Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  The last Wikiparagraph relating to Cager’s family ended with a blue-tinted mention of Dreamer, linking to what was, at the time, the fourth longest Wikipedia entry, trailing Christianity, Islam, and, at the top, SL Prion.

  The entry proper on Afronzo Junior went a bit further, mentioning a well documented public spat between father and son (link to a cellphone-quality YouTube video of the two men screaming obscenities at each other backstage of a humanitarian awards dinner at which Senior was the guest of honor), excerpting a magazine profile wherein Junior had opened up about the distance between the two (“It sucks not liking your dad. But sometimes people just don’t like each other. Me and my dad, we don’t like each other. I can live with that. It seems like it’s most everybody else who has a problem with it.”), and summing with the theory (again flagged as requiring a proper source and footnote) that Junior’s personal wealth was, in fact, not his at all. That whatever resources that became his when he came of age had been rapidly sucked away by the massive multivenue club he’d had built, assorted legal defenses and settlements, and a wholesale investment in funds that had been bulwarked all but entirely by shares in several Icelandic banks.

  This snapshot of the wealthy scion of an international pharmaceuticals conglomerate was all Park had time to learn of the man. Looked up and printed in a small break during another day spent wrangling the baby and his wife. Immersing himself in the constantly replenishing swirl of tasks that engulfed a household with both a baby and someone fatally ill. Exhausted before he began the first load of laundry, not certain he could keep his feet through the day, he was repeatedly shocked to look up and see another hour had passed.

  During that short break in the office, he looked at the pages he’d printed and thought about Dreamer and the bodies at the gold farm.

  Captain Bartolome had told him to stay off it. Captain Bartolome had told him that murder wasn’t his beat. For a code of behavior to mean anything, Park knew you had to adhere to it. By accepting the job of police officer, he had accepted the terms upon which that job had been offered. And he followed orders. To do otherwise was to betray a trust.

  So he did not lie to himself as he opened his laptop, plugging the flash drive with his reports into a USB slot; he did not tell himself that what he was doing was excusable. Scrolling through months of his records until he found a notation and phone number he was looking for, he did not say to himself, No, murder is not my beat, but Dreamer is. And I am investigating a possible Dreamer connection. There was no need to lie to himself about what he was doing. He was ignoring orders and doing what he thought was best. So he placed a call, asked a few questions, bartered a deal, hung up, sent a text, and waited. When his phone chimed a moment later, he flicked to his inbox and read the reply to his message.

  from bnie:

  omfg so kool

  when/where?

  It was hours before Francine would arrive. He pictured the traffic at that time, estimated how long it would take to get to West Hollywood and make the swap, special k for opium, texted back.

  midnight

  denizone

  7

  LOOKING AT THE BODIES, IT WAS EASY ENOUGH TO SEE WHAT had happened. Someone who was familiar to the dead men had been admitted. He, and, this being a crime that involved multiple bodies, none of them wearing a wedding ring, the murderer was most assuredly a he, entered, carrying an easily concealable automatic weapon that fired standard NATO 5.56 × 45 ammunition. At least one of the cartridge casings on the floor showed the telltale scratches left when an already poor weapon is converted to full automatic. Forced to venture a guess, I’d have said he used one of Olympic Arms’s nearly infinite variations on the AR-15. An LTF with the stock removed seemed about right.

  Whatever easily procurable piece of mass-produced, consumer-grade ironmongery he had concealed upon his person, once inside he engaged in conversation. Had a soda. A Mountain Dew. His conversation was with a young Korean American who may have been a fan of the Black Panther comic book character or may simply have had a taste for very expensive designer T-shirts with superhero motifs. Regardless, the conversation between the two turned argumentative, sufficiently hostile that the other young, pasty Asian men in the room made a conscious effort to turn their backs and focus on their computer monitors. Which was the pose they were all essentially frozen in when the man who had entered so genially lost his shit and pulled his weapon from his backpack or messenger bag and sprayed the room. Putting several rounds in the Korean American’s face while shooting the others in the back.

  Or something similar.

  In any case, they were all dead. Someone with a personal issue, and poor anger control, had done the deed. Murder is an acquaintance event; best always to assume the motive is personal. Or money. Or both. This looked, with very little effort invested, like a both scenario. Personal issue, involving money.

  Oh, the humanity.

  The only mystery I was concerned with was the absence of the travel drive that I was told would be sitting at a corner workstation. The most obvious scenario was that the same man who had executed his acquaintances had taken the drive. The fact that Lady Chizu wanted the object was as much indication of its value as one needed, but the fact that someone else might be willing to kill for it was fair evidence that the value was a known quantity. Something of a complication, but not at all outside the terms of my contract. Regardless, there was far too much valuable gear on hand for simple robbery to have been at the root of the evil deed. No, it appeared someone had come here with a clear purpose, to get the drive, had been denied possession of the drive, and had opened fire and taken the drive.

  What I knew of the drive myself was slight:

  It was wanted by Lady Chizu.

  It was a Western Digital travel drive decorated with a red biohazard sticker.

  It would be at the corner workstation by the ladder.

  If, by some chance, it was not made available to me at my first request, I was to take it.

  And I was to exact a mortal price from anyone who interfered with Lady Chizu’s wishes on this matter.

  Clearly I needed to find whoever had taken the drive, retrieve it, and do my client’s bidding.

  I began this process by climbing the ladder and poking my head in the cubbyhole it led to. I ignored the Benelli 12-gauge M4 that had been left there for the obvious purpose of being shoved through the mouse hole cut in the bottom of the three-inch-thick Plexiglas screen at the other end of the cubbyhole. I was already carrying what I considered a perfect balance of firearms and other lethal bits of steel, alloy, and ceramic upon my person. A tactical automatic shotgun would have thrown it all out of balance. Besides, the weapon wasn’t nearly as compelling as the Mace four-channel DVR sitting next to it.

  Surveillance technology had reached a point where it was rarely more difficult to master and operate than your average HDTV/digital cable box/Tivo/surround sound/universal remote setup. True, craning my neck to the side to get a clear view of the readout while I tapped various buttons wasn’t terribly comfortable, but it still took me only a few moments to determine that the 500-gig hard drive had not been erased. Someone had thoughtfully left a spindle of disks on top of the recorder, so I slipped one inside the Mace’s integral CD burner and set it to record the most recent two hours of activity. Assuming the motion-sensitive cameras outside had not been installed and calibrated by an idiot, they would not have been activated by the horde of rats in the alley, and one disk should provide me with two hours of high-quality time-lapse video, including the mass murder.

  I took a few pictures of the room while the disk burned, used the forked tip of my Atwood Bug Out Blade to dig a spent round from the thick four-by-four leg of a homemade worktable, and was studying the blood spray on a Chasm Tide poster that covered half of the rear wall, when both the deadbolt and the knob on the outer door were blown out in rapid succession, leaving behind two neat, soup-can-size holes. I had just time enough to regret not closing the door of the inne
r security cage before the outer door was kicked open to allow three large men in khaki pants and black short sleeves to crouch and scuttle into the room, one sweeping the barrel of a Remington 870 across the space, two of them with their cheeks pressed tight against the stocks of their shouldered Tavor TAR-21s, proceeded by lasered red dots that skittered over the walls.

  I immediately went slack-jawed, twisted my neck to an awkward angle, allowed a bit of drool to escape my mouth, and screamed: “Ratfuck! Ratfuck!”

  This drew their attention, the laser dots racing to draw a bead on the middle of my chest. But every bit as professional as they appeared to be coming through the door, they didn’t spasm and smear me over the wall. Instead, smoothly and without verbal communication, the two TARs took flanking positions as wide as the room would allow, pinning me in their theoretical cross fire and leaving a wide safe-angle down which the Remington could approach me. Which he did, after first switching on the halogen lamp slung under the barrel of his weapon. I felt certain, with the door now disabled, that his chambered round would be buckshot. It hardly mattered; at this range the compressed copper dust of a door-breaching cartridge would punch one of those soup can holes in the middle of my face.

  So I continued to drool, adding a slight twitch.

  “Ratfuck!”

  The halogen swept me up and down, freezing on my stiffened neck.

  “Sleepless.”

  A voice from one of the TARs.

  “What is he doing here?”

  The man with the Remington came closer.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I spun my eyes, clacked my teeth, let spittle fly from my lips.

  “Ratfuuuuuuuuck!”

  The circle of halogen lowered from my neck, angled to the side, away from my body.

  “He’s gone.”

  “Get him out of the way.”

  The twin dots arced away from me, out and up, clean and safe, firing lines staying clear of their partner.

  The halogen cut rapidly up the wall.

  “Sorry, old man.”

  The butt of his shotgun swung upward at the side of my head.

  I lurched to the side, drooling a little more, the light synthetic stock missing me by an inch, putting its owner off balance, allowing time for a couple things to happen.

  First, giving one of the TARs time to start to berate the Remington.

  “Get your shit together …”

  The second thing it allowed time for cut off whatever else might have been said, as I took advantage of my attacker’s lack of balance and also took away his shotgun.

  Of course there was more to it than that. He wasn’t a child with a lollypop; I didn’t simply pluck it from his hands. What I did was deliver a tightly coordinated series of blows, slapping the barrel of the shotgun to the side, kicking him in the stomach, chopping him in the throat, removing the shotgun from his limp hands, and using the base of the stock to crush his nose. This caused the halogen to race around the room while also putting the disarmed man and me in complicated proximity, the combination and suddenness of all this creating a fair amount of confusion for the two TARs.

  Which is why their employer, whoever it may have been, might be expected to forgive them for not getting off a shot at me before I had emptied the remaining five rounds from the Remington 870 MCS, now in my hands, at their heads.

  They were buckshot cartridges, double-aught, a bit of overkill in my book. I used two on one, three on the other, alternating between them until the weapon was empty. Then I dropped it, falling to the side, diving for cover under the worktable, drawing my Les Baer .45 Custom from the horizontal shoulder holster under my jacket and waiting there, patiently, holding aim on the doorway by the light of a computer monitor that had flared to life when a mouse had been jostled in the middle of the action incident.

  I might have held that aim for an hour just to be certain there were only the three, but the man whose shotgun I had taken groaned, reminding me that I had best conclude my business.

  I got out from under the worktable, checked the two dead bodies for ID, and found none. Nor any watches or jewelry, though one had a telltale band of white skin around his otherwise distinctly olive wrist, and the other a similar band around his left thumb, as well as piercings in both earlobes.

  The third man groaned again. And then the Mace chimed. I went up the ladder and retrieved the newly burned CD and slipped it into my sport coat pocket. I hadn’t yet inspected the material for stains or rips. I couldn’t stand the thought that I might have damaged Mr. Lee’s handiwork. His garments were, literally, irreplaceable. Putting that inspection off until later, I touched some buttons on the Mace, confirming twice that yes, I did want to erase all contents of the hard drive, and went back down the ladder.

  There was now a considerable amount of confusing physical evidence in the room. And no time to tend to it efficiently.

  For a moment this created an unpleasant frisson. The idea of leaving the room without bringing to it some order, without grooming it to tell a story that did not include me, was almost unbearable.

  I touched my phone. I held it in one hand and the Les Baer with the matching finish in the other. I thought about a gardenia bush on my deck at home, how, three years ago, after a week of unprecedented rainfall, it had blossomed, flowering in utterly spontaneous perfection, no bloom out of place or proportion to the others, a jewel of nature.

  My breathing continued to race.

  The man on the floor groaned again.

  I asked him, gasping, who he and his partners were, by whom employed, and to what purpose. He groaned again, the tone of it telling me that he was not sensible enough to understand what I was asking.

  I shot him. Once. Thought carefully. And shot him again. And my breathing began to even out. Not that killing the man brought any peace in and of itself. But the new symmetry in the room, the assortment and sprawl of all the dead bodies, was drawn into new balance by those two bullets, and I could move again.

  Down to the end of the alley where I had parked the Acura between two Dumpsters and shoved some of the heaped garbage onto its roof, giving it a cosmetic air of abandonment. From the passenger seat I retrieved my Tumi, drawing from it a shaped Octol charge. Intended to punch holes in armor plating while blasting molten alloy through the hole, it was a device less than ideal for my purposes. But with a slight modification it would do. Taking the five-gallon gas can that the Thousand Storks motor pool always bungeed securely in the trunks of their vehicles, I went back to the gold farm and placed the charge at the mouth of the open inner door, with the can of gas just in front of it. Thus modified, the Octol would not create order in the room full of dead people, but it would make them all strangely equal to one another.

  Driving away, I found an unlocked black Range Rover just before the street, facing out, ready for a speedy but never-to-be getaway. There was nothing of interest. Three black nylon athletic bags filled with the odds and ends of a tactical operation. Spare clips, black gaff tape, an assortment of plastic buckles and straps, a small tool kit, and various components for converting the TARs to 9 mm. That kind of thing.

  I wasn’t surprised by the lack of identifiers. Men like the professionals I’d killed couldn’t be expected to leave their wallets behind in their car. Granted, yes, they could be expected to be suspiciously armed with weapons favored by the Israeli military and to wear the five-pocket, guyabera-style jackets favored by the Shabak secret service, but they were still very good at what they did. So I ignored the plates I knew would be dead ends, copied the VIN from the tag on the dash, for form’s sake, dropped another Octol charge in the Range Rover, and drove away.

  Just down the street I heard the whomp of the gasoline-modified charge going off, followed shortly by the sharper bang of the explosive in the SUV. The flames would reduce the gold farm and at least a few of the surrounding abandoned buildings to ash long before any emergency services could respond. Not that it was likely they would.

&n
bsp; Back at LAX I realized that I had neglected to call the pilot in advance of my arrival. The thirty minutes needed before we could be cleared to take off had to be passed in some manner. As it turned out, he had no objection to my suggestion as to how we could spend the interval. And the door gunner was perceptive enough to take a hint and wander off to smoke a cigarette or three.

  There was little enough time for conversation, but it turned out that he was indeed a legionnaire. A faded regimental tattoo on his shoulder giving evidence. He noticed my own age-spotted Special Forces tattoo and made a joke about soldiers and what really happens in foxholes, though neither of us laughed. The back of a helicopter is hardly conducive to romance, but it was far from the most uncomfortable place I’ve made love. And after the most pressing business was taken care of, there were still a few minutes left. So we held hands, his thumb returning again and again to rub a callus on the inside of my right index finger, just where it fits the trigger.

  Soon after, we were airborne, headed north, the first step on my campaign to erase all evidence and record of the object I had been sent for now complete. There would, no doubt, be more to do once I looked at the security DVD and saw who it was who had come to call ahead of me.

  Poor soul.

  8

  PARK HAD STARTED AS A BUYER.

  Working from a sheet of phone numbers Captain Bartolome had given him, he had become a regular customer with three delivery services that he found were consistently somewhat reliable and seemed to employ couriers who were a step above the typical stoner on a mountain bike who showed up two to three hours later than he said he would. Couriers who had cars and who looked more like USC film students than they did Venice Beach burnouts. Couriers who could hold a coherent conversation while a transaction was completed. Couriers who mostly talked about the job as a way to make fast cash to pay down a student loan or to finance a new laptop.