Park’s fingers had begun to dig into his knees.
“Furthermore, I believe, I believe.”
Senior leaned slightly forward.
“Are you all right, Officer?”
Park shook his head violently once.
“Furthermore, I believe that the advent of the sleepless prion was somehow, intentionally or accidentally, a by-product of your company’s initial development of Dreamer. I believe that your labs experimented with the fatal familial insomnia prion, seeking to find an application for your over-the-counter sleep aid. I believe, intentionally or by accident, that your labs created a new prion, a designed material, and that, intentionally or by accident, that prion escaped the clean zone of your labs and entered and infected the general population. I believe that prion is the prion that has come to be known as SLP I believe that A-ND’s ability to develop and bring to market a drug such as Dreamer was only possible because A-ND is the creator of SLP. I believe that A-ND, realizing that the market for their drug will eventually die out and that they will have no engine for the profits currently generated by Dreamer, have created a black market to circumvent limits placed on trade when Dreamer was designated Schedule Z. I believe. I believe.”
Senior rose, walked to the bar, poured water from a cut-glass decanter into a matching glass, carried it to Park, and pressed it into his hand.
“I think you should take a moment to catch your breath, Officer. You’ve been carrying a heavy load. A load like that, you only realize how heavy it is when you set it down.”
Staring at the dark wainscoted wall behind the bar, Park’s mouth hung just slightly open, as if he were trying to weigh the implications of bad news that had just now been brought to him.
“My wife is dying.”
Senior patted his shoulder and walked back to his chair.
“Yes, I know.”
He sat.
“Mine died several years ago. My second wife. I was divorced from my first. Although she is dead as well. My second wife, it’s odd to call her that, I only ever think of her as my wife. You have a baby.”
Park spoke to the glass he held in his lap.
“A daughter.”
“I’d been told about your wife, but the baby, is she?”
“I don’t know. My wife doesn’t want her tested.”
“Yes, I can understand that. It was cancer that killed my wife. Lung cancer. We both smoked far beyond the point of reckless idiocy. To this day I refuse to have a lung X-ray. Afraid to know what may be waiting for me. Although at my age it hardly seems to matter. Something will finish me soon enough. Does your daughter sleep?”
Park took a sip of the water.
“She did, at first. But the last few weeks, it’s hard to say.”
“How’s that?”
“She cries all the time. Or it seems that way. But I’m not home very much. And my wife, she. I’m not sure how clearly she remembers if the baby is sleeping when I’m not there. The woman who helps us, she says the baby sleeps, but it never looks like sleep when I see it. Her eyes are usually open. And it never lasts.”
Senior looked at the ceiling.
“What I remember from having babies around, and I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t at home often when I had babies, but what I remember is that they can be that way. Cry nonstop, go days without sleep, crying the whole time. Hours and hours of crying. Could be your daughter is just colicky.”
Park didn’t say anything.
Senior looked down from the ceiling.
“What’s her name?”
Park ran a thumb up and down the facets on the side of his glass.
“Omaha.”
“The hell you say.”
“My wife said, ‘No one will fuck with a girl named Omaha.’”
Senior smiled.
“She had a point there.”
He dropped his smile.
“You should have her tested.”
Park nodded, looked for somewhere to put down his water glass, placed it on a bookshelf behind his shoulder, and faced the other man.
“Your son sold me Dreamer on two separate occasions. I’m going to arrest him. Is he at home?”
Senior cocked his head to the side.
“You’re going to arrest my son because he?”
“Charges of possession and sale of a restricted substance. But I have evidence that could lead to racketeering charges. Money laundering. Tax evasion. And charges relating to the murders of a man named Hydo Chang and several of his associates.”
“You think my son killed someone.”
“I believe that several young men found shot in gangland style were his Dreamer retailers and that they were killed over matters relating to the sale of Dreamer. I believe that it is likely Parsifal K. Afronzo Junior was involved in those killings.”
Senior drew his brows together.
“Then it is my son who you suspect as the mastermind behind the Dreamer black market?”
“I think it is possible. Although I think you are a more likely suspect.”
Senior pulled his brows apart.
“You are direct. You are direct. Well.”
He placed his hand on the snifter he’d set down earlier.
“In the interest of directness, I’d like to say a few words that might shed considerable light on these suspicions of yours. If you don’t mind?”
Park looked at the door. He was aware that a performance was taking place. He was aware that he was being manipulated. He knew that if he let it draw to its conclusion, he might never leave the cottage. He’d been trying to apply the principles he’d learned from the Hurtin’ Man. That there was danger in the room was not at all in doubt, but whether that danger was best dealt with by attacking its source or by running from it was unclear. And probably beside the point. Park had little hope that either option would be successful. And it didn’t matter. Because what Park was most aware of was the slippage of time. Dawn would be coming. He needed to be home.
But he also needed to stay to the end of the show so he could know what happened.
He lifted a hand from his knee and turned it palm up.
“I would like to hear anything you have to say that might clarify this matter.”
Senior picked up the snifter, swirled the contents, and swallowed them.
“Good. Good.”
He kept hold of the empty glass.
“To start, you are correct; there is a black market trade in Dreamer. You are also correct that A-ND is involved in that trade. But frankly, that is the price of doing business today. Distribution, Officer, is not an easy matter. Beyond the fuel costs, security contractors to escort the shipments, cross-state inspections, Homeland Security checkpoints, and occasional corrupt officials, there are also the Teamsters. In order to bring our product to market in a timely and efficient manner, we often find we must circumvent criminal and bureaucratic roadblocks. Hell, our trucks sometimes have to deal with physical roadblocks. We have to pay people off. A lot of people. A great deal of money. Usually cash. Not only do we have to get this money from somewhere, but we have to hide it. What we’re doing, the payments we’re making, it doesn’t matter that we’re greasing people so we can get the Dreamer out where it will do some good; the payments, most of them, are far from legal. We’re bribing officials at every level of government. We have no choice. It’s mostly just a collection of fiefdoms at this point. City, state, federal, interdepartmental. Dealing with the road gangs is easier. And there’s no telling who might get it in their head to blackmail us for more or, God forbid, look to prosecute us if they found traces of what we’re doing. So we need invisible money. Dreamer itself is better than cash money. We could just toss a few cases off each truck whenever we hit a snag. But then what? Chaos is what. Dozens of free agents trying to sell off little stashes of Dreamer. It would be a mess. And the trail would lead directly to A-ND. Also, we saw that a Dreamer black market was inevitable. Too much demand and not enough supply. We saw that inevitability, m
atched it with our need for cash, and chose to create and control a black market ourselves. Shipments move through the supply chain to the local markets. Every time a container of Dreamer is randomly scanned, the RFID chips are right where the manifest says they should be. And that’s because they are where they should be. We don’t break them out until they reach the local level. Grease the folks handling inventory in the dispensaries, and that’s that. We can pull what we need. We sell by the case and pallet to hospices that have raised money through donations from the families of their wealthier patients, medicinal marijuana outlets, and yes, to some very robust and well-structured open source drug operations servicing low-income neighborhoods that are not well policed these days. As you said, the Dreamer end user has no interest in endangering the supply chain. Some larger institutions get shorted, but I have to feel that’s offset by the fact that this system actually gets Dreamer to many folks who wouldn’t otherwise have access. We’ve had very few leaks in the months it’s been running. As for Junior being the architect of all this, well, does my son strike you as an architect?”
Park thought about Cager.
“He strikes me as a very intelligent person.”
Senior frowned into his empty glass.
“And he is, he is. Very intelligent. Off-the-scale intelligent if IQ tests matter a good goddamn. But unfocused. And not what you’d call a people person. Incapable of wrangling something on this scale. He couldn’t bring his full abilities to bear on a problem like this because the human relations would make him too uncomfortable. That boy, I tell you, more natural ability, pure talent, than a father could hope to see in a son, and just, just, he cannot apply it to anything useful. Business, I understand it’s not for everyone, and I could; he can paint. I mean, expressive, powerful images. So if it had been that, painting, I would have been all for it. An artist son? I would have been damn proud. But even art, he just.”
Senior floated one hand through the air.
“Drifted from it. Lost focus, lost interest. All that energy. That ability. And the only thing he has ever stuck with are the damn games. That one damn game. He. He builds his life around that game now. So I, well, I’m his father, so I want to understand, be a part of what he loves, show him support, take him seriously. And I was, frankly, proud when he showed up and he’d, on his own, just through observation of the market, the implications of peak oil, credit collapse, infrastructure erosion, the outright impotence of the federal government, he saw that A-ND must have an outlet for off-market Dreamer. We were just getting it started, but that kid, smart as hell, he knew it was happening just because he could put it together. And he wanted a franchise. For himself.”
He raised and dropped his shoulders.
“I have backed him in so many ventures. But he had a plan, a model that made a kind of sense. In this world. He showed me the numbers on sleepless players in Chasm Tide, showed me the online markets where in-game valuables were trading, the currency exchanges between virtual and real. That was an eye-opener. And I thought, well, maybe this is it, a business tied directly to his real passion, maybe this will be the thing that he locks into. So I supplied him with a couple pallets. Made sure the pricing was in line with the rest of the off-market trade. We don’t gouge these people, Officer.”
He leaned forward.
“That should be very clear. We set the price. And if we hear that one of our franchisers starts to spread the margin and pocket the difference, we take action. And I do not mean that in any metaphorical sense.”
He leaned back.
“I’m in the pharmaceuticals trade, not the human misery trade.”
He shook his head.
“Not the human misery trade.”
He pointed vaguely east.
“Those people. In Washington. That homunculus in the White House. When I think about who our president could have been, who it should have been. Know the man who shot him had his NRA membership card on him? Bought his weapon at a gun show. Barely had to flash his driver’s license. That day, I burned my own card. Hardly matters anymore. Person wants a gun, they can find a gun. Well, those people in Washington, they turned out to be about as useless as everybody knew they’d be when it really hit the fan. A plague of sleeplessness. Democrats and Republicans trying to deal with a plague of sleeplessness. If it wasn’t for the tears, you’d laugh yourself to death. A plague of sleeplessness. Any wonder all the zealots are going even crazier than before? Like it should come after locusts and frogs and the deaths of the firstborn.”
He touched the part in his hair.
“So it gets left to people like me, people with influence, with some infrastructure of their own, people with money, it gets left to us to, hell, to make sure something is, something is left. That’s not right. That’s not my job. No one elected me. But hell, it’s got to be done. Someone has to do something. We can’t just walk away from the table, throw up our hands, say, ‘I’m out.’ This is what’s fallen to me, this is my duty, and I won’t shirk it.”
He turned the empty glass in his hands.
“Sorry. It’s late. I’m tired. Sometimes the frustration just comes out. It’s. It’s hard to look at the world and. It’s hard.”
He set the glass on the little table next to his chair.
“We were talking about Junior. And his interpretation of business. Long story shorter, I should have paid more attention, trusted my gut, said no. He turned it into a game. That crazy distribution, the caches, making people, sleepless or their family members or friends, stumble around town with RFID scanners looking for hidden bottles of Dreamer. Like it was a damn Easter egg hunt. And of course he lost interest, anyway. Just let someone else run the whole thing for him. Supposed to turn the money around, put it back in, buy more Dreamer, put it on the market, take his margin and do whatever he wanted with it. Put it in that sad club. I don’t know. But he didn’t. None of that money came back, not to pay the advance I gave him to acquire the first pallets, not to buy more. It was a small loss in terms of A-ND, but it needed to be covered. I did it out of my own personal accounts. On principle. It was my mistake. I paid for it. And I confronted the boy, told him to return what hadn’t been sold. Make good his debts. He offered me a spreadsheet of GPS coordinates. Told me he wasn’t even getting paid for most of the Dreamer. He was trading it outright for goods to equip his gaming teams. Bartering for ‘character art.’ Other things I didn’t understand. To my shame, I slapped him. Never did that before. Don’t believe anything good comes of striking your flesh and blood. And, well, that was that. It didn’t matter much what he was doing with the Dreamer once I covered the loss. His distribution method is slow, inefficient, and cruel, but you are correct, it’s nearly invisible. I asked some people in law enforcement to keep an eye on the streets, told them that some Dreamer might have leaked from the system. They understood. Set something up so they’d know if rumors started spreading, make sure the general public didn’t find out. Word got out that my son was dealing Dreamer, half the country would likely get burned down by the other half. We’re just that close to the edge of what people can understand and endure without running mad in the streets. And. And that’s about it. Pathetic is how it sounds. When I say it all aloud.”
Park stared at the man.
“The murders.”
Senior nodded.
“The murders.”
He shrugged.
“I never met the people Junior was in business with. But they were doing the nuts and bolts for him. Maybe they stepped on another dealer’s turf without realizing it. Started selling to sleepless south of the Santa Monica. We supply some very aggressive Dreamer franchises down there. Very protective of their clientele. And very traditional in terms of how they deal with competitors. Gangland sound like their style. Maybe it wasn’t even about Dreamer. That gold farming, if the numbers Junior showed me are real, that’s serious money. Could have been a competitor in that space. But Junior? Pulling the trigger? Or having those two ex-SEAL supermodels of his d
o it for him? No. He’s a, a difficult boy, frivolous, but there’s no killing in him. I may not be best friends with my son, but I know him that well. That well, at least.”
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