Sleepless (10 page)

And they all come to gold farmers like Hydo and his guys for what they need.

And sleepless play. More than anyone else, sleepless play. Twenty-four hours a day they can go in-world and not be sick. Total insomnia becomes a virtue.

Rose plays. She always liked certain aspects of gaming. The parts that connected with her work. Like the graphics, the intricacies of world building. Her first real hit, the video she did for Gun Music, was all about the band falling into a game. But now she really plays. She says it feels like she's getting something done. When she can't focus enough to work. Which is pretty much all the time now.

Chasm Tide.

The ideal place to find connections to Dreamer.

But Captain Bartolome sat there and knocked on the tabletop and asked me, "What the hell were you doing at the gold farm?"

He told me to stay off it. Said, "Murder isn't your beat."

I nodded.

And I didn't tell him that Beenie had said Hydo Chang might know the guy.

If I'd had some sleep, I think I would have told him. With a clear head, I would have done what I always do, given a full and complete report. But I'm tired. I can sleep, but I'm not getting any sleep.

Is that ironic? I think it is. I mean, I know it is. I think. Rose could tell me.

Rose.

After my paperwork was processed, Captain Bartolome cuffed me and took me to his unmarked. Dawn again. They had me all night.

He drove me back across the checkpoint. A column of Guard vehicles was forming up on the west side, getting ready to do a show-of-force patrol. Part of the response to the suicide bombing. We drove past the tanks and Humvees, a contingent of Thousand Storks, and neither of us said anything. When we were past all of them, he pulled over and he uncuffed me and drove me to my car.

It was still there. That was no surprise. No one steals cars anymore. But no one had drained the tank. Bartolome waited while I got in, made sure it started up, then stuck his head out his open window and told me again, "It's not your beat. Stay off it."

I should have told him about the hard drive then. But he doesn't want to follow the investigation where it wants to go. He only wants to follow it toward those "busts of scale." I don't know if that's where the gold farm murders lead. And it doesn't matter.

Yes, Dreamer is my beat, but Hydo and his guys were murdered on my beat. And I don't have to explain why that's the way it is to Bartolome.

Or to anyone else. It just is.

I called Rose. She answered after half a ring. I told her I was fine. I told her I'd been caught in traffic all night, that a blackout had taken down the cell towers where I was and I couldn't call. She said she'd waited up all night. And laughed at her joke. The way she laughs when she knows she's the only one who thinks it's funny. I asked about the baby, but I didn't need to. I could hear her crying in the background. Rose said she'd just started, that she'd been quiet for hours. That she'd been "sleeping like an angel."

That's how I knew she was lying. Rose never says things like "sleeping like an angel." Rose says things like "She was out like a drunken sailor on shore leave after fucking all night at the whorehouse." But she hasn't said anything like that in forever. Not since the last time we were sure the baby slept.

I told her I loved her and that I'd be home in a couple hours. And then I drove to Srivar Dhar's and took him one of the Shabu dragons in my stash. To keep him from going back to Kargil. A worse place than this.

PARK AND HIS family lived in a subprime short sale in Culver City. As far as Park was concerned, there was initially little else to say about it. He felt the taint of others' misfortune whenever he pulled into the driveway next to the unwatered brown lawn that matched all the lawns on the street.

He'd resisted buying, but Rose had been pregnant, and had wanted a house, and had fallen in love with the place on first sight. Once he saw Rose, with a swollen belly, smiling as she stood at a kitchen window and looked out at a yard still canopied in trees, there was nothing left to do but engage in some dispirited haggling with the seller. Both of them seeming in a hurry to give in to the other's demands.

Now there was no separating the place from himself. The house where his daughter was born, in their bed, on a covering of secondhand hospital sheets. The house where his wife's illness first manifested, where she slowly began to erode, losing layers of herself, being stripped slowly in front of him to thin strata of fear, anger, and want.

Standing at the back of the car, he watched as two boys from up the street took their skateboards over a ramp they'd made from bricks and a sheet of plywood. Coming off the lip of the ramp, flipping the boards with their feet, landing on hands and knees as often as on wheels. One of them caught him watching and waved. Park waved back, then took his gun, his father's watch, the travel drive, and his drugs from the car and went inside, where he could hear the baby howling.

The baby was on her back in the middle of the living room floor, sprawled on a play mat, limbs flailing at the dangling ornaments and chimes above her. Park let the screen door swing shut. The cooler morning air from the Pacific had already baked away, and the thin foreshadow of a Santa Ana was snaking through the open windows and doors, shifting dust from corner to corner of the hardwood floors.

Park knelt next to the baby, called her name, cooed, and caught her eye. Just a few weeks before, her face would have opened into a wide smile at the sight of him, but that was when she was still sleeping, before the crying started. He called Rose's name, waited, called her again.

He knew it meant nothing, the lack of a response, but still he went through the house with dread.

And found her in the detached garage that they had converted into an office, seated at her workstation, eyes darting back and forth across three linked wide-screen monitors that showed the same looping frames from an old black-and-white cartoon, skeletons dancing on loose bones in a graveyard.

At first he thought she was lost in Chasm Tide again, but then he registered the two-dimensional craft of hand-drawn animation.

"Rose."

At the sound of her name she tilted her face slightly upward, eyes still on the screens.

"Hey, babe. Which one?"

Park came nearer.

"Which one?"

A finger lifted from a wireless mouse.

"Which one do you like better? I've been on this all fucking day, trying to get a loop that times at exactly three fucking seconds to run during that old school scratch Edison's Elephant has in the chorus of their new track. See, the song they're scratching is off a Putney Dandridge seventy-eight called 'The Skeleton in the Closet,' and I thought it'd be cool to use this clip from a Disney Silly Symphony. 'The Skeleton Dance,' yeah? No one will have a fucking clue what they're scratching; it will be like a subliminal clue. But there's no three seconds from the original that works as is. I've been clipping frames but still trying to keep that great cell animation fluidity. So these are the three best I've got. And I've been staring at them so fucking long, I don't know which one is best for the video. And where's my fucking kiss?"

Park bent and kissed her. Both their lips dry and cracked.

She pulled away.

"What the fuck, Park?"

She was staring at the gun he still had cradled in his hand.

"You know I don't want that fucking thing in the apartment. Leave it at the goddamn station, will you."

Park clipped the holstered weapon to his belt at the small of his back, out of sight.

"Rose."

She was staring at the screens again.

"Yeah, what? I'm trying to work, babe."

"The baby's crying."

"What?"

"The baby."

Her finger clicked the mouse, one of the screens froze, she moved a green slide at the bottom of the screen a fraction of a millimeter to the left and released the button, and the skeletons danced for her again.

She looked up at him.

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

Park touched the top of her hair, where they gray was coming in along the center part.

"The baby, Rose; she's crying. She's alone in the house, and she's crying."

When she changed, it was not so much like a veil was lifted but more like a briefly surfaced diver, perilously short on oxygen, was dragged below again after a moment's respite.

Park watched the memory of his wife submerge and her present self come bobbing to the surface.

"The baby. Christ. Fuck. How long? Fuck, Park, how long were you going to let me?"

She was out of her ergonomic editor's chair, leaving it spinning as she went to the door.

"Was she crying when you got home? I mean, is there a reason you didn't just pick her up, for fuck sake?"

"I have my gun."

She stopped at the door.

"Of course you do, I mean, of course you can't pick up your crying daughter because you have your gun in your hands."

"I don't like leaving it anywhere but in the safe. And I don't like holding her when I have it on me."

She turned.

"Then get fucking rid of it. Get rid of the fucking gun and the fucking job that goes with it and come home and be with your daughter before the fucking world blows the fuck up and you don't have her any fucking more, you fucking asshole!"

Park waited, and watched realization come over her, and wished he could do something to keep it at bay, at least stoke her anger further if he could not salve the regrets that always followed it.

She banged her forehead with her fists.

"Shit, shit, babe. I'm. I don't fucking. You know I don't. I just."

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

"I'm so fucking tired."

He came to her, pulled her hands down.

"I know. It's okay. I love you. It doesn't matter."

"It does, it does. It, everything is so hard anyway and I. Fuck."

He shook his head.

"Rose. It doesn't matter. I'm fine. Really."

Her head was turning, pulled to the sound of their crying daughter drifting across the small yard.

"I just. If we could have a little time, the two of us."

He nodded.

"Sure. I'll try and get a night. I'll just do it, get a night. Francine can be here with the baby. We can go stay somewhere for a night."

She was drifting out the door.

"Yeah. That would be. I'm gonna go check on her. She. I love you, babe."

"I love you."

She slipped out, Park standing at the door of the office, listening as she entered the house.

"Hey, kiddo, hey, sweetheart, Mom's here. I know, I know, you're right, yep, I left you alone, I know. I'm sorry, Mom's sorry. My bad. But you know what? Here I am. Yep, that's me. Right here. And I love you. I love you. I love you. Come here, come here, I got you, baby, I got you."

Before leaving the office he glanced at the monitors, seeing no difference at all in the way the skeletons danced.

He crossed the dry yard, back into the house.

In the bedroom where once he and Rose had slept together, before sleep had been taken from her entirely, Park stepped inside the closet, took a key from his pocket, inserted it into the lock of the Patriot Hand-gunner on the shelf above the clothes bar, punched a sequence into the keypad, turned the key, and opened the safe. Inside, a sheaf of birth certificates, passports, a marriage license, and various financial documents that may or may not have had any remaining value, also a .45 Para Warthog PXT that served as backup for the Walther, ammunition and extra clips for both weapons, an ivory broach that had been his mother's, four plastic-wrapped rolls of troy ounce Krugerrands, a four-gig flash drive that stored all his reports on his current assignment, and, in assorted baggies, vials, and bottles, his retail stash.

The drugs he'd taken from the car were in a faded olive drab canvas engineer's field bag that Rose had bought for him at an army-navy store on Telegraph when he'd moved to Berkeley to live with her after his Ph.D. was completed. He'd always complained about the number of pockets available in the average messenger bag or backpack, not nearly enough to organize his pens, pencils, student papers, grade books, cellphone, charger, laptop, extra battery, assorted disks, iPod, headphones, lunch, and miscellaneous. Now the pockets served to organize Ecstasy, ketamine, foxy methoxy, various shades of heroin, crack, crank, and powder cocaine, liquid LSD, squares of dark chocolate hash, gummy buds of medical marijuana, Dexedrine, BZP, Adderall, Ritalin, and two remaining Shabu dragons, carefully wrapped in origami-like complexities of tissue.

He needed to catalogue the stock. It had been more than two full twenty-four-hour cycles, nearly three, since he'd last done so. Much of what he'd sold and acquired was in his notes, and just as he'd been able to in college and at the academy, he relied on his exceptional memory and recall for details that he didn't have a chance to write down or record. But that memory was beginning to fragment.