Charlie Huston - Sleepless

Cager took a phone, identical to the Nokia he had just smashed, from the bag and studied it.

“When did you talk to Hydo?”

“Uh, yesterday?”

Beenie looked at Park.

“Is that when I saw you there?”

Cager’s eyes twitched from the phone to Park and back.

“You know Hydo?”

Park nodded.

“We do business.”

Cager thumbed opened the SIM door on his new phone and slid in the card from the old phone.

“Can you get a Codex for me?”

Beenie coughed.

“That’s not his deal. He does the other kind of business.”

The tiny card door snapped shut.

Cager brought out the comb, raked the part, wiped it on his thigh, and put it in his pocket.

“Shabu?”

Looking at Cager’s green eyes, Park had a moment when he was certain that he must be sleepless. It wasn’t simply that the pupils were pinned tight, it was the sense of a vision that was perceiving a different wavelength of light. The look he saw in Rose’s eyes when she began conversing with the past or with entire realities that had never existed. Then, just as quickly, Park realized his mistake. Cager wasn’t sleepless; he just wasn’t seeing the same world that most people saw. It was a look he recognized from childhood, from occasions when his family was required by the rules of protocol that governed his father’s career to interact with the inhumanly wealthy.

He nodded.

“Yes. Shabu.”

Cager’s eyes took on a new focus as Park and his profession were fitted into his area of experience.

“Do you have it with you?”

“Yes.”

Cager nodded.

“Imelda.”

The bodyguard came to slight attention.

“Yes, boss?”

“Do you have any news for me?”

She unnecessarily touched the knob of a Bluetooth earbud.

“No, boss.”

Cager looked Park down and back up.

“Okay.”

He rose, slinging the bag over his shoulder, lifting the section of velvet rope closest to him.

“Come on.”

Park ducked his head and stepped under the rope, Beenie following.

“Where?”

Cager waved his phone at the tournament room.

“Away from this.”

He turned from them and touched a rivet on a strip of rusted iron trimming the scarlet wainscoting, and a secret panel swung open.

Adrian and several of the other followers rose to take their places in Cager’s wake. He help up a hand.

“Guys, there won’t be any rock stars to meet or have sex with, and I’m not going to be giving anything away. You may as well stay here and watch the hack-n-slash.”

He pointed.

“You stay here too Beenie. I don’t need any more middlemen.”

Park shook his head.

“He’s not a middleman.”

“Then we don’t need him to do business.”

“I want him to come.”

Cager popped open the keyboard on his new phone and started flicking buttons.

“Why?”

Park, tired and hitting the wrong side of the speed, was reminded of his years at Deerfield, the ruthlessness with which class warfare had been in practice there. Not of the purple himself, he had been close enough in terms of background, family wealth, connections, and physical appearance, that he’d been free to circulate with any given clique. And he found after his freshman year that the place where he felt most at ease was at the bottom of the food chain, with the scholarship and legacy students. Once there he found ample opportunities over the next three years to use his gifts when facing down bullies who had marked his friends as easy targets.

It took Rose, laughing hysterically at the thought that he’d never put it together, to point out that there might be some connection between that experience and his love of police work.

Thrown back to the school yard, he lost some of the dealer’s natural subservience in the face of a rich client and slipped character.

“Because he’s my friend.”

Cager tilted his head to the side.

“He’s your friend?”

“Yes.”

Cager looked up from the phone.

“And what is that supposed to make me think about you?”

Park shook his head.

“I don’t care what you think about me.”

Cager smiled.

“Come on. You and your friend go first. That will give Imelda and Magda a better shot at you if you try to abuse my person.”

Park looked down the passageway revealed by the open panel.

“So if there’s no rock stars or freaky sex, why are we going?”

Cager used the comb again, pressed the tines to his chin, whitening the skin in stripes.

“To look at something beautiful.”

The passageway had the feel of a disused maintenance access. Their feet clanked over steel grates laid on rusting train rails. A thin sluice of viscous reddish-brown liquid ran underneath, light came from a row of caged industrial lamps hanging from exposed conduit, all but two of them broken, dim, or flickering; the concrete walls seemed to sweat bile.

Park touched a wall and found it bone-dry and warm, could feel the delicate stipple of artfully layered paints.

Cager nodded.

“I told the designer that I wanted a secret passageway and that it should feel like you were being taken someplace to be tortured.”

He pointed at a rust-mottled institutional door ahead, shifting light showing through a cracked panel of chicken-wire glass.

“This was going to be the insider’s insider celebrity VIP lounge. Secret door, secret passage, establishing an expectation of decadence. Inside it was all luxury, of course. CCTV feeds from the dance floor and bathrooms, private bar and DJ, a majordomo you could send to fetch anyone you saw on the screens and wanted to bring behind the green curtain to see how the wizards of the world live. Ultimately it was just the same silly show that makes the rich and famous feel special. Or less bored for a few minutes. And I wasn’t interested in catering to that crowd for very long.”

He stepped past Park and Beenie and put a hand on the door.

“Money makes people stupid. They don’t have to work as hard as people who don’t have money. That’s why the smart people who do have money mostly use it for one thing.”

Park thought about his father.

“They use it to make sure the people without it don’t get any more.”

Cager tilted his head.

“You’re not stupid. What’s your name?”

“Park.”

Cager adjusted the hang of his shoulder bag.

“You know what I think, Park?”

“No.”

“I think that pretty soon we’re going to find out which is more powerful, knowledge or money. I think the worse things get, the more distance there’s going to be between the smart poor people and the stupid rich people. And that the smart poor people are going to figure out how to live, and the stupid rich people are going to probably do something very dumb. Like pushing a bunch of red buttons and blowing everything up. That’s what I think.”

He combed his hair.

“What do you think?”

Park felt the chill of the frozen world, but the scenario being described was not one he could believe in. His baby did not allow such visions. There was no place for his baby in a world like the one this wealthy alien was describing, so how could it ever come to be?

He pointed at the door.

“I think we better make a deal before money stops having any value.”

Cager took a prison movie key from his bag.

“Not stupid. But you lack imagination. Or maybe just the will to use it.”

He put the key in the lock and gave it a grinding 360-degree turn.

“This may be wasted on you.”

He gave the door a push, and it swung open.

“But you’ll dream about it whether you want to or not.”

He stepped inside, combing again, a series of tiny adjustments to the lay of his hair, imperceptible.