Charlie Huston - Sleepless

Getting caught with DR33M3R with intent to sell carries mandatory federal time.

Stashing the bottles minimizes the amount of time anyone has them in their possession. Risk reduction. Deals are made for the coordinates, not for the bottles themselves. It’s safe. And like a game at the same time. Treasure hunting. Geo caching.

Busting anyone with this setup requires a snitch on the inside. Even then, you could only get a little. If Cager gave Hydo the franchise on selling the Dreamer, the arrests would stop with him and the guys at the farm, unless one of them talked.

And they were going to talk. Rose. They were killed because they were going to talk. Whoever was using me to make sure there were no leaks about this, they found out that Hydo was going to talk to someone or that he had threatened to talk to someone. Blackmail.

Or he might have been informing. He might have already been busted by the feds himself, may have started turning evidence. Whoever is protecting Cager, someone even higher up (national security?) could have arranged the attack on the gold farm. But they missed the drive. Or they didn’t know about the drive. How could they know about everything else and not know about the drive?

Too much. It’s too much for me. I’m not a detective. I never was. I’m a cop. I’m not supposed to be figuring out this kind of thing. I’m supposed to protect people. But something has happened. Afronzo-New Day has done something. People have been murdered.

No one will listen if I just try to tell them, no matter what evidence I have. I can only make them listen if they have no choice. If it’s too big not to listen. I can only make them listen if I arrest Cager.

It will be too big then. Too much noise. They will have to listen to what I say. And someone will do something about it. Someone will stop what is happening to us. It’s wrong. The world has gone wrong, Rose. Give me a little more time. I can do something to help. I can do something.

OUTSIDE OF THE LAPD self-defense classes, Park had studied at a tiny studio in South Gate. A strip mall storefront below a doughnut shop where old Thai men from the neighborhood hung out to play the lotto and buy strips of scratch tickets. It had been recommended to him by an older officer who had taken a look at his light build and suggested that he might want to heft up and get you to the Hurtin Man.

The Hurtin’ Man had turned out to be a former Latin Kings chapter president who taught a form of martial arts that he described as what we do on the inside when shit goes down. The basic philosophy of the fighting style was concerned with ending any conflict in the swiftest possible manner. The Hurtin’ Man exhorted his students to assess a given situation and place it into one of two categories: Is this a runnin scenario or a hurtin scenario? Indeed, a great deal of his training involved conditioning one to make that judgment as close to instantaneously as possible. So that action, whatever it might be, could be taken at once. This conditioning largely involved a stick that motivated pupils who found themselves frozen for the slightest moment. As far as actual methods of attack, the Hurtin’ Man favored soft targets. Eyes, ears, nose, genitals, kidneys, throat, and solar plexus. All easily identified and struck in moments of extreme stress when adrenaline has a tendency to short-circuit training.

Once a situation was assessed, the course of action taken was never to be reversed unless there was literally no other choice. If one, for instance, ran oneself into a blind alley, one could turn and fight. If one, for another instance, found oneself suddenly outnumbered after beginning an attack on a single opponent, one could turn and run. Otherwise, one pressed the attack, always moving forward, always encroaching on the opponent’s space and freedom of movement, always striking, until the opponent, or oneself, was disabled. Or one ran as fast as one could, as far as one could, and did not stop until it was physically impossible to run any farther, or one was caught.

Park had discovered many things about himself in the studio. Not the least of which was that he didn’t mind being hit all that much. He didn’t enjoy it, but he was more than willing to accept a few blows if it allowed him to deliver at least one blow more than he received. He also discovered that he didn’t mind hitting other people. Again, he didn’t enjoy it, but in the context of training or actual combat, it didn’t bother him at all to find that he had hurt someone.

He was quite good at it, though his talent lay more in the purely martial side of the class than in the speed with which he made his decision to run or attack. Always, it seemed, there was a blip of hesitation before he took action. His attitude toward combat revealing his inner philosopher. Inquiry was not a light issue for Park, even when the answers had been reduced to fight or flight. Once decided, he would run until his lungs burst, or advance relentlessly on his opponent, but either course was often preceded by a sharp blow from the Hurtin’ Man’s stick.

Jumping down from the fence outside the golf course after he’d made the notes in his journal, he was only slightly surprised by the appearance of the men emerging from the shadows of the trees. It wasn’t the fact of armed men waiting for him that was the slight surprise, but the fact that he’d never seen them before. Three tan men in khaki pants and what he took for dark guayabera shirts. He’d have expected Hounds.

Faced with three well-armed men who carried themselves with the same air of prowess as Cager’s bodyguards, Park was able to choose his course of action before his feet had landed on the ground outside the fence. Action so suddenly committed to that he had cut between two of them and had a five-yard head start before they began pursuit.

None of which changed the fact that they were simply faster than he was. In fact, they caught up and overwhelmed him so quickly, he never had a chance to change his mode of action and begin an offensive. Instead he found himself rapidly disarmed, divested of all possessions upon his person, and tumbled into the backseat of an obligatorily black SUV, where he was comfortably ensconced in supple leather, offered a beverage, and driven, sans restraints, to the Afronzo family estate well inside the gates of Bel Air.

MY NATIONAL ID CARD WAS A MARVELOUSLY HACKED BIT OF the counterfeiter’s art that took full advantage of the many loopholes that popped up when Patriot II dictated. We all walk about with cards broadcasting our personal data hither and yon. With the software that had come included in the mind-numbing cost of the card, I could, as often as I liked, log on to my cardholder’s account, input my password, place my card on an RFID read/write/rewriter USBed to my computer, and have my card’s RFID chip updated with all the latest travel clearances. Guaranteed to be current within five hours of any changes to local, state, and federal security. On any given day I would make a point of updating my clearance before leaving the house, thus ensuring that I might pass easily through the most stringent checkpoints and roadblocks. Even in a rapidly evolving security environment such as the one emerging outside, it saved me no end of trouble. Unfortunately, the card did not create an identity from scratch when it was updated; it simply altered one’s clearance for sensitive and hazardous areas. Assuming that anyone was actively looking for the identity radioed from that tiny chip, it would appear on a number of data logs and registries every time it was scanned and cleared, leaving a trail of electronic bread crumbs to be followed wherever I should go.

In normal circumstances it would be an unthinkable breach of personal security to travel with that card after repulsing an attack. But it seemed that I had passed beyond the realm of normal circumstances, even for myself.