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: 2016-01-27 05:36 am (UTC)"You're not freaked out by it," she said, head angled a little as she watched him. "Why not? That's the usual reaction I get when I accidentally slip." She took another sip as she waited for his answer.
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-27 05:49 am (UTC)"Because I just read a crime scene with my hands. Not intuition. Not forensics. I put my hand on a bullet hole and I saw it happen. That's what I can do."
He picked up his hot chocolate and drank some.
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-28 12:42 am (UTC)"You're serious," she said, fingers falling still where they had been picking at the slightly torn edge of the lid of the cup. "That's what you were doing, when I was standing there, you were seeing someone shoot that woman." It was said as a statement, not a question, as she had already skyrocketed past the obvious answer and started wondering what else he could 'see'. "Could you see who did it? Or do you see only one point of view, or are you the bullet? What did you see?" Deflection came naturally to her as she had had to do it for a long time.
"And who was the guy in the car?"
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-28 01:35 am (UTC)"The guy was a detective, like I said before. As for what I can see, it's like... like being in the room, or the area, I guess. For a couple of seconds. It's a flash."
He shrugged.
"It's not all the time. Some places, some things just have strong memories attached to them, good and bad. I can't step foot on Boylston Street anymore."
He wanted to ask things about her gift, but maybe it wasn't the time for that yet. He took his foot off the brake and let the van ease into motion again. They passed the house where the crime happened and kept on, Brian depending upon Melody to tell him which car along the road belonged to her.
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-30 01:40 am (UTC)"So what did you see there? At that house? Was there anything that might help figure out what happened, and who shot the woman?" she asked, her curiosity piqued in both the event, and his abilities.
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-30 03:02 am (UTC)Brian wasn't sure why he felt uncomfortable except that maybe her questions and her eyes were too much direct attention. He rubbed the sharp point of his elbow. "Look, you defied physics," he said. "I'm just kind of psychic."
After a quiet second, he picked up his phone and stuck the auxiliary cable into the port. He thumbed through a playlist of songs, seeing nothing but a blur of color. Brian found himself willfully disengaging from the conversation, disengaging from her, not because he wanted to be a tool but because he couldn't seem to stop himself.
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-30 04:56 am (UTC)But she didn't want to overdo it. "Thanks for the ride."
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-30 07:19 pm (UTC)Which was a stupid thing to say.
Brian frowned. He knew few others who were strange like him, and none closely. Should he let the unusually friendly, normal acting girl who happened to have telekinesis exit his van without another word? His eyes lit on the hot chocolate in his console.
"Campo," he said. "That's my last name. If you ever need anything."
He went into his dashboard and dug out a crumpled black business card for his shop, Retrograde Records, and handed it to her.
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-31 01:30 am (UTC)BEST WAI Catering, with her own name and cellphone number at the bottom, the company's details in the middle, with the other side listing the types of events they specialised in.
"That's my number at the bottom," she pointed out as she handed it to him.
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-31 02:44 am (UTC)"Night."
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-31 02:48 am (UTC)"Nice to meet you too, Brian," she replied, shaking his hand and smiling. "And thanks for the ride," she added letting his hand go and heading around the back of the van to grab the fuel. "Good luck with the case too."
Re: Lost Sleep
Date: 2016-01-31 02:56 am (UTC)