Sleepless (27 page)

He flipped over the badge folder hanging from his neck and displayed a Miranda card with frayed edges.

"But check this out. Call me nostalgic."

He looked at the reserve officer.

"He's someone's snitch. What the fuck do I know what they want? They want it to look like a bust is what they want. What they put there for why the charge doesn't stick, fuck do I care."

She rubbed at a visibly knotted muscle in her neck.

"Looks bad on your record, not following procedure."

Hounds adjusted his sunglasses.

"Hey, part-timer, fuck you."

She stopped rubbing her neck.

"Excuse me?"

"Excuse you what the fuck. I care, my record? Fuck you. I care about I do my job. I'm, you know what, I'm past my fucking twenty, lady; think I give a shit what some fucker wanting to talk to this piece of shit does to my record with his whatever the fuck sleight of hand trying to cover his tracks? I don't. I don't give a fuck. Someone calls on the radio, says, 'Pick the fucker up,' I pick the fucker up."

The reserve rocked back in her chair and wiped sweat from under her chin.

"Hey, asshole."

Hounds smiled at Park.

"Here it comes, man, about to get my comeuppance."

The reserve settled her hand on the butt of her sidearm.

"Comeuppance this, asshole. I'm fucking dying. I haven't slept in like two weeks. I'm running my brain on Diet Coke and NoDoz and chocolate-covered coffee beans. I'm not so far along that my hormones have gone off the rails, so I'm also on the fucking rag. I got no kids, and my husband, a fucking cop who I thought I might understand better if I became a reserve, left me for a younger model three fucking years ago. Now, the job, it's the only thing I got in my life that I give a shit about. And at the end of next week my captain says he's gonna have to put me on unpaid leave because I'm losing it. So I'm gonna go home and die alone."

She leaned forward, hand still resting on her weapon.

"You think I give a fuck if I die in jail, or get popped myself, if before I go I can shoot some big shot fucking dickhead detective like my ex?"

She stared at Hounds.

Hounds took off his sunglasses and looked at the reserve.

"I'm sorry for your troubles."

Her lips thinned, she took her hand from her gun, and she wiped her eyes.

"Yeah, well, we all got something on our minds."

Hounds put his sunglasses back on.

"Yes, we do."

She leaned forward and rested her fingers on the keyboard.

"What charge?"

Hounds picked at the peeling decal on the front of the faded black XXL Metallica T-shirt stretched over his chest.

"Resisting. And threatening a public o."

She clacked a few keys.

"Code sixty-nine and seventy-one it is. You want to do a report?"

"Fuck no. He stays inside for more than a couple days I'll write something up. Pen an epic about him he stays inside."

She nodded.

"I get it. Okay. Bring him around."

Hounds grabbed Park by the elbow and led him over to a steel door.

"Time to go wait for your girlfriend, whoever the hell it is."

The skinny black man on the bench raised an eyebrow.

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

Hounds kicked the bench.

"Asshole, you got something to say?"

The man shook his head.

"Thought I know the man is all."

Hounds took Park by the shoulder and spun him around.

"This asshole?"

"Yeah-hm, that asshole."

"You know him?"

The man dropped his head to the side and squinted.

"I know you?"

Standing there in the West Los Angeles Community Police Station on Butler Avenue, roughly five miles from his home, a station he'd patrolled out of for his first six months on the job, Park looked directly at the man and nodded.

"Yeah, you know me."

The man grinned.

"I thought as much, I did. What was it?"

Park looked at Hounds, looked back at the man.

"I ripped you off once."

The man's eyes got big.

"Bullshit?"

"No, no bullshit. I sold you some dope, went light on the weight."

The man shook his head.

"I bought dope from a white guy?"

He raised his shoulders high and dropped them, sighing.

"See, that right there a reason to stay off the shit. How high a man gotta be to buy off a white guy? Like it a mystery a white guy gonna rip you off?"

"Just business."

"Shit, just business to you. I don't get high, I'm like to go rob or kill someone. An now you in here for resisting, nice white dope dealer like you."

Park closed his eyes for a moment, thinking about a big red button he could push to stop all this, just pause everything around him and allow him to walk away from it, back home.

He opened his eyes.

"We all make mistakes."

The man opened his mouth wide, showing a junkie's rotted teeth, and laughed.

"Ain't that the truth. Ain't it, though. All make mistakes. And then some, I tell you. Yeah, I thought I know you. Wasn't where I thought it was from, but I thought so. All make mistakes. Yeah, we do."

Hounds kicked the bench again, shutting off the skinny black man's laughter.

"That's it, that's where you know him from?"

The man shrugged with his whole body again, his chains jingling.

"He's the expert. He say that was where it was, why I got a reason to disbelieve him?"

Hounds turned to the door.

"Should have known."

The reserve put her finger on a button.

"Did you think they were gonna know each other from when they were in the CIA together?"

She hit the button and a buzzer sounded.

Hounds pulled the door open.

"Just like to know why this asshole gets the treatment. He ain't a regular asshole is all I'm saying. Right, asshole?"

Park didn't say anything.

The skinny black man was laughing again.

"All make mistakes. Yeah-hm, we do. We do."

Holding the door open, Hounds jerked his chin at the man.

"What's laughing boy up for?"

The reserve drank from a can of Diet Coke, drained it.

"Killed his family. His grandma and two sisters he was living with."

She took another can from a desk drawer and opened it.

"They were all sleepless. All three. Killed them, he said, so they wouldn't have to do the suffering."

Hounds stared at the man, kicked the bench again, spoke soft.

"Hey."

The man reached down and fingered a link in his chain, didn't say anything.

Hounds cleared his throat.

"How'd that go down? How'd they take it?"

The man didn't look up.

Park scuffed the floor with his heel, looking at his father's watch on Hounds wrist.

"How do you think it went down? Leave him alone."

Hounds slammed him into the wall next to the door, got his fingers on his neck, and banged his head off the plaster twice.

"Fuck do you know about it? Fuck do you know? Shut the fuck up."

The reserve coughed.

Hounds let go of Park's neck.

Park looked at the man on the bench playing with the chain; the reserve rubbing the knot in her neck; Hounds opening and closing the hand he'd used to grab Park's throat.

"I have a wife. I'm not special. I know about it. I have a wife."

No one looked at anyone else.

Hounds lightly kicked the bench again, but the skinny man just played with his chain.

Hounds looked over at the reserve.

"Why's he out here instead of the cage?"

She spun on her chair.

"Keeping me company."

He moved Park through the open door into the lockbox.

"Let's go."

He waited for the door to swing closed and a second buzzer to sound and the door on the opposite side of the box to open.

Hounds nodded at the cop standing on the other side, unlocked the cuffs from Park's wrists.

"Your part-timer out there is losing it."

The cop pulled a zip-strip from his belt.

"Yeah she is. You want in, we got a pool going; when she's gonna off herself."

Hounds pocketed his cuffs.

"Fucking. You got someone?"

The cop paused.

"What?"

Hounds shook his head.

"No, you don't."

He bumped Park's shoulder with his fist.

"Asshole, he don't know."

The cop looked at them both.

"What the fuck?"

Park looked at Hounds, shrugged.

"I don't know who knows what."

Hounds shook his head.

"But you got a wife."

Park looked at him.

"I have a wife."

The cop started to zip Park's wrists.

"Fuck you guys."

Hounds held up a hand.

"Hang on a fuck."

He looked at the floor.

"Shit."

He unbuckled the watch, stuck it in Park's pocket, and looked at the cop.

"Don't touch the fucking watch."

Park looked at him.

"Sorry about Kleiner."

Hounds settled his sunglasses a little tighter over his eyes.

"The fuck out of here."

And turned and buzzed out the door.

The cop zipped Park's wrists and shoved him down a hall of cells. A din of imprisoned men crammed against the bars, held there by the pressure of the bodies at their backs.

The guard shoving him along, talking to himself.

"I need a watch to know what time it is? Please. It's five minutes before we're gonna stuff one too many in there. Gonna stuff one too many in there and the bars are just gonna pop off and we're gonna be fucked. Five minutes."

Silently, Park agreed.

STANDING ON my deck to enjoy the morning air, I was having my worldview reinforced by a phone call from Vinnie the Fish.

"You punch this guy in, you get Officer Haas, Parker, T Assigned to Venice. Patrol car cop. My guy calls over there to ask someone he knows what they think of Haas, that guy never heard of him, can't find him on the station roster. So he's a cop. Four years on the job. Almost three of those he was in uniform. Then there's some kind of hanky-panky. There's a file, but it's a special assignments file, for someone else's eyes only. Your guy, someone fingered him for undercover somewhere. They transferred him to Venice so no one would know he was going SA, but it's a paper transfer is all, because someone doesn't want anyone to know he's going under."

I pinched the flowering tops from a basil plant.

"What does that suggest?"

"To me it suggests one of two. Number one is that he's gone undercover for IAD. They like new cops, guys who haven't had a chance to get too dirty yet. The fact my guy was able to find his SA file, even if he can't get a look, that doesn't speak well of the effort to hide your cop. And that smells very IAD. Get all sneaky, but do it in a half-assed way."

"And number two?"

"Number two is bagman."

I inhaled deeply, oils from the basil filling the air.

"Ah."

"Yeah, ah. Way the force is now, is it's kind of fragmented. Goes way beyond this division won't share with that one. There are units that are off the map. Gone dark. Fringe law enforcement. They operate without sanction, but also without rebuke. As long as bad guys are being removed from the board, there's a lot of looking the other way. Financing operations like that is tricky. Can't draw too much from the budget. Can't dedicate too many visible resources. So most of the money comes from the bad guys. Asshole A pays to have his operation protected and, just as important, to see that Asshole B is struck from the record. In this number two scenario, your guy is dirty from when he walks through the door, someone spots his potential, and he's recruited. They move him to the margins of the books, and he's your new invisible bagman. Drawing pay, carrying a badge, but all he does is call on assholes and take donations."

I thought about the conversation I'd witnessed a few hours before, outside the gallery.

"Yes, Vincent, that sounds quite plausible."

"Yeah, it's a sad, dirty world."

"My thoughts almost exactly."