Lost Sleep
Jan. 10th, 2016 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brian_campo posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
hauntedbostonrpgAt 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.
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.
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-19 05:52 am (UTC)"I was doing a 'loaves and fishes' act for a couple over on Willard Street, who have a funny idea of a dozen or so people for a dinner party, when they really meant 42, though I really don't think they even realised it was that many themselves as I don't think the left hand let the right hand know who they'd been inviting. And there are a whole lot of similies in there if you think about it, from the Last Supper right through to the answer to life, the universe and everything along with the restaurant at the end of the universe and the dolphins telling us so long and thanks for all the fish." She stopped, glanced over at him, and huffed a soft laugh as she wondered if he would be considering dropping her at the gas station and keeping on driving. She had a tendency to jump from one thought to another, and leave people floundering in her wake trying to figure out just where her mind was heading, or just not even wondering, but giving up trying to follow what she was saying.
"And I had to do a bit of driving around for those loaves and fishes, and didn't remember to fill up," she finished with a self-deprecating grin. "A blow for women libbers the world over. They'll probably revoke my non-existent membership..."
no subject
Date: 2016-01-19 02:58 pm (UTC)“I think you’re alright,” he hedged and accelerated through an intersection. “Running out of gas is a genderless crime.” The streets were dead, no traffic to contend with as the van bounced across a dip in the road. The high-glare lights of the gas station canopy came into sight. A few silent seconds passed.
Brian turned to her. “I’m just clarifying. Was that a Dolphin Olympics reference? I caught some Hitchhiker’s in there. A little Bible, too, but I don’t want to miss anything.”
His urge to be kind to her surfaced out of nowhere. Melody seemed good, and he guessed that was why. She seemed guileless. When he was younger, Brian kept the antenna up at all times, hoping that he could pick up bad vibes (from people and their accompanying places) early on and then duck out before he got connected. Now, more often than not, he put the antenna down and just assumed everybody had dark secrets and pain. If he kept people just past arm’s length, minded his own business and relegated the truth-gathering to paid gigs, he didn’t have to know a damn thing.
Melody just gave off a different vibe.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-20 01:12 am (UTC)"The last thing the dolphins said as they baled off this rock was, or is, or will be,'so long and thanks for all the fish!' And so that was the title to the 4th book in the Hitchhiker trilogy, because only Douglas Adams would write a trilogy with a 4th book," she explained with a glint of mischief in her eye.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-20 02:16 am (UTC)"What can I do, anything?"