"Sleepless" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huston Charlie)

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PARK HADN’T PLANNED ON MAKING A LIVING THIS WAY. Which was odd, for him to be doing something he hadn’t planned to do. But that was the way of the world now. And he accepted it. Or that’s what he would have said, but it wasn’t true at all.

Park did not accept that this was the way of the world. He knew the true world was hibernating, waiting to come out from its long winter nap. People were waiting to be themselves again. It wasn’t that human nature was base and obscene and brutal, it was only fear and confusion and despair that made them look and act that way.

He felt that deeply.

Felt it even as the plainclothes pushed his face a little harder against the raw heat of his car hood.

“What the fuck is this?”

Park didn’t answer the question. He knew from experience that answering the question would just lead to more grief.

Grief, something he had in ample supply.

So when the plainclothes shoved the Ziploc of Ecstasy in his face, he kept his mouth shut.

“This your prescription, asshole?”

“What about this?”

The partner shook two large brown plastic bottles, one in each hand, like maracas.

“What we have? Ritalin? Xanax? Got ADD issues? Anxiety attacks? Can’t really tell with these unmarked bottles. Pharmacy forget to print the labels, asshole?”

The first plainclothes, the one wearing a black Harley-Davidson T and chrome wraparounds, kicked Park’s feet a little wider apart.

“He’s got an anxiety attack now, motherfucker. Got anxiety about how far he’s gonna have it up his ass once they see him inside.”

The partner tipped his Angels cap.

“Too true, too true, he’s a looker. Sistahs are gonna eat him up.”

Park shifted, trying to peel his face up before it blistered.

The plainclothes grabbed him by the hair and gave his head a shake.

“Fuck do you think you’re doing? Did I or did I not say not to fucking move?”

He nodded at his partner.

“This guy, he thinks he can get up and walk away when he wants. Thinks he’s at liberty to split.”

The partner pulled his head out of the car, flipping through the plastic zipper wallet that contained Park’s registration, insurance card, AAA, and extra fuses. All of it, except the fuses, essentially useless at this point.

DMV had frozen up when the state went broke; it was unlikely there was an insurance company left with the holdings to cover a claim on a dented bumper; and the phones at AAA had been playing the same recorded apology for nearly a year now: “We regret that membership services have been suspended indefinitely.”

Suspended indefinitely.

Thinking about those words, Park had a sudden mental image of the world, its activity and life frozen, paused, suspended indefinitely, waiting while this overlay of the world reeled about, aping the original.

At some point this interlude would expire, and that true world would resume from where it left off, transition seamless, strange interruption erased.

The partner slapped his face with the zippered wallet of useless paper.

“He’s at liberty, at liberty to get his face fucked up if he fucking moves again.”

He tossed the wallet back in the car.

“Nothing else in here.”

The plainclothes yanked on the cuffs that locked Park’s hands behind his back.

“’Kay, fuckstick, let’s go to jail.”

He pulled Park up, frog-walked him to the unmarked, and pushed his head low as he shoved him into the backseat.

“Try not to piss yourself.”

He slammed the door, slid behind the wheel.

“And away we go.”

The partner climbed in on the passenger side.

“Off to see the wizard.”

The Crown Victoria pulled from the curb, leaving behind the small crowd of rubberneckers that had surrounded the scene right after the unmarked had screeched up to where Park was idling at Highland and Fountain and the two cops had jumped out, guns first. They must have hung about to watch the old-fashioned novelty of a drug bust. It may or may not have occurred to any of them that this was a suspiciously frivolous use of law enforcement resources in a time of pandemic, economic collapse, and general social upheaval, but if they did notice, no one chose to speak out.

What would they have said?

Unhand that man.

Go do your job somewhere.

Tell the Fed to go back on the gold standard.

Put more resources into alternative energy sources.

Begin talks with the NAJis.

Find a cure.

Nothing the cops were doing was going to make that big a difference, anyway, so why not stand around and watch the bust?

Still, it was odd.

Except to Park.

The plainclothes started a low machine gun mutter of curses and hit the grille lights and siren.

“Fucking civilians. Fucking bulletins on the fucking TV, radio, fucking Internet, they still gotta get in their fucking cars and come out on the road. Tell them, straight up, the alert level is fucking black. Black! What is that, subtle? We got to change it to alert level everyone fucking dies? Mean, no one saw the news? No one knows the NAJi blew up forty-something people last night? What do they think, it’s a rumor? Government plot to keep them safe at home? Motherfucker!”

He jerked the steering wheel to the left, using the heavy bumper of the Crown Vic to shove a wheezing Focus farther into the left turn lane, making room for himself, gunning to beat the light at Sunset.

“Got to be just about the only functioning street light in the city, and no one pays it any mind. Fucking assholes.”

He jabbed an elbow at his partner.

“So what the fuck, Kleiner?”

Kleiner was spilling pills from one of the brown bottles into his palm.

“Valium.”

“No fucking.”

The plainclothes shot Park his eyes in the rearview.

“Who the fuck is buying Valium? That’s bullshit. That’s your bullshit stash, isn’t it? Mean, no one wants Valium. Where’s your fucking ups?”

Park braced his feet against the back of the front seats as the plain-clothes slammed the brakes to make the sharp right onto Franklin.

“It’s for a sleepless guy.”

“For a sleepless? Don’t give me that shit. Valium does shit for sleepless. All they take is ups.”

He wrenched the wheel, cutting across southbound traffic on Western, carving his own path onto Los Feliz Boulevard, gunning up the hill, past the fire-gutted hulk of the American Film Institute, where Park and Rose had once been invited by a friend to watch Some Like it Hot, Rose’s favorite movie.

They jumped a curb, rode at a cant, half on the sidewalk, and bumped back even, past another logjam of cars.

Kleiner braced his hands against the door and the roof.

“Jesus, Hounds.”

Hounds killed the siren.

“What else we got? Dreamer?”

A new note in Hounds’s voice as he said the word. Same note that might have come into the voice of a drunk playing a scratcher at a gas station, before the state leased the lottery, before the company that bought it went bust. A note of hope and disbelief in the bare second before he confirms that the number that looks like it might be worth a million is indeed his usual two-buck winner. Just like he knew it would turn out to be.

Kleiner dropped the caps back in the bottle.

“No, Demerol.”

The sedan lurched as it was broadsided by a hybrid edging into traffic from North Vermont, and the plainclothes pointed at the driver.

“Motherfucker! Fucking shoot that motherfucker!”

Kleiner ignored the request, opening the baggie.

“Who has Dreamer? No one has real Dreamer. Just bootleg crap.”

Hounds turned to look again at Park.

“And you, what’s this bullshit about a sleepless taking Valium?”

Park looked between his knees.

“This guy in Koreatown. Says they help. He takes them ten at a time. Drinks a bottle of red wine. Says he almost naps.”

Hounds chewed his lip.

“Ten at a time. Does it work?”

Park shrugged.

“He thinks it does. Never heard of it before. But they all have things they try. Know a lady, she chops up melatonin and snorts it. Twenty, thirty grams at a time.”

“Yeah, but the Valium?”

Park shook his head.

“I doubt it.”

“Fuck. Fuck.”

Griffith Park loomed brown on their left.

Park looked at the fire-scorched hillside. Tents were starting to repopulate it now that the wreckage and dead bodies from the original refugee camp had been mostly cleared away and the smoldering ground fires extinguished.

Hounds slapped the dash.

“Hey, what about the Demerol? That help sleepless any?”

“Not that I ever heard of. I sell that to a regular old pill head. Guy used to be a roadie for Tom Petty.”

Park watched a crowd of refugees gathering at a Red Cross truck. Most of them had been burned out of the canyons between the Ventura Freeway and the coast, flushed from the chaparral as far north as Mugu Lagoon.

Looking at the lost and unmoored, his mind drifted.

“The only thing I ever heard of really working other than Dreamer is maybe Pentosan. But the molecule is too big to penetrate the blood-brain barrier. So they have to install a shunt to administer it.”

He remembered the doctor who had described the procedure to him and Rose.

Basically we drill a hole in your skull and drive a bolt through it.

Rose had declined. Rather, Rose had said, No fucking way in hell.

Park shook his head.

“Anyway, all the Pentosan really does is keep you alive. You’re still sleepless, still in pain. Some sleepless have been given massive doses of Quina -crine and recovered. Briefly. Then they get worse than before. Palsies. Liver failure.”

He shrugged again.

“Valium, stuff like that, mostly it’s people grabbing at whatever makes them feel better for an hour or two.”

Hounds was tapping the brakes, slowing as they approached the line of cars before the Los Angeles River checkpoint.

“How you know all that shit?”

Again Park shrugged.

“I sell drugs.”

“Shit.”

Hounds wiped sweat from his forehead.

“My fucking mother-in-law, she’s with us. Sleepless for a couple months now. Bitch is getting bad. Fucking insufferable. Stumbling around all fucking hours. Talking shit all the time. Freaking out the kids. Why’s Grandma calling me Billy, Daddy? Try explaining to a kid, Well, honey, it’s cuz Granny’s thalamus is being eaten away by misfolded proteins and she’s having waking dreams that are more like fucking nightmares and she doesn’t know where the hell she is and she thinks you’re her son who was actually a miscarriage she had in high school when she was fifteen. I could give her ten Valium and a bottle of Zinfandel and she’d chill out; I’d fucking kiss you that worked.”

Park didn’t say anything.

Hounds held out his hand.

“Fuck it, give me the fucking things.”

His partner passed him the bottle of Valium.

“Yeah, you should give it a try. Got nothing to lose.”

Hounds pocketed the pills.

Park looked away, and Hounds caught it in the rearview.

“What the fuck? This a problem for you, asshole?”

Park didn’t say anything, just watched the crowd around the Red Cross truck start to roil as people realized there weren’t enough bags of rice to go around.

Hounds drove.

“Worst can happen to the old lady is she can die.”

He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Fucking real worst thing is that she could live another six months. Jesus. I get it, I go sleepless, I’m eating the bullet. Soon as I know it’s for real, I’m out. My wife’s mom, she gave us the money to put the down on our first place. Found out her daughter was marrying a black guy, she started reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I mean, that was bullshit, but I appreciated the thought. Now? Watching that, watching someone rot in front of you? I thought I could get my wife to go along, I’d put the bullet in her brain. And swear to God, she’d fucking love me for it. Aw, this fucking shit, what now?”

A SWAT in full body armor, visored Kevlar helmet, a belt of 5.56-mm draped over his shoulder feeding the M249 Squad Auto in his arms, waved them to the side.

Hounds stuck his head out the window.

“What the fuck? We got a perp in here.”

The SWAT walked over, shifting the machine gun’s butt to his hip and pulling off his helmet.

“Easy, man, just trying to cut you through the line. Roll up here on the side.”

He pointed at the empty traffic lane, bordered by spools of razor wire, kept clear for military and emergency traffic.

Hounds nodded.

“Thanks, G, my bad with the attitude. Just someone up the chain put something in my captain’s ass and we spent the day tracking down some fucking dealer.”

The SWAT set his helmet on the roof of the car, looked in the back at Park.

“Dreamer?”

Hounds grunted.

“Right, you’d think that, make us roll for this shit when there’s real police work to do. Fucking recreationals is what he’s selling.”

The SWAT ran a hand over the top of his crew cut, a fine spray of sweat getting caught in the halogen glow of the generator-driven spots lighting the checkpoint.

“Any ups? I’m about to fall over here.”

Kleiner showed the remaining bottle and Baggie.

“Demerol and X.”

The SWAT stuck out his hand.

“Hit me with a couple tabs of X. Might keep me from shooting some of these fucking spics.”

Kleiner poured some pills into the outstretched hand.

“What’s the go-down?”

The SWAT shook two of the pills into his mouth and started to chew, tucking the others into a pouch on his tac belt.

“Avenues are burying one of their warlords. Guy started his Impala the other day and it blew up under him. Fucking Cyprus Park psychos. Anyway, funeral cortege is gonna roll at midnight tonight, and they want to run it right through Cyprus Park turf and over to Forest Lawn. Send some kind of I-don’t-know-what-the-fuck message.”

Hounds pointed east.

“Fuck that. Tell them no fucking way. Blockade the street.”

The SWAT nodded.

“Where you out of?”

Hounds took off his sunglasses.

“West Bureau, Hollywood Community. Something to say?”

The SWAT held up a hand.

“Nothing to say, police is police. But we got a treaty on with Avenues right now. They’re doing neighborhood enforcement east of San Fernando. All it really means is we can hit their turf without worrying too much about taking fire. But we come down on them about how they bury their dead? Next thing you know, cop can’t come out from behind the wire without a sniper taking potshots, getting shrapneled by a garbage can IED.”

Hounds put his shades back on.

“Yeah, I get it. Keep some of the scumbags on our side while we deal with the worse scumbags.”

The SWAT picked up his helmet.

“Hey, that’s a nice way of looking at it, but a little optimistic from where I am.”

He put on his helmet and pointed at the pedestrian bridge that crossed Los Feliz Boulevard where it jumped over the bone-dry bed of the Los Angeles River.

“See that?”

They could see it.

Hanging from the bridge, pinned in the light from one of the checkpoint halogens, a corpse, arms bound behind its back, skin blackened by fire, dangling by a chain that snaked down to what was left of its neck.

“That’s a sixteen-year-old cousin of the Cyprus Park warlord. Avenues hung him up there this morning. Checkpoint commander, he said leave it up. Said he ain’t gonna fucking antagonize Avenues as long as this is his post. Says he gives a fuck, just wants to stop watching his officers die. So you tell me.”

He buckled the chin strap of his helmet.

“Who’s dealing with whose scumbags over here? Cuz I don’t fucking know.”

“What do those fucking fashion plates have to do with it?”

Hounds pointed at a small group of men and women dressed in fitted black short-sleeve fatigues and Dragon Skin armor, Masada assault rifles at the ready, clustered around two armored Saab 9-7X SUVs with swooping white door stickers that matched the patches on their shoulders.

The SWAT spit.

“Thousand Storks? They got fuck all to do with it. Waiting here to escort some assholes from city hall on a tour of Glassell Park. Local council-woman wants to show how the situation has been normalized. Fucking showboaters will end up all over the evening news, speeding around, jumping out of their vehicles, securing perimeters and shit. Everyone will think they really deserve those huge security contracts. Tape won’t show the three gunships they got hovering overhead giving cover. Know why they won’t shoot that? Because a hovering helicopter isn’t good TV. Fuck this shit.”

The SWAT snapped his visor down and waved to the side of the road.

“Pull on in here, I’ll move the wire.”

Hounds rolled slowly forward as the SWAT carefully pulled aside one of the corkscrews of wire, giving the cop a nod as they accelerated toward the checkpoint.

“That fucking guy and this duty he’s on, I got one thing to say about that guy.”

He nodded to himself.

“Better him than me, man. Better him than me.”

Park was looking out the right side window, down at the I-5.

Some stretches were still entirely open. This one, directly under a checkpoint, was sealed by barricades of abandoned cars a quarter mile to the north and the south. From what Park heard, the middle sections of the barricades would be rigged with charges to blow the cars out of the way if a military or law enforcement column needed to pass. Through most of the length of the 5, from the Mexican to the Canadian borders, a lane was supposed to be kept open for military traffic, but there were long unpoliced stretches of the interstate where road gangs set tariffs, using the lane to cruise north and south, pulling motorists over and siphoning their gas. Down here that kind of thing wasn’t much of a worry. There was the more basic worry regarding the many choke points where abandoned cars had accumulated like plaque in an artery.

Like the plaques left behind on a sleepless brain, blocking its normal function, leading it to Baroque variations on its usual course of business.

Park thought about all these accretions of debris, within the body and without, driving it to more bizarre extremes. The Crown Vic rolled to a stop at the checkpoint, and he looked up at the hanged man twisting slightly to and fro in a hot shaft of air rising from the generators.

The cops in the front seat showed ID and badges to the cops manning the checkpoint, showed the ID they’d taken off Park, and were waved along with specific instructions about how to approach Silverlake Station.

Coming off the overpass, the bed of the Los Angeles River behind them, they passed the Los Feliz Golf Course, only slightly more brown now than it had been before severe water rationing became mandatory.

The boulevard here was all but empty. The bars and restaurants that had been outposts of East Side gentrification were gated, boarded up, or burned out. A few sleepless walking aimlessly, scratching their heads, rubbing their eyes, talking to themselves. Some Griffith Park refugees had managed to cross the I-5 and the river below the checkpoint and were scavenging in the abandoned storefronts. Not that there was much left. But once the boulevard dipped under the railroad just past Seneca, the blocks started to repopulate.

Heavily armed vatos, favoring AR15s and Tec 9s, were on every street corner. Sandbags lined the edges of rooftops, gun barrels peeking out from behind. Taco trucks and tamale carts were at the curbs, vendors sporting holstered sidearms. Kids played in the street, running in and out of the night traffic, young mothers calling to them in Chicano Spanish. Older men sat at tables on the sidewalks, playing cards or dominoes.

Hounds pulled his Glock from its holster and tucked it between his thighs.

“I find out who fingered us for this fucking detail, I’m gonna get his home address, come back here, and pay one of these vatos twenty bucks to go burn his house down with him and his family inside. I mean, look at this shit. Like another fucking country. What the fuck.”

Kleiner stuck one of Park’s Demerols between his lips.

“Be like this in the Fairfax pretty soon. The Jews, they’re starting to put up sawhorses at the ends of their blocks. Yarmulkes and Uzis. Gonna change the name to Little Israel any day now.”

They drove past a dropped 1980 Chevy Stepside, a man perched on the fender, leather holsters crossed over his chest Pancho Villa style, mad dogging them.

Hounds gritted his teeth.

“Give me the eye. Find your ass west of the Five, break your ass down you look at me like that. Fucking savages over here. Goddamn jungle. Show me now, show me the guy who thinks building a border fence would have been a bad idea, and let me make that asshole run naked through this shit.”

Down San Fernando, just before Treadwell, they came to the concrete anti-car bomb barriers that closed the street around Silverlake Station. Freshly spray-painted across one of the barriers, over the tangle of tags, a new graffito:

The retrofitted minigun on a Stryker infantry fighting vehicle turned and trained its cluster of barrels on the Crown Vic, an amplified voice blaring.

“Welcome to Silverlake Station. Get out of the fucking car with your hands in view and get your fucking face on the pavement.”

Hounds killed the engine.

“Fucking jungle.”

DRIVING DOWN SKID Row had always been a prospect not unlike visiting the set of a George Romero movie. But with the advent of the sleepless prion, that effect had started to envelop the entire city. The sidewalks, malls, movie theaters, tourist attractions, beaches, and restaurants becoming populated with stiff-necked, shuffling sleepless.

Zombie jokes were common. Gallows humor being about all the situation made room for.

Movies themselves had not stopped shooting. Certainly production had been scaled back, and more than one studio had gone under or, more accurately, been consumed whole by somewhat heartier competitors, but even as energy costs spiked, even as all cities, most suburbs, and many rural areas, experienced outbreaks of organized violence, even as the standing army was deployed with obvious permanence to the oil fields in Alaska, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Brazil, even as the draft was reinstated and the gears of the economy audibly snapped their teeth and ground to a squealing halt, even as the drought extended and crops withered, even as the ice caps melted and coastal waters rose, people still liked a good picture.

The fact of millions of sleepless wandering about trying to fill the dark hours meant an expansion of one market, even as it contracted in other areas.

Sleepless provided other new opportunities as well.

I’d been told by a client about an independent horror movie he was helping to finance. A zombie picture. The zombies played almost exclusively by sleepless extras.

A new standard in zombie verisimilitude.

Or so he said.

I said nothing, sometimes finding that even I can be rendered speechless. A not unpleasant sensation, except for those times when it is engendered by the rising of my gorge.

In any case, the traffic jam I found myself caught in was not caused by the shooting of this breakthrough in cinema, but it was indeed the result of a film crew somewhere in the waning afternoon light, ahead of me on Santa Monica.

SOP in traffic jams, and therefore SOP whenever one got in one’s car, was to roll down the windows and turn off the engine. It was no longer a simple matter of common sense, it was also now enforceable by law. Sitting in deadlocked traffic with your engine running, powering your stereo, AC, seatback TV, game console, and recharging your various portable devices, was both unpatriotic and illegal.

Not being a patriot, giving not a damn about getting a ticket, and having more than enough wealth to fill the tank of my resolutely gas-guzzling STS-V, I blasted the air conditioner, listened to a bootleg MP3 of an original recording of Giuseppe di Stefano performing Faust at the Met in 1949, and ran my Toughbook off the AC outlet. I did, out of courtesy, keep the windows up, not wanting the people sweltering around me to grow resentful, but I suspect the low grumble of the V-8 gave me away. Certainly I registered a few nasty looks shot at me through the tinted glass, but those would have concerned me only if the glass, indeed the whole car, were not bulletproof. Had I been so inclined, I could have rammed my way straight through the mass of traffic and come out the other end with little more to worry about than scratched paint and a few dents, but I was surfing the Net, reading up on di Stefano’s biography, so I endured.

Ten percent of the world’s population could not sleep.

They were dying, yes, but it took the average sleepless as much as a year to die after becoming symptomatic. Once the oddly stiff neck, pinprick pupils, and sweat manifested, insomnia shortly followed, gradually worsening, until it was absolute. Months were endured by the sufferers, months of constant wakefulness, plunging in and out of REM-state dreams without ever falling asleep, alert, always, to the terrible wrack of their bodies. There was no cure, death was inevitable, and while one’s self might gradually slip away, one’s awareness of the pain and physical chaos never ceased.

The most sensible thing was to dose on massive quantities of speed.

By the time the sleepless entered the later stages and sleep became an utter impossibility, there was little the average amphetamine could do to the human body that it was not already doing to itself. But it could lend some artificial burst of vigor, it could also sharpen and focus the mind and sometimes stave off the disorienting slippage into dream and memory. Condemned to disquietude and fueled by bennies, one-tenth of the world’s population not only wanted to go to the movies at midnight, they also wanted to surf the Internet.

At first glance it would appear a losing proposition to market to this demographic, seeing as they were set to expire. And that would have been true if the disease were not spreading.

It hadn’t, after all, always been ten percent that were infected. It had, of course, started quite small. Indeed, in its infancy, the sleepless prion had been little more than a boutique disease. A fringe illness known as fatal familial insomnia. The name tells you all you need to know about its quaint beginnings.

Familial.

For virtually all of the 245-odd years of its recorded history, FFI had restricted itself to less than a handful of genetic lines. How and why it widened its scope so terribly and suddenly was, you’ll understand, a subject greatly debated.

To be more precise, the sleepless prion was not the same as the FFI prion. For better or worse, FFI offered a much quicker, and therefore, many would say, more merciful death.

SLP was something else.

SLP.

Sleepless.

Or, to the kids,

A slang variation playing off the chemical designation used in the patent for the only known treatment for the symptoms of SLP.

Commercial name: Dreamer.

Chemical designate: DR33M3R.

A wholly fortuitous alphanumeric, speaking in terms of marketing, that is. So serendipitous, so instantly obvious to even the most slack-jawed account exec, that one could almost be made suspicious.

If one were of a suspicious mind.

I am suspicious of very little, having, in my sixty years, been assured time and again that people are an utter waste and capable of anything when contemplating their own fortune and well-being. With such a worldview, there is little need for suspicion. Easier to simply assume the bastards are screwing everyone else, out for their own good.

Indeed, I was living proof of my own thesis, sitting there in my final generation Cadillac, listening to Gounod, my brow chilled by the cold air coming from the vents, reaping the benefits of a diseased population’s need for distraction as manifested in the continued availability of broadband wireless service in the L.A. basin.

Humanity endures.

Excelsior.

I was so at peace with the world and myself that when the shockingly sinewy vegan in the Mercedes 300 plastered with biodiesel stickers got out of her car and started rapping on my window, screaming at me that I was “killing the planet and the children,” I almost didn’t roll down that window and point at her face the Beretta Tomcat I’d pulled from my ankle holster.

The Tomcat is a stunningly slight weapon, its 2.4-inch barrel virtually useless beyond the length of one’s arm. In appearance, when wielded, it is often mistaken for a toy or tool of some kind. The nubbin of barrel poking from the fist doesn’t appear to be a serious threat at all.

But it feels serious when crammed under your chin. And it sounds serious when the hammer is thumbed back. And in case she was in any doubt, I made certain she knew that both I and the gun were quite serious.

“You are going to die in front of dozens of witnesses, and none of them will do a thing to help you or avenge you. Because they know exactly what you know: The world is ending. The difference being, they have surrendered and are willing to watch it pass away as long as they can do it in relative comfort. You, on the other hand, are squandering what few resources of personal will and energy you have left by trying to stop an avalanche. Give up. Things are as bad as you fear they are. People are as self-serving as you fear they are. The universe does not care. And neither do you. Not really. Go find a warm body you can huddle against for animal comfort. Go get in your car and don’t look at me again. I’m getting bored of talking now. Go away before I get bored of not pulling the trigger and not watching your brains fountain out the top of your head.”

She made a noise deep in her throat, and then she walked away, eyes fixed at a level just above the roofs of the cars, in a gait that could be taken for sleepless but was merely despair.

And I touched a button, a button the engineers at GM, before going bankrupt, had considerately designed so that I did not need to hold it down while the window rolled up, and was sealed again in the perfect cool dimness of what the brochure had described as the car’s cockpit, pressing the thumblike barrel of the Tomcat into the hollow below my jaw.

But even with the perfect lyric accompaniment, this was not the moment.

So, as the traffic began, mystically, to flow, all of it parting around the stalled Mercedes containing the sobbing woman, I slipped the gun back into its moleskin holster, and was carried smoothly on the pitted road, past the location shoot (an artfully reproduced scene of a traffic accident), wondering at the noise she had made, how in perfect dissonance with di Stefano’s diminuendo on the high C in “Salut! Demeure” it had been:

I greet you, home chaste and pure,I greet you, home chaste and pure,Where is manifested the presenceOf a soul, innocent and divine!I greet you, home chaste and pure.

PARK WAS HAVING trouble breathing.

It wasn’t just the fact of the bag over his head, it was the fact that he was far from the first prisoner to have worn it. Stiff with old sweat, crusted at the open end with dry vomit, the black canvas sack stifled more than just air.

And his knees hurt.

He’d already learned not to try to lower his buttocks to his ankles for relief. Having done so once and received a truncheon blow across his shoulder blades.

And he’d lost feeling in his fingers.

That was a concern, but a far greater concern was that he’d started not to feel the zip-strip where it dug into his wrists. Losing circulation to the fingers was one thing, having it cut off from his hands entirely was more disquieting.

The man to his right moaned something in Spanish.

Boots crossed the tile room, echoing, and a nightstick bounced off a skull.

“Shut the fuck up!”

Park felt the man tumble against him and struggled to somehow catch him, leaning his body far backward, trying to support the man’s weight against his torso. The muscles in his thighs, already trembling, gave out, and they both fell to the floor.

“Up! Get the fuck up!”

Someone grabbed a fistful of his hair through the bag and hauled him back up to his knees.

“Stay up! Up, asshole!”

A lazy fist caught him across the ear.

“Fucking shoot your ass now.”

A loud buzz shocked the room, vibrating the rank air, a bolt slammed back into its socket, and a door opened, letting in a draft of fresher air that Park could just feel on his upper arms.

Sneakers squeaked on the tiles. Some papers rustled.

“Adam, three, three, zero, hotel, dash, four, dash, four, zero.”

His arms were jerked as someone tried to get a look at the plastic bracelet fastened around his wrist.

“Yeah, that’s this asshole.”

The truncheon dug into his ribs.

“Up, asshole.”

He tried to unfold his legs and rise but only succeeded in falling over again.

“Fucking.”

The shaft of the truncheon crossed his throat, and he was dragged choking to his feet, stumbling, almost falling again, and caught under the arms.

“I got him.”

“Yeah, well, fucking enjoy. And try not to leave too many marks.”

Blind and lurching, led out into a quiet hallway where the air, only a couple of degrees cooler, felt like a spring breeze. Tripping over his own numb feet, saved again and again from falling, and then leaned against a wall.

“Can you hold yourself up for a second?”

He nodded but didn’t know if it could be seen through the hood.

His voice cracked like his dry lips.

“I think so.”

The hands left him, and he kept his feet.

Keys were jingled, one fitted to a lock, and another door opened.

“In here.”

The hands took him again, not carrying him as much as guiding him this time, feeling coming back into his legs and feet.

“Sit.”

A chair.

“Lean forward.”

He leaned, found a table, and rested his head on it, his eyes sliding shut, almost instantly asleep. And brought back in seconds as the zip-strip was clipped from his wrists and blood rushed into his hands, filling them with needles.

The sack was yanked from his head, and he coughed on the sudden oxygen, blinking his eyes against hard fluorescents.

“Here.”

A wiry man with a tonsure of gray hair, eyes hidden by green-tinted aviator sunglasses, placed a water bottle in front of him.

Park nodded. He tried to pick up the bottle but couldn’t get his hands to close around it.

The man twisted the cap from the bottle and held it to Park’s lips, slowly tilting it upward as Park swallowed.

“Enough?”

Park coughed, and the man lowered the bottle and set it back on the table. He took Park’s hands in his own and started rubbing them.

“When were you picked up?”

Park looked for his watch, forgetting for the moment that he had stashed it before the bust.

“I don’t know. Last night? What time is it?”

The needles in his hands were turning to pins, and he found he could flex them on his own.

The man let go and took a cell from a plastic clip on the belt of his navy blue Dickies.

“Little after midnight.”

“I should call my wife.”

The man put the phone back on his belt.

“Later.”

From the corner of the table he picked up a wrinkled and stained manila envelope, names and numbers scrawled across it in long rows, each crossed out in turn, except for one: HAAS, PARKER, T./A330H-4-40

The man untwisted a frayed brown thread from a round tab, opened the envelope, looked inside, and then dumped the contents onto the table.

“What the hell is this?”

Park looked at the baggies of brown, seedy ditch weed.

“Not mine.”

The man looked at the uncrossed name on the outside of the envelope.

“Says it is.”

“It’s not.”

The man nodded.

“ Lot of trouble to be in for a couple ounces of Mexican brown.”

Park made fists; just the tips of his fingers tingled now. He looked at the door.

“Can we talk?”

The man folded his arms across the Dodgers jersey he wore open over a white tank.

“That’s why we’re here.”

Park flicked one of the bags with his index finger.

“That’s what they planted on me.”

The man pointed at the bag.

“Because this isn’t what I expected to find on you.”

Park nodded.

“And it’s not what I had on me.”

“Hounds and Kleiner took what you had on you?”

“Yes.”

“And planted this?”

“Yes.”

The man folded his arms a little tighter.

“And what did the arresting officers take off you?”

Park looked at the man’s cellphone.

“I should really call my wife. She’ll worry.”

The man shook his head.

“Later. Tell me what they took off you.”

Park drank from the water bottle, draining what was left.

“Demerol. Valium. X.”

The man nodded and unfolded his arms and picked up one of the baggies.

“Because this will get you nowhere.”

Park touched the ear that had been punched while the black sack was over his head.

“I know. And it’s not what I had. It’s not what I’ve been doing.”

The man waved a hand.

“I know what you’ve been doing.”

Park shrugged.

“Well, then?”

The man stared at him, shook his head, and sat in the chair opposite.

“I want to hear it.”

Park looked at the door again.

“We can talk?”

The man took off his sunglasses, revealing bagged eyes, bloodshot, sunk in deeply wrinkled sockets.

“We can talk.”

Park pointed at the sack on the floor.

“Then can you tell me who the hell is running things here, Captain?”

The man with the worried eyes shrugged.

“We are.”

Park didn’t want the duty at first.

It wasn’t what he’d joined for. He’d joined to help. He’d joined to do service. When asked by his friends what the hell he was going to do, he told them he was going to protect and to serve.

None of them laughed, knowing that Parker Thomas Haas did not joke about such things. He had, in fact, no sense of humor at all when it came to matters of justice and ethics.

Morality he found amusing, in the obscure way that only a man with a Ph.D. in philosophy could find such things amusing, but justice and ethics were inflexible measures, applicable to all, and not to be joked about.

Not by him, in any case.

And so he’d wanted to stay in uniform.

Long before he had finished at the academy, he had resolved for himself that justice within the courts did not often live up to the standards it should and must. Long, hot afternoons spent between classes in the downtown courthouses, watching the wheels of justice squeal and creak, had settled that case.

But street justice was another matter.

It could be applied directly. In the face of injustice, a man with a badge on the street could actually do something. What happened after the point of interdiction could be a mystery, but in the moment of arrest, leniency, summons, unexpected tolerance, no-BS takedown, comfort, lecture, or application of force, a cop on the beat could enact true justice.

A matter of setting a standard and applying it always, without exception, to everyone.

Including oneself.

For Park, that was as easy as breathing.

But hard as hell for anyone working with him.

Which was one of the arguments Captain Bartolome had used on him.

“No one likes you.”

Standing in his office, in front of the autographed picture of himself as a boy with a smiling Vin Scully, Bartolome had shrugged.

“Not saying it to make you feel bad, it’s just true.”

Park had looked at the LAPD ball cap in his own hands.

“It doesn’t make me feel bad.”

“I didn’t think it did. Another reason I think you’d be good for this. Helps not to care if people don’t like you.”

Park ran a hand up the back of his neck, felt the sharp horizontal hairline that his barber had carved at the bottom of his buzz cut.

“It’s not that I don’t care in general, Captain. Depends on why they don’t like me.”

Bartolome stuck the tip of his tongue behind his lower lip, then pulled it back, sucking his teeth.

“So it’s just you don’t care that they don’t like you because you’re a pain in the ass to work with? Other reasons people don’t like you might bother you, that it?”

Park stopped playing with his hair.

“I don’t care if they don’t want to work with me, because I know I’m right.”

The captain from narcotics raised both eyebrows.

“Jesus, Haas. No wonder they don’t like you.”

Park brushed something from the leg of his blues.

“May I go now?”

Bartolome pointed at the door.

“Can you leave my office now? Yes.”

Park started to rise.

Bartolome pointed at the window.

“Can you go back out on the streets? No.”

Park, half out of the hard plastic chair, stalled and looked at his superior.

“Sir?”

Bartolome looked at his desk, frowned at the headline on the L.A. Times sports section spread there:

MLB ENDS SEASONPlay Not to Resume Until SLP Pandemic Has Been Contained

He looked at the officer across the desk.

“There will be no more solo acts, Haas. Everyone rides with a partner. Department can’t afford the gas to put enough vehicles on the street. Until we see some more stimulus cash miraculously filling the motor pool with electrics and hybrids, all patrol cars roll with two, three, four officers.”

He rubbed his eyes.

“And no one, absolutely no one, wants to ride with you anymore.”

Park straightened.

“They never have.”

“Uh-huh, but things weren’t this bad before. Things weren’t as dangerous as they’re getting out there. The department wants maximum morale in the face of this shit. Maximum morale means we don’t have to worry about the kind of desertions they got when Katrina hit. Cops losing faith in the system and just disappearing.”

He stopped rubbing his eyes and looked Park up and down.

“Maximum morale also means that officers have each other’s backs. We don’t want guys cutting slack out there because they figure they’d be better off if the pain in the ass riding shotgun maybe took one in a gang incident.”

Park thought about the time about a year before, riding with Del Rico. How they’d rolled on a two-eleven. Del had said the stockroom at the back of the liquor store was clear. But it wasn’t. Turned out the perp wasn’t strapped; what the Korean owner of the store had taken for a gun was a length of pipe. But it had been a gun call, and Del had let Park walk into a supposedly cleared room where a perp was hiding behind some boxes with a pipe that could easily have been a piece. Park walked with a couple bruises on his ribs. The perp took a series of baton spears to his genitals.

Del was always cool to Park’s face, but he’d heard him making cracks with the guys. Talking about how he couldn’t wait till his tour with the monk was over.

Park didn’t think Del Rico knew the perp was back there. But he was a good cop. And he’d said the room was clear. Would he have been more thorough if he hadn’t been thinking about when he’d be done riding with Park?

“You follow me, Haas?”

Park looked up at the captain.

“I could do bike patrols.”

Bartolome rubbed the smooth brown top of his head.

“Bike cops are doubling up, too.”

“Motorcycles. I can do traffic.”

“You ever ride a hog?”

“No.”

Bartolome pointed at a picture on the wall. A younger version of himself, traffic leathers, white and blue helmet, astride a Harley

“Field training for the hogs, that takes weeks and costs the department. Tell you right now, the budget the way it is, the only retraining going on is for SWAT and the antiterrorism academy.”

Park looked at the picture of Bartolome in his bucket-head rig.

SWATs were in love with their guns and the rush of blowing a door down and charging in. Why they were there, who had done what and to whom, didn’t matter in the least to a SWAT. They just wanted a clean shot.

The antiterrorism academy was a one-way ticket to a desk. Paperwork. Intelligence review. Coordinating task forces with the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection.

He looked away from the picture.

“I don’t think I’d be suited to either of those duties, sir.”

“You aren’t being offered either of those duties.”

Bartolome weighed two invisible objects, one in either hand.

“You’re being offered this one thing.”

He showed the heft and gravity of what it was Park was being offered.

“Or you can accept online training for dispatch.”

He displayed the relative lightness of a job relaying radio calls.

Park remembered his father asking him what he thought he could achieve as a police officer that he could not achieve in the family business. The family business having been government service and politics.

He shook his head.

“I simply don’t think I’m suited to the duty, sir.”

Bartolome nodded.

“Why?”

“From a practical perspective, I’m white. And I don’t do street. I mean, I know the jargon, but it never sounds natural. And I’ve never done drugs myself, not even in college. I don’t know where to begin a fake.”

The captain smiled.

“Haas, what the hell? What are you thinking? Are you thinking I’m gonna send you down to Wilmington? Have you dealing meth to the longshoremen working the night shift at the port? Try and mix you in with the vatos down there? Think I’m gonna have you sling rock to the homies in South Central?”

Park found himself thinking about his father again.

“You said ‘undercover,’ sir. You said ‘selling drugs.’”

Bartolome looked at his desk. He cleared away the sports page that had delivered the news that the bullshit going down outside wasn’t going to be relieved any longer this summer by the distraction of a few ball games, and found a sheaf of pages that he’d printed on the back sides of old incident reports and call sheets. As per new department regulations that all paper be double printed before recycling.

“Haas.”

He flipped through the pages, turning them over and back, finding the side he wanted.

“Most cops, being a cop is one of two things to them. One, being a cop is a job. Pay’s not bad. Advancement is available to anyone with some initiative. Benefits are outstanding. No one these days gets the kind of medical police get. Good pension. Lots of perks. And, used to be, plenty of assignments where you don’t have to even wear a gun, let alone worry about pulling it. A high school diploma, couple years at a JC, that or do your bit in the service, and you can get in the academy. It’s a regular guy job. Average cop, his attitude has more in common with a welder than it does, say, a Treasury agent. Second thing is, for some, being a cop means the badge and the baton and the gun. Guys never gonna say it out loud, not sober, but they just plain like telling people what to do. Go to their house for a barbeque, see them talk to their wife and kids same way they talk to some guy they just busted for assault with intent. Guys come in badge-heavy and stay that way.”

He peeled back the corner of one of the sheets of paper in his hand and looked at the one below it.

“Where do you fit in that lineup?”

Park was still thinking about his father, remembering the last time they met, at his mother’s funeral. A month later he had chosen not to go east for his father’s. The old man had said all he wanted to say to Park at his wife’s graveside, though it wasn’t until he got the call from his sister, telling him in stoic Pennsylvania tones that their father had done it with his favorite Weatherby 20-gauge, that he understood what had been meant by the words, No need for you to come home again. Standing over his mother’s coffin, he’d assumed those words were the final dismissal that their entire relationship had been slowly building to. Hanging up after his sister’s call, he knew they’d actually been T Stegland Haas’s last attempt at sheltering his son from the world’s pain.

No need to come back. No need to stand at another parent’s graveside. Go about your business. This is over. You are excused.

He rubbed the face of his watch with his thumb.

“I don’t know where I fit in there, sir.”

Barlolome nodded.

“Let’s take a look. Trust-fund family. Deerfield Academy. Whatever the hell that is. Columbia BA. Stanford Ph.D. Doesn’t sound like someone in need of solid job prospects.”

He folded back another sheet of paper.

“And, well, you’re not shy about use of force, but you’ve got no complaints of merit in here. Good collection of busts, but nothing that smells like you enjoy snapping the bracelets on. Doesn’t read like a guy gets stiff from pushing people around.”

He rolled the paper into a tube and pointed it at Park.

“What this is, this is the account of an educated young white man with a genuine desire to do the right thing and serve his community.”

Park was twisting his wrist back and forth, letting the movement propel the self-winding mechanism inside the watch.

It had been his father’s, a 1970 Omega Seamaster, a gift from his wife, given in turn to Park the same day he was excused from future funerals. His father taking it from his own wrist, handing it to him with these words, It’s a good watch. When they start dropping the bombs in a couple years, it wont be knocked out by an electromagnetic pulse. Even in the apocalypse, someone should know the correct time, Parker.

He twisted his wrist a little more quickly.

“Is that an accusation, sir?”

Bartolome let the papers unroll in his hand, showed them to Park.

“No. It’s just what I need. An educated young white who can talk to other educated young whites. The kind of people who not only have enough money to buy drugs but enough to be able to afford to be discriminating about who they buy them from. People who don’t want to circle MacArthur park in their Mercedes. People who want to call a discreet phone number, place an order, and have it delivered. Like sushi. People like that, Officer Haas.”

He leaned close.

“Those are the only kind of people who can afford to buy Dreamer.”

Park stopped twisting his wrist.

“Sir.”

Bartolome put the roll of papers on his desk.

“Have you seen anyone with it yet? Close up. Someone you know?”

Park touched the watch without looking at it.

“My mother. But I didn’t see her. She died fast.”

“Good.”

Bartolome nodded twice.

“That’s good. One of my brothers got it early. Before the test. When they still thought it was a virus. Quarantine. Nonstop tissue samples. Experimental treatment. On top of the fucking thing itself. His last week, that was when they allowed the first human Dreamer trials. His number got drawn, but he was in the placebo group. I saw a woman who got the real thing. She slept. She dreamed. Woke up, she smiled, talked to her family. She’d been screaming nonstop for five days before that. Covered in lesions. Those went away, too.”

He looked at another picture on the wall: dress blues, the day he got his bars, between his two cop brothers, arms draped over one another’s shoulders.

He looked away.

“Afronzo-New Day Pharm has finally agreed to a federally brokered deal to lease the patent on Dreamer internationally. A-ND will have to settle for profiting just a little less obscenely on this deal than they would have. Man, they can nationalize the banks, car manufacturers, utilities, and telecom, but as long as Big Pharm is still in the black those cocksuckers in Congress will scream ‘free market’ like someone nominated Marx for President.”

He rubbed his nose and grunted.

“Anyway, no telling how long it will take for overseas production to ramp up, and even when it does, if it ever does, demand is going to stay way ahead of supply. But that’s over the borders and across the seas, and I don’t have the energy to give a shit. For the time being America has all there is and everyone wants it and we have to keep people from killing each other for it. To wit, FDA is going to take it off Schedule A and invent something called Schedule Z. Totally regulated. Distributed out of hospital pharmacies only. Administered directly by hospital personnel to admitted patients. One dose at a time. Rare exceptions will be possible for hospice and home care, limited scrips, signed by two doctors. Every box, every bottle has an RFID tag. Small batch produced, the pills in each batch will have three unique identifying features.”

He put both hands on top of his head, fingers knitted.

“Everyone at least knows someone who has someone close who’s had SLP. Pretty soon, everyone’s gonna have someone they know well. Someone they love. Trade in Dreamer, if it hits the street, that’ll cause a war. The stuff that’s already out there, the counterfeits, that low-grade Southeast Asian knockoff junk; we’d like to cut it off, but that’s not our mandate. We’ll be working DR33M3R, the real stuff. A bottle here or there, a few dozen pills, that’s gonna happen. But we can’t have this stuff hitting the street in quantity. Busts of scale, that’s what we’ll be after.”

Park crimped the bill of his cap.

“People have to know distribution is fair and equal and blind to money, class, and color. People can’t start thinking it’s only for the rich and the white.”

Bartolome eyeballed him.

“Haas, to hell with what people think. Eighties crack? You know anything about how bad that was? You don’t. You weren’t here. It was bad. This, Dreamer, this is the highest-profit-margin dope in history. What I’m concerned about is a drug war. If someone figures out how to intercept the distribution chain or manufacture a quality clone, we’ll go from the skirmishes out there straight to trench warfare in days. Some local cartel starts pulling down Dreamer money, they’ll be outfitting their people with Russian and Chinese military ordnance. We’ll need a flyover just to patrol Crenshaw.”

Park nodded.

“What kind of resources are they committing?”

Bartolome blew out his cheeks.

“At the Fed? Got me. LAPD?”

He unlaced his fingers and pointed at himself and then at Park.

“No expense spared.”

He put his hands back on top of his head.

“So, Officer Hass.”

He rocked back in his chair.

“Does this sound like the kind of duty you’re suited for?”

Park stood, fitted his cap onto his head, settled the weight of his weapon on his hip, and nodded.

“Yes, it does, sir.”

Bartolome closed his eyes.

“Welcome to Seven Y, Narcotics Special Units. Go back to Van Nuys and clear your shit out of your locker. Anyone asks, you got transferred to Venice. That’ll make them hate you even more.”

Park stayed where he was.

Bartolome opened one eye.

“Yeah?”

Park scratched the side of his neck.

“One thing.”

“Yeah?”

Park touched his badge.

“I’m not good at lying.”

Bartolome rolled his eye.

“It’ll come to you, Haas.”

Parker nodded, turned to the door.

“Haas.”

He stopped.

“Sir?”

“Hear your wife is pregnant.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A kid, that will make this kind of thing a lot harder.”

Park didn’t say anything.

Bartolome opened his other eye.

“You like that, don’t you?”

Park didn’t say anything.