The Sleep Police

by Jay Bonansinga

  “Yes.”

  “Great, okay, and now we’re rising up to the ground floor level, and you’re almost back to consciousness, and you’re feeling good, and you’re refreshed, and when I snap my fingers at the count of one, you’ll be able to sleep at night, and you won’t have any more nightmares. Do you understand, Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  The cellular continued beeping.

  “And every morning you’ll wake up refreshed, and you’ll be alert during the day, and you won’t let the crime scenes bother you anymore, and you won’t have any more blackouts. Are you ready to come back, Frank?”

  “Yes, I’m ready.”

  “Alright, here we go—five, four, three, two, one.” Henry snapped his fingers.

  Frank’s eyes fluttered open. He looked around for a moment, disoriented, his eyes glassy. The sound of the cellular tittering hadn’t registered yet.

  “Welcome back, Frank,” Henry said with a smile. “How do you feel?”

  Frank licked his lips. “Um...good. I feel...pretty good. How did I do?”

  “Came through with flying colors, Frank, as usual,” Henry said, his heart aching for this poor young man.

  Frank was glancing toward the chirping sound. “Is that—?”

  “Yeah, Frank, it’s your phone,” Henry nodded. “I thought I should bring you back so you could answer it.”

  The detective went over to his coat, fished through the pocket and grabbed his phone. He flipped it on and said, “Hello.” He listened for a moment. “Yeah, this is he.” His expression hardened. “I’m sorry, you said she did what?”

  Henry watched with concern. There was something wrong, and it was tearing the doctor apart to see this poor kid dealing with so much life-stress. The detective reminded Henry of his youngest son, Mitch. Mitch was a sweet kid just like Frank. Why do the good always seem to suffer more than the evil?

  Frank snapped the cellular off and put on his coat. “Sorry, Doctor Pope, I’m gonna have to cut the rest of the session short,” he said.

  “I understand, Frank,” Henry said. “I hope it’s not serious.”

  “It’s my mom,” Frank said, his expression bloodless and terrified all of a sudden. “She accidentally took too many sleeping pills.”

  “Oh no,” Henry uttered sadly. “I’m sorry to hear that. Is she—okay?”

  “Barely,” Frank said. “I apologize for running out on you like this, I promise I’ll be in touch.” And then he walked out.

  The door closed with a resounding click.

  Frank sat on one side of the bed, and Kyle sat on the other, both men staring at the obese crone lying unconscious in the nest of sheets and IV tubes. Helen’s flaccid, liverspotted face was oddly serene, her translucent eyelids so thin and wrinkled you could almost see her eyeballs through them. A tiny metal heart-rate cuff was clipped to one of her plump, arthritic fingers.

  The room was institutional green, the air close with disinfectant, filled with the pinging, electronic breathing sounds of vital monitors.

  “Hemphill says mom’s a DNR,” Kyle murmured, his goateed face resting on his clasped hands as he gazed at his mother.

  “DNR?” Frank said.

  “Do-not-resuscitate.”

  “What?” Frank swallowed a wave of nausea. “I don’t remember seeing that in the paperwork.”

  “Well, somebody put it there.”

  “You think mom wrote that in?”

  Kyle shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what her legal status is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Kyled sighed. “Is she still considered a convict?”

  “What do mean? She was never a convict—”

  “She was—what?—not guilty by reason of insanity? What is that?”

  “Let’s not get into this again, Boomer, come on,” Frank said with a weary hitch in his voice. He was sitting on a stiff vinyl armchair next to a sputtering air vent that smelled of must and refrigerant, and he was starting to get dizzy again. His head felt like a faulty gyroscope. His stomach was levitating again, threatening to bring up his lunch. He needed a cigarette and a cup of coffee. He had changed out of his damp Armani and into a fresh Bill Blass, but he felt worse than ever. His eyes ached. His body ached. His soul ached.

  Kyle was gazing sadly at his mother. “Look, I’m starting to think maybe—I don’t know—maybe Hemphill’s right.”

  “What?!” Frank couldn’t believe his ears. “You mean about pulling the plug?!”

  Kyle looked at his brother. “No, no, no. Look. All I’m saying is, we should look at the humane side of things.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I don’t know,” Kyle said and looked back at Helen. She was breathing low, thick breaths, her mouth gaping open. Her eyebrows furrowed suddenly, as though she were having some kind of troubling dream. One of her hands clutched at the sheet, an involuntary reflex probably. Kyle watched this for a moment, his face crestfallen. Then he said, “I just don’t want it to get to the point where she’s unmanageable.”

  Frank felt his heart breaking like a clock jamming inside him, his eyes welling. “I understand what you’re saying,” Frank said softly.

  “She was a piece of work, wasn’t she?” Kyle said, his voice faint now, barely audible above the monitors.

  “Still is,” Frank said.

  Kyle nodded, looking at the woman for another moment, a single tear tracking down the younger man’s face.

  Frank saw the bead glistening on his brother’s cheek, and the sight of it made Frank mist up a little. Frank pressed his hand against the bridge of his nose. A wave of vertigo fluttered through him.

  “Hey, Francis, I just thought of something,” Kyle said then.

  Frank looked up.

  Kyle’s face was wet. He tried to smile but his face wouldn’t allow it. “We’re the sleep police now,” he said, nodding at his mother.

  “What?” Frank wasn’t sure he had heard him correctly.

  “The sleep police? Remember?” Kyle pointed at his mother. “We’re mom’s sleep police now.”

  Frank swallowed. “Yeah, Boomer... sure.”

  Then Frank turned away and tried not to let his brother see him cry.

  Deets’s desk was inundated with paper. You couldn’t see his blotter anymore. You couldn’t even see his overflowing ashtray. There were bundles of GPR forms in descending chronological order on the left. And there were stacks of missing person datasheets on the right, each one clipped to a black-and-white of a smiling girl. And there were crime scene diagrams, M.E. reports, and autopsy notes from the Wacker scene and the Devon Avenue Jane Doe. There were also packets of Polaroids from the Jeeter scene, shots of blood drip patterns, and numerous angles of a single heel mark.

  Deets was on the phone, holding a pink WHILE-YOU-WERE-OUT phone message in his left hand, listening to his wife’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “It’s already six-thirty, Sul, for Chrissake,” Margie was saying. A hard-as-nails south-sider, Margie Deets had a voice like rusty barbed wire, and she did not suffer workaholic husbands lightly. “When the hell are you coming home? I got a letter from Wendy today, and we need to talk about it. She needs money, Sully.”

  This got Deets’s attention. He dropped the slip, gripping the phone a little tighter. “You got what?”

  “A letter from Wendy, and we need to talk about it. She needs money, Sul.”

  “I told you—”

  “She’s still your daughter, Sully.”

  There was a pause. Deets sighed. His twenty-six-year-old daughter had left home when she was eighteen to become a stage actress in New York. Instead, she became a phone sex operator. This was by far the worst thing that had ever happened to Sully Deets. “I don’t have time for this right now,” he said finally through clenched teeth.

  “Sully—”

  “I gotta go, Margie, I’ll see you in an hour,” he said, and hung up the phone.

  He sat there for a moment, stewing in his own sl
ow-cooked anger. A secretary strolled by, and she said hello, and Deets didn’t even hear her. He was too busy brooding. Not only for his wayward daughter, but for the suspicions that were festering inside him. The cigarette butt from the Jeeter scene, the heel, the hair follicle. What began as a vague, troubling knot in his belly was now metastasizing into something hard and cancerous. He picked up the note and looked at the hastily scrawled note from the technician: The collapsed filter belongs to a Marlboro regular, still working on possible DNA match.

  “Fuck it,” Deets grumbled, pushing himself away from his desk, standing up on sore knees and putting on his jacket.

  He made his way down the corridor.

  Before leaving the squad house, he stopped by the men’s locker room.

  The air inside the locker room was peppery with BO and hair tonic, and there were three other detectives in there, over by the sinks, talking basketball, discussing whether the post-Jordan Bulls were ever going to get their act together. Deets nodded a greeting to them and then went over to his own locker and sat down on the wooden bench in front of it. He pretended to untie his shoes. He waited. A few moments later, the other detectives filed out and Deets went over to the last locker on the right. There was no padlock.

  The name stenciled at the top said JANUS, DET. F.

  Deets opened the metal door and looked inside. There wasn’t much. A gym bag on the top shelf, a box of plastic drinking straws, a bottle of Maalox, an empty shoulder holster with an extra speed loader. There was also a fresh sport coat—one of Frank’s high fashion jobs—and a pair of shiny Lagerfeld loafers on the shelf. Deets picked up one of the shoes and looked at the heel.

  Then he put the shoe back, closed the locker, and wandered out of the locker room.

  Deets left the squad house in a dark mood, unaware that he had missed a carton of cigarettes on the top shelf of Frank’s locker, behind the box of straws.

  They were Marlboro regulars.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Twenty-fourth late at night. Quiet. The sounds of janitors down the hall. Power buffers humming. And Frank Janus, the insomniac, slumped in a folding chair by a bank of video monitors, half asleep, a zombie hypnotized by the blue flicker of a TV screen.

  Frank bolted upright suddenly, gasping, blinking fitfully at the screen.

  Had he been asleep? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t even remember sitting down in this folding chair. The last thing he remembered was standing over by the window, shuffling through the witness statement videos. Now he was sitting across the room, and a strange voice was crackling out of the tiny speaker on the side of the monitor—

  “—Girls turn up dead, sure, but like, a lot of dudes I see, they’re on a death trip anyway, so it’s like, what do you do? There was this one guy, he figured out how to file his teeth down, I mean, I shit you not, he filed them down like razor sharp, and he kinda looked like a fish, you know, with these razor teeth, like a fucking shark—”

  On screen was a greasepaint harlequin, a broken-down streetwalker masquerading as a goth, her white face sporting a spider web around two bloodshot eyes. Her voice was cured by smoke and booze. She sat in a chair against a light blue cardboard backdrop—the standard departmental backdrop—and she spoke right into the lens, like she was at ease with cameras, like she had done this before, and she spoke in dreamy tangents, dampened by years of drugs and degradation.

  “—and his thing was, he wanted to bite my nipples off and eat them. I swear to God. It was like, he had this kit with him, these fucking bandages and alcohol, so my tits wouldn’t get infected, I mean, what kind of fucking shit is that?—”

  Frank hit STOP.

  He swallowed hard, running fingers through his hair. These statements were ridiculous. They were getting him nowhere. Jittery and dizzy, his chest tight with tension, he looked around the room again, listening to the silence for a moment, listening for any signs of life out in the squad house, but all he could hear was the whirr of a vacuum cleaner and a distant fax machine fluttering.

  Where the hell was everybody?

  He went out into the main room and saw one of the third-shift guys—Randy Jeffers—over by the vending machine, rattling a lever, trying to a candy bar to spit out. Frank waved at him. A thin, light-skinned black man, Jeffers looked up, nodded, then went back to the lever.

  Frank went over to his desk.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Deets’s desk across the aisle. It was a disaster area, the in-box brimming with forms waiting to be filled out, the blotter covered with a spray of bulging manila files. And everything was exactly as it had been thirty minutes ago—

  —except for a mysterious unmarked package sitting on top of the folders.

  “What the heck is this?” Frank said, walking over to Deets’s desk and picking up the package, taking a closer look.

  Cops are not the least bit shy about checking out each other’s interoffice mail, especially partners.

  The package was about the size of a paperback book, and weighed only a few ounces, and the brown wrapping paper had been neatly sealed with invisible tape. There were no labels on it. Frank frowned. Somebody other than the interoffice mail boy must have dropped this thing on Deets’s desk.

  But why leave it blank?

  “What the hell?” he said again, somewhat rhetorically, his gaze glued to the object.

  All at once a flutter of panic traveled up his gorge, dizziness coursing over him. He thought of the message on his computer, the note in his spiralbound: Walk away, shut it down, forget about it. Pipe bombs were small these days. There were metal detectors downstairs, near the door, and most of the mail was routinely scanned. But what if this thing had slipped through? Maybe Frank was being paranoid. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. But there was something wrong with this picture.

  He glanced over at Jeffers. “Hey, Randy! Did you see who it was, dropped this thing on Sully’s desk?”

  The black detective looked up from the vending machine. “What’s that?”

  Frank waved the package. “This package—you have any idea who put it on Deets’s desk?”

  “Sorry, Frank, no,” Jeffers said. “Call the mail room.”

  Frank waved a thank you.

  He couldn’t call the mail room right now because the mail room was closed. He looked at the package. He rattled it. Something was loose inside it. Like a pea or a rock or...what?...a detonator? Frank took a deep breath. He glanced over at Jeffers. The black detective was wandering off toward the break room with his candy bar. Frank was alone now.

  Frank put the package down, a spurt of adrenaline juicing through his veins.

  He reached for his phone.

  There was supposed to be somebody down in tactical right now, at least one third-shift officer. Frank remembered the number from a couple of weeks ago when he and Deets needed assistance on an arrest over at Loyola. Frank dialed the four-digit interoffice number with a trembling hand.

  A voice answered on the second ring. “Twenty-fourth Tactical, this is Porterly.”

  “Jim, it’s Frank Janus upstairs.”

  “Frankie—how ya doin’?”

  “Great, I’m doing great. How’s Kim?”

  “Meaner than ever. Finally made me get rid of that fucking German Shepherd.”

  “That’s too bad, Jimmy.”

  “What’s up, Frank?”

  “Not much. I was just wondering—um—you got anybody from Special Units on tonight?”

  “Special Units?”

  Frank was trying to sound low-key, trying not to sound spooked. “Yeah, you know. Like HazMat or ECU.”

  ECU stands for Explosive Control Unit. In the wake of the ‘68 Convention, as well as subsequent incidents at O’Hare Airport, the Chicago Police Department created a full-time bomb squad that still operates today. Officer James Porterly was one of the few neighborhood tactical people who had any experience working for the unit.

  “I got some hours in ECU, Frank,” Porterly was saying. “You n
eed somebody?”

  “Yeah, well, we got a package up here—um—I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing.”

  There was a pause. Then Porterly’s voice: “You mean, like, a suspicious package?”

  Frank took a deep breath. “I don’t know—yeah—maybe it’s a little suspicious. It’s unmarked.”

  “It’s unmarked?”

  “Yeah, it just turned up—”

  “Wait a minute, wait, you’re saying it’s in the house right now?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And it’s unmarked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is it right now?”

  “It’s on Sully Deets’s desk.”

  Another pause. “And he brought this thing in with him?”

  “No, no, see, Deets isn’t even here,” Frank said, his throat scratchy and dry all of a sudden. He could not stop staring at the package. “The thing just turned up on his desk. I was working some overtime hours, looking at some tapes in the property room, and I came out and there it was.”

  “You mean somebody put it on Sully’s desk?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  Frank let out a tense sigh, then told Porterly what the thing looked like.

  While he was describing the package’s dimensions, Frank could see out of the corner of his eye a figure at the end of the hallway, peering out the break room door. It was Jeffers. He was listening now with some interest.

  Jeffers started toward Frank.

  “And it rattled when you shook it?” Porterly was saying now on the other end of the line.

  “Yeah, that’s right, like a hollow rattling sound.”

  “Are you holding it right now?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “I wouldn’t rattle it anymore, either.”

  “Okay, no problem,” Frank said. “What do you want me to do, Jim?”

  There was a long pause, and Frank waited, his heart thumping. Jeffers was standing next to him now, staring at the package.

  Finally Porterly’s voice said, “It’s probably nothing, Frankie. They’re usually nothing.”