Charlie Huston - Sleepless

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.