They’d come back later that same night. Lilly wasn’t half as clever when she was sleeping. No doubletalk legal mumbo jumbo. No apps to record Sullivan and Pacheco to splay their faces all across the internet. Turns out all it took to shut her up was a unique chemical concocted just for that purpose, piped through the ailing motel’s old HVAC unit. Thankfully, the motel was no livelier than a ghost town.
In a young set of lungs like Lilly’s, the gas would do no lasting damage. An older person, though, or one with some kind of pre-existing condition? That might be a sleep they didn’t wake up from.
Of course, these things happen, these accidental deaths. Bystanders, family members, and the public at large. It might happen to any of them -- or all of them. Such was the cost to stave off the great undoing of society. Plus, ASP was generous whenever an innocent was killed in the line of fire. They were known to send, anonymously, very nice flowers to the funerals of any victims of happenstance.
For better or worse, Lilly was neither dead nor innocent. Sullivan and Pacheco, as instructed, handed her off, still unconscious, to a colleague a few hundred miles east of Swell. Sullivan didn’t recognize their counterpart and they exchanged no words, pleasantries, or otherwise. What happened to Lilly after that was of no concern to Sullivan. A holding cell, an interrogation tank, the stocks -- it didn’t make a difference to him. As far as he was concerned, the guilty got exactly what they deserved.
How exactly she had been in cahoots with their real targets, Sam and Hillary, Sullivan hadn’t deduced. He was no expert on the machinations of the Milieu. Even their codewords had codewords. They used nom de plums and signed bad checks. Any given member of the Milieu, it was said, knew no more than two other members, so that the capture of one never resulted in the toppling of all. There were other rumors, too: they bathed in blood in the shadow of harvest moons; they baited fishing hooks with the skulls of crash test dummies; they chanted in tongues to the rhythms of bongo drums…
No, he didn’t know how Lilly and Sam and Hillary were connected and he didn’t care to know either. She was hiding something. She was covering for them. She had been stingy with her information and rude to them to boot. She directly impeded an investigation of ASP and tried to make a mockery of everything they did. If that didn’t make a person guilty of both being a rotten jerk and a card-carrying member of the Milieu, Sullivan didn’t know what did.
Let come to her what might. If she were smart, she’d turn on her compatriots and admit everything she knew. Maybe they would be lenient to her. Maybe she would see the light of day again. Most likely, though, she would be too prideful, too stupid to do what was right.
They usually were.
As a boy, Sullivan had loved hotels. The strange sensation of waking up in a different bed. The scents pumped through the vents meant to smell like nostalgia. The premium cable channels unseen in the living room back home. Of course, back then, nights in hotels had been a rare treat: the trip his family took to the Grand Canyon or the time they visited his uncle in Des Moines. There was novelty then. Surprise.
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Now, Sullivan was a nomad. Hotels were the closest to settling down he came. Over two-hundred sixty nights a year, on average. His apartment was no more than a glorified storage shed with an air mattress. He didn’t keep more clothes there than he needed to live for a day or two. He couldn’t remember the address. The neighbors didn’t know him as anything but a specter who might be seen once or twice a month, and even then only late at night or early in the morning and always on his way from or to the airport.
Did he mind? Well, there were times he missed having routine. As is, he never knew what to expect, not where he’d eat the next meal or what would be on his plate. He couldn’t count on a case lasting any length of time: they came and went at the whimsy of his superiors. He went where they told him to go and only stopped when and where they let him.
So, yes, he minded the lack of stability. The impermanence.
He could use some more companionship, too.
He had tried with Pacheco. Theirs had been an almost monogamous pairing, again the handiwork of the unseen forces of ASP. But they had never grown close. She insisted that he never refer to her as anything other than a colleague. He didn’t know if she had a husband or kids. They rarely ate together so he didn’t know if she leaned towards burgers or steaks. He knew nothing of her hobbies, her likes or dislikes. He didn’t know, if he were in danger, that she would do a thing to save him -- unless it had been explicitly laid out as one of her duties for the case at hand.
Heck, he didn’t even know her first name.
In another room in that hotel, assuming she too hadn’t forgotten the magic pills that made all these uncomfortable thoughts go away, she was dreaming, but about what he would never know. They might share a car, they might breathe the same air, they might even laugh at each other’s jokes -- though that was very unlikely.
But they would never be friends. Partners, begrudgingly. Friends, never.
He had heard, once, early in his time with ASP, that they preferred to hire lunatics. Their word, not his. The ultra-violent. The ultra-ruthless. The ultra-subservient. After that, he couldn’t help noticing the traits in his colleagues. The ones who liked to inflict pain instead of exacting justice. The ones who couldn’t turn it off. The ones who didn’t know anymore how to separate their own identity from that of ASP.
Sullivan never once stopped to think which bucket he fell into or if he might sometimes dip his toes in more than one.
He had no true commanding officer. There were people in charge, he assumed. There must have been. But there was no one person he reported to, no one to approve his expenses or vacation, on the off-chance he took one.
His orders came electronically. Simple messages with simple instructions. His own requests were handled just as impersonally. He didn’t know who or what was on the other side. Though, he used to wonder.
Just like he used to wonder about the things he’d see on cases they sent him to. The work ASP did, no, the work he did for ASP, gave him plenty to wonder about. Extra-judicial killings, for instance. Kidnapping. Bribery. Pulling a trigger or stuffing a body into a trunk -- what exactly was he complicit in? Was that even the right question? The blood literally was on his hands. Guilt, that’s what he felt.
Never mind all he’d seen lately. Impossible things. Alien things. Things that…shouldn’t be. All of it made him wonder.
He’d bring it up now and then to Pacheco but she would brush him off, accuse him of wasting his breath, and ask him why he’d stopped taking his pills.
His wondering, and the sleepless nights it would cause, were why ASP put him on the pills to begin with. And, whenever he asked questions to the invisible bosses above, they would ensure his dosage was increased.
Still, he couldn’t help but wonder.