Sleepless. Part 8

I joined her at the window.

"I thought you might."

I looked down at her profile, admiring the smoothness of her complexion, how it showed in youthful contrast to her gray hair, telling the story of a long impa.s.sive life, the dearth of wrinkles speaking of displeasures concealed, laughter abated, furrowed brows smoothed, pursed lips straightened.

To eke a smile from that visage was a great pleasure.

So I bowed my head in thanks.

"And for you, Lady Chizu, what do you need found?"

The smile left, and she looked up at me.

"What is your opinion of these anachronisms?"

She glanced back at the wall of obsolete machines.

"My collection."

A thick wad of purple scar tissue behind my ear throbbed. There was shrapnel still under there, decades old, that sometimes reminded me of its presence when odd atmospheric changes were nigh.

I pursed my lips.

"Some are quite beautiful. Others not. I admire its completeness. The fact that no machine seems weighted with more value than any other. The fact that they are clearly organized with purpose. Whatever the guiding principle may be, it is not readily visible. Not age, country of manufacture, color, design specifications, size, condition. All these qualities are distributed randomly, but not necessarily evenly. There is undeniable balance. And order. I am not drawn to these things, but I understand the need for such a collection. And I admire it."

She looked out at the night.

"The typewriters around which the others are arranged, the singularities that define the collection, are those upon which suicide notes were written. And not another word, after."

I looked again at the devices and saw, in this new light, a subtle emphasis put on certain of them, a seeming willful distancing on the part of the surrounding machines, as if even the inanimate wished to avoid proximity to tragedy and madness.

"Ah."

I nodded.

"Yes."

I turned to her.

"I see."

And bowed my head again, in appreciation of her trust, sharing this detail with me.

Her mutilated hand lifted slightly from her side, dismissing my tribute.

"The provenance of these particular typewriters is unquestionable. Must be so. But they do not, of late, draw me as they have in the past. They seem dulled. And I wonder. An appet.i.te such as I have had for these things."

A muscle in her forearm pulsed several times, causing the heart to beat beneath the dragon's breast.

"What will possibly fill it?"

She looked at me; eyes nearly black showed the same rim of fire as the mountains.

"A portable hard drive. It contains property of mine. It must be returned to me. And no memory of it remain."

I bowed a final time, accepting the contract.

Noticing as I did so, a tension revealed in the sternocleidomastoid and trapezius muscles of her neck, betraying an intense effort. An effort, I had no doubt, that was preventing an opposing tension, one that would produce the unmistakable stiff-neck posture that was the first outward sign of sleeplessness.

I turned away, not wis.h.i.+ng to betray my discovery. And thus I betrayed to myself my own doubt that I could employ the blade concealed upon my person before she realized I had discerned her new weakness and let loose the dragon her tattoo proclaimed was just beneath her skin, waiting, not patiently.

Chapter 5.

7/9/10.

CAPTAIN BARTOLOME HAD me arrested again. Old-timers named Hounds and Kleiner. They took Ecstasy (30 tablets of Belgian Blue), Demerol (15 commercial caps) and Valium (20 commercial) from my stash and replaced them with what appeared to be no more than an ounce of poor quality Mexican marijuana. Captain says the busts are still the safest way for us to talk face-to-face. I say the arrest record tells too much to anyone who takes a look. I keep getting picked up and kicked loose. Doesn't matter that the booking is always at a different precinct with different cops. Anyone who makes an effort looking in the file will put it together. Either I'm a snitch or I'm undercover. Either way I'll be against the wall. Bartolome says not to worry. He says no one but other cops see the jacket. I say that's what I'm worried about. Hounds and Kleiner. What would it take to buy those two? Or maybe not. Just because they're pre-Rampart, that doesn't make them dirty. Or not any dirtier than any narcs cherry-picking from a dealer's stash. But if not them, then some other cop. Some other cop could be paid off to look in my jacket. Bartolome says it won't happen. He says he won't push it too far. I say it's already too far. Too long. I've been doing this too long. Sitting and talking with him, I worried as much about the customers blowing up my phone as I did about letting Rose know I was okay. Bartolome says that dealers always make their customers wait. He says it's like "part of their credo." But he's not out there. The people he wants me dealing to are not used to waiting. That was supposed to be the whole point of me doing this. He says my client list is getting too big, anyway. He says there is no point in keeping them for more than a few weeks. He says we're not trying to bust users, we're trying to find Dreamer. "If they don't connect to Dreamer, stop taking their texts." But I need the good referrals to get the new customers. And some of them, they need what I get for them.

Srivar Dhar left five messages. He's in final stages, the suffering, and only Shabu keeps him from falling into waking REM states. Every time he hits a REM cycle, he hallucinates the Kargil War. He was an officer in the frontal a.s.saults on Pakistani positions that were inaccessible to Bofors howitzers and airpower. Uphill at eighteen thousand feet, near zero Fahrenheit, in darkness. His house is built on a slope. In REMs he charges the slope, falls on his stomach, and starts to crawl, s.h.i.+vering and crying. He says he can feel the cold. Smoking Shabu keeps him fully awake. He's more aware of his body, the pain, but he says it's better than going back to Kargil.

Bartolome wants me to dump him.

I told him that Srivar introduced me to a whole community of western-educated wealthy Kashmiris. The kind who have connections to bootleg South Asian Dreamer. Dumping him before he dies would alienate all of them. He didn't say anything. But he didn't insist on getting rid of Srivar. Other than maybe a few bottles worth of loose pills, the bootlegs are the only Dreamer we've seen dealt in quant.i.ty. Busts of scale, the only kind he's interested in. Maybe the little ones are the only ones we'll get. Maybe the Dreamer distribution chain is just that tight. Maybe no one is dirty enough to try and steal from that supply. No one greedy enough to risk it. I said something like that to Bartolome once. He didn't laugh out loud, but only because he stopped himself. He says, "There's always someone dirty and greedy enough when there's that kind of money to be made. If they aren't dirty and greedy to start with, the money will make them that way." He can't imagine there aren't busts to be had. Big Dreamer busts. I hope he's wrong. But he's probably right. So I have to keep looking.

Something weird when I told him about the murders at the gold farm. He did that thing where he stares at me and knocks on the tabletop while he stares at me. I'm still not sure if it's an intimidation thing or if he's knocking on the table intead of my head. It's completely unlike anything my father would have done but carries some of the same exasperation. My father would have become utterly still. I'd have had to check his pulse to know he was alive. Then he would have asked something like, "Tell me, Parker, do you think that is wise?"

"I've submitted a Personal Qualifications Essay and begun prepping for the LAPD Academy tests."

Followed by the long stillness.

"Tell me, Parker, do you think that is wise?"

Anyway, when Captain Bartolome does the knocking thing, I get the same kind of feeling that I used to get when my father asked that question. A feeling like I want to either explain myself fully so that he'll understand, or knock him down and kick his teeth in. But Bartolome didn't ask if I thought something was "wise," he asked, "What the h.e.l.l were you doing at the gold farm?"

He didn't want me there. Told me a couple weeks back to cut them off my client list.

Said they weren't "upscale" enough to connect to Dreamer. I'd been trying to explain to him that they were not only plenty upscale but that they were natural connectors for all social levels.

I didn't get it at first. At first Beenie was just a customer when I was building my cover dealing medical marijuana, but he was the one who got me to see the potential, and then he got me into the farms.

People don't leave home. Gas is too expensive to go anywhere you don't have to go. And people are getting more and more afraid to go outside, anyway. The servers that support most of the Internet have backup power for emergencies. Even when local Internet service is out or when you lose power, the Internet itself is still there. And so are the games. And these people, they're using the game environments not just for the usual adventures, they're using them socially. Families on opposite coasts can't afford to fly or drive to see one another, and who knows what the phone service might be like, but an online virtual world like Chasm Tide is there. And the more time people spend in-world, the more committed they are. The demand for in-world artifacts, gold, highly advanced characters, is huge. The real-market value on virtual money, possessions, and people keeps going up as the stock market continues to flounder. Now people are trading in Chasm Tide gold futures. Farmers who spend their time hacking up orcs and zombies and collecting their treasure until they have enough to push it onto the market are building almost equal value in real-world currency. Most of it in dollars. Euro and yuan are weaker against the dollar than Chasm gold is at this point.

Where you're from or what you're worth doesn't matter in Chasm. There's no cla.s.s distinction in-world. The level 100 Eldritch Knight is the clerk at your local bodega. The level 2 Stone Druid is your boss. And they have a venue for interaction that wouldn't be there otherwise.

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 h.e.l.l 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 sh.o.r.e leave after f.u.c.king all night at the wh.o.r.ehouse." 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, s.h.i.+fting 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 f.u.c.king day, trying to get a loop that times at exactly three f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king long, I don't know which one is best for the video. And where's my f.u.c.king kiss?"

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

She pulled away.

"What the f.u.c.k, Park?"

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

"You know I don't want that f.u.c.king thing in the apartment. Leave it at the G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 b.u.t.ton, and the skeletons danced for her again.