Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  He shined the beam from the Maglite over the floor, picked out a blood-free path, and stepped as close to the center of the room as possible. Standing there, he took his phone from his pocket and began to slowly turn in place, snapping a picture after every few degrees of rotation. Finished, he took a similar series of shots covering the floor and ceiling, all the time wishing he’d bought a phone with a better camera.

  Done with his photo map, he knelt next to Hydo, found his BlackBerry, opened the contacts list, and deleted his own number and email before wiping the device and putting it back in the dead man’s pocket.

  He looked at the ladder bolted to the wall, leading up to the coffin-space box. There was no one in the box now. No telltale feet sticking out from the opening. No trail of blood running down the wall. Park had been around when Hydo had told one of his guys to change a disk up there in the recorder for the security camera.

  His face would be on several of those disks, but it would just be a face. In any case, there were far too many to go through now. His fingerprint biometric would be logged on a hard drive somewhere, but it would only be tagged to a JPEG of his face. Hydo might keep a record of his customers’ names, but he wouldn’t keep his dealer’s name anywhere but his own phone.

  Or that’s what Park hoped for.

  Park looked at the room: well over a hundred thousand dollars in highly portable equipment, some of it riddled with bullets, but nothing obviously missing. That didn’t have to mean anything. The true wealth of this place wasn’t materially present. Product and payment both were stored elsewhere, hosted on massively secure overseas servers. Immediate connections ran to One Wilshire, a downtown telco hotel where fiber optics wormed up the exterior, in through windows, converging in the service core, all of it connecting to Pacific submarine cables. Pure bandwidth, hardwired to a durable Far East product: miles of underground bomb shelters converted to climate-controlled server farms. Powered by black market reactors, the most reliable ISPs on the planet. Bulwarks, keeping the ephemeral real, if not touchable.

  But while the gold and other treasures the guys farmed and fought and campaigned for online were not in this room, nor the digital payments they received in exchange, still a robbery could have taken place.

  A password coerced before the trigger was pulled.

  Park counted seconds, setting himself a limit of sixty more before he must leave.

  With seventeen seconds remaining, he saw it.

  Right at the foot of the ladder, a small workstation. A widescreen XPS Notebook cabled to a travel drive, connected to nothing else. Not the hardwired LAN the other machines in the room shared, not a printer or any other peripheral. Just the power cord running from a surge strip screwed to the baseboard next to eight more just like it, and the travel drive.

  Park stepped over Hydo’s body, his toe smearing a comma of blood on the sealed cement floor. He stood at the station, looking at the drive, and the red biohazard sticker adhered to its top.

  In the months since Beenie had hooked him up with Hydo, and he had become the regular dealer for the farm, he’d seen this station used only once. Sitting in one of the Red Bull-stained Zody chairs, counting white tablets of foxy from his baggie into a Ziploc, he’d nodded when Hydo received a call and told him he had to take it.

  Keeping his head down, double counting the savage little pills of 5-methoxy-dijopropyltryptamine, he’d relaxed the muscles around his eyes, letting his peripheral vision widen as his self-defense instructor had taught him, and at the edge of his vision he’d seen Hydo unzip a backpack, take out a small flat box decorated with a single dot of red, and connect it to the sleeping Dell. An action followed by a Bluetooth conversation regarding items such as a Tyrant’s Pointing Hand, a Shadow Amulet, Crusader Gauntlets, someone named Thrad Redav, and a large amount of gold.

  Park looked at his watch, self-winding, dependent on no power other than his own movement.

  He’d been in the room for over five minutes.

  He disconnected the drive’s USB plug, wrapped the short cable around its body, and tucked it into a cargo pocket.

  Coming out of the room, he paused to take a picture of one of the partial footprints and then walked out into the final linger of evening sun, leaving the door open behind him, moving without hurry to the WRX parked behind a Dumpster nearly buried in its own trash at the open end of the alley that let onto Aviation.

  It wouldn’t do to be seen running from here.

  Even now the police investigated murder.

  He told himself that was the point of the pictures he’d taken, and the hard drive he’d stolen.

  But there was this as well: Beenie had said Hydo knew “the guy.”

  And Rose hadn’t slept in over four weeks now. And late that afternoon, before leaving again for work, he’d come into the nursery and found her standing over the crying baby’s crib, index finger against the baby’s lips, making loud, desperate hushing noises, her finger pushing down hard enough to whiten the baby’s new skin.

  His phone buzzed. A text. A summons:

  dr33m3r rpt 3hrs/highland+fountain

  Three hours. He thought about the distance, the traffic. He might be able to get something to eat first. If he drove on a few curbs.

  First things. He opened the driver-side door, reached under his seat, and gently ripped the holstered Walther from its Velcro patch. Taking the gun and the travel drive, he popped the hatchback. Clearing aside some of the trunk clutter, he pulled up the cover that concealed the jack and other tools, dug his fingers behind the undersized spare, and peeled open the flap of rubber, exposing the interior of the permanently flat tire. The gun, the drive, and his watch went inside, a baggie of low-grade Ecstasy and a couple bottles of Valium and Demerol came out. The cover went back, clutter redistributed, and hatch closed. The pills he tucked under the passenger seat for easy access.

  He paused, wondering if he should put something more substantial down there, something to satisfy whoever found it, but decided against it. No reason to throw away his best stock on something like this.

  Not pearls before swine, perhaps. But he still had, at this late date, his father’s Protestant values deeply ingrained. In this case, “Waste not.” Period.

  Leave right now and there would be time to grab something to eat.

  But he sat, hand on the key in the ignition, knowing he needed to turn it and drive away but frozen for the moment as he tried to remember what day of the week it was, and what month.

  THE FLAMES WERE extinguished when I got up the next morning, a thick smudge of black smoke still hanging over La Cienega, putting me in mind of the history of the basin.

  Cradling a saucer and a demitasse of espresso, I’d thought about the swamp it had all been reclaimed from and of the clouds of gases that must have hung over it. And the oil fields that followed, the greasy plumes of industrial reek. And the ’70s heyday of smog, before the catalytic converter and unleaded gas.

  Those bruised yellow skies had never quite returned, but not for lack of trying. Traffic was a waking nightmare, but it had less to do with overall density of vehicles than it did with streets closed for lack of maintenance or the wreckage from a fatal accident that was never cleared or traffic rerouted around an incoming column of Guards or burst water mains flooding or downed power lines snaking or some group desperately protesting the condition of the roads and highways.

  All that aside, the price of gas had put enough hybrids on the road and knocked enough low-income types off their wheels that the air quality probably would have been at its best in years, if not for the occasional explosion and the constant pall of smoke drifting in from brush fires to the south, east, and north of the city.

  When I thought about it, I often regretted buying the house in the Hills rather than the one I’d looked at in Santa Monica. Sooner or later the last stand would be made with our backs to the sea and our ankles in the surf. Not that I relished the thought of being there for that final scene. Far from the point of thi
ngs, that would be.

  I spent the bulk of the day tending to my garden and my collections. Rotating pots and planters in and out of sun, pouring water liberally here, misting there. A bit of mulch. Then inside, running a dust cloth over the tops of canvases and prints, an urn or two, the flickering screens of two video installations that faced each other in an otherwise empty hall, adjusting the setting on a humidifier for fear the air might become too dry in a room devoted to original pen and ink drawings. Finally, oilcloth, soft bristle steel brushes, and silicon lubricant, removing dust and easing friction in the moving parts of my many firearms. The most time-consuming of the tasks, and the one to which I applied the greatest effort. Not for love of the things, but out of appreciation for the fact that any one of them was significantly more likely to save my life than even my most luscious tomato plant or most vibrant Murakami acrylic.

  Done with my chores by afternoon, I was able to settle into a deck chair and contemplate those tomatoes and what wine I might drink with a plate of them doused in balsamic vinegar. For a moment I considered the possibility that the tomato plant might be more vital to me than my arsenal. The further possibility that those weapons posed more danger to me than they deflected. It was not a new thought.

  I pictured myself, menaced by foes, brandishing a tomato.

  A phone rang in the house.

  A business phone.

  “Welcome to My Nightmare” as ring tone.

  I allowed myself to finish my exercise in visualization, picturing a bowl filled with bullets floating in a vermilion sauce of unknown origin. It was unappetizing. No, things were as they should be with me. My values in place. Such as they were.

  I went inside, letting the tinted green glass door sigh closed behind me, my ears registering the slightest change in pressure as it shut. The song continued to play, Alice Cooper telling me he thought I’d feel like I belong in his nightmare.

  Right at home.

  I stood at the Dadox cube table, my face reflected in the chrome surface, framed top and bottom by the eight phones laid out in neat rows of four. From this angle, looking down, the recessed ceiling lights highlighted perfectly the strip of thinning hair running back to front on top of my head.

  I made a mental note to shift the table so to diminish this effect, knowing the change would set off a chain reaction of furniture moving as I tried to keep the room in balance.

  The song continued to play.

  I considered the flashing screen on the bright blue Sanyo Katana. I’d assigned the phone to this particular client not out of any attempt at broadly ironic racist humor but because the shade of blue on the casing matched so well the color I’d seen highlighting the lower scales of a dragon tattoo encircling the length of her left arm. Still, sometimes the shoe fits.

  I answered the phone.

  “You let me ring for a very long time.”

  I nudged the Dadox with my knee, just a few inches to the right, looking down to gauge the impact the change had on my revealed bald spot.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You had something pressing.”

  “That sounds like a statement.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It sounds to me as if you just made a statement of fact, declaring that I had something more pressing to do than answer the phone, as opposed to asking if I did.”

  The light still glared unacceptably off the shiny skin topping my dome.

  Moved one inch farther from this spot, the relocation of the table would demand not only rearrangement of the room, but the jettisoning of several pieces and the acquisition of several new ones. In my mind I could see the shock waves this would create, radiating through every room in the house.

  “And did you?”

  I considered her question, looked at my reflection, thought briefly about my own vanity, and shook my head.

  “No, I had nothing more pressing. I was simply procrastinating.”

  “Don’t, in future, when I call, keep me waiting, please.”

  The “please” was an afterthought on her part, dedicated to the skill and efficiency with which I did my work. A bone of courtesy thrown my way, perhaps, but I knew it took some effort on her part. And I appreciated that.

  “I will, in future, endeavor to be promptly responsive, thank you.”

  “Come and see me.”

  I looked out the glass at the smoking world.

  “Someone blew up La Cienega last night. The Guards have checkpoints everywhere.”

  “Did you set off the bomb?”

  “No. According to the news, whoever set off the bomb did so as a final editorial comment regarding the universe.”

  “Then you have nothing to fear from checkpoints.”

  “I don’t fear the checkpoints, I simply don’t care to be stuck in the resulting traffic.”

  A pause. Perhaps a slight exhalation over the line, betraying the thinnest reed of annoyance.

  “You kept me waiting for you to answer. Do not keep me waiting any longer. Please.”

  The word, on this occasion, meant to imply that it was for my own sake she was pleading. And most certainly, it was.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I may.”

  The line went dead.

  Was it me, or had there been coarseness in the quality of her tone, slight nicks and burrs along the usually sharp edge, betraying overuse or lack of care?

  Even after all the carriers had merged under pressure from the government to pool their resources and keep the wireless taps open, it wasn’t always possible to tell what was in a person’s voice over a cell and what was simply static, interference, white noise. But, assuming I’d heard true, her tone implied nothing quite so much as someone very tired.

  I held the phone in my hand, looked about the room, and set it on the pearlescent white top of the broad oval Thor coffee table.

  It looked quite good there. And I could easily picture the other phones arranged around it. The change would require only the slightest echoing modifications of the room. The Dadox could simply remain in place, as I’d no longer be required to look into its reflective surface.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, picked up the Katana, and retuned it to the silver cube among the other phones. The point was that I should be required to look at myself when these phones rang. That I be taxed to contemplate myself honestly before answering, knowing that to answer the phone would likely obligate me to take the job. And looking at oneself honestly must, sadly, include the contemplation of one’s thinning hair.

  So I carefully moved the table back to where it had been before, and went down the hall to my office, somewhat at peace, wondering which guns I should take with me to best suit my current mood.

  7/8/10

  LUNCH. OR DINNER. Does it matter at this point? Second meal of the day, eaten well after sundown. Hot dogs from the cart in Culver. How do they get their grass-fed beef dogs down here from SF? I suspect they are using different beef, more likely something other than beef. I know not all the California herds were destroyed, but I still can’t imagine the cost of raising them organic. Better not to think too much about it.

  Looking in my phone after the first batch of deliveries, realized I’ve fallen behind logging them. Trying to get caught up, but it’s hard to remember everything. Was the Chinese Shabu dragon delivered to the models throwing the suite party at the Chateaus? Or did it go to the airbrush artist at the custom bodywork shop on South La Brea? There might be something in my journal, but I don’t have time to go through it.

  Guess?

  No. The fault is mine for not keeping more accurate records. Better to record only what I can definitely remember about the sales than to implicate someone in a crime they had no part in.

  Was that course work? Justice in Practice and Theory? Professor Steinman. An A- from Steinman because “a young man should always be left room to improve.”

  That pissed off Rose.

  “An A is a fucking A.”

  I tried to tell her it didn�
��t matter to me. Not like the minus was going to drag down my GPA and hurt my prospects.

  She said that wasn’t the point.

  “You earned it. It’s not fair that you earned it and he ticked a fucking minus after it because he thought it would teach some cute fucking lesson. Fuck that. You should report that shit to the chair of your department.”

  Had I ever met a girl who cursed so much? It was college, so I must have, even at Stanford, but I’d never had a beer with one before. And something about the cursing of a Cal girl was particularly blunt. They weren’t test curses, dropped to see how you’d react, or tried on for the first time after moving away from mother and father; they were the real thing, casual and heartfelt.

  I don’t even remember who won The Game now. I barely watched after I got a look at her in the stands. So unlikely that she would be at a football game in the first place or that she’d talk to someone who looked like I did. Lucky the guy who brought her was such an asshole. Derrick. Thanks for being an asshole, Derrick. Thanks for leaving her at the after-game party.

  Parties.

  The party on Vermont.

  Where Beenie introduced me to Hydo.

  All Hydo could talk about was girls. Girls and gaming. Speed jabber. That girl over there looked just like a girl he wanted to nail when he was playing World of Warcraft for the first time. When it was “like just for fun an’ shit, not like a career.” He talked about the character he had, his first character, a dwarf. Told me its name. Zolor? Zoler? Zolar? Zorlar? Zolrar? Zorlir?

  Xorlar.

  “Like with an X. Anytime you slap an X on something, you make it cooler.”

  Xorlar.

  That’s it.

  Funny how those things float to the top.

  Rose told me, “The point isn’t to try and think about anything, don’t try to solve anything, just write. What’s important will float to the top.” Me sitting with a thick leather-bound journal in my hand, flipping all those blank pages. The first gift she ever gave me. She wanted me to fill it with something. With me. I don’t know. I tried. But I didn’t have anything to write. It sat on our bookshelf for how long? 2001. We met at The Game. Spent Christmas together in her cold room in Berkeley. I remember because we talked about 9/11 so much. She was so pissed at us, America. I understood the point she was making, but it still made me angry. And she gave me the book.