Sleepless. Part 32

"You look amused by something, Haas."

Park, straightened the odd smile that had come to his lips.

"Just something that occurred to me, sir."

"Asked if you'd call me Senior, please."

"I think we'll both be more comfortable if I call you sir."

Senior nodded.

"Then I suppose I best call you Officer."

Park nodded as well.

"Yes, that would suit the occasion."

"The occasion being?"

Park sat forward on the couch, his back straight, hands on his knees, not allowing himself to lean into the soft leather, to a.s.sume the conversational demeanor of the older man.

"The occasion being that I have been kidnapped by men that I believe are in your employ. Who I can only a.s.sume did so at your behest. And until I am given some indication otherwise, I a.s.sume I am being held by you against my will."

Senior waved his snifter toward the door.

"The door's unlocked. No one will get in your way if you leave."

He raised the snifter a little higher.

"If you do leave without our first having a talk, I'll have to pursue some inquiries about you and your business with my son, through official channels. That is not a threat, simply what I'll have to do. I'd just as soon have those questions answered here and now, face-to-face. And yes, that is to save my family and my business any awkwardness, as well as to save you any professional setbacks."

Park kept his seat.

Senior lowered his snifter.

"All right, then, let's talk. Safe to a.s.sume that when you mentioned 'serious crimes' you didn't mean my men picking you up and bringing you here. Yes?"

"That is correct."

Senior relaxed deeper into his chair and crossed his legs.

"Let's start there, then. What is it you suspect has been happening with my business?"

Park thought about his family and spoke.

"With or without your knowledge, an organized, high-level operation within Afronzo-New Day is diverting large shipments of DR33M3R and distributing them outside of the venues and restrictions of a Schedule Z drug. This large-scale black market enterprise has accessed inventory at the warehouses. This is not a matter of a few bottles or cases but entire pallets, pods, even shipping containers, leaving the legal supply chain. These shipments are being broken down and parceled for retailers to be sold a bottle at a time. Bottles are cached individually so that retailers are rarely in possession of enough Dreamer at any one time to be accused of intent to distribute. GPS coordinates of the caches are logged and sold to buyers. Many of these buyers are never physically in proximity to the retailers. I believe that transactions are often carried out online in social networking and gaming environments, primarily in Chasm Tide. I believe that it is likely that most of these transactions are completed through the barter of virtual goods that are translated into money and valuables in secondary transactions. Additionally, as the market is controlled by elements within A-ND, they have the wherewithal to break up the large shipments in secret after they have left your warehouses. Thus, the top end of distribution is shielded by its proximity to official Dreamer trade; the midsection, when shipments are broken down, are hidden by the financial and physical resources of the A-ND partic.i.p.ants in the operation; the bottom end is hidden by the cache distribution, virtual s.p.a.ce transactions, and infrequent use of traceable currencies. Seeing as the only potential users of the drug are sleepless, there is little risk that customers will reveal the existence of this black market. They are in desperate need of access to the drug, and most will die within a year of becoming fully symptomatic, the point at which Dreamer can be of use to them. It is an effectively invisible black market. But I have physical evidence of its existence, have personally witnessed a portion of it in action, and have grounds to arrest one of the architects and primary operators of the entire trade in black market DR33M3R."

Park's fingers had begun to dig into his knees.

"Furthermore, I believe, I believe."

Senior leaned slightly forward.

"Are you all right, Officer?"

Park shook his head violently once.

"Furthermore, I believe that the advent of the sleepless prion was somehow, intentionally or accidentally, a by-product of your company's initial development of Dreamer. I believe that your labs experimented with the fatal familial insomnia prion, seeking to find an application for your over-the-counter sleep aid. I believe, intentionally or by accident, that your labs created a new prion, a designed material, and that, intentionally or by accident, that prion escaped the clean zone of your labs and entered and infected the general population. I believe that prion is the prion that has come to be known as SLP I believe that A-ND's ability to develop and bring to market a drug such as Dreamer was only possible because A-ND is the creator of SLP. I believe that A-ND, realizing that the market for their drug will eventually die out and that they will have no engine for the profits currently generated by Dreamer, have created a black market to circ.u.mvent limits placed on trade when Dreamer was designated Schedule Z. I believe. I believe."

Senior rose, walked to the bar, poured water from a cut-gla.s.s decanter into a matching gla.s.s, carried it to Park, and pressed it into his hand.

"I think you should take a moment to catch your breath, Officer. You've been carrying a heavy load. A load like that, you only realize how heavy it is when you set it down."

Staring at the dark wainscoted wall behind the bar, Park's mouth hung just slightly open, as if he were trying to weigh the implications of bad news that had just now been brought to him.

"My wife is dying."

Senior patted his shoulder and walked back to his chair.

"Yes, I know."

He sat.

"Mine died several years ago. My second wife. I was divorced from my first. Although she is dead as well. My second wife, it's odd to call her that, I only ever think of her as my wife. You have a baby."

Park spoke to the gla.s.s he held in his lap.

"A daughter."

"I'd been told about your wife, but the baby, is she?"

"I don't know. My wife doesn't want her tested."

"Yes, I can understand that. It was cancer that killed my wife. Lung cancer. We both smoked far beyond the point of reckless idiocy. To this day I refuse to have a lung X-ray. Afraid to know what may be waiting for me. Although at my age it hardly seems to matter. Something will finish me soon enough. Does your daughter sleep?"

Park took a sip of the water.

"She did, at first. But the last few weeks, it's hard to say."

"How's that?"

"She cries all the time. Or it seems that way. But I'm not home very much. And my wife, she. I'm not sure how clearly she remembers if the baby is sleeping when I'm not there. The woman who helps us, she says the baby sleeps, but it never looks like sleep when I see it. Her eyes are usually open. And it never lasts."

Senior looked at the ceiling.

"What I remember from having babies around, and I'll be the first to admit I wasn't at home often when I had babies, but what I remember is that they can be that way. Cry nonstop, go days without sleep, crying the whole time. Hours and hours of crying. Could be your daughter is just colicky."

Park didn't say anything.

Senior looked down from the ceiling.

"What's her name?"

Park ran a thumb up and down the facets on the side of his gla.s.s.

"Omaha."

"The h.e.l.l you say."

"My wife said, 'No one will f.u.c.k with a girl named Omaha.'"

Senior smiled.

"She had a point there."

He dropped his smile.

"You should have her tested."

Park nodded, looked for somewhere to put down his water gla.s.s, placed it on a bookshelf behind his shoulder, and faced the other man.

"Your son sold me Dreamer on two separate occasions. I'm going to arrest him. Is he at home?"

Senior c.o.c.ked his head to the side.

"You're going to arrest my son because he?"

"Charges of possession and sale of a restricted substance. But I have evidence that could lead to racketeering charges. Money laundering. Tax evasion. And charges relating to the murders of a man named Hydo Chang and several of his a.s.sociates."

"You think my son killed someone."

"I believe that several young men found shot in gangland style were his Dreamer retailers and that they were killed over matters relating to the sale of Dreamer. I believe that it is likely Parsifal K. Afronzo Junior was involved in those killings."

Senior drew his brows together.

"Then it is my son who you suspect as the mastermind behind the Dreamer black market?"

"I think it is possible. Although I think you are a more likely suspect."

Senior pulled his brows apart.

"You are direct. You are direct. Well."

He placed his hand on the snifter he'd set down earlier.

"In the interest of directness, I'd like to say a few words that might shed considerable light on these suspicions of yours. If you don't mind?"

Park looked at the door. He was aware that a performance was taking place. He was aware that he was being manipulated. He knew that if he let it draw to its conclusion, he might never leave the cottage. He'd been trying to apply the principles he'd learned from the Hurtin' Man. That there was danger in the room was not at all in doubt, but whether that danger was best dealt with by attacking its source or by running from it was unclear. And probably beside the point. Park had little hope that either option would be successful. And it didn't matter. Because what Park was most aware of was the slippage of time. Dawn would be coming. He needed to be home.

But he also needed to stay to the end of the show so he could know what happened.

He lifted a hand from his knee and turned it palm up.

"I would like to hear anything you have to say that might clarify this matter."

Senior picked up the snifter, swirled the contents, and swallowed them.

"Good. Good."

He kept hold of the empty gla.s.s.

"To start, you are correct; there is a black market trade in Dreamer. You are also correct that A-ND is involved in that trade. But frankly, that is the price of doing business today. Distribution, Officer, is not an easy matter. Beyond the fuel costs, security contractors to escort the shipments, cross-state inspections, Homeland Security checkpoints, and occasional corrupt officials, there are also the Teamsters. In order to bring our product to market in a timely and efficient manner, we often find we must circ.u.mvent criminal and bureaucratic roadblocks. h.e.l.l, our trucks sometimes have to deal with physical roadblocks. We have to pay people off. A lot of people. A great deal of money. Usually cash. Not only do we have to get this money from somewhere, but we have to hide it. What we're doing, the payments we're making, it doesn't matter that we're greasing people so we can get the Dreamer out where it will do some good; the payments, most of them, are far from legal. We're bribing officials at every level of government. We have no choice. It's mostly just a collection of fiefdoms at this point. City, state, federal, interdepartmental. Dealing with the road gangs is easier. And there's no telling who might get it in their head to blackmail us for more or, G.o.d forbid, look to prosecute us if they found traces of what we're doing. So we need invisible money. Dreamer itself is better than cash money. We could just toss a few cases off each truck whenever we hit a snag. But then what? Chaos is what. Dozens of free agents trying to sell off little stashes of Dreamer. It would be a mess. And the trail would lead directly to A-ND. Also, we saw that a Dreamer black market was inevitable. Too much demand and not enough supply. We saw that inevitability, matched it with our need for cash, and chose to create and control a black market ourselves. Shipments move through the supply chain to the local markets. Every time a container of Dreamer is randomly scanned, the RFID chips are right where the manifest says they should be. And that's because they are where they should be. We don't break them out until they reach the local level. Grease the folks handling inventory in the dispensaries, and that's that. We can pull what we need. We sell by the case and pallet to hospices that have raised money through donations from the families of their wealthier patients, medicinal marijuana outlets, and yes, to some very robust and well-structured open source drug operations servicing low-income neighborhoods that are not well policed these days. As you said, the Dreamer end user has no interest in endangering the supply chain. Some larger inst.i.tutions get shorted, but I have to feel that's offset by the fact that this system actually gets Dreamer to many folks who wouldn't otherwise have access. We've had very few leaks in the months it's been running. As for Junior being the architect of all this, well, does my son strike you as an architect?"

Park thought about Cager.

"He strikes me as a very intelligent person."

Senior frowned into his empty gla.s.s.

"And he is, he is. Very intelligent. Off-the-scale intelligent if IQ tests matter a good G.o.dd.a.m.n. But unfocused. And not what you'd call a people person. Incapable of wrangling something on this scale. He couldn't bring his full abilities to bear on a problem like this because the human relations would make him too uncomfortable. That boy, I tell you, more natural ability, pure talent, than a father could hope to see in a son, and just, just, he cannot apply it to anything useful. Business, I understand it's not for everyone, and I could; he can paint. I mean, expressive, powerful images. So if it had been that, painting, I would have been all for it. An artist son? I would have been d.a.m.n proud. But even art, he just."

Senior floated one hand through the air.

"Drifted from it. Lost focus, lost interest. All that energy. That ability. And the only thing he has ever stuck with are the d.a.m.n games. That one d.a.m.n game. He. He builds his life around that game now. So I, well, I'm his father, so I want to understand, be a part of what he loves, show him support, take him seriously. And I was, frankly, proud when he showed up and he'd, on his own, just through observation of the market, the implications of peak oil, credit collapse, infrastructure erosion, the outright impotence of the federal government, he saw that A-ND must have an outlet for off-market Dreamer. We were just getting it started, but that kid, smart as h.e.l.l, he knew it was happening just because he could put it together. And he wanted a franchise. For himself."

He raised and dropped his shoulders.

"I have backed him in so many ventures. But he had a plan, a model that made a kind of sense. In this world. He showed me the numbers on sleepless players in Chasm Tide, showed me the online markets where in-game valuables were trading, the currency exchanges between virtual and real. That was an eye-opener. And I thought, well, maybe this is it, a business tied directly to his real pa.s.sion, maybe this will be the thing that he locks into. So I supplied him with a couple pallets. Made sure the pricing was in line with the rest of the off-market trade. We don't gouge these people, Officer."

He leaned forward.

"That should be very clear. We set the price. And if we hear that one of our franchisers starts to spread the margin and pocket the difference, we take action. And I do not mean that in any metaphorical sense."

He leaned back.

"I'm in the pharmaceuticals trade, not the human misery trade."

He shook his head.

"Not the human misery trade."

He pointed vaguely east.

"Those people. In Washington. That homunculus in the White House. When I think about who our president could have been, who it should have been. Know the man who shot him had his NRA membership card on him? Bought his weapon at a gun show. Barely had to flash his driver's license. That day, I burned my own card. Hardly matters anymore. Person wants a gun, they can find a gun. Well, those people in Washington, they turned out to be about as useless as everybody knew they'd be when it really hit the fan. A plague of sleeplessness. Democrats and Republicans trying to deal with a plague of sleeplessness. If it wasn't for the tears, you'd laugh yourself to death. A plague of sleeplessness. Any wonder all the zealots are going even crazier than before? Like it should come after locusts and frogs and the deaths of the firstborn."

He touched the part in his hair.

"So it gets left to people like me, people with influence, with some infrastructure of their own, people with money, it gets left to us to, h.e.l.l, to make sure something is, something is left. That's not right. That's not my job. No one elected me. But h.e.l.l, it's got to be done. Someone has to do something. We can't just walk away from the table, throw up our hands, say, 'I'm out.' This is what's fallen to me, this is my duty, and I won't shirk it."