Poor soul.

PARK HAD STARTED AS A BUYER.

Working from a sheet of phone numbers Captain Bartolome had given him, he had become a regular customer with three delivery services that he found were consistently somewhat reliable and seemed to employ couriers who were a step above the typical stoner on a mountain bike who showed up two to three hours later than he said he would. Couriers who had cars and who looked more like USC film students than they did Venice Beach burnouts. Couriers who could hold a coherent conversation while a transaction was completed. Couriers who mostly talked about the job as a way to make fast cash to pay down a student loan or to finance a new laptop.

When Park had suggested to one of these couriers that he was looking for some part-time work before his wife had their first baby, the kid had scratched his belly under his Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and told him guys were always flaking out and that the service always needed new couriers. So the next time Park called, instead of leaving his code number and hanging up and waiting for a callback, he left a message.

“This is Park Haas, number six-two-three-nine. I talked to Rohan; he said you might be hiring. I’m interested.”

Which did lead to a callback, but instead of being asked where he was and how long he would be there and being told how long it would take for a courier to arrive, he spent fifteen minutes talking with a young woman about reliability and time management and being asked if he’d gone to college and what his major had been and, finally, if he was a police or other law enforcement officer.

And Park lied. Which, as Captain Bartolome had promised, he’d already found himself getting better at. Though never without some twinge of regret, the voice of his father in the back of his mind: Lying, Parker, is a great weakness in a man. I advise you to never allow it in yourself. Or you will become exposed.

The danger of being exposed, physically or otherwise, having always been at the forefront of his father’s considerations.

Following the man’s example, Park had spent the majority of his life trying to restrict any such exposure. The elements of his existence had been few. Few possessions. Few relationships. A streamlined life, one best able to make passage without catching on any dangerous shoals. Beyond his parents, his sister, her rigid husband and two cold children, and an always reducing number of childhood friends, he had no emotional exposure of any measure when he left Philadelphia and headed west to study philosophy, acting upon a desire to better understand the nature of things, if not people.

Rose had changed that.

Slamming hard into his side, she had created an irreparable breach, a wound so deep and immediate that he’d nearly collapsed at the impact. Had almost fled, bleeding, to find some quiet place where he could either heal or die. But she hadn’t let him. Instead, ungently, she had battered him, split him, spilled his life about, played among the bits, and convinced him that such a thing could be fun.

By the time Park was in a Starbucks on Melrose, watching through the window as a parade of sleepless and other night owls shopped the midnight hours away, listening as the young woman who belonged to the voice on the phone described exactly how he would pick up product, how he would be accountable for shortages, how much he would be paid per delivery, and asked him to show her his current driver’s license, vehicle registration, and insurance, by that time Park was exposed on all fronts. Made deeply vulnerable by the wound Rose had opened in him and the things he had come to understand that philosophy had never illuminated, Park was barely present in the coffee chain. Most of him back at the house, in the nursery, where his wife and child, still sharing a single body, were putting together a crib, while he took his first lesson in selling drugs.

Presentable, educated, white, behind the wheel of a decent car, and, most valuable of all in a dealer, both prompt and reliable, Park was very quickly specializing in deliveries to the service’s top-end clients. Rather than being detailed to a specific geographic locale to maximize the number of deliveries he could make in one day, Park received a larger per-delivery commission and a fuel stipend and found himself often eyeballed by private security, buzzed through locked gates, ushered into exclusive clubs, ranging from what was left of Malibu, between the rising waters and sloughing hillsides, to Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Hancock Park, the Hollywood Hills, certain blocks of West Hollywood, the Los Feliz homes of bright young reality TV stars, and the changing rooms of Rodeo Drive boutiques.

Then he became a buyer again. Making a move that his employers took for granted, he purchased three kilos of Canadian crippleweed. Agreeing not to pursue any of their clients, but not promising to turn down business that came to him, he left the service and began almost instantly to receive texts from those clients.

As SLP spread, increasingly aggressive chemical responses were caught in its draft and pulled along. The not surprising desire shared by many to bubble-wrap their awareness and muffle any intrusions regarding what was happening in the world at large was compounded by the desire of many others to match the pace and awareness of the sleepless. The population was becoming rapidly segregated by personal taste: uppers, downers, or stridently clean.

With over thirty million sleepless in the United States, spanning all ages, economic classes, ethnicities, religions, or any other readily know-able demographic, the twenty-four-hour marketplace was in high gear. Needing not only to be staffed but fueled as well.

Staked to an evidence room nest egg of some of the rarer exotics, Park was able to enhance his already rock-solid reputation as a reliable source of the basics with equally glowing word of mouth as a finder of impossible things. A reputation that engendered, as it turned out, only one major problem: an unwillingness on the part of many of his clients to share his number.

No one wants to lose their good thing.

But no matter. Unable to do less than bring every ounce of his father’s work ethic to bear on any effort, Park found that his market share grew.

Having spent most of his life around people with great deals of money, he knew more than he cared to about distractions such as box office receipts, celebrity infidelities, luxury cars, flux in the stock market, designer brands, real estate prices, workout routines, and the ever-increasing popularity of radical elective plastic surgery. He found, unexpectedly, that this chatter, the same kind that could be expected between retailers and customers everywhere, began to segue into the intimacies one would have expected to hear passing in a hair salon, or a doctor’s exam room, or a therapist’s office.

Observant and still, saying little, but that little always relevant and as likely to be an apt layman’s reference to Descartes, Lao Tzu, Sontag, or Aquinas as it was to be taken from a recent episode of a given client’s half-hour, single-camera sitcom, Park’s customers found him to be a comforting presence. None suspecting that the keenness of his insights was largely based on the depth of his concentration, his desire to record everything that he saw and heard in his book of evidence.

So it was with the special aura of both a reliable source and a good listener that he had been invited to the party where Beenie had introduced him to Hydo. Where he’d had a conversation that led him to first suspect that the world’s descent into madness was neither random nor the natural consequence of humanity’s excesses, that there was a hand behind the wheel steering us into deepening misery. That someone, massive and unseen, was drawing profit from the piles of suffering dead. And that they must pay a price for their greed. If only he could find them.