Charlie Huston - Sleepless

So it was that the lurking I’d engaged in after I had finished with Vinnie’s antagonist was rewarded. The few hours I’d spent outside Denizone waiting for young Afronzo to appear, on the off chance that I might find the police officer somewhere near at hand, had borne surprising fruit. I’d not expected to stumble onto such luck, finding the young policeman at Afronzo’s side. An association that confirmed the police officer was every bit as dirty as I’d suspected.

Their conversation outside the gallery, I assumed, concerned the travel drive. Which, I further assumed, was the source of Afronzo’s dispute with the gold farmer. And, finally, I assumed that he’d simply been too shocked by his own actions to remember to take it with him. The dirty cop, likely a well-used family appendage, had been asked to recover the drive. His photography and other evidence gathering were intended to generate potential blackmail material should he ever find himself in dire straits with members of his own profession.

At the curb across from his home, I contemplated entering and obtaining the drive. Were it hidden, there was no reason to think I would be unable to force the secret of its location from him. Or any other secrets, for that matter. I only deferred this errand to another time because of the possibility that he had already passed the drive to Afronzo Jr. Pillaging the Culver City two-bedroom Craftsman of a dirty cop was a mission I could undertake spontaneously. Raiding the Afronzo compound could require days of planning with no guarantee of survival. If he had given the drive to his client, I would need his assistance recovering it. Better, for the moment, to gather more intelligence.

Several windows showed light. At the back of the house I found two that were open and uncovered, allowing the night air inside for the illusion of cool it might create.

Through the master bedroom window I watched a woman in bed, propped on a mound of pillows, as she clicked away at the laptop on her knees. The pace and rhythm of her keystrokes told me that she wasn’t writing. She was either very rapidly clicking through web pages or gaming. The bit of lower lip she chewed at in concentration suggested gaming. The hollowness and intensity of her eyes, the stiffness in her neck, the twitch of a muscle in her upper thigh, and her careworn beauty, told me she was sleepless.

As I watched, the police officer came out of a walk-in closet, they passed a few words, and he disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

Through the second window I saw a stout-limbed woman teetering on the edge of forty, her hair kept very short for reasons her no-nonsense features suggested were entirely practical. Her eyes were closed; she may or may not have been asleep. On her lap was a baby, fitful, twitching.

These scenes of home life telling me as much as I needed to know about why this particular cop chose to exchange his oath for money. And amply supplying me with the means and weapons with which to attack and bend him, should the need arise, before I did away with him entirely.

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Park sent the text as the sun was rising, shortly before Francine roused herself to go take care of her own children and the baby began crying again. He received a response less than an hour later as he was trying to persuade his always restless daughter to both open wide and remain still for the moment it would take for him to get the nipple of a baby bottle into her mouth. The text he read as he wrangled her on his lap was succinct.

0730

He’d need to leave soon. Leave Rose alone with the baby again.

Until the last few weeks Park wouldn’t have hesitated. Throughout her illness, from the sixth month of the pregnancy when Park had finally convinced her to have the test done if only so they could take it off the list of things to worry over, caring for the baby had always centered Rose. She’ll die without us, she’d said to Park when she first held the small bloody thing against her chest. But she’d acted more as if the baby would die without her. Not that she excluded Park. Not that. She’d always told him that one of the things she most looked forward to about having a baby was seeing how it would take him out of himself.

You live too much in your head, Park. With a baby there’s no thinking, you just do what needs to be done. It’s gonna be great for you. You’re gonna be a great fucking dad, she’d told him more than once. Often enough for him to have it memorized.

So it wasn’t that she didn’t want him involved. It was more that she refused to ask for help. Insisted on doing anything and everything that she possibly could. Not because she didn’t trust Park but because it gave her focus.

The baby would die without them. And as long as she was consumed with that thought and the small daily concerns of keeping a baby alive, she did not think about her own dying. Inevitable. Imminent. Horrible. The baby drew her away from dying, into a realm where the future was not a looming wall but a limitless horizon. For many months taking care of her daughter was Rose’s refuge, a source of great calm and concentration. During those months Park didn’t simply feel comfortable leaving Rose with the baby, he felt relieved to be able to do so. With the baby in her arms, fear, an emotion he’d thought she might well be incapable of feeling, until the moment of diagnosis, left his wife’s eyes.

Now the only time the fear appeared to subside was when she became awash in the past. The increasingly frequent hallucinations that seemed always to stretch back to the years before the baby, and therefore did not allow for her.

Finding his daughter abandoned on the living room floor had not been the worst of it. Park had come home a week earlier and discovered her in the bathtub, squirming and crying in three inches of cooling water in the bus tub they bathed her in. Rose, he found along the side of the house where they kept the bicycles and lawn mower, sneaking a cigarette. God knows where she had found the cigarette, at the bottom of a shoe box in the garage perhaps. She’d reduced her habit to the occasional smoke behind Park’s back shortly after they had met and she’d realized just how much he loathed the damn things. When she stopped using birth control she’d given them up completely, without a second thought.

Caught by Park in the side yard, she’d dropped the butt and begun to whistle casually, looking at the sky as she ground it under her heel, making a joke of being busted by her cop husband, just as she had on a dozen occasions in the past. But it wasn’t the past. The wet and screaming baby girl in Park’s arms had at first confused her and then brought the fear back to her eyes. So horrified at what she had done that she ran into the house and hid in a closet, to be coaxed out only after Park had sat outside the door for an hour, singing the ABCs to their baby over and over again until she calmed, and Rose calmed as well.

More and more often she could be found drifting, either lost in the past or immersed in Chasm Tide. The baby forgotten.

When Park had accepted Bartolome’s assignment, there had been no concerns about schedule; day or night, he did what he needed to do when it needed to be done. Two months later, as Park had just started establishing his own clientele, he had noticed the stiffness in his wife’s neck, the sweats and sharp pupils, and the increasingly restless sleep that she said was due to the pregnancy weight and the onset of an early summer.

Everything is changing, babe. Your work. My work. A house. Baby on the way. Of course I’m not sleeping. And of course my fucking neck is stiff. Let’s slap ten, twelve pounds on your stomach and add a bra size, see how your back feels. Don’t make a big fucking deal out of nothing was what she’d said.