was pretty bloody American in any case. When my burger came, I’d lost my appetite but John ate his and half of mine and I had a few fries. We drank Coke and John smoked and left. A nice night. I was feeling better now.
    We walked down Broadway. The city of Denver ahead of us. The sky filled with stars and airplanes crossing the vast continent from coast to coast. Amazing to be here. Very different from living on an island as small as Ireland. You could get in your car in Ireland and the farthest you could drive from home was two hundred miles. Here, you could get in your car and drive to the top of Alaska or to the jungles of El Salvador.
    Neon lights. The warm night. Police cruisers. Sirens. Big American cars. A club letting in a line of kids. John turned to look at me.
    “No way, no way,” I said. “I’m going home and I’m going to get a good night’s sleep. No way, mate. No way.”
    The nightclub…
    Girls at the upstairs bar. A redhead in the PhD astronomy program at the University of Colorado. Brown eyes, feline, intelligent. John with an Asian girl in Daisy Dukes and sandals, John explaining that in The Wild One, Brando rode a Triumph, not a Harley. The girl feigning interest wonderfully.
    John got us a round and his big smile infected all of us. He took the brunette to the dance floor and I talked to the redhead about astronomy. I told her my dad was a maths