Charlie Huston - Sleepless

“Officer Haas, did you tell anyone?”

Park looked at the fuzzy image, a still from a video, taken in a dark room, blown up, himself sitting at a table, speaking with Cager.

Bartolome took off his sunglasses; his eyes had sunk yet farther into their sockets since Park had last seen them.

“Did you tell anyone?”

Park took the picture. The ink had soaked into the cheap paper and rippled the surface, distorting both their faces.

“I was going to tell you.”

Bartolome used his hand to whisk sweat from his bald crown.

“Tell me what? That you’ve gone out of your fucking mind?”

“No.”

Park rotated the picture so that it faced his captain.

Earlier, while he’d waited on the track, he’d arranged his case into a detailed outline. An order of fact and supporting evidence, bullet-pointed and footnoted with everything that had happened over the previous forty-eight hours and during the vast hours of observation he’d logged working Dreamer. He’d been prepared. He tried to recall that tightly rendered diagram of logic, cause and effect. But it was gone now, blown from the page by exhaustion and worry. Only the principal assumption remained legible in the mental scraps.

He placed his finger on the picture, pointing at Cager.

“It’s him.”

Bartolome took another poor photo print from his papers and showed Park a close-up of Cager.

“I know who it is. Everyone knows who he is. That’s the point.”

“No, it’s not.”

Park was remembering his father again. Remembering conversations where they seemed always to be speaking different languages. Or talking in code, each lacking the key that would unlock the secret of the other’s meaning. Conversations about why he was taking a Ph.D. in philosophy instead of carrying on in political science. About taking the degree at Stanford rather than Harvard. About joining the police force. About having a child. His father had shifted the phone, a crinkle of newspaper, and then read a few headlines from the front page of the Washington Post. Sighed. Having a child, Parker? Now? What possible sense does that make? And Park had stopped trying to explain.

But now he needed to be understood.

He covered the picture of Cager with his hand.

“It’s him. He’s the one doing it.”

Bartolome squinted at him.

“Can you pass a piss test?”

Sweat ran from Park’s hairline, beaded in his eyebrows, stung his eyes, and made him blink.

“What?”

Bartolome stood up.

“Jesus, Haas. Of all the asshole rookie moves, hitting your stash. No one expects you to be a saint on a job like this, but you don’t get high when you’ve requested a sit-down.”

Park rubbed the sweat from his eyes.

“I didn’t. I.”

Bartomome was looking at the AC vent.

“Bullshit.”

“Captain.”

He walked to the vent.

“Goddamned thing.”

Park watched as Bartolome took a butterfly knife from his pocket, twirled it open. He remembered how his father would shift an awkward conversation by suddenly embarking on some small task. After his mother’s funeral, standing in a far corner of the room as close to the door as possible, he’d watched as his sister had asked their father what his plans were for the house. Watched his father rise in midconversation, go to the wall, and stick his finger into a divot that Park had put there nearly twenty years before while playing field hockey indoors. That, he’d said, should have been tended to by now. And he’d gone to the garden shed for a can of spackle and a putty knife.

Bartolome slide the blade of his knife into the slot on the back of one of the screws that held the vent grille in place.

Park remembered following his father from the room, breaking off into the kitchen, calling a car to come pick him up, and leaving a half hour later while Ambassador Haas was still in the library covering one of the few remaining signs that indicated his children had been raised in his home. The patch, his sister told him when they next spoke, had not been painted over. Their father had left it visible. Apparently, she mused, he forgot to finish the job.

Park watched the older man unscrewing the grille.

“He gave me Dreamer.”

Bartolome kept his back turned.

“Captain.”

He didn’t look at Park.

“The real thing, Captain.”

He pocketed the two bottom screws, began turning the one in the grille’s top right corner.

Park rapped two points of his argument into the tabletop with his knuckles.

“Hologram. RFID.”

Bartolome jabbed the knife point into the wall and left it sticking there as he used his fingertips to pry at the edges of the grille.

“Shut up.”

Park rose.

“He used it to conduct a transaction.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The grille swung loose, hanging from the remaining screw in the upper left corner, revealing a cluster of tiny microphones and cameras mounted around the rim of the duct.

Park walked over. He looked at the listening and observation devices. He looked at his captain. He remembered his father’s final act of surrender in the face of a world that had grown wild beyond his ability to keep himself and his family safe. He pointed at the pictures still resting faceup on the table and raised his voice.

“Parsifal K. Afronzo Junior. He gave me Dreamer in exchange for Shabu.”

Bartolome stuck a hand inside the duct and began ripping out the mikes and cameras. He dropped them on the floor, a bristle of wires and antennae, and stomped the pile twice with his Kevlar-soled boot.

He put on his sunglasses, yanked his knife from the wall, scooped the papers from the table, and pulled the door open.

“Come on.”

Park looked at the pile of broken surveillance equipment and started to open his mouth again.

Bartolome came back into the room and grabbed his arm.

“You have a family, Haas. Keep your mouth shut and come on. Those were just the ones we could see.”

He pulled Park down a hall of two-way mirrored glass peering in on interrogation rooms. Park saw a woman sitting alone, picking at a cake of scab on her neck. A small soot-smeared boy being screamed at by two uniformed officers. A man being beaten with a bloodstained telephone book. He pulled to a stop at the last room. Someone with a black bag over his head hung by his wrists from a U-bolt driven into the ceiling. An officer sat in a chair, smoking, occasionally setting the hanging body to swinging with prods from a PR-24 baton.

“Captain.”

Bartolome shoved him down the hall.

“Shut up.”

Bartolome slapped a button next to the door at the end of the hall and looked up at a camera in the corner where the wall and ceiling met.

“Coming out.”

A squelch of feedback, then a crackled voice.

“With what?”

“With my fucking collar.”

“Where’s his cuffs?”

Bartolome kicked the door.

“In your fucking ass if you don’t buzz me out.”

The door buzzed, they walked out into a box, the door swung closed, another buzzer, and they opened the second door, onto a loading dock in the parking garage. A van beeped as it backed up to the dock. Park could see faces smashed against the heavy-gauge wire screens that covered the openings where the windows had been shattered.

Cops waited on the dock with batons, zip-cuffs, and riot helmets. Bartolome pushed through them. One of the cops flipped up her visor, the reserve who had processed Park.

“Where you going with him?”

Bartolome started down the steps, keeping Park in front of him.

“Out of your hair.”

“Where? I got paperwork.”

“What the hell do you care? I just opened a space in your cells.”

The reserve waved at Park.