“Miss what? Are you telling me there’s going to be a time warp up there on top of the dam?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “Time warp?” she said. Her grin glittered in my headlights. “No. Come on.”
Even Coronado had finally said, “All right, enough,” and ordered his men to strangle El Turco. But not until he’d been lured all the way up to Kansas. And, according to Rosa, Colorado. The Seven Cities of Cibola were not going to be up on top of Cherry Creek dam, no matter what Rosa said, and I wasn’t even going to get a story out of this, but I switched off my lights and got out of the car and climbed over the chain.
It was almost fully light now, and the shadowy dimnesses below were sorting themselves out into decentralized Denver. The black 2001 towers off Havana were right below us, and past them the peculiar Mayan-pyramid shape of the National Farmer’s Union. The Tech Center rose in a jumble off to the left, beer cans and trapezoids, and then there was a long curve of isolated buildings all the way to downtown, an island of skyscraping towers obviously in need of a moratorium.
“Come on,” Rosa said. She started walking faster, panting along the road ahead of me and looking anxiously toward the east, where at least a black van wasn’t parked. “Coronado shouldn’t have killed El Turco. It wasn’t his fault.”
“What wasn’t his fault?”
“It was one of those time-things, what did you call it?” she said, breathing hard.
“A temporal agitation?”
“Yeah, only he didn’t know it. He thought it was there all the time, and when he brought Coronado there it wasn’t there, and he didn’t know what had happened.”
She looked anxiously to the east again, where a band of clouds extending about an inch above the horizon was beginning to turn pinkish-gray, and broke into an ungainly run. I trotted after her, trying to remember the procedure for CPR.
She ran into the pullout at the top of the dam and stopped, panting hard. She put her hand up to her heaving chest and looked out across the snow at Denver.
“So you’re saying the cities existed in some other time? In the future?”
She glanced over her shoulder at the horizon. The sun was nearly up. The narrow cloud turned pale pink, and the snow on Mt. Evans went the kind of fuschia we use in the Sunday supplements. “And you think there’s going to be another time-warp this morning?” I said.
She gave me that “how can one person be so stupid” look. “Of course not,” she said, and the sun cleared the cloud. “There they are,” she said.
There they were. The reflecting glass in the curved towers of Fiddler’s Green caught first, and then the Tech Center and the Silverado Building on Colorado Boulevard, and the downtown skyline burst into flames. They turned pink and then orange, the Hotel Giorgio and the Metropoint building and the Plaza Towers, blazing pinnacles and turrets and towers.
“You didn’t believe me, did you?” Rosa said.
“No,” I said, unwilling to take my eyes off of them. “I didn’t.”
There were more than seven. Far out to the west the Federal Center ignited, and off to the north the angled lines of grain elevators gleamed. Downtown blazed, blinding building moratorium advocates on their way to work. In between, the Career Development Institute and the United Bank Building and the Hyatt Regency burned gold, standing out from the snow like citadels, like cities. No wonder El Turco had dragged Coronado all the way to Colorado. Marble palaces and golden streets.
“I told you they were there all the time,” she said.
It was over in another minute, the fires going out one by one in the panes of reflecting glass, downtown first and then the Cigna building and Belleview Place, fading to their everyday silver and onyx and emerald. The Pavilion Towers below us darkened and the last of the sodium street lights went out.
“There all the time,” Rosa said solemnly.
“Yeah,” I said. I would have to get Jake up here to see this. I’d have to buy a News on the way home and check on the time of sunrise for tomorrow. And the weather.
I turned around. The sun glittered off the water of the reservoir. There was an aluminum rowboat out in the middle of it. It had golden oarlocks.
Rosa had started back down the road to the car. I caught up with her. “I’ll buy you a pecan roll,” I said. “Do you know of any good places around here?”
She grinned. Her gold teeth gleamed in the last light of Cibola. “The best,” she said.