Sleepless. Part 4

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 d.a.m.n 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 gla.s.s, but those would have concerned me only if the gla.s.s, indeed the whole car, were not bulletproof. Had I been so inclined, I could have rammed my way straight through the ma.s.s 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, pinp.r.i.c.k 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 ma.s.sive quant.i.ties 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sume the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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 pa.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton, a b.u.t.ton 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 c.o.c.kpit, 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 b.u.t.tocks 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 f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.k up!"

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

"Stay up! Up, a.s.shole!"

A lazy fist caught him across the ear.

"f.u.c.king shoot your a.s.s 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 a.s.shole."

The truncheon dug into his ribs.

"Up, a.s.shole."

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

"f.u.c.king."

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, f.u.c.king 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 sungla.s.ses, 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 d.i.c.kies.

"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 h.e.l.l 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.