hauntedbostonrpg | Lost Sleep

At 2:59 a.m., a text had arrived and it simply read: “01/08/16. Shooting. Female victim. 700 Block of Washington Street. No leads.”

The message came from a burner phone, but Brian, thick with sleep and thirst, knew that it was Detective Wilt Shipman, who didn’t give a shit if the ordinary men of the world were drooling into pillows or fucking pretty girls or what. When he wanted information, he was relentless, like a drill bit to the skull. If Wilt acted according to pattern, one ignored text led to a call, which led to a fist on the door, and finally an unmarked police car blaring its horn on the street. The dude was a prick. Brian attempted to cut him off at the pass with a return text - “she’ll still be dead at 8 a.m.”, but wisdom prevailed. At this hour, no one would see him skulking around the crime scene, which was probably Wilt’s line of thinking.

In the amber haze of a dirty streetlamp, he put on jeans and laced into his boots. He reclaimed an only vaguely dirty Ramones t-shirt from the hamper and topped it with a wool coat. His hair was still plastered to his forehead when he left the house. His old van grumbled and a fan belt squealed. The van was a holdover from his twenties when he needed it to haul gear for his band, back before responsibilities like child support and a mortgage payment. He plugged his phone into the stereo (definitely not factory) and picked through a playlist. Once he found a good song, he wiped his dry eyes and threw the transmission into reverse.

He stopped only once, for cigarettes, between his driveway and the address. He double-checked it. As far as murders went, it was an odd place to pick. Residential, historic neighborhood, cars with no body damage, American flags proudly swaying on front porches. The yellow tape, strung between the corner of a slumping garage and a cluster of trees, stuck out like a sore thumb; during another month, it would’ve been mistaken for a cheap Halloween decoration.

Wilt knuckle-tapped on the window. “I wish you’d lose this hunk of junk,” he said through the crack. The detective peered into the interior. “People probably think you’re hauling sex trafficking victims.”

“I bet the money’s better.” Brian got out and shut the door. On the way to the plot of grass, he killed his cigarette. “What am I looking for?”

“Bullet hole in the side of the garage,” called the detective, who gestured with a single cup of coffee.

Asshole.

Brian watched him head back to the street and then ducked under the tape. His palms, closed tight in their coat pockets, held an anticipatory tingle. They had been weapons in his thirty-two years of life, tricky digits designed to receive tactile information -- soft, rough, cold, wet -- but which supplied him with untold other details. The deep history of places. The secrets of people. The banal didn’t leave much of an imprint. It was the meat of life, the love and the hate and the greed, that turned an ephemeral thing like memory into a sort of fingerprint… psychic energy pressed onto three-dimensional objects.

He found the hole in the vinyl siding. His hand hovered. It was a risk. Sometimes he got more than he bargained for. A knife that sliced a stranger’s flesh cut Brian, too, in a different way. He had once lost an entire month of good sleep over a noise and a vivid mental picture (red bubbles expanding and popping in a throat). There were other, less violent ones. Powerful ones, like the treachery of his mother’s unlaundered sheets, and the last moments of his father’s life, which he spent clutching his chest inside the vinyl cape of a wet shower curtain.

What would he see this time? Was it worth whatever cash Wilt threw his way in order to improve his ratio of solved cases?

Brian shut his eyes and traced the shape of the bullet hole.

God, he hoped so.

Threaded | Flat

She really did have to remember to put fuel in the car before the needle dropped past the E on the gauge. No matter how she felt, or tried, the car just didn't want to work without it. And 3am was a really shitty time to be reminded.

Especially after the night she had had at the Monroe's. "Just a dozen or so," they'd said, "and we'll buy in all the food," they'd said, "so you will have an easy night of it!" they'd said.

They'd lied. Or not lied as much as lost all touch with reality. She wasn't quite sure whether she'd missed the math class that equated 'a dozen' was actually 42, and there must have been something somewhere on her forehead that said 'SUCKER' because they didn't even think that perhaps the food her mother had listed for the dozen 'or so', was just not going to stretch to another 30 people.

She was glad her brother's study could be put aside for this emergency, and he was able to come and get things started while she'd done an emergency run to an all-night market to pick up, at premium prices of course, more supplies. She and Wyn had worked furiously, preparing and plating, serving and stashing away the containers their mother had also brought over to supplement the supply. At least the Monroe's had realised their screwup and had given an extremely large tip, on top of what they would be paying once it had all been calculated - her father's job the next morning.

And now she was walking. She could actually feel the footpath through the soles of her shoes as she trudged along the street, walking to the nearest gas station nearly eight blocks away. She turned the corner and blinked, a frown forming as she slowed a little. Two men talking, one gesticulating toward the building where some tape appeared to snake across the yard to a tree. She didn't have to check her watch to know it was well after 3am, and a glance at the vehicles in the street added to the disjointed scene - they're weren't from this neighbourhood.

Her curiosity got the better of her and she paused at the front of the block, head cocked to one side as she watched the man who appeared to be studying the wall of the garage.

"Other than give me a lift back to my car?" She shook her head as she opened the door and slid out. "It's OK, you don't have to hang around if you need to get back. I really appreciate the ride here," she said, slipping his coat off and putting it back on the passenger's seat so he could go.

Lost Sleep

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