"Yes, Sergeant, my investigation is urgent."
The NCO pulled a logbook from one of the side pockets of his fatigues.
"Sir, I'll need an address, sir."
Park gave him a random sequence of numbers and the first Venice Beach street name he thought of.
The sergeant wrote it down, returned the logbook to his pocket, nodded at Park, and leaned against the car, dipping his face close to the open window.
"Sir, I don't suppose you've heard anything, sir."
Park shook his head.
"I was just about to ask you."
He looked over his shoulder at his command and smiled.
"He was gonna ask me what the fuck is going on. Believe that?"
A round of weary soldiers' laughter went through the squad.
He looked back at Park.
"They ain't told us shit. We get what y'all get from the radio. Some bad guys shot a rocket at some of our guys. We hit Little Persia. Little Russia. Things didn't get kerfucked until we hit a Church of the New American Jesus in Hollywood and a couple flash-bangs started a fire and burned the fucking thing down. That was around thirteen hundred hours. We got rolled here by fourteen hundred. Haven't heard shit from the space ants since."
Park nodded.
"Wish I knew something I could tell you, Sergeant."
The sergeant flashed another sequence of fingers, and the Humvee with the gun mount backed up a few yards to clear a space in the middle of the barricade.
"Shit, we ain't worried."
He pointed at the hood of the Subaru, and Park started the engine.
The sergeant looked north, where all the trouble was.
"This is America, motherfuckers. We'll be just fine."
He waved a hand, and Park drove through the opening. West, away from the worst of it.
The few other cars on the boulevard were driven by those whose cares were great enough to take the risk, who were stupid enough not to see the danger as real, brave enough to face it with a desire to find some way to help, or the sleepless. No reason to fear anything, they wandered the sidewalks and drove the roads. Sudden bursts of speed, violent turns, or constant meandering between lanes tipped one off that the car ahead should be given a wide berth.
After turning south onto Oxford, Park found another checkpoint at the Admiralty Way entrance to Marina Del Rey This one manned by an impromptu militia of boat owners and sail buffs who had failed to get their vessels out before the Navy sealed the marina to cut it off from use by smugglers bringing arms in to the NAJi.
Carrying sporting shotguns last used shooting skeet from the decks of their yachts, a few illegally modified assault rifles ostensibly necessary for repelling South Asian pirates but more often fired during drunken barbeques in international waters, two flare pistols, and one spear gun, they told Park to turn around and fuck off.
He showed them his badge.
They asked him who he was there to see.
He told them to get out of the way and stop interfering with police business before he put in a call to the Guard checkpoint on Washington and told them there was a well-armed insurgent group raiding the marina.
They let him pass, and he drove out Bali Way onto one of the relatively low-rent piers, parked, walked to the end of the fourth dock, found Beenie's day cruiser floating in its slip, and crept on board, his Walther PPS in his hands.
Coming down the steps from the deck into the cabin, the boat bobbing gently, he leaned back to duck under the hatch and found his left ankle grabbed from below, his leg pulled from underneath him. Twisting, he fell to the side, his hip, elbow, and shoulder cracking against the steps. The gun slipped partially from his grasp, and he fumbled his finger inside the guard while bringing it up.
Someone waved an arm from beneath the steps.
"What the fuck! What the fuck!"
Park froze, the weapon half-raised, and waited as Beenie emerged.
"What the fuck, Park? I could have killed you, man. Hail the vessel before you come aboard."
Park lowered his gun.
"I thought. Was anyone here?"
Beenie put down the steak knife he was holding.
"No, man. Who's going to be here? No one is going anywhere. No one except Guards and. Oh, Jesus."
Park followed Beenie's eyes down to the badge hanging from his neck.
"Oh, Jesus, Park."
Park got up slowly, stretching his arm and leg, rubbing his hip, determining that nothing was broken.
He holstered his gun.
Beenie dropped onto his bunk and put his face in his hands.
"Fuck, Park. I told you shit."
He looked up.
"I mean, fuck. We were friends."
Park looked around, found Beenie's day pack and held it out to him.
"We need to fill this with anything you can't live without."
* * *
When they drove away from the marina Beenie's favorite trail bike was in the back of Park's car along with his helmet, elbow and knee pads, riding clips, and halogen lamp, along with a solo tent and mummy bag strapped to the frame with loops of bungee cord. The day pack was in Beenie's lap. Inside were his laptop, several accessories, a jumble of thumb drives and cards, tangled chargers, an ounce of British Columbian weed, some clean socks, biking shorts and jerseys, his phone, a copy of On the Road, a set of silk long underwear, and a thick envelope filled with pictures of his wife and a letter he had never been able to read, written by her for him to open after she died.
Park had helped Beenie collect those things, opening drawers and digging under piles of dirty laundry as directed while Beenie changed into hiking pants with zip-off lower legs, an EMS Techwick shirt, and a boot-style pair of mountain biking shoes. He'd recognized the unopened light blue envelope with the frayed edges not because he'd ever seen it before, but because Beenie had described it to him one evening nearly a year before. On the anniversary of her death, uncharacteristically sober, he had told Park about it while they waited in line at Randy's Donuts. He'd told him that he kept trying to lose it. Carelessly flipping it to the back of a drawer, finding it after a few months and stuffing it into his pocket, leaving it there when he tossed the pants into a laundry pile, only to have it fall out before they went into a machine weeks later. On the boat, Park had found it poking from the bottom of a stack of cycling magazines, pulled it free, and, without asking, slid it in with the photos.
In the car, Beenie put the finishing touches on a joint and showed it to Park.
"Any objections?"
Park shook his head; Beenie lit the joint and took a hit.
"Were you going to bust me?"
Park concentrated on the car ahead of him. It zigged across two lanes as if to make a last-second right at Ocean Avenue and then zagged back to the middle, straddling the broken white line, blocking both westbound lanes.
Beenie blew smoke out the open window.
"If whatever's happening hadn't happened, were you going to bust me?"
Park shifted into fourth, swung the Subaru into a gap in the sparse eastbound traffic, and passed the car, stealing a glance at the stiff-necked driver, an old man wearing no shirt, howling like a dog along to a German death metal song that was cracking his speakers.
He pulled back into the westbound lanes.
"Yes. I would have busted you."
Beenie looked at the joint pinched between his fingers and frowned.
"But now?"
Park drove them over the small bridge that crossed the Grand Canal, the water on either side scummed with a thick pelt of algae broken by flotillas of plastic bottles.
"If I bust you, I think someone might kill you."
Beenie brought the joint to his lips, took it away without inhaling, and flicked it out the window.
"What's it about, Park?"
Park edged the car to the curb on Strongs Drive.
The Venice Beach encampment spilled up Washington from the shore. Tents, lean-tos, corrugated shanties, they stretched along the sand from the park at Horizon Avenue to just below Catamaran. A combination of the homeless who had long ago staked their claims to this stretch of oceanfront, canyon country fire evacuees, and refugees from Inglewood and Hawthorne. They had run until they hit the ocean. Those trying to flee farther north hit chain link and barbed wire on the southern edge of Santa Monica and found themselves turned about. No one bothered to go south. Assuming they could skirt the marina, the beach at the foot of the LAX runways was patrolled by Marines. If they somehow made it past either of those hazards, they would surely be machine-gunned by the private security agents at the El Segundo Chevron refinery.
There was still a great deal of tattered tie-dye and faded army surplus to be found in the encampment, but any vagabond spirit of the past was all but dead. Park had never thought of Venice as anything but a grimy sideshow distraction featuring destitute junkies and aging acid heads so thoroughly burned out that you could all but see the broken filaments behind their eyes. There was no romance in the legend of the place as far as he was concerned, but that didn't make its present less desperate.
He switched off the engine and ran his thumb along the teeth of his house key.
"It's about Dreamer."
Beenie dropped his head and shook it.
"Fuck."
He looked at Park.
"I introduced you to Cager."
Park watched a scramble of dusty boys and girls kicking a soccer ball in and out of the darkness between two unbroken street lamps.
"I know."
Beenie opened his door and climbed out.
"Fuck."
Park got out, went to the rear of the car, opened the hatch, and stood aside.
Beenie pulled out his bike.
"Hold this."
Park took the handlebars and held the forks off the ground as Beenie reattached the front wheel he'd removed to fit the bike in the back of the small five-do or.
"Even so, man, Cager is an asshole, but I don't think he would kill me. I mean, you're a cop. You can ruin my life, but what can you do to him?"
Park leaned the bike against the car.
"Someone hit the gold farm yesterday morning."
"Hit it?"
Park looked at the kids again. An argument had broken out over the boundaries of the field.
"They killed Hydo and the guys. Shot them."
Beenie winced.
"Keebler?"
"And Melrose Tom and Tad, and I think his name was Zhou."
"With the scimitar earring?"
"Yeah, him."
Beenie nodded.
"Yeah, that's Zhou. Fuck. Fuck."
He started to cry, stopped himself, started again, punched the roof of the car, and stopped.
"Fuck. Those guys. They. That's just fucking stupid, killing those guys."
Park nodded.
Beenie wiped his eyes.
"Cager?"
Park looked away from the kids.
"What was he doing with Hydo, other than buying artifacts?"
Beenie sat on the bumper and started strapping his clips to his riding boots.
"Park, how the fuck do I know? I didn't even know you were a cop."
He put his feet down, the clips tapping against the asphalt.
"Hydo was like his house dealer for anything in-world."
He strapped on an elbow pad.
"Anything Cager wanted for Chasm, anything he wanted for one of his quests, Hydo got it for him. Only reason I was involved is because Hydo subcontracted some of it to me when Cager's requisition list was too long. I came through, and every now and then Cager would throw me some business."
Park reached in the back of the car, pulled out the other elbow pad and handed it to him.
"Why?"
Beenie strapped it on, grabbed the knee pads.
"Because he likes being in the middle. He likes the hustle. Like meeting you and making that Shabu deal on the fly. He could have that shit delivered whenever he wants, but he likes to play. He likes action."
He sat with a knee pad in either hand, clacking them together.
"Me and Hydo talked about it. The way you talk about someone famous when you meet them. Try to figure out what they're really about. That whole cult of celebrity thing and the way it gets inside your head, man. Like you don't even want to think about these people, but they're so relentlessly shoved in your face, you can't help it. Then you meet someone you only saw before on TV, and you really trip out."
Park was again rubbing his father's watch.
"What did you guys think?"
"Thing about Cager is, we thought, he's all about the game."
He looked up at Park.
"He talks about Chasm different than other people. Lots of players, they talk about it like it's real. Shit, I do sometimes. But he talks about it like it's more than real. Or more important than real. The way he games out here, how he plays people, that's him trying to live the game outside the game. Not like wear a sword or anything, but he loves barter. He loves to put together different teams to take on different tasks. He's got groups of friends for gaming, groups for dancing, groups for getting into trouble. Different teams for different quests. Like those sleepless he puts together in Chasm. And just like in the game, he likes each person in one of his groups to be a specialist. Look at you."