Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

I got most of the rest of it right. The escalation of the argument with the Korean American, the tactfully turned backs of the workers. And then my re-creation went awry. He did not search the premises. He did not even glance at the travel drive that I could clearly see sitting exactly where I’d been told it would be. He came, he killed, and he left. Leaving the drive.

  I watched as the cameras went into delay mode, recording in shorter and shorter bursts at longer and longer intervals, allowing hours to pass in minutes, slight stutters in the lighting caused as one of the monitors continued to flicker. And then the cameras revived, movement bringing them back to life, and a second young man under duress entered the room.

  He surveyed the crime scene with some thoroughness, taking several photos, recording the positions of bodies, the placement of entry wounds and blood sprays. Then pausing for a final assessment, he noticed the drive, made a brief mental calculation of some kind, took the travel drive, and left. Giving the impression that the theft of the drive was not at all premeditated.

  As for his obvious anxiety and stress, they were revealed not in any particular tick of behavior but rather in the contrast between the efficiency with which he went about his business, and the blind distraction apparent in his failure to erase himself from the security hard drive from which I had recorded the DVD I was watching.

  I watched it again. I watched it several times over.

  His frame was lanky but fit. The haircut wasn’t one. It was what had been very short hair neglected over several months. The clothes were practical and inexpensive. Off-brand khaki cargo pants, a plain black T-shirt. Only his shoes were of any particular interest. A pair of black Tsubo Korphs, legendarily durable, comfortable, and ugly. Excellent for anyone who spends a great deal of time on his feet. Nurses and hospital orderlies often favor the white ones. In terms of palette and basic silhouette, he could quite easily have been taken for one of the mercenaries I had killed in the room several hours after he had gone carefully through the procedures I was watching him execute.

  But he was not one of them. He was, in fact, a cop. Young, not terribly experienced at detective work, but game and apt. He’d obviously done his homework and listened up in class. He went about his business with care, but with concern for the time it was taking, frequently looking at the anachronism on his wrist. I watched and came to another conclusion.

  The camera image could be magnified enough for me to see that he was deleting something from the Korean American’s BlackBerry That, combined with his time sensitivity, the impulsive theft of the drive, and his stress level, seemed to make a simple case. Dirty cop. Covering up traces of whatever dirty business he had been engaged in there.

  This diagnosis was contraindicated by a few details: the time he took to survey the crime scene, take pictures, and check the pulses of the dead. Dirty? Well, certainly he had something to hide. More than likely it was some form of dirtiness. Always best to assume the worst about a stranger until you know otherwise.

  The killer, for instance, had killed out of juvenile rage. There might be money involved, nothing would be more natural, but when it boiled down to the moment of the deed, he simply lost his self-control and, because he had one handy, pulled his gun and opened fire. It was on his face. Not beforehand, not even while he was shooting. But afterward, with smoke still oozing from the barrel of his weapon, the absolute shock on his face. The look that said explicitly, Did I just do that? I hardly needed to see his lips move: Oh, shit. Or to observe the nervous giggle that escaped from them. He’d never planned to go in there and kill those people. He’d just walked into a room where he knew he was going to have an argument with someone and took a high-powered assault rifle with him. For no real reason. Just because he thought he might need it. For what, he would have found it impossible to say.

  The other young man, the one with the well-maintained ancient watch, the practical shoes, and the precise methodology, he’d never have lost control in that manner. Had he wanted to kill those people, he’d have gone in with a plan and carried it out with great efficiency. And possibly still have walked out having forgotten to take care of the cameras.

  I was, I will admit it, intrigued.

  Not that my curiosity was a matter of concern. I would have had to track him down whether or not I was keen to know just how and why he’d come to be there.

  He had Lady Chizu’s drive.

  Inevitably, I must find him. And take it. And do all that she had asked of me.

  Sitting in my Cadillac, spending another late evening in traffic, some hours after the dear French pilot had touched down on the Thousand Storks pad in Century City and reminded me that I had his number, as if I had forgotten, I found a section of the recording where the cop’s face was turned almost directly to one of the cameras. I froze it, grabbed the frame, saved it as “Young Faust,” connected via Bluetooth to the Canon Pixma in the glove box, and printed several copies. Then I left-clicked the touchpad button on my Toughbook and skipped back on the recording, watching Young Faust depart backward, and the killer enter similarly, and, would that it were so easy, watched the dead jump joyously to life, expelling bullets from their bodies in sheer relief that it had all been a bad dream. Or so I chose to reimagine the scene.

  I froze the picture and considered the killer. I would need no assistance from business associates who owed me favors to identify this face and give it a name. I owned a TV, after all.

  Parsifal K. Afronzo Jr. Cager to his friends. Freshly minted mass murderer.

  The policeman, dirty to whatever degree, would likely be seeking him, or vice versa. So then must I.

  10

  PARK DIDN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT MUSIC. HIS IPOD WAS FILLED with playlists that Rose made and loaded for him. Music she thought he should listen to. Or things she just thought he might enjoy. He listened to all of them, trying always to listen to them in the manner she suggested.

  Listen to this on the ride to class, she’d said the first time she made him a list. She did this after buying him the iPod as a birthday present and seeing that it hadn’t left the box in the two weeks since he’d unwrapped it. She thought that once he saw how much fun the little gadget could be, he’d start filling it himself, seeking out new music to expand his world. But he didn’t.

  What he enjoyed was listening to what she chose for him. He’d never have told her what she came to suspect anyway, that he consciously avoided loading new music onto the player so that she would feel compelled to keep doing it herself. Over the years it gradually filled with music that came to be a part of the day-to-day communication between a woman who didn’t know how to edit a thought or emotion that crossed her mind and a man who barely understood that there might be a need to communicate anything that wasn’t absolutely essential to the immediate situation.

  Playlist titles:

  The ride to the water

  Walking on Telegraph

  Mowing the lawn

  Missing Rose

  We’re having a baby

  Cheese sandwich for lunch

  Keep your head down

  What I’ll do to you tonight

  Don’t forget the toilet paper

  It’s not that big a deal, I’m not really mad at you, just frustrated with my fucking work

  The baby kicked me this morning

  Don’t worry so much

  She has your eyes

  Come home safe

  Awake without you

  When she asked at the end of a day how he’d felt about a new list, what songs he liked best, he never knew the song titles or the names of the artists. The songs were the messages from her; it never occurred to him to care what they were called or who was playing them. He’d say he liked, That one in the middle, with the happy beat, but it was kind of sad, about the kid falling down on the playing field and everyone looking at him and he just lies there. Or he’d hum the melody as he remembered it. Or, when she insisted, sing a lyric that had stuck in his head.

  That’s what he was thinkin
g about as he walked down the line of people waiting to get inside Denizone. Every time the doors, designed to look like the much-battered gates of an under-siege castle, opened to admit another tan and fit young thing, Park heard a bit of a song he’d once sung for Rose. The chorus only, sung to her in a high whisper, with a tempo more appropriate to a waltz than to a rock song: This heart’s on fire, this heart’s on fire, this heart’s on fire, this heart’s on fire.

  It froze him for a moment, just before the velvet rope, the doorman, in the blockbuster-fantasy distressed leather and chain mail of a mythical kingdom, nodding at him.

  “’Sup, Park?”

  The door swung closed, cutting off the song, and Park came back, letting go of the memory, the night he’d sung it for her.

  “Priest.”

  He offered his hand, and Priest took it, palming an offered vial of powdered Ecstasy.

  He held it up between forefinger and thumb.

  “Same stuff as before?”

  Park shook his head.

  “Better.”

  Priest pocketed the vial and unhooked the rope.

  “Big party tonight. Tournament in the basement. Top gladiators.”

  Park waited while the Priest’s counterpart, a young man of similar girth, wearing an equally detailed costume, put a bracelet of brown microsuede around his wrist, fastening it with a pincer that snapped a thin copper rivet into place.

  “I’m just meeting a customer.”

  Priest waved a macelike baton at the door, tripping an electric eye.

  “Hope they’re in there already. We’re at capacity.”

  The huge door swung open.

  “We’ll find each other.”

  Priest offered his fist.

  “Have a good one.”

  Park gave him a bump, a gesture that never felt genuine to him, but one he’d learned to execute without a grimace.

  “Always.”

  He passed into an entryway of textured concrete contoured to look like living stone, the mouth of a tunnel hewed into the side of a mountain, the walls pulsing with projected images from Chasm Tide. Desert landscapes of the Wilting Lands, the Aerie’s Village, a pontoon city he’d never seen, it looked scavenged from the remains of a great twentieth-century seaport, and the Lair of Brralwarr, the great dragon worm rampaging on an overmatched band of adventurers.

  These would be live player views from gamers currently in-world, snagged and sampled and projected here, stirred and flashing by, perspectives randomly distorted, colors filtered, resolution mixed and pixelated.

  A giant ax blade cut down the wall, and he flinched, recognizing a trap from the Clockwork Labyrinth. He stopped, staring, wondering if he might catch a glimpse of Cipher Blue. It was always possible, watching someone else’s game, that you could see, in the distance or close at hand, the avatar of someone you knew, friend or enemy.

  But she wasn’t there. And then the scene was gone, replaced by the Precipice Bacchanal, a ceaseless orgy of virtual flesh that endured with ever increasing frenzy in the circular city of Gyre, hemming the edge of the Chasm itself.

  A new song was playing. One he didn’t know, one that vibrated through the floor and walls, beating at the doors at the opposite end of the hall, past the coat check and the cashier.

  Heaped on the cashier’s table, trinkets of jewelry, packets and tubes of intoxicants, a stack of gift cards from high-end merchants, a few rare coins, a pair of ostrich cowboy boots, a samurai sword, a bowl full of car keys, each with a pink slip rubber-banded to it, several thick wads of cash money, and, on the floor, a fifteen-gallon gas can.

  The cashier, a man who had discarded the robe that was meant to make him look like a cleric, wearing instead two-sizes-loose factory-distressed black jeans of recycled cotton held up by wide blue suspenders that draped thin bare shoulders, looked up at Park and pointed a fat plastic pistol.

  Park held out his wrist, and the cashier aimed the RFID interrogator at it and pulled the trigger. There was a beep as the device read the signal the tiny silver chip on the bracelet broadcast in response to the interrogator’s prompt. The clerk looked at the code that appeared on an LCD screen on the plastic gun.

  “Comp.”

  Park offered his hand anyway, slipping the clerk a tiny Ziploc packed tight with gummy buds. He’d learned in the past months that even when he was comped into clubs it always paid to tip the staff. It engendered goodwill. Something a dealer could never have too much of. As it often led to early warnings of trouble. Rival dealers. Unhappy customers. Law.

  The Ziploc disappeared into a pocket, and the clerk knocked lightly on his table in acknowledgment while tapping his toe on a floor switch that triggered the inner doors, exposing Park to a blast of bass that went through his chest and slammed against the beat of his heart.

  Inside, a scene reminiscent of the Precipice Bacchanal. More clothes in place, less blatant penetration, and no elves, but the same mass spasms of desperation and fear manifesting as revelry. The place reeked of sweat, ganja, cigarette smoke, infused vodkas, and cherry lip gloss. The flashing screen grabs from the hall were here: panoramas projected on the ceiling, crisscrossed by shadows cast by several catwalks that were populated by the most astonishingly beautiful of the club’s clientele, culled from the crowd by unemployed assistant casting directors who traded their expertise for drink tickets. The dancers themselves took their chances on the catwalks, after signing releases against any and all bodily harm, for the pure glory of having been selected, their physical perfection singled out and highlighted.

  Park didn’t work Denizone. He didn’t work any of the clubs regularly. Came to them only at the request of regular customers who needed special deliveries. In the early days, before it had become apparent how rapidly SLP was spreading, he had been circumspect in these places. Doing his business in the bathrooms and back hallways, in the alleys where the clubbers slipped out to smoke in the night air. But soon enough everyone was lighting up inside, antismoking laws not carrying quite the same bite any longer, likewise the dangers of indulging the habit, and as the smokers moved inside and multiplied, so too did the drug deals. A subtle handoff was still appreciated as a point of style but was barely a legal necessity. To say nothing of using.

  Staying on the cabaret level above the dance floor, moving toward the bar, Park walked past booths where lines of coke were being snorted from the black enameled tabletops, where a girl with a cupped palm full of little blue capsules doled them out to her circle of friends, where a couple snapped amyl poppers under each other’s noses, where any number of people took hits off pipes, joints, or blunts, and where a man slumped half off his banquette, rubber tourniquet still around his upper arm, hypo loose in his fingers, a drop of fresh blood welling amid a hash of purplish tracks in the hollow of his elbow. Park almost stopped to check the man’s pulse but saw him open and close his lizard eyes, a slight smile coming to his lips as he licked them, and so moved on.

  These places were not for Park. Rose, on the one occasion when she made the mistake of dragging him to the Exotic Erotic Halloween Ball, thinking that he might lose his self-consciousness in the cheesy exuberance, realized almost instantly that she had made an awful mistake. It wasn’t that Park was a prude. Not by any measure. He was not offended or made uncomfortable by the expanses of flesh, the free displays of human sexuality in all its variations, the men dressed as naughty nuns, the women dressed as Nazi angels; it was simply that the whole affair made him terribly sad. The general air of insecurity and affectation made it too easy for him to imagine these once-a-year fabulous creatures as the cubicle dwellers most of them were in everyday life. Overly sensitive to the jittery signals regarding sex, longing, and rejection that were being bounced around the hall, he soon felt as if his nerve endings were being scrubbed with fine sandpaper. Seeing the look of extreme discomfort on his face, through the zombie pancake she had painted him with, she made the excuse that she wasn’t feeling well and asked if he minded if they left. He did not
mind.

  Riding BART under the bay, he watched their pale reflections in the dark glass, whited out in beats of safety lights as they swept down the tunnel. Dressed as an especially tawdry Raggedy Ann, Rose put her head on his shoulder.

  He was thinking that he was a fool, that it was absurd to imagine that he knew what those people’s lives were like, that his inability to relax and enjoy himself had nothing to do with self-confidence and everything to do with immaturity and insecurity. Only a weak child would be afraid at a party. Stand in the corner. Not talk to anyone. Project his fears onto the people who were enjoying themselves. He added another entry to his personal accounting of his weaknesses. And swore to be better.

  But crossing Denizone, turning sideways, plastering himself to the waste-high chains meant to keep people from tumbling onto the dance floor, finding an eddy in the crowd in which he felt for a moment almost alone, he could only look at them all and wonder which had kids at home, unattended, while their parents reveled.

  Lost for a moment, he almost didn’t feel his phone vibrating, the tiny sensation lost in the whomping bass notes. When he answered, he could hear only the slightest tinny chatter. Clicking a button on the side of the phone, boosting the volume to max, and sticking a finger in his other ear, he shouted.

  “Beenie?”

  A barely audible scream.

  “Yeah, man. What’s up?”

  Overwhelmed by the combination of the noise, the crowd, fatigue, and the speed he’d taken, Park found honesty coming out of his mouth.

  “Not much. Just standing here judging people I don’t know.”

  He heard Beenie’s gulping laugh.

  “Yeah, kinda hard not to in here, isn’t it?”

  Park raised himself on his toes and scanned the crowd.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the main dance hall. You?”

  “Same.”

  “Do you see, look up at the catwalks, do you see the girl dressed like classic Mortal Kombat Sonya?

  Park looked up at the catwalks, and in a stutter of strobes found the girl, shaggy blond hair, big dangling earrings, green headband and matching spandex jazzercise gear, dancing, mixing crunk with choreographed kicks and punches straight from the old video game.