Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  “Here.”

  A wiry man with a tonsure of gray hair, eyes hidden by green-tinted aviator sunglasses, placed a water bottle in front of him.

  Park nodded. He tried to pick up the bottle but couldn’t get his hands to close around it.

  The man twisted the cap from the bottle and held it to Park’s lips, slowly tilting it upward as Park swallowed.

  “Enough?”

  Park coughed, and the man lowered the bottle and set it back on the table. He took Park’s hands in his own and started rubbing them.

  “When were you picked up?”

  Park looked for his watch, forgetting for the moment that he had stashed it before the bust.

  “I don’t know. Last night? What time is it?”

  The needles in his hands were turning to pins, and he found he could flex them on his own.

  The man let go and took a cell from a plastic clip on the belt of his navy blue Dickies.

  “Little after midnight.”

  “I should call my wife.”

  The man put the phone back on his belt.

  “Later.”

  From the corner of the table he picked up a wrinkled and stained manila envelope, names and numbers scrawled across it in long rows, each crossed out in turn, except for one: HAAS, PARKER, T./A330H-4-40

  The man untwisted a frayed brown thread from a round tab, opened the envelope, looked inside, and then dumped the contents onto the table.

  “What the hell is this?”

  Park looked at the baggies of brown, seedy ditch weed.

  “Not mine.”

  The man looked at the uncrossed name on the outside of the envelope.

  “Says it is.”

  “It’s not.”

  The man nodded.

  “Lot of trouble to be in for a couple ounces of Mexican brown.”

  Park made fists; just the tips of his fingers tingled now. He looked at the door.

  “Can we talk?”

  The man folded his arms across the Dodgers jersey he wore open over a white tank.

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  Park flicked one of the bags with his index finger.

  “That’s what they planted on me.”

  The man pointed at the bag.

  “Because this isn’t what I expected to find on you.”

  Park nodded.

  “And it’s not what I had on me.”

  “Hounds and Kleiner took what you had on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And planted this?”

  “Yes.”

  The man folded his arms a little tighter.

  “And what did the arresting officers take off you?”

  Park looked at the man’s cellphone.

  “I should really call my wife. She’ll worry.”

  The man shook his head.

  “Later. Tell me what they took off you.”

  Park drank from the water bottle, draining what was left.

  “Demerol. Valium. X.”

  The man nodded and unfolded his arms and picked up one of the baggies.

  “Because this will get you nowhere.”

  Park touched the ear that had been punched while the black sack was over his head.

  “I know. And it’s not what I had. It’s not what I’ve been doing.”

  The man waved a hand.

  “I know what you’ve been doing.”

  Park shrugged.

  “Well, then?”

  The man stared at him, shook his head, and sat in the chair opposite.

  “I want to hear it.”

  Park looked at the door again.

  “We can talk?”

  The man took off his sunglasses, revealing bagged eyes, bloodshot, sunk in deeply wrinkled sockets.

  “We can talk.”

  Park pointed at the sack on the floor.

  “Then can you tell me who the hell is running things here, Captain?”

  The man with the worried eyes shrugged.

  “We are.”

  Park didn’t want the duty at first.

  It wasn’t what he’d joined for. He’d joined to help. He’d joined to do service. When asked by his friends what the hell he was going to do, he told them he was going to protect and to serve.

  None of them laughed, knowing that Parker Thomas Haas did not joke about such things. He had, in fact, no sense of humor at all when it came to matters of justice and ethics.

  Morality he found amusing, in the obscure way that only a man with a Ph.D. in philosophy could find such things amusing, but justice and ethics were inflexible measures, applicable to all, and not to be joked about.

  Not by him, in any case.

  And so he’d wanted to stay in uniform.

  Long before he had finished at the academy, he had resolved for himself that justice within the courts did not often live up to the standards it should and must. Long, hot afternoons spent between classes in the downtown courthouses, watching the wheels of justice squeal and creak, had settled that case.

  But street justice was another matter.

  It could be applied directly. In the face of injustice, a man with a badge on the street could actually do something. What happened after the point of interdiction could be a mystery, but in the moment of arrest, leniency, summons, unexpected tolerance, no-BS takedown, comfort, lecture, or application of force, a cop on the beat could enact true justice.

  A matter of setting a standard and applying it always, without exception, to everyone.

  Including oneself.

  For Park, that was as easy as breathing.

  But hard as hell for anyone working with him.

  Which was one of the arguments Captain Bartolome had used on him.

  “No one likes you.”

  Standing in his office, in front of the autographed picture of himself as a boy with a smiling Vin Scully, Bartolome had shrugged.

  “Not saying it to make you feel bad, it’s just true.”

  Park had looked at the LAPD ball cap in his own hands.

  “It doesn’t make me feel bad.”

  “I didn’t think it did. Another reason I think you’d be good for this. Helps not to care if people don’t like you.”

  Park ran a hand up the back of his neck, felt the sharp horizontal hairline that his barber had carved at the bottom of his buzz cut.

  “It’s not that I don’t care in general, Captain. Depends on why they don’t like me.”

  Bartolome stuck the tip of his tongue behind his lower lip, then pulled it back, sucking his teeth.

  “So it’s just you don’t care that they don’t like you because you’re a pain in the ass to work with? Other reasons people don’t like you might bother you, that it?”

  Park stopped playing with his hair.

  “I don’t care if they don’t want to work with me, because I know I’m right.”

  The captain from narcotics raised both eyebrows.

  “Jesus, Haas. No wonder they don’t like you.”

  Park brushed something from the leg of his blues.

  “May I go now?”

  Bartolome pointed at the door.

  “Can you leave my office now? Yes.”

  Park started to rise.

  Bartolome pointed at the window.

  “Can you go back out on the streets? No.”

  Park, half out of the hard plastic chair, stalled and looked at his superior.

  “Sir?”

  Bartolome looked at his desk, frowned at the headline on the L.A. Times sports section spread there:

  MLB ENDS SEASON

  Play Not to Resume Until SLP Pandemic Has Been Contained

  He looked at the officer across the desk.

  “There will be no more solo acts, Haas. Everyone rides with a partner. Department can’t afford the gas to put enough vehicles on the street. Until we see some more stimulus cash miraculously filling the motor pool with electrics and hybrids, all patrol cars roll with two, three, four officers.”

  He rub
bed his eyes.

  “And no one, absolutely no one, wants to ride with you anymore.”

  Park straightened.

  “They never have.”

  “Uh-huh, but things weren’t this bad before. Things weren’t as dangerous as they’re getting out there. The department wants maximum morale in the face of this shit. Maximum morale means we don’t have to worry about the kind of desertions they got when Katrina hit. Cops losing faith in the system and just disappearing.”

  He stopped rubbing his eyes and looked Park up and down.

  “Maximum morale also means that officers have each other’s backs. We don’t want guys cutting slack out there because they figure they’d be better off if the pain in the ass riding shotgun maybe took one in a gang incident.”

  Park thought about the time about a year before, riding with Del Rico. How they’d rolled on a two-eleven. Del had said the stockroom at the back of the liquor store was clear. But it wasn’t. Turned out the perp wasn’t strapped; what the Korean owner of the store had taken for a gun was a length of pipe. But it had been a gun call, and Del had let Park walk into a supposedly cleared room where a perp was hiding behind some boxes with a pipe that could easily have been a piece. Park walked with a couple bruises on his ribs. The perp took a series of baton spears to his genitals.

  Del was always cool to Park’s face, but he’d heard him making cracks with the guys. Talking about how he couldn’t wait till his tour with the monk was over.

  Park didn’t think Del Rico knew the perp was back there. But he was a good cop. And he’d said the room was clear. Would he have been more thorough if he hadn’t been thinking about when he’d be done riding with Park?

  “You follow me, Haas?”

  Park looked up at the captain.

  “I could do bike patrols.”

  Bartolome rubbed the smooth brown top of his head.

  “Bike cops are doubling up, too.”

  “Motorcycles. I can do traffic.”

  “You ever ride a hog?”

  “No.”

  Bartolome pointed at a picture on the wall. A younger version of himself, traffic leathers, white and blue helmet, astride a Harley

  “Field training for the hogs, that takes weeks and costs the department. Tell you right now, the budget the way it is, the only retraining going on is for SWAT and the antiterrorism academy.”

  Park looked at the picture of Bartolome in his bucket-head rig.

  SWATs were in love with their guns and the rush of blowing a door down and charging in. Why they were there, who had done what and to whom, didn’t matter in the least to a SWAT. They just wanted a clean shot.

  The antiterrorism academy was a one-way ticket to a desk. Paperwork. Intelligence review. Coordinating task forces with the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection.

  He looked away from the picture.

  “I don’t think I’d be suited to either of those duties, sir.”

  “You aren’t being offered either of those duties.”

  Bartolome weighed two invisible objects, one in either hand.

  “You’re being offered this one thing.”

  He showed the heft and gravity of what it was Park was being offered.

  “Or you can accept online training for dispatch.”

  He displayed the relative lightness of a job relaying radio calls.

  Park remembered his father asking him what he thought he could achieve as a police officer that he could not achieve in the family business. The family business having been government service and politics.

  He shook his head.

  “I simply don’t think I’m suited to the duty, sir.”

  Bartolome nodded.

  “Why?”

  “From a practical perspective, I’m white. And I don’t do street. I mean, I know the jargon, but it never sounds natural. And I’ve never done drugs myself, not even in college. I don’t know where to begin a fake.”

  The captain smiled.

  “Haas, what the hell? What are you thinking? Are you thinking I’m gonna send you down to Wilmington? Have you dealing meth to the longshoremen working the night shift at the port? Try and mix you in with the vatos down there? Think I’m gonna have you sling rock to the homies in South Central?”

  Park found himself thinking about his father again.

  “You said ‘undercover,’ sir. You said ‘selling drugs.’”

  Bartolome looked at his desk. He cleared away the sports page that had delivered the news that the bullshit going down outside wasn’t going to be relieved any longer this summer by the distraction of a few ball games, and found a sheaf of pages that he’d printed on the back sides of old incident reports and call sheets. As per new department regulations that all paper be double printed before recycling.

  “Haas.”

  He flipped through the pages, turning them over and back, finding the side he wanted.

  “Most cops, being a cop is one of two things to them. One, being a cop is a job. Pay’s not bad. Advancement is available to anyone with some initiative. Benefits are outstanding. No one these days gets the kind of medical police get. Good pension. Lots of perks. And, used to be, plenty of assignments where you don’t have to even wear a gun, let alone worry about pulling it. A high school diploma, couple years at a JC, that or do your bit in the service, and you can get in the academy. It’s a regular guy job. Average cop, his attitude has more in common with a welder than it does, say, a Treasury agent. Second thing is, for some, being a cop means the badge and the baton and the gun. Guys never gonna say it out loud, not sober, but they just plain like telling people what to do. Go to their house for a barbeque, see them talk to their wife and kids same way they talk to some guy they just busted for assault with intent. Guys come in badge-heavy and stay that way.”

  He peeled back the corner of one of the sheets of paper in his hand and looked at the one below it.

  “Where do you fit in that lineup?”

  Park was still thinking about his father, remembering the last time they met, at his mother’s funeral. A month later he had chosen not to go east for his father’s. The old man had said all he wanted to say to Park at his wife’s graveside, though it wasn’t until he got the call from his sister, telling him in stoic Pennsylvania tones that their father had done it with his favorite Weatherby 20-gauge, that he understood what had been meant by the words, No need for you to come home again. Standing over his mother’s coffin, he’d assumed those words were the final dismissal that their entire relationship had been slowly building to. Hanging up after his sister’s call, he knew they’d actually been T Stegland Haas’s last attempt at sheltering his son from the world’s pain.

  No need to come back. No need to stand at another parent’s graveside. Go about your business. This is over. You are excused.

  He rubbed the face of his watch with his thumb.

  “I don’t know where I fit in there, sir.”

  Barlolome nodded.

  “Let’s take a look. Trust-fund family. Deerfield Academy. Whatever the hell that is. Columbia BA. Stanford Ph.D. Doesn’t sound like someone in need of solid job prospects.”

  He folded back another sheet of paper.

  “And, well, you’re not shy about use of force, but you’ve got no complaints of merit in here. Good collection of busts, but nothing that smells like you enjoy snapping the bracelets on. Doesn’t read like a guy gets stiff from pushing people around.”

  He rolled the paper into a tube and pointed it at Park.

  “What this is, this is the account of an educated young white man with a genuine desire to do the right thing and serve his community.”

  Park was twisting his wrist back and forth, letting the movement propel the self-winding mechanism inside the watch.

  It had been his father’s, a 1970 Omega Seamaster, a gift from his wife, given in turn to Park the same day he was excused from future funerals. His father taking it from his own wrist, handing it to him with these words, It�
��s a good watch. When they start dropping the bombs in a couple years, it wont be knocked out by an electromagnetic pulse. Even in the apocalypse, someone should know the correct time, Parker.

  He twisted his wrist a little more quickly.

  “Is that an accusation, sir?”

  Bartolome let the papers unroll in his hand, showed them to Park.

  “No. It’s just what I need. An educated young white who can talk to other educated young whites. The kind of people who not only have enough money to buy drugs but enough to be able to afford to be discriminating about who they buy them from. People who don’t want to circle MacArthur park in their Mercedes. People who want to call a discreet phone number, place an order, and have it delivered. Like sushi. People like that, Officer Haas.”

  He leaned close.

  “Those are the only kind of people who can afford to buy Dreamer.”

  Park stopped twisting his wrist.

  “Sir.”

  Bartolome put the roll of papers on his desk.

  “Have you seen anyone with it yet? Close up. Someone you know?”

  Park touched the watch without looking at it.

  “My mother. But I didn’t see her. She died fast.”

  “Good.”

  Bartolome nodded twice.

  “That’s good. One of my brothers got it early. Before the test. When they still thought it was a virus. Quarantine. Nonstop tissue samples. Experimental treatment. On top of the fucking thing itself. His last week, that was when they allowed the first human Dreamer trials. His number got drawn, but he was in the placebo group. I saw a woman who got the real thing. She slept. She dreamed. Woke up, she smiled, talked to her family. She’d been screaming nonstop for five days before that. Covered in lesions. Those went away, too.”

  He looked at another picture on the wall: dress blues, the day he got his bars, between his two cop brothers, arms draped over one another’s shoulders.

  He looked away.

  “Afronzo-New Day Pharm has finally agreed to a federally brokered deal to lease the patent on Dreamer internationally. A-ND will have to settle for profiting just a little less obscenely on this deal than they would have. Man, they can nationalize the banks, car manufacturers, utilities, and telecom, but as long as Big Pharm is still in the black those cocksuckers in Congress will scream ‘free market’ like someone nominated Marx for President.”