I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

When a confidential informant brings word that a recently paroled trafficker has murdered one of his own, Murphy and his partner Nik make the arrest. It should be routine. Instead, the night bends. Murphy is summoned to a rooftop crime scene downtown, where his lieutenant asks him to identify the victim. It’s Ruby. Murphy denies knowing her and walks away—just another lie in a career built on managing them.

The lie doesn’t hold. Evidence begins to stack. Murphy is brought in, questioned hard, and released only because lab results aren’t back yet. He returns home to find Internal Affairs already there, his wife Andie confronted with photographs she was never meant to see. Fleeing in his Mustang, Murphy blacks out at the wheel and nearly dies.

In the ICU, a doctor gives him a sentence more final than any indictment: a rare neurological condition caused by an inoperable mass on his brain stem. If Murphy falls asleep, his body will simply stop breathing. There will be no second chances.

With arrest imminent and time collapsing, Murphy walks out of the hospital and into a city that suddenly feels foreign. His badge means nothing now. His fellow cops are hunting him. His body is betraying him. To stay alive, he pushes himself through sleepless days and nights, fueled by fear, borrowed drugs, and the thin hope that the truth can still be found.

Murphy believes the killer is the trafficker he put away—revenge for the arrest, a message sent the only way criminals know how. But the deeper Murphy digs, the more the case points inward: to his partner, to his marriage, to the quiet compromises he’s made over years on the job. When he finally returns home, prepared to confront the man he thinks destroyed him, the truth is closer—and more devastating—than he imagined.

As dawn approaches and his body begins to fail, Murphy faces the last choice of his life: fight to clear his name, or take responsibility for the damage he’s caused. In a city that never forgives and rarely forgets, justice comes due—whether he’s awake to see it or not.