Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  She leaned forward, hand still resting on her weapon.

  “You think I give a fuck if I die in jail, or get popped myself, if before I go I can shoot some big shot fucking dickhead detective like my ex?”

  She stared at Hounds.

  Hounds took off his sunglasses and looked at the reserve.

  “I’m sorry for your troubles.”

  Her lips thinned, she took her hand from her gun, and she wiped her eyes.

  “Yeah, well, we all got something on our minds.”

  Hounds put his sunglasses back on.

  “Yes, we do.”

  She leaned forward and rested her fingers on the keyboard.

  “What charge?”

  Hounds picked at the peeling decal on the front of the faded black XXL Metallica T-shirt stretched over his chest.

  “Resisting. And threatening a public o.”

  She clacked a few keys.

  “Code sixty-nine and seventy-one it is. You want to do a report?”

  “Fuck no. He stays inside for more than a couple days I’ll write something up. Pen an epic about him he stays inside.”

  She nodded.

  “I get it. Okay. Bring him around.”

  Hounds grabbed Park by the elbow and led him over to a steel door.

  “Time to go wait for your girlfriend, whoever the hell it is.”

  The skinny black man on the bench raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, I know you. I know you? Yeah, I do.”

  Hounds kicked the bench.

  “Asshole, you got something to say?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Thought I know the man is all.”

  Hounds took Park by the shoulder and spun him around.

  “This asshole?”

  “Yeah-hm, that asshole.”

  “You know him?”

  The man dropped his head to the side and squinted.

  “I know you?”

  Standing there in the West Los Angeles Community Police Station on Butler Avenue, roughly five miles from his home, a station he’d patrolled out of for his first six months on the job, Park looked directly at the man and nodded.

  “Yeah, you know me.”

  The man grinned.

  “I thought as much, I did. What was it?”

  Park looked at Hounds, looked back at the man.

  “I ripped you off once.”

  The man’s eyes got big.

  “Bullshit?”

  “No, no bullshit. I sold you some dope, went light on the weight.”

  The man shook his head.

  “I bought dope from a white guy?”

  He raised his shoulders high and dropped them, sighing.

  “See, that right there a reason to stay off the shit. How high a man gotta be to buy off a white guy? Like it a mystery a white guy gonna rip you off?”

  “Just business.”

  “Shit, just business to you. I don’t get high, I’m like to go rob or kill someone. An now you in here for resisting, nice white dope dealer like you.”

  Park closed his eyes for a moment, thinking about a big red button he could push to stop all this, just pause everything around him and allow him to walk away from it, back home.

  He opened his eyes.

  “We all make mistakes.”

  The man opened his mouth wide, showing a junkie’s rotted teeth, and laughed.

  “Ain’t that the truth. Ain’t it, though. All make mistakes. And then some, I tell you. Yeah, I thought I know you. Wasn’t where I thought it was from, but I thought so. All make mistakes. Yeah, we do.”

  Hounds kicked the bench again, shutting off the skinny black man’s laughter.

  “That’s it, that’s where you know him from?”

  The man shrugged with his whole body again, his chains jingling.

  “He’s the expert. He say that was where it was, why I got a reason to disbelieve him?”

  Hounds turned to the door.

  “Should have known.”

  The reserve put her finger on a button.

  “Did you think they were gonna know each other from when they were in the CIA together?”

  She hit the button and a buzzer sounded.

  Hounds pulled the door open.

  “Just like to know why this asshole gets the treatment. He ain’t a regular asshole is all I’m saying. Right, asshole?”

  Park didn’t say anything.

  The skinny black man was laughing again.

  “All make mistakes. Yeah-hm, we do. We do.”

  Holding the door open, Hounds jerked his chin at the man.

  “What’s laughing boy up for?”

  The reserve drank from a can of Diet Coke, drained it.

  “Killed his family. His grandma and two sisters he was living with.”

  She took another can from a desk drawer and opened it.

  “They were all sleepless. All three. Killed them, he said, so they wouldn’t have to do the suffering.”

  Hounds stared at the man, kicked the bench again, spoke soft.

  “Hey.”

  The man reached down and fingered a link in his chain, didn’t say anything.

  Hounds cleared his throat.

  “How’d that go down? How’d they take it?”

  The man didn’t look up.

  Park scuffed the floor with his heel, looking at his father’s watch on Hounds wrist.

  “How do you think it went down? Leave him alone.”

  Hounds slammed him into the wall next to the door, got his fingers on his neck, and banged his head off the plaster twice.

  “Fuck do you know about it? Fuck do you know? Shut the fuck up.”

  The reserve coughed.

  Hounds let go of Park’s neck.

  Park looked at the man on the bench playing with the chain; the reserve rubbing the knot in her neck; Hounds opening and closing the hand he’d used to grab Park’s throat.

  “I have a wife. I’m not special. I know about it. I have a wife.”

  No one looked at anyone else.

  Hounds lightly kicked the bench again, but the skinny man just played with his chain.

  Hounds looked over at the reserve.

  “Why’s he out here instead of the cage?”

  She spun on her chair.

  “Keeping me company.”

  He moved Park through the open door into the lockbox.

  “Let’s go.”

  He waited for the door to swing closed and a second buzzer to sound and the door on the opposite side of the box to open.

  Hounds nodded at the cop standing on the other side, unlocked the cuffs from Park’s wrists.

  “Your part-timer out there is losing it.”

  The cop pulled a zip-strip from his belt.

  “Yeah she is. You want in, we got a pool going; when she’s gonna off herself.”

  Hounds pocketed his cuffs.

  “Fucking. You got someone?”

  The cop paused.

  “What?”

  Hounds shook his head.

  “No, you don’t.”

  He bumped Park’s shoulder with his fist.

  “Asshole, he don’t know.”

  The cop looked at them both.

  “What the fuck?”

  Park looked at Hounds, shrugged.

  “I don’t know who knows what.”

  Hounds shook his head.

  “But you got a wife.”

  Park looked at him.

  “I have a wife.”

  The cop started to zip Park’s wrists.

  “Fuck you guys.”

  Hounds held up a hand.

  “Hang on a fuck.”

  He looked at the floor.

  “Shit.”

  He unbuckled the watch, stuck it in Park’s pocket, and looked at the cop.

  “Don’t touch the fucking watch.”

  Park looked at him.

  “Sorry about Kleiner.”

  Hounds settled his sunglasses a little tighter over his eyes.
/>   “The fuck out of here.”

  And turned and buzzed out the door.

  The cop zipped Park’s wrists and shoved him down a hall of cells. A din of imprisoned men crammed against the bars, held there by the pressure of the bodies at their backs.

  The guard shoving him along, talking to himself.

  “I need a watch to know what time it is? Please. It’s five minutes before we’re gonna stuff one too many in there. Gonna stuff one too many in there and the bars are just gonna pop off and we’re gonna be fucked. Five minutes.”

  Silently, Park agreed.

  STANDING ON my deck to enjoy the morning air, I was having my worldview reinforced by a phone call from Vinnie the Fish.

  “You punch this guy in, you get Officer Haas, Parker, T Assigned to Venice. Patrol car cop. My guy calls over there to ask someone he knows what they think of Haas, that guy never heard of him, can’t find him on the station roster. So he’s a cop. Four years on the job. Almost three of those he was in uniform. Then there’s some kind of hanky-panky. There’s a file, but it’s a special assignments file, for someone else’s eyes only. Your guy, someone fingered him for undercover somewhere. They transferred him to Venice so no one would know he was going SA, but it’s a paper transfer is all, because someone doesn’t want anyone to know he’s going under.”

  I pinched the flowering tops from a basil plant.

  “What does that suggest?”

  “To me it suggests one of two. Number one is that he’s gone undercover for IAD. They like new cops, guys who haven’t had a chance to get too dirty yet. The fact my guy was able to find his SA file, even if he can’t get a look, that doesn’t speak well of the effort to hide your cop. And that smells very IAD. Get all sneaky, but do it in a half-assed way.”

  “And number two?”

  “Number two is bagman.”

  I inhaled deeply, oils from the basil filling the air.

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah, ah. Way the force is now, is it’s kind of fragmented. Goes way beyond this division won’t share with that one. There are units that are off the map. Gone dark. Fringe law enforcement. They operate without sanction, but also without rebuke. As long as bad guys are being removed from the board, there’s a lot of looking the other way. Financing operations like that is tricky. Can’t draw too much from the budget. Can’t dedicate too many visible resources. So most of the money comes from the bad guys. Asshole A pays to have his operation protected and, just as important, to see that Asshole B is struck from the record. In this number two scenario, your guy is dirty from when he walks through the door, someone spots his potential, and he’s recruited. They move him to the margins of the books, and he’s your new invisible bagman. Drawing pay, carrying a badge, but all he does is call on assholes and take donations.”

  I thought about the conversation I’d witnessed a few hours before, outside the gallery.

  “Yes, Vincent, that sounds quite plausible.”

  “Yeah, it’s a sad, dirty world.”

  “My thoughts almost exactly.”

  “Of course there’s another possibility.”

  “Yes?”

  Vinnie coughed as if he might be embarrassed to bring something up.

  “He could just be a cop doing his job.”

  I considered the possibility.

  “Is that likely?”

  “No.”

  I nodded.

  “My feeling as well.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. This was extremely helpful.”

  “My pleasure. And thanks for taking care of things on my end.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  “Keep your head down, Jasper.”

  “And you as well, Vincent.”

  I closed my phone and dropped it in my pocket.

  Above the San Gabriels the sun shone silver behind an unseasonable marine layer. Though, at that point, labeling any weather phenomenon as seasonable or otherwise was a fool’s errand. It was not the intense early morning brightness of just a few years prior, but plenty hot. The cool I’d enjoyed a moment before was fading. I brushed my hand along the tops of the basil and the other herbs in my little container garden. Rosemary, lemon thyme, Mexican oregano, peppermint, bay, coriander, all of them releasing their oils.

  I needed to get out of the previous day’s clothes. I needed a shower. I needed a few hours’ sleep. Refreshed, I would return to Officer Haas’s home and pursue my business with him. I still harbored a slight hope that he was in possession of the drive. But imagined it more likely that it had been sold to Afronzo Jr. for monies that would fatten the coffers of whatever secret police squad Haas was a member of.

  The blend of herbs was disrupted. A change in the breeze taking it from me. But there was no breeze. I began to turn, and, as I did, my attention was caught by the sight of an intense bead of light arcing up out of the Los Angeles basin.

  Perched on an extreme southern foot of the Santa Monicas, just above West Hollywood, overlooking the entire basin from an advantageous elevation, Number One Electra Court was a natural location for SoCal Theater of Operations Command to place an observation post. Yes, the high-rent owners within the dubiously named Mount Olympus development objected, but national security was invoked and little more could be said. Had anyone known the flying saucer-shaped house was also a forward firebase the objections might have endured. I knew that it was a forward firebase. As I am certain that anyone with any personal experience of artillery knew it was a forward firebase. Not only could such a position be used to call in pinpoint coordinates for bombardments from the 16”/50 Mark 7 guns of any Iowa-class battleship that might one day find itself anchored off Santa Monica, it was also the ideal spot from which to launch surface-to-surface rockets, or lob mortars onto the street below.

  Just across Laurel Canyon, with my own spectacular view of the basin, I was shocked to see that the first shot fired did not come from Mount Olympus, but from below. It flashed across the sky, leaving a contrail. More than likely a Javelin, it could have come from anywhere within twenty-five hundred meters. Anywhere with a clear line of sight. Any number of parking lots along Fairfax would have worked. Whether by luck or by virtue of poor marksmanship, it didn’t strike the house directly but impacted on the blast walls covered in soldiers’ graffiti that had been staggered across the yard to defend from just such an attack.

  Still, it served its purpose. Served it if I may be so bold as to suggest that Electra Court was not the actual target of the rocket. Assuming my own ego has not run away with me, the Javelin scored an absolute bull’s-eye on my awareness. I watched it hit, watched it explode, a bare moment before it rolled thunder over the hills, felt the trailing waves of super-heated air, the reverse suck as the fireball rolled upward, smelled the burned plastic odor of modern warfare, and came back to myself.

  The scent of herbs. How the air had shifted unexpectedly seconds before. What had caused that change? All too late considered.

  Two teams of three. Well-trained units of mercenaries like the ones I had killed at the gold farm. One coming up from below the deck, one from within the house.

  I said they did not take me by virtue of surprise. And if there had been only two attackers, indeed they would not have been successful, as that is the number I killed before I was subdued.

  16

  IN A WINDOWLESS ROOM, A COMBINATION OF FATIGUE POISONS, adrenaline dregs, and the waning influence of the spansule he’d taken before leaving his house, had twisted the hands from Park’s internal clock. Counting slowly to himself, Mississippi by Mississippi, as if he were “it,” Park waited, his face buried in his hands, until he could count high enough for someone to let him start seeking, peeking from time to time at his father’s watch, his guesses about how much time had passed never correct.

  The door opened.

  “What were you doing there?”

  He stopped counting and looked up at Captain Bartolome.

  Bartolome looked at the AC vent
mounted on the wall. He lifted one of the limp pieces of ribbon tied to the grille and let it drop.

  “This thing been off since you came in?”

  Park pulled the front of his sweat-soaked shirt from his chest.

  “Yes.”

  Bartolome dragged a chair away from the table at which Park sat.

  “You tell anyone?”

  “No one has been in since they left me here.”

  Bartolome set a few sheets of copy paper on the table.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Park lifted his left hand and jerked it twice against the cuffs that latched him to a steel ring welded to the tabletop.

  Bartolome dropped his keys on the table.

  “You tell anyone?”

  Park found the stubby cuff key and unlocked himself.

  “What time is it?”

  Bartolome scooped up his keys.

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  Park rubbed his wrist.

  “Tell anyone what? That the AC doesn’t work? I haven’t seen anyone. Except Hounds. He thinks I’m a snitch.”

  “Haas.”

  Bartolome picked one of the sheets of copy paper and turned it over, revealing the reverse side; a photo print blurred by a printer running low on toner.

  “Officer Haas, did you tell anyone?”

  Park looked at the fuzzy image, a still from a video, taken in a dark room, blown up, himself sitting at a table, speaking with Cager.

  Bartolome took off his sunglasses; his eyes had sunk yet farther into their sockets since Park had last seen them.

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  Park took the picture. The ink had soaked into the cheap paper and rippled the surface, distorting both their faces.

  “I was going to tell you.”

  Bartolome used his hand to whisk sweat from his bald crown.

  “Tell me what? That you’ve gone out of your fucking mind?”

  “No.”