Sleepless (26 page)

"I just want to stop sometimes. And I can't. And I think about. Being done. And it sounds. Not so bad."

She touched his chin.

"It's okay, I wouldn't. I just. Sometimes. If I could fall asleep. And skip the rest of what's going to happen. Sometimes. That's all. It's just a temptation is all. Because I'm tired."

He spoke.

"It's not too late to go to a hospital. They'd still accept you. You could get Dreamer."

She raised a hand.

"Park."

He opened his mouth, but she didn't let him speak.

"I won't. And then what, anyway? If I'm in the hospital and you're on the street. And then what? Francine can't always be here. So, what? Who takes care of her? God knows it's not that I'm opposed to taking the drugs. But I won't go to a hospital. I won't leave her alone. Not while there's no one, no one to take care of her."

He forced his words between hers.

"I'm here. I can take care of her."

She looked at him.

"Parker, I love you, but you're not here. You can't take care of her."

Park remained utterly still, afraid that if he moved in the least he would shatter, shocked that the beating of his heart had not already turned him to shards.

When Park requested a sit-down, he never specified where; they simply met at whatever spot was next on a list they'd made at the outset of the assignment. Once used, a safe location was crossed from the list, never revisited. The track that ran around the football field at Culver City High, where the Centaurs once played, was next on the list. Within walking distance, it was, literally, a little close to home, but Park was grateful for that proximity on this occasion. The meeting would take some time, explaining to Bartolome what he'd discovered and how, but at least he wouldn't have to worry about the hazards of traffic. He'd get home soon, just as he'd promised Rose he would.

He waited on the curve of track behind one of the field's end zones, trying not to fidget with the thumb drive hanging around his neck, one of the ten-gig drives Rose had used for work, onto which he had loaded a copy of his reports.

Driving around the neighborhood before they bought the house, he and Rose had talked about how loud it might be on game nights, both of them enjoying the idea of hearing the dull roar on Friday evenings. But by the time the season began and many parents pulled their children out of school, and particularly off the football squad (sports in which blood was regularly spilled did not seem like a wise choice of extracurricular activities in a time of plague), there weren't enough players to field a team. Not that they would have played more than one home game. It wasn't long after the school year began that most districts across the country began canceling all sports, dances, clubs, band practice, theatricals, or any other event that might require students to gather after school hours. Eventually the classes themselves would be canceled. For the time being a much-reduced curriculum was still offered to students whose parents signed waivers relieving the schools of all liability for any harm that might befall their children from morning to final afternoon bell. Classes taught by teachers who had signed similar waivers for the privilege. The numbers on both sides of the classroom greatly reduced, it was, nonetheless, a sad fact that teacher-to-student ratios had not improved overall.

Park rubbed his foot back and forth on the latex track surface, the sole of his shoe squeaking. He'd taken another Dexedrine spansule before leaving home. He hadn't felt he needed it to keep awake, having passed his window of sleep opportunity yet again, but his thoughts were unruly; he'd need to marshal them to make his case to Bartolome. Twenty-four hours of hard sleep was out of the realm of possibility, so the speed had been his best option. He'd taken the pill, recorded it in his journal, police report, and dealer inventory, and left Rose playing Chasm Tide in the office, with the baby cradled around her neck in a hammocklike carrier, both of them wide awake but neither of them crying.

He looked at his father's watch.

"Where'd you get that watch?"

Hearing the voice, Park almost bolted. Dealer's instinct fueled by the speed almost sent him sprinting down the length of the football field, aiming for the dry L.A. River runoff beyond the parking lot.

"I don't remember seeing that watch."

Before he could run, another instinct had overridden the first. Cop instinct, telling him that if he ran he'd end up with boots in his backside, if not bullets.

"I'd have remembered a watch as nice as that."

Parked thumbed the rotating bezel that his father had used to time course changes when sailing with only a compass and the sun or stars.

The man walking from the parking lot raised one of his arms and displayed a pair of handcuffs.

"I'll make you a trade, my bracelets for your watch."

He grabbed the back of Park's neck and squeezed, kicking his right foot out from under him, and Park went to his knees.

"Only I'm gonna want my bracelets back."

Park didn't move as the watch was removed from his wrist.

"I'm going to look for that in my property envelope."

The wrist that had worn the watch was pulled to the small of his back and forced upward, and the cuff went on.

"Yeah, you look in there, trust me, you'll find a fucking watch."

Hands patted him down, took his keys and phone, his wallet and the backup thumb drive, all that he'd carried with him out the front door, and he was yanked to his feet.

He looked at the man who'd come from underneath the bleachers as he shook the watch and held it to his ear.

"That watch better be the one I find when I look in my property envelope."

"Or what, asshole?"

"Or I'll come looking for you."

The man shoved Park toward the street beyond the west bleachers.

"Asshole, you come looking, you better pray you don't fucking find me."

He shoved Park again.

"And by the way, that's fucking threatening a public officer as far as I'm concerned, and I'm putting it in your jacket along with obstruction, no matter what the fuck kind of rat-fink asshole you are. Asshole."

Park said nothing more.

He'd asked for a sit-down with Bartolome. He'd gotten Hounds. He knew when he was being told to shut up.

I HAD DISPENSED with burglar alarms and other home security measures long ago. That was shortly after I had become an independent contractor and found myself at odds with a long-established firm that provided services similar to mine. A boutique operation, they'd had business cards. No name, just the discreet number of an old-fashioned answering service, and a motto: Solutions for Extreme Circumstances.

As you can imagine, having such a card offered to you by a crew-cut gentleman with obviously scarred knuckles, wearing a well-tailored suit, was very impressive. This operation had a wonderful sense of theater. They were also, I must admit, quite good. Their solutions were effective more often than not, and most definitely extreme. The specific reason they had become displeased with me personally had to do with what they perceived as my poaching of a client they had serviced for some years. Poaching was the word they used when they called to advise me that I should desist and renege on the contract I had already accepted. All fairly polite but rendered with the unmistakable subtext that I had best get the fuck out of town on the next train. Or something equally Old West.

I declined.

There were a minimum of ways they could menace me. I was young. Capable of excellence in my field. Confident in my ability to succeed in the marketplace against any form of competition. And I lived within a highly secured property. The rule of law was strong, and my business was largely conducted in civilized countries; I had little to fear while engaged in my professional affairs. Having established what I believed to be my terminal exposures, I set to defending them, and went about my working days.

They came at me at night. Within the unbreachable security of my home. Dulled by the sense of safety that the locks, pressure-sensitive plates, armored doors, unbreakable glass, air density detectors, CCTV cameras, and obligatory infrared beams had imparted, I did not know I was at risk until I awoke with a blade at my throat. I was saved only by the fact that these were the kind of men who felt that an affront could be redressed only to the offender's face. If they'd been of another sort, the kind who are genuinely happy to discover their victims asleep and to kill them in that state because of the many hazards and difficulties it eliminates, they would have survived. They were not of that sort.

I am.

So, finding myself alive when I should have been dead, I knew I had a slight momentary advantage. That advantage born of two facts: the first being that they clearly believed me to be helpless and at their mercy, the second being that I was clearly more ruthless than they.

No one expects that a naked man who was fast asleep only a moment ago will ignore the knife you have at his throat and attack you. What sane person would do such a thing? What sane person would do anything but beg for his life and pray for God's forgiveness of his sins?

It is not a trick question. I am, by any recognizable measure, quite sane. Baroquely obsessive, but not to the point of insanity.

Regardless, I attacked. From my supine position I brought my knee up and struck the back of the knife wielder's head. Simultaneously I slipped my hand between my body and his wrist, preventing him from cutting my neck deeply when my knee made contact and he lurched forward. Taking hold of his knife arm at the wrist and elbow, I pushed over to my right, rolling him off the edge of the bed while shielding myself with his body, discouraging his friends across the room from opening fire. That discretion would last only a moment. Landing atop my assailant on the floor, I maintained my grip and bent his arm at the elbow, forcing the knife into his throat just above the thick shield of the thyroid cartilage. I was deft enough that I could have thrown the knife at the others. Not so much out of any real hope that I could kill or disable either of them but rather to distract them for a precious moment while I took the dying man's side -arm from its shoulder holster. But there was no real need to attempt such a high-risk maneuver. Instead, I ran and hid in the closet.

Bullets struck the armored door. After a pause while the men in my bedroom did some quick mental geometry, more bullets ripped through the wall next to the door at a sharp angle and struck the armored plates that lined the interior walls of the closet. If the men had squirmed under the house and attempted to shoot upward through the floor of the closet or climbed to the roof and fired down through its ceiling, they would have met with equal success. The closet was an informal panic room. Not proof against gases or radiation, or stocked with batteries and bottled water, simply a secure hard point when under fire from small arms. But these men would not be wasting any more time probing for the closet's weaknesses. They would be placing a grenade just outside the door. A fact I confirmed when I entered the room through the main door behind them and shot them both in the back with a single short burst from an HK MP5 submachine gun. To a hindsight observer it may seem obvious that, once they knew I had retreated to an armored position, they should have taken care to defend their rear in case I had rearmed and emerged behind their line via an alternate egress. But in the heat of battle such mistakes are often made, and it never occurred to them to consider that the closet might have a concealed panel at the back, opening into a large linen closet in the guest bedroom next door. A linen closet stocked more amply with firearms than with sheets and pillowcases.

Still naked, I went through the house, determined that no others had participated in the intrusion, and went out the guest bathroom window. Screened by an overhang of pussy willow I'd had planted for this purpose, I was able to take the sentry by the pool unawares. I used a knife. The integral suppressor on the MP5SD was effective where there were walls to help baffle the noise, but in the open air even a round or two would have been heard by anyone at the front of the property. Still, I miscalculated. Coming up behind the man, I cut once across the back of his right knee; his leg went out and his body dropped, and I stabbed him once in the kidney and once in the side of the neck as he dropped lower still. The first two wounds were inflicted rapidly enough that they elicited nothing but a loud gasp, but the third, which should have pierced horizontally through his windpipe and ended any vocalizations, was off the mark and he managed a gurgled cry. Acting without appropriate forethought, I pushed him into the pool to silence him, forgetting that it was covered. Entangled in the blue plastic sheet, he thrashed loudly. Loud enough to draw whoever had been left in front of the house, but not so loud that I couldn't hear them coming. The dying man's struggles had pulled the cover away from the edge of the pool, so I dove in myself, gliding beneath his death throes and the growing red cloud that was spilling from the cover into the water.

Latched onto the ladder at the deep end, I used my knife to create a slit in the cover, which was still fairly taut at that side of the pool, and surfaced far enough to peek through and see two more men come into the backyard. Sensibly, they did nothing to help their coworker, focusing instead on the darker shadows among the foliage, searching for where I might be hidden. But they could not afford to be overly thorough. Though I had a generous full-acre plot, heavily landscaped in a tall and dripping southern style that suited the area where I lived, there were still neighbors. There was little doubt that they were at the limits of their time allowance for this operation, if not already beyond it. And they still needed to collect their dead and transport them for disposal.

Haste made them negligent.

And me, as well.

Letting go the ladder, kicking softly, I circled the edge of the pool just below the surface. Coming back into the shallow end, I waited another moment to be sure that the men were fully engaged trying to haul the dead man from the pool. Their hands were occupied, but I did not wish to make the same mistake they had made when they allowed me to wake. Rather than surfacing entirely, I bobbed only my head above the water-line. My weapon was capable of operating quite efficiently for a limited period while submerged, but I had no desire to subject my eardrums to the shock waves when I pulled the trigger. What I should have been more concerned about was the ammunition I had preloaded into the clips stored with the MP5.

There are those who will say that loading an SMG with hollow-point ammunition is overdoing it, but aside from the fact that the ammunition must be custom made and is somewhat expensive, there are no real drawbacks. It gives an all but absolute guarantee that one's target will be stopped instantly by a short burst. Expanding and staying inside the body, the bullets transfer all of their kinetic energy to the target. And the typical lack of an exit wound means less mess. Indeed, when I'd shot the two men in my bedroom I'd created virtually no splatter to be concerned over. Nonetheless, I would not, given any other option, use the combination ever again.

I was far more lucky than I deserved to be considering my oversight. The first eight rounds fired without incident. The water disrupted the trajectory of the bullets only minimally, and, at such close range, any loss in velocity was irrelevant. Six of the bullets struck their targets. The men were falling back away from the pool as the bullets forced their inertia upon them; my finger was lightening on the trigger, a scant four ounces of pressure less and the gun would cease to fire, but not before the ninth round hit the water that filled the barrel, the flawed hollow-point mushrooming under the pressure, turning the barrel and suppressor to shrapnel.

As I said, far more lucky than I deserved to be.

A five-inch shard found its way into my abdomen. I was able to remove it myself and stitch the wound closed, but only after I had triggered the timer that would ignite the phosphorous charges set at various key structural points around the house, gotten myself into the well-stocked Series III Land Rover in the garage, and driven five miles so as to be out of the immediate area when emergency vehicles began to arrive.

Doing all this while still nude.

In the end it was a week before I had reasserted control over my survival compulsions to the extent that I was able to comfortably seek medical care within my professional sphere. By then the wound had become horribly infected and I ended up losing several feet of intestine. Smaller shards had peppered my left hand and I permanently lost all feeling in the palm and along the inside of the thumb. Had I been firing the weapon while fully submerged, shouldering the stock as would have been proper, the barrel fragment that caused me a year of severe discomfort would have likely lodged in my brain.

It haunts me still, how close I came to a death that would have registered as little more than blackly humorous. If I dwell on it for any length it is enough to draw me into an instinctive posture of attack. A dangerous memory.

It took almost as long to repair the damage I'd done to my fledgling business concern as it did to heal fully. The competitors who had challenged me were no longer an issue, but they did get one of their wishes.

It was a tightly knit world I worked in; some egos, and a few wallets, needed to be flattered after such a display. I did as much, relocated to Los Angeles, and put out a fresh shingle. Perfectly happy to leave town in the end. But when I moved into my new home, I forewent any security measures. They had, I felt, made me more vulnerable than safe. Instilled a false sense of security. A few good locks and a fraudulent sticker declaring that my home was "protected by armed security" were enough for common housebreakers. As for my peers, I could think of no measures that could keep them from going about their business should it come to that again. Short of succumbing to my compulsion and retreating to the woods to live in a cave, there was no level of safety that could put me entirely at ease. Which was as it should be.

My home became a spiderweb of sorts. An elaborately arranged mosaic of architecture, landscaping, and possessions. Strictly organized, my familiarity with the placement and resonance of every element was literally sensuously intimate. I could, without exaggeration, feel when everything was right with my home, as well as when discordance intruded. It took little more than a raccoon crossing the deck and upsetting a planter in my herb garden for me to wake from a sound sleep.

So it was not by sheer surprise that I was taken when I returned home from Culver City very early that morning, but rather by overwhelming force.

Chapter 15.

THERE WAS NO BAG ON THE HEAD THIS TIME. INSTEAD HE waited to be booked at the front desk by a level III reserve officer showing clear early indications that she was sleepless.

A skinny black man in an orange jumpsuit, the slack in his ankle chains looped around the leg of a heavy wood bench bolted to the floor, eye-balled him and grunted loudly.

"I know you? Yeah, I know you. I know you? Yeah, I think I know you."

Turning away from the man, Park faced toward the reserve officer as she spoke on the phone with an IT intern, trying to determine why she'd lost access to the National Crime Information Center, and found himself trying not to focus on her red eyes, stiff neck, and profuse sweat but unable to do otherwise. Reminded by every minute that passed, Rose home alone with the baby. He shifted his gaze and watched Hounds scroll through the contacts list in his phone, deleting names, talking to himself.

"Dead. Who the fuck? Dead. Dead. Don't know and don't care. Dead. Dead. Dead."

The man on the other bench rattled his chain.

"I know you? Yeah, I must know you."

Park turned farther away from the man, tilting his head to look down at Hounds's phone.

Hounds looked up.

"Something you're curious about, asshole? A peek in my little black book, intrigues your ass? Back the fuck off, motherfucker."

Park shifted, still looking at Hounds.

"Where's Kleiner?"

Hounds snapped his phone shut.

"'Where's Kleiner?' That what you asked? 'Where's Kleiner?'"

Park shrugged.

"Just wondering how you split up my watch if he's not here."

Hounds growled, a phlegmy rattle that warned of imminent police brutality.

The man on the other bench was leaning forward, trying to get a better look at Park.

"Know you? Sure. Maybe. I don't know."

Park scratched his head, covering that side of his face, and ignored the growl.

"Or do you just pocket it and Kleiner can go fuck himself?"

Hounds slapped him, a heavy open hand that knocked Park from the bench to the floor, drawing a hushing gesture from the reserve on the phone, and an admiring whistle from the con in the orange jumpsuit.

"No windup. Just bang. Damn."

Park got back on the bench.

Hounds opened his phone again.

"'Where's Kleiner?' Tell you."

He showed Park the screen of his phone, an entry displayed: kleiner, cecil. He pushed a button; the entry blinked twice and disappeared.

"Kleiner's in the land of motherfucker better not ever show his face around me if he knows what's good for him."

He closed the phone.

"In the land of gone over the fence. Partnered five years. Know what I know about Kleiner? Turns out I know what his farts smell like and fuck-all besides."

The reserve hung up her phone.

"What?"

Hounds looked at her.

"Said nothing. Said my fucking partner bugged out."

She shook her head.

"One of those."

Hounds pulled Park to his feet.

"One of those."

He pushed Park against the high front desk.

"Used to play, during Katrina when we heard about those cops walking out on the job, used to play would he or wouldn't he? Looking at other cops, talking about which ones we figured as the assholes who'd bolt when the shit dropped like that. Cops started making for the exits this last year, he talked about what he's gonna do he ever sees one of those fuckers. Now, what, gone. Waited to collect his last pay, and gone."

She pulled her earlobe.

"You got paid?"

Hounds held up a hand.

"The fuck. That's what? We got paid. It's staggered, yeah. Some precinct gets paid here, some other gets paid there. Alternating whenever the fuck they feel like it. First pay in nine weeks. Point is he chickenshitted and. Fuck this. Fuck. Just. This asshole, deal with him."

He watched as the reserve dropped Park's wallet and keys and the thumb drive into a property envelope. He gave her Park's name, and she punched it up on the now-connected computer.

"Why did you pick him up?"

Hounds was fiddling with Park's watch; he looked at her.

"Because I got a tip."

She sealed the envelope, looked at something on her computer monitor, tapped a button a few times, frowned, and rubbed her eyes.

"You picked him up before?"

Hounds buckled the watch on his wrist.

"Yeah. Another tip."

"And he got cut loose because?"

"Fuck do I know? What's it say?"

She tapped the screen.

"Says because you blew Miranda. Someone still cares about Miranda."

He looked at Park.

"Asshole, did we card you last time? Honestly, did we? I can't even fucking remember."