“I don’t like leaving it anywhere but in the safe. And I don’t like holding her when I have it on me.”
She turned.
“Then get fucking rid of it. Get rid of the fucking gun and the fucking job that goes with it and come home and be with your daughter before the fucking world blows the fuck up and you don’t have her any fucking more, you fucking asshole!”
Park waited, and watched realization come over her, and wished he could do something to keep it at bay, at least stoke her anger further if he could not salve the regrets that always followed it.
She banged her forehead with her fists.
“Shit, shit, babe. I’m. I don’t fucking. You know I don’t. I just.”
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.
“I’m so fucking tired.”
He came to her, pulled her hands down.
“I know. It’s okay. I love you. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does, it does. It, everything is so hard anyway and I. Fuck.”
He shook his head.
“Rose. It doesn’t matter. I’m fine. Really.”
Her head was turning, pulled to the sound of their crying daughter drifting across the small yard.
“I just. If we could have a little time, the two of us.”
He nodded.
“Sure. I’ll try and get a night. I’ll just do it, get a night. Francine can be here with the baby. We can go stay somewhere for a night.”
She was drifting out the door.
“Yeah. That would be. I’m gonna go check on her. She. I love you, babe.”
“I love you.”
She slipped out, Park standing at the door of the office, listening as she entered the house.
“Hey, kiddo, hey, sweetheart, Mom’s here. I know, I know, you’re right, yep, I left you alone, I know. I’m sorry, Mom’s sorry. My bad. But you know what? Here I am. Yep, that’s me. Right here. And I love you. I love you. I love you. Come here, come here, I got you, baby, I got you.”
Before leaving the office he glanced at the monitors, seeing no difference at all in the way the skeletons danced.
He crossed the dry yard, back into the house.
In the bedroom where once he and Rose had slept together, before sleep had been taken from her entirely, Park stepped inside the closet, took a key from his pocket, inserted it into the lock of the Patriot Hand-gunner on the shelf above the clothes bar, punched a sequence into the keypad, turned the key, and opened the safe. Inside, a sheaf of birth certificates, passports, a marriage license, and various financial documents that may or may not have had any remaining value, also a.45 Para Warthog PXT that served as backup for the Walther, ammunition and extra clips for both weapons, an ivory broach that had been his mother’s, four plastic-wrapped rolls of troy ounce Krugerrands, a four-gig flash drive that stored all his reports on his current assignment, and, in assorted baggies, vials, and bottles, his retail stash.
The drugs he’d taken from the car were in a faded olive drab canvas engineer’s field bag that Rose had bought for him at an army-navy store on Telegraph when he’d moved to Berkeley to live with her after his Ph.D. was completed. He’d always complained about the number of pockets available in the average messenger bag or backpack, not nearly enough to organize his pens, pencils, student papers, grade books, cellphone, charger, laptop, extra battery, assorted disks, iPod, headphones, lunch, and miscellaneous. Now the pockets served to organize Ecstasy, ketamine, foxy methoxy, various shades of heroin, crack, crank, and powder cocaine, liquid LSD, squares of dark chocolate hash, gummy buds of medical marijuana, Dexedrine, BZP, Adderall, Ritalin, and two remaining Shabu dragons, carefully wrapped in origami-like complexities of tissue.
He needed to catalogue the stock. It had been more than two full twenty-four-hour cycles, nearly three, since he’d last done so. Much of what he’d sold and acquired was in his notes, and just as he’d been able to in college and at the academy, he relied on his exceptional memory and recall for details that he didn’t have a chance to write down or record. But that memory was beginning to fragment.
No, not beginning to; it was well along in the process.
He needed to keep the record straight. When it came time to make arrests, issue indictments, call witnesses, do justice, he needed a clear record.
Names, dates, amounts. Crimes committed.
Captain Bartolome might not be concerned about anything but Dreamer, but Park didn’t know how to approach his work with tunnel vision.
He needed to make a record. But he was too tired.
And the window of opportunity for sleep had swung past, as if he were fixed to a single point on the earth, waiting for the perfect alignment with the heavens that would allow him to ascend into orbit and, having missed that opening, was now forced to wait until it rotated back again.
He slid the engineer’s bag onto the bottom shelf of the safe. Popped the clip from the Walther and placed it and the gun next to the Warthog. Snagged the flash drive by its lanyard and closed and locked the safe.
Gun hidden. From anyone who might use it. In desperation.
He buried that thought. There were ample options in the house if Rose ever decided she’d had enough. Locking away the guns eliminated only two of them.
Anyway, that was not the best way to protect her. Or the baby. The best way to protect them was to do what he was doing. That buried world, hidden, frozen beneath the madness outside, he had to dig, find it, and hack at the ice until it was free.
So he walked past the living room where Rose was feeding the baby from a bottle, her own milk having dried up after the first few days of sleeplessness, and did not stop, as he used to, to marvel at them. At the unlikelihood of them. Two people, entirely his, to love.
Back in the office, he switched off his wife’s monitors, hiding the skeletons, though he knew they continued to dance invisibly; touched the power button on his own Gateway UC laptop, took the biohazard-stickered travel drive from his cargo pocket, and plugged in the USB cable.
And watched as Hydo’s world appeared on his desktop.
A sickly luminous green mist spreading from the bottom of the screen, erasing Park’s familiar wallpaper collage of baby pics, scattered with icons, that Rose had put together for him, leaving, as it crept upward, a hyper-real boneyard of rust.
An auto wrecker, somewhere in the Inland Empire, rendered by Hydo as a high dynamic range photograph. Digitally composited from various light exposures of the same image, HDR photography had been Hydo Chang’s only passion beyond gaming, drugs, money, and pussy. What he’d referred to as his higher calling.
The wrecking yard on Park’s screen, centered on twin rows of flattened cars stacked ten high under a sky tortured by streaks of fast-running cloud and the violent umbers of a doomsday southern California sunset, was photography as Van Gogh might have dreamed it. Thick lashings of color, layered so deep and in such relief, that it seemed you would feel them in ridges and dimples if you ran your fingertips over the screen.
Park’s eye caught on a freeway sign glimpsed over the high barbed wire fence around the yard. No information regarding the next exit ahead, but a list of HDR forums and photo pools. Park ran his finger across the Gateway’s touchpad and watched the cursor flicker from arrow to pointing hand and back. Now tuned to the detail, he started to see wrinkled license plates, alphanumerics exchanged for some of the usual names: Google, eBay, Firefox, Pornocopeia, YouTube, Facebook, Trash. And some not so usuaclass="underline" modblog, tindersnakes, felonyfights, shineyknifecut, riotclitshave.
Not just extra storage, a place to preserve and protect sensitive and valuable information away from the gold farm’s Internet-linked LAN, the travel drive was a clone of Hydo’s own personal machine. A mirror of the dead man’s desktop mythology.
Park maneuvered the cursor over the screen, watching it douse icons on peeling bumper stickers, grease-smudged handbills on the side of an office shack, rocks, an airplane, a decapitated street lamp. All of them stamped with either a domain or a file, revealing it as the morphing hand passed over. Until it crossed a blackened grate of scaling iron set into a cube of graffitied concrete. The graffiti themselves were surprisingly dead to the cursor’s touch, but the grate prompted the transformation into a hand without revealing what was beyond.