Sleep Tight

by Jeffrey Jacobson

  One level down, he followed the utility corridor all the way from the Clark side of the building to the east side. He always made sure to unlock a certain door the first level down as soon as he started his shift. This wasn’t part of his regular job, but he had to uphold his end of the bargain. This provided access to the building from the relative privacy of the alley. He found the chain already unlocked.

  Those rich pricks.

  They had forgotten again. Or they were breaking another rule, going in or out during the daytime. It got dark back here, but not dark enough. It needed to be night; otherwise, someone passing on the street might see them. He locked the chain tight again, as a reminder to the bastards. If they were outside and needed in, well then, that was too damn bad.

  He moved with an urgent purpose now, heading down another level to a forgotten storeroom that had been sealed off decades ago. Before retiring, Herman’s predecessor had explained that the room had been repurposed and outlined the deal he’d struck. It served as a crash pad for a small group of stockbrokers and was a place for a quick snort of coke to get pumped for the trading floor and fuck girls from the downtown bars. Over the years, it had dwindled to just two brokers. Still, they paid Herman rent and everybody kept quiet.

  But lately, they had been slacking off adhering to Herman’s rules.

  Vest-wearing ass-clowns.

  He tried the door. It was locked.

  He swore in Croatian, dug around his front pocket for the key. He stepped inside, and locked the door behind him. The place was dark and filled with furniture looted from the Chicago Board of Trade. A couple of desks with outdated computers, office chairs, a couple of leather couches. He switched on one of the lamps and the room grew a little brighter with the muddy light. They’d decorated the concrete walls with stolen street signs and abstract images taken from beer advertisements and horror movie posters.

  Herman wrinkled his nose. The place smelled. Bad. The desks were covered in fast food containers and white Chinese food boxes. It didn’t look like they used the half fridge in the corner for anything but beer. The garbage can was overflowing with old food. This was just the first room.

  They had walled part of the room off using cubicle partitions, presumably for a bit of privacy. The first room was empty. Which meant they were probably outside, and Herman would be damned if he was going to clean this mess up himself. They would follow his rules or he would find someone else to rent the room.

  He went to check the back room before he locked up the place for the night, just in case they were sleeping off an early drunk. Herman knew they had at least two couches behind the partitions. He just hoped they didn’t have any girls back there. Girls didn’t listen. Girls were loud. Girls were trouble.

  There were no lights in the second room. If anything, it smelled worse back here. Something rotten. And something else too . . . something that smelled strangely like the bear claws he used to buy every morning, until he stopped because he couldn’t shake the feeling he was wasting money on something frivolous.

  He fished his penlight out of his pocket to check the couches.

  Sure enough, there they were. Illuminated in the narrow, weak yellow beam, he could see one of the brokers still passed out on one of the couches. The other one had rolled off the second couch and lay facedown on the floor. He shook his head. Stupid, arrogant assholes.

  “Hey,” he said, kicking the frame of the closest couch. “Wake up. You forget the rules, hey?”

  Neither man moved. In fact, they seemed unnaturally still.

  Herman kicked the couch again. “Hey! Time to wake up. I’m talking to you!”

  Still no movement.

  He aimed the light straight into their faces and his gut knew before his brain figured out that the two brokers were dead. Something looked wrong with their skin, but it was hard to tell in the wavering light. They both seemed unnaturally pale, and the skin looked puffy almost, something akin to the texture of a rough sponge.

  He backed out of the room, knees buckling. He dropped into an office chair and pushed himself across the room. He could not understand how they had died. For the first time in over six years, if he could have found a cigarette, he would have broken his solemn vow. He placed a trembling hand out to the desk to steady himself.

  He switched the flashlight off. It wasn’t much help in the first room anyway. He took several deep breaths, focusing on just inhaling and exhaling, long and slow. He needed to think this out. But the two corpses in the makeshift room, not ten feet from where he sat, kept getting in the way of making a decision. He felt paralyzed. He pulled his hands into fists and tried to just breathe.

  The CO2 he exhaled caught the attention of a dozen bugs dozing under the chair’s seat. They set out to the edge of the fabric, thousands of years of instincts directing them to a large warm-blooded mammal.

  To feed.

  To spawn.

  The bugs found Herman’s slacks. Their jaws could not penetrate the fabric, so they latched onto the threads, wriggling along on six legs. They stopped when he moved, and just hung on, and when they felt the stillness, they worked their way closer to the warmth of bare flesh.

  Herman couldn’t feel them. The thought of fingerprints had just crossed his mind. He jerked his hand off the desk and wiped it with his rag. He stood up quickly and patted his pockets, making sure nothing had fallen out. His wife was always watching those police forensic TV shows, and it seemed like the cops would inevitably find some hair or some damn thing to discover the killer. He backed out of the room, hoping he hadn’t touched anything else.

  Outside, in the corridor, he locked the door and twisted the rag around the handle. He could always call 911 later, after he figured out what he would say. In the meantime, he would do his job and stick to his usual routine. He could always claim he found them later.

  He started up the stairs, moving slow, and had to pause near the top to catch his breath.

  The bugs crawled up under his shirt and over the waistband.

  Herman opened the door to the basement and rubbed his sore back, rolled his shoulders, and made sure to lock to the door behind him. He still couldn’t feel the bugs.

  CHAPTER 25

  3:21 PM

  August 11

  Sam shook his head at the empty hallway. “What a fuckin’ asshole.” He called back to Captain Garnes, “You want to write this up?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Me, neither. He say who he’s with?”

  “CDC.”

  “Ahhh . . . shit.”

  “Shit is right. Listen, I’m sorry, but when this comes down, I’m passing this down to you, you know?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

  “I got no time for the kind of shit that’s gonna rain down, understand? What the hell are you doing here anyway?”

  “Prisoner transfer. Some homeless woman.”

  Captain Garnes laughed. “I see. Assignment like that, you’re already in trouble. What are you, a goddamn shit magnet or something? She’s in the old jail. Get her and then get the fuck out of here.”

  Ed said, “Good seeing you again too, Harold,” as Captain Garnes led the cops upstairs.

  Sam gave Tommy his card. “That’s us, your local shit collectors. You got problems, you let me know.”

  “Thanks,” Don said and tilted his head at Tommy. “Fuck it. No more rat. We’re done. Happy Hour isn’t gonna last forever.” He shook Ed and Sam’s hands, doffed his Blackhawks cap at Tonya, and started upstairs.

  Tommy grabbed the equipment, gave Tonya a nod, and followed.

  Sam and Ed worked their way through City Hall, heading to the County side. The hallways were slowly beginning to fill up with people again. A deeply tanned, middle-aged guy came out of the sheriff’s office. He was dressed like a tourist, baggy shorts, even looser loud Hawaiian shirt, but he was far too muscular for a regular tourist. He had a crew cut, and scars on his scalp. He tried not to limp, but something in his right knee was sore. He kept his
gaze pointedly straight ahead and passed the detectives without a glance in their direction.

  Something about the lack of expression on the guy’s face set off Sam’s radar, so he filed it away, and then focused on the job immediately in front of him. Inside, they saw an empty front area. Ed signed in. Sam stepped behind the front counter and knocked on the security door. It was unlocked. Behind it, the two rooms were empty, and the cell door stood open.

  It didn’t feel right. Something was off.

  Sam unbuttoned his sport coat, keeping his hand near his shoulder holster. Ed sensed it too, and unsnapped his own holster.

  Qween lay facedown inside the cell. Her hands were handcuffed behind her. When she heard Ed and Sam’s footsteps, she rolled over and kicked out, yelling, “Dirty motherfucker.”

  “This is Detectives Ed Jones and Sam Johnson, ma’am,” Ed said.

  They got a look at her face. One eye was starting to puff shut. Her bottom lip was cracked bloody. Somebody’d been using her as a punching bag. “Come git some, motherfuckers. That’s right.” She kicked out at them.

  “Ma’am. We’re here to pick you up. You promise to behave, we’ll take those handcuffs off.”

  “You just want to get my back turned, fucker.”

  “We’re serious, ma’am.”

  A pause while she thought about it. “Slide them keys over, then.”

  Ed sighed, slid the keys over to Qween, then stepped back and waited. When he was a rookie, he’d learned that ninety percent of being an effective patrol officer was being patient. Give people enough time to blow off steam and calm down, they would accept the situation, sometimes willingly follow him to the station. He didn’t look at it as wasted time. It was worth going slow, instead of having some homeless prisoner puking or shitting in his car.

  It took Qween a full minute to scoot over, grab the keys, and unlock herself. Ed thought she might be moving slowly on purpose; it felt like she might have done this before. She tried to pocket both the keys and the handcuffs but Ed made her give them back.

  “Who did that to your face?” Sam asked.

  “Who did that to yours?”

  Ed tried not to laugh, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself, like when his three-year-old grandson swore.

  Sam said, “Ma’am, we’re trying to help you out here. We don’t much like it when someone decides to beat up a handcuffed prisoner. You want to tell us? We’ll see to it that something is done.” He kept seeing the guy in the Hawaiian shirt.

  Qween squinted at them, then snorted. “The day I need some dumbass cracker and his Oreo partner to fight my battles is the day Jesus calls me home.”

  Ed brushed at some invisible lint on his suit jacket without meeting Sam’s eyes. It was his signal that Sam should drop the questions. Patience was key here. Clearly, she’d rattled something near the top of the food chain if serious heavyweights like Dr. Reischtal were taking an interest.

  “You don’t want to tell us, fine. Let’s go,” Sam said.

  “Where we going?” she demanded.

  “To Twenty-sixth and California,” Ed said.

  “Goddamnit.” She rolled her eyes. “They gone sent another goddamn stupid dick licker.”

  “Excuse me?” Ed asked.

  “Don’t you people ever stop to think? Ain’t nobody ever asked me why. Too busy thinking I just another crazy nigger lady. Stupid motherfuckers. Why you think I did it? Answer me that. Do this one thing, before hauling me off to another piss tank.”

  “Did what? Turn a rat loose?”

  “No, take a dump on the sidewalk. ’Course the fucking rat.”

  “No idea.”

  “You did it to prove a point,” Sam said.

  “No shit. You be a regular Sherlock.”

  Sam started to like the homeless woman. “Okay. I’m listening. You tell us.”

  Herman was halfway through cleaning his floors when an insistent sluggishness began to take hold. He couldn’t believe it. He’d gotten nearly four hours of sleep last night, enough to keep him going at least until eleven, when he would start his second job as a cab driver, shuttling passengers back and forth to Midway. And tonight, panic had been flitting through his system because of the bodies in his secret rented room.

  Still, there was no denying the exhaustion pulling at him. He finally gave up, and promised himself a short nap now, and finish the floors later. He switched off the floor buffer and went back to the desk in the maintenance room. Ever since he’d yelled at one of the cleaning women who had come down to ask for help one night, nobody ever came down here anymore during his shift, so he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.

  Part of his mind knew something was wrong, but he ignored it, attributing it to the panic he’d felt earlier with the dead bodies. They didn’t seem so important anymore. Nothing seemed important anymore. Only sleep. Shadows crowded at the edges of his vision and he had to feel around for the chair. He fell into it, but it rolled backwards and he slipped to the floor.

  He didn’t get up.

  CHAPTER 26

  4:28 PM

  August 11

  Qween took the detectives back to the Washington Blue Line Station under City Hall and made Sam pay for three tickets. Sam went first through the turnstile, followed by Qween. She took her time squeezing through, enjoying the tightness around her hips. “About the only action I get these days,” she said with a lewd grin. Ed tried not to touch the bars any more than he had to. They descended into the subway down a wide set of smooth concrete stairs. The entire place needed to be repainted. The air was cool, but stale.

  On the platform, they followed her through the crowd to the northbound edge and then along it. “You never see ’em in the light,” Qween explained. They reached the end, where the platform simply stopped, dropping off to the darkness of the subway tunnel. One by one, they climbed down the utility ladder and walked along the tracks ten yards up the tunnel.

  “Stop,” Qween said. “Smell it?”

  Sam shut his eyes and tested the air. She was right. Something thick clogged the atmosphere, stronger down in the shadows, almost enough to blot out the smell of human piss and burnt steel. He opened his eyes and found them fully adjusted to the dim light.

  He saw dozens of rat corpses, curled up like pill bugs. The more his eyes adjusted to the dim light, the more rat corpses he could see. Hundreds of them. Something glinted in the wash from the fluorescents, then disappeared. Ed held up his smartphone, using a flashlight app. It was his favorite feature, once his oldest grandson had downloaded it and shown Ed how to use it. The light caught movement fifteen feet down the tunnel. It was the eyes of a living rat, which tugged at the shoulders of one of the corpses.

  “Damn,” Ed said. His voice echoed off the curving concrete.

  The feeding rat flinched and hissed. Dozens of other answering hisses, as if they were tuned to the same radio static, erupted from the shadows all around them.

  “Fuck me,” Sam said, backing to the lights of the station. Ed splashed the light around, revealing square holes regularly spaced along both walls. These black tunnels were full of eyes. The closest rat squealed, whether in fury or terror Sam couldn’t tell, and scuttled forward. Qween kicked at it and they scrambled back to the ladder. Ed and Sam pushed Qween up ahead of them, then pulled themselves over the ledge. They moved quickly into the light and stood for a moment, catching their breath, watching the edge for rats.

  “Don’t know about you, but I’ve seen enough,” Sam said.

  They decided a drink was necessary. After collecting Qween’s cart, they found a quiet booth in the back of Monk’s Pub a few blocks away. While the regulars laughed and shouted at the bar, plugging quarters into the jukebox, Ed, Sam, and Qween didn’t talk. They concentrated on their shots of Jameson and slowly swirled the shot glasses in the condensation on the table that had collected from their beers.

  Sam got tired of waiting for the waiter and went up to the bar for another round. The bartender poured the shots and glance
d over at their table. “I appreciate the business, but just so you know, the only reason she’s allowed in here is ’cause she’s with you.”

  “Fucking relax,” Sam said. “You oughta worry about me instead. Tell you what. Give me six shots.”

  The bartender shrugged and didn’t look at Sam again.

  Sam popped another stick of nicotine gum and chewed on it ferociously. Some dipshit on the TV caught his eye. The evening news, interviewing some “witness” at City Hall. “Hey, turn that up,” he said.

  The bartender found the remote, and increased the volume.

  “—crazy, you know. I heard people saying it was some kind of political statement, but I don’t know.” This was from the witness. They cut back to a perky reporter, wearing an elaborate outfit and about a gallon of hairspray to combat the humidity. The shot was live, outside of City Hall. “Some are calling it a sick joke, some are calling it a political prank that got out of control, and some are even saying it is part of some bizarre performance art piece.”

  The shot cut back to a prerecorded piece, shot inside City Hall. Tonya, looking cool and unflappable, smiled compassionately. “It’s true that we experienced an unfortunate incident earlier today, yes. However, the important thing to remember here is that a mentally disturbed individual will be getting the help they need at this time.”

  Back to the reporter. “This is Cecilia Palmers, live from City Hall. Back to you, Barbara and Rob.”

  The smug, smiling face of a male anchor filled the screen. “Thanks, Cecilia. And now over to Tad Schilling, in Weather Center One. So tell me Tad, when are we going to get a break with this heat?”

  Sam paid and borrowed a tray. He put all the shot glasses on it and carried it back to their table. “Just saw the news. They’re brushing it under the rug as we speak. By tomorrow, it’ll be forgotten.” He passed out the first three shots and said, “Salute.”