"Who are your accomplices?"
It took, you see, only three questions to realize that his script was not pertinent to me. It concerned suspicions he held regarding me but which had little or nothing to do with my true intentions.
"Are you working with the cop?"
A question that did little more than reinforce my growing feeling that I had been misapprehended.
"Where were you going to take Mr. Afronzo Junior?"
Here, a little light appeared at the end of the tunnel.
"What were your demands to be?"
Clarity, when it comes, is literally physical. Tension is released from muscles, shoulders unbunch, jaws unclench, brows unfurrow. The body lightens, becomes, for a moment, less earthbound. A delightful sensation. No wonder many people make of it a lifelong quest.
"Is your employer political or criminal?"
It was then that I might have begun to state my case. I could have told them that I understood that I had been observed in proximity to Mr. Afronzo Junior. That, yes, the behavior I exhibited was suspicious, and yes, I was surveilling someone. Yes, I understood that anyone in Mr. Afronzo Junior's buffer zone who engaged in certain proscribed activities, such as spying, would have their faces extensively photographed, their actions videoed, their utterances parabolically recorded, and the resulting archive submitted for review by teams of experts in tightly sealed rooms where secrets were doled out a syllable at a time to protect against leaks. Yes, frankly, I might have said, this situation is as much of my making as anyone's. I should have realized that the history attached to my features, mannerisms, and voice is precisely the kind that should set every red light on Afronzo security consoles to blazing, and taken greater care when I was observing the young man. Certainly I understood that of the vast range of threats I represented, the greatest was kidnap. And yes, the highest possible threat level should be applied to such as I, and action taken immediately. Nonetheless, I would have been forced to conclude, shooting a missile at a SoCal TOC observation post in order to distract me was perhaps an ill-advised overreaction. For, you see, I could have explained, you have the wrong man.
It was then, after those seven essential questions had been asked in an offhand manner, with no reply expected, that I could have launched that defense. I might even have gone so far as to have sketched the barest outline of my actual goals. But it would have been to cross-purposes. No, I had no intention of kidnapping Mr. Afronzo Junior, but I was seeking to take possession of a hard drive for which he had killed several men. Cut too close to that truth and the result would be the same. It was possible things would reach a point where I would speak the truth about my lack of interest in kidnapping the young man, but what lies I might concoct to cover my actual intentions escaped me for the moment, as I became distracted by the slight click the soldering iron emitted when it had reached the optimal temperature.
Chapter 17.
PARK WAS LOOKING INSIDE THE SAFE AT THE EMPTY BIT OF space where he had left the bottle of DR33M3R.
"It doesn't matter."
He ignored Bartolome's words, going through the remaining contents of the safe. His legal documents, the gold coins, his weapons and spare clips, even his stash, all still there. But the print slides, the thumb drive with his reports, and the DR33M3R itself were gone.
"It doesn't matter, Haas."
Park turned from the safe, walked out of the closet, and looked at his captain.
"Who?"
Bartolome stood at the bedroom window, watching something in the yard.
"DEA. FBI. Fuck, CIA. I don't know. Guys in Washington suits. It doesn't matter."
Park started to strip out of the shirt he'd worn all day.
"It's all that matters."
"They make it, Officer. They make it."
"That's the point."
Bartolome turned from the window.
"Yes, it is, but not how you're thinking about it."
Park was at the dresser, digging in his shirt drawer.
"It doesn't matter how I think about it. It's either what it is or it's not what it is."
"Jesus. Jesus, Park. Will you? Just look over here for a minute. Just. Officer, look at me for a fucking minute right fucking now."
Park looked at Bartolome. Beyond him, through the window screen, he could see Rose in the backyard, cross-legged on the dead lawn, picking dead weeds. Francine sat in the hammock strung between a palm tree and a ficus, the baby in her lap, singing a French lullaby.
Standing in the middle of the disordered living room when he came through the door, Rose had looked at him, looked around the room, said, Some men were here for you, and walked out of the room.
"There were men in my house. Men who are supposed to be working with us came here and stole evidence from my safe."
Bartolme sat on the edge of the bed.
"No wonder no one wanted to work with you. Haas. They didn't steal shit. Patriot II says they can take what they want when they want. And you didn't have anything, anyway."
"I had Dreamer that was given to me by an Afronzo."
Bartolome came off the bed.
"Yes! And what is that? Are you listening to me? They make it. They make the stuff, Haas. Of course he had Dreamer. He probably has it coming out of his ass. He probably shits it. And so what? You think what? That the Afronzos are illegally distributing Dreamer? Dealing their own invention on the black market? Why? So they can make more money?"
Park stood there with a clean T-shirt in his hand, saying nothing.
Bartolome nodded.
"Yeah, right? Motive, Haas. They have no motive at all to deal Dreamer off the market. All it would do is put at risk the most profitable revenue stream since oil. So he had a bottle on him and he traded it for Shabu? What does that get you in court against their lawyers? It gets you litigation for a hundred years."
He stepped closer to Park.
"No. It gets you riots. It gets you blood in the streets. It hits the gossip sites, ET and Gawker, and it gets you a bunch of people dead. Why? Because the kid is using extra bottles of his family product to score drugs? What we drove through coming over here, crackdown because some militia or insurgent or flat-out gangbanger took a shot at that TOC outpost. That won't be shit. People will die by the thousands. For something that just doesn't matter."
Park twisted the shirt between his hands.
"What did they tell you?"
Bartolome crossed his arms.
"They came to me and showed me those pictures of you and Afronzo and asked me What the fuck? I told them I didn't know what the fuck. They said you had something they needed to recover and asked what they could expect from you in the way of cooperation. I told them they could expect you to be a hellacious pain in the ass."
He looked out the window again.
Both men stayed where they were.
Bartolome looked back at Park.
"So they said to get you someplace secure and to make sure you kept your mouth shut. About then, you messaged for a sit-down. I had to deal with the feds, so I sent Hounds."
"Why him?"
Barlolome waved a hand.
"Because he's old school. Because he hates Washington suits. Because I didn't think he could be bought by the feds to take you to the airport to be flown to Gitmo."
Park looked at the drawer full of black T-shirts he'd bought when Rose became ill. He'd thrown out all his old ones. Kept just the blacks. One less decision to be made every day. He stared at them as if one might have greater value than the others.
Then he closed the drawer and put on the shirt already in his hands.
"Now?"
Bartolome looked around the bedroom.
"Now you make the call. Dreamer is still your beat if you want it. Busts of scale. Real busts. Not this conspiracy bullshit. Or you deal with what you got here at home. My job, I've been doing it too long to do anything any other way. Someone tells me what I'm after, I find my guys, send them after it. Make busts. I make busts. You, your wife. You've been a cop a couple years. Time comes, you need to deal with what's here, no one will have anything to say about that. I won't have anything to say about that. Your call."
Park was looking at the bed. Would he see it differently if he slept? Was exhaustion making him paranoid? The modern world record for staying awake, before SLP, was held by Randy Gardner. Eleven days. When sleepless went their first eleven days, they called it pulling a Randy. Park knew he hadn't pulled a Randy, but he couldn't remember being up this long before. If he crawled into bed and switched off the light, what would happen? Would he sleep and find sense again when he woke? Or, once in the dark, would he find sleep had abandoned him as it had his wife?
He thought about Kleiner.
Bartolome was looking out the window again.
Park came to the window and looked out at his wife.
"My deal is to do my job."
Bartolome looked at him, took his sunglasses from his breast pocket, covered his eyes, and walked to the door.
"Get some sleep, Haas. It'll all make more sense when you get some sleep."
Park waited until he heard the captain's Explorer start in the driveway and pull away down the street. Then he walked out to the front of the house and unlocked the hatchback of the Subaru. He shoved the trash, first-aid, and roadside emergency kits out of the way, lifted the carpet flap, and exposed the spare. Reaching inside, he took out Hydo's travel drive and his own red-spine journal. He slammed the hatch closed, went back into the house, and ripped open the property envelope Bartolome had given him on the ride home; the thumb drive he'd copied his reports on spilled out.
He took his father's watch from his back pocket and buckled it around his wrist and checked the time.
He'd sleep later.
A FULL-THICKNESS, or third-degree, burn occurs when the epidermis is lost entirely, with partial damage to the fatty superficial fascia below. Such a burn is characterized by charring of the skin, black necrotic tissue, loss of sweat glands and sense of touch. Exposure to a temperature of roughly 160 degrees Fahrenheit for one second is enough to produce such a burn in an adult.
Lead-based solder requires a temperature between 482 and 572 degrees Fahrenheit. Lead-free solder requires 662 to 752 degrees. There was no way to say for certain which solder the iron was designed for, but it seemed certain that even at its lowest possible setting it was bound to leave a mark.
Something more than a slight touch was likely to bore through the epidermis, dermis, fascia, muscle, and allow the man wielding the tool to burn his initials into my bones if he cared to.
How fortunate that he had yet to touch me with the iron. Which is not to say that it didn't do its job admirably when held a centimeter from the skin. He'd not started with my genitals. Well trained, he left himself something to escalate to. He started instead with the pockets of tender skin behind my knees.
I focused, at first, on the dead animals in the room. The collection of three was the work of a Minnesota artist whose medium was "salvaged roadkill." One of the pieces was composed of two flayed and gutted squirrel carcasses posed as if dancing a jitterbug. One was a cow eye preserved in a jar of Formalin. And one was a very lifelike black cat with the spread wings of a blackbird attached to its shoulders.
Elements in my apocalypse collection, they had occasionally served me as barometers of human nature, measuring the extent to which certain people had been deadened to revulsion by their reactions at seeing them lined up on a shelf in the bookcase. None of the men in the room had given them more than a glance. But they were worthy of a second look. Excellent craft had gone into their making. The jitterbugging squirrels and the cow eye were gallery pieces, the winged cat was a special commission I had waited over a year to receive. I'd requested a large cat, and the artist had had to wait until an appropriate corpse became available. In the end she'd asked if I would accept a calico dyed black. I did. The dimensions were my primary concern; the authenticity of color was never an issue. Its girth anchored the entire bookcase; everything on the shelves referred back to it. The black-winged cat in its book-lined aerie.
It became impossible to continue along that line of thought, however. The smell of burning hair and seared skin had become punctuated by a whiff of rendered fat. My scream shocked me from my reverie, and I became aware again of the questions that were being asked.
"Is your employer political or criminal?"
The question had been asked many times, but, for some reason, it was only at that moment that the humor of it struck me, and as my scream diminished, I laughed.
There was a general pause in the room. The man inventorying my data and records looked up from the laptop he was currently trying to access without my password. The man at the windows took the binoculars from his eyes. The interrogator glanced away from his script. And the man with the soldering iron pulled it from my leg, holding it poised in the air like a quill that he would soon dip again into a well of ink.
They waited out my moment of hysteria, knowing that if they forged on I might well slip over an edge and become insensible for several hours. My composure returned in a matter of moments, but I continued to laugh for a full three minutes. Laughter, they say, is the best medicine. I have never accepted that bit of homespun, but I indulged myself nonetheless.