Charlie Huston: Sleepless

But the door was hanging open.

And Park didn’t have a gun.

A visit like this, he left the gun under the front seat of his Subaru.

He could go get it. But someone inside might need help. The time it took to get to the car and come back, someone inside could be beyond help in that time.

Not that Park was thinking it out or weighing his options. As soon as he saw the open door, his hand reflexively went to the spot on his belt where he’d worn his weapon back when he’d worn a uniform, and then he went in. He may as well have gone for the gun; everyone inside had ample time to spare.

The cage door was open. He looked up at the tiny window near the ceiling and saw no sign of someone crammed behind it in the box. He looked at the floor and saw a series of red smears. Thin strips decorated on one side by a geometric pattern. The edges of half a dozen right footprints, each fainter than the one before, coming from the inner door, leading into the cage, and fading from existence before they could slip outside.

Ignoring the fact that the trail led away, he took his key ring from his pocket, unclipped the Mini Maglite, and palmed it; an inch of the narrow handle jutted from the base of his fist, suitable for sharp blows to the temple, throat, or eyes. But through the door beyond the cage, inside the gold farm itself, the first thing he used it for was to shine a bright beam of light into Hydo’s dead eyes, looking for what he knew he wouldn’t find: an impression of the killer’s face.

He could have looked in any of their eyes. They were all equally dead.

Hydo. The one whose name Park thought was Zhou. Keebler and Tad and Melrose Tom. There was no sign of Oxnard Tom, but he was pretty much part time at this point, or at least that’s what Park had gathered.

Park stood over Hydo’s corpse, thinking.

He needed very much to not be there.

Quickly, and with a minimum of disorder, he needed to erase himself from the place.

He looked at the floor.

The room was always kept dim, minimizing reflection on the monitors as the guys plied their trade, but now the only light came from the one remaining corkscrew of energy-efficient bulb that hadn’t been broken and the one live monitor that had likewise been spared.

The light cast by the monitor flickered in various shades of green and blue: a forest at night, a dead body pulsing with an ectoplasmic glow in the foreground, a dismal zombie lurching about the edge of the trees. A haunted grove that one of the guys had been mining. Killing hordes of zombies, one at a time, harvesting their meager treasure, banking it all in an ever-growing account, waiting for a buyer.

He shined the beam from the Maglite over the floor, picked out a blood-free path, and stepped as close to the center of the room as possible. Standing there, he took his phone from his pocket and began to slowly turn in place, snapping a picture after every few degrees of rotation. Finished, he took a similar series of shots covering the floor and ceiling, all the time wishing he’d bought a phone with a better camera.

Done with his photo map, he knelt next to Hydo, found his BlackBerry, opened the contacts list, and deleted his own number and email before wiping the device and putting it back in the dead man’s pocket.

He looked at the ladder bolted to the wall, leading up to the coffin-space box. There was no one in the box now. No telltale feet sticking out from the opening. No trail of blood running down the wall. Park had been around when Hydo had told one of his guys to change a disk up there in the recorder for the security camera.

His face would be on several of those disks, but it would just be a face. In any case, there were far too many to go through now. His fingerprint biometric would be logged on a hard drive somewhere, but it would only be tagged to a JPEG of his face. Hydo might keep a record of his customers’ names, but he wouldn’t keep his dealer’s name anywhere but his own phone.

Or that’s what Park hoped for.

Park looked at the room: well over a hundred thousand dollars in highly portable equipment, some of it riddled with bullets, but nothing obviously missing. That didn’t have to mean anything. The true wealth of this place wasn’t materially present. Product and payment both were stored elsewhere, hosted on massively secure overseas servers. Immediate connections ran to One Wilshire, a downtown telco hotel where fiber optics wormed up the exterior, in through windows, converging in the service core, all of it connecting to Pacific submarine cables. Pure bandwidth, hardwired to a durable Far East product: miles of underground bomb shelters converted to climate-controlled server farms. Powered by black market reactors, the most reliable ISPs on the planet. Bulwarks, keeping the ephemeral real, if not touchable.

But while the gold and other treasures the guys farmed and fought and campaigned for online were not in this room, nor the digital payments they received in exchange, still a robbery could have taken place.

A password coerced before the trigger was pulled.

Park counted seconds, setting himself a limit of sixty more before he must leave.

With seventeen seconds remaining, he saw it.

Right at the foot of the ladder, a small workstation. A widescreen XPS Notebook cabled to a travel drive, connected to nothing else. Not the hardwired LAN the other machines in the room shared, not a printer or any other peripheral. Just the power cord running from a surge strip screwed to the baseboard next to eight more just like it, and the travel drive.

Park stepped over Hydo’s body, his toe smearing a comma of blood on the sealed cement floor. He stood at the station, looking at the drive, and the red biohazard sticker adhered to its top.

In the months since Beenie had hooked him up with Hydo, and he had become the regular dealer for the farm, he’d seen this station used only once. Sitting in one of the Red Bull-stained Zody chairs, counting white tablets of foxy from his baggie into a Ziploc, he’d nodded when Hydo received a call and told him he had to take it.

Keeping his head down, double counting the savage little pills of 5-methoxy-dijopropyltryptamine, he’d relaxed the muscles around his eyes, letting his peripheral vision widen as his self-defense instructor had taught him, and at the edge of his vision he’d seen Hydo unzip a backpack, take out a small flat box decorated with a single dot of red, and connect it to the sleeping Dell. An action followed by a Bluetooth conversation regarding items such as a Tyrant’s Pointing Hand, a Shadow Amulet, Crusader Gauntlets, someone named Thrad Redav, and a large amount of gold.

Park looked at his watch, self-winding, dependent on no power other than his own movement.

He’d been in the room for over five minutes.

He disconnected the drive’s USB plug, wrapped the short cable around its body, and tucked it into a cargo pocket.

Coming out of the room, he paused to take a picture of one of the partial footprints and then walked out into the final linger of evening sun, leaving the door open behind him, moving without hurry to the WRX parked behind a Dumpster nearly buried in its own trash at the open end of the alley that let onto Aviation.

It wouldn’t do to be seen running from here.

Even now the police investigated murder.

He told himself that was the point of the pictures he’d taken, and the hard drive he’d stolen.

But there was this as well: Beenie had said Hydo knew “the guy.”

And Rose hadn’t slept in over four weeks now. And late that afternoon, before leaving again for work, he’d come into the nursery and found her standing over the crying baby’s crib, index finger against the baby’s lips, making loud, desperate hushing noises, her finger pushing down hard enough to whiten the baby’s new skin.