What Fire Cannot Burn

"But there was, there was flaking there?"

Han said to Soledad: "Yes."

"Dead flesh," Soledad said. She said: "This wasn't an old wound."

"That just," Raddatz said, "narrows it down to a million other things it could be."

Soledad stepped up, put her hand to the invulnerable. No matter that it was dead, except that it was cold, it was human to the touch. Not hard. Not alien. Nothing exceptional other than the marks on the body. Marks like… they were like… Soledad's fingers slipped neatly into them.

It had started to rain. Just a little. Anywhere else, any other city, a little rain would be an annoyance. Slightly bothersome. In LA anything more than a misting is a plague from God. A disaster of the highest proportions. The motorists of the city, suspect of skill on good days, were utterly deficient in the short-term-memory department. Between the annual sprinkles that came around in January and February, then took the rest of the year off, LA drivers had a habit of forgetting real quick that water is wet and wet pavement is slick. So idiots would take the Laurel Canyon speedway-a twisty road that ran over "the hill"-at the limit plus fifteen. Same as they did on hot dry days. Launch their vehicles over the center line or into one of the houses that bordered the road. Occasionally, they took flight over a guardrail and down the Santa Monica Mountains where they sometimes went days, months… wasn't weird for a launched vehicle to go well more than a year without getting spotted in the thick growth despite an organized search by the LAPD.

And Soledad was fine with that. Other than innocents potentially getting hurt, the people who ended up in a porch or over an embankment were the same ilk who, millennia ago, would've been stuck in the tar pits watching the rest of humanity pass them by.

Instead, here, now, Soledad and Raddatz were stuck in traffic courtesy of a Neanderthal with a CA driver's lie.

"So what do we do?" Soledad asked.

"Sit here like everybody else. What do you want me to do, hit the lights and siren?"

Soledad wasn't sure if Raddatz didn't catch her meaning or was giving her shit. Either way, her true question wasn't answered.

"What do we do about the John Doe? What's the procedure with DMI?"

"Write up his particulars, log it. Try to track his family, any other freaks he had contact with-"

"But the John Doe; what do we do about him?" "We keep surveillance on living freaks. We don't deal with dead ones."

"And when they die of questionable causes?"

"Don't think anybody said it was questionable."

"Nobody said anything, because nobody knows what happened. You can't give an answer, to me that counts as questionable."

The radio was playing. Old-school rock and roll. Raddatz reached over. Lowered it. "From your dealing with things one time that's your professional opinion?"

"Yeah, 'cause I've never done cop work before. Never even went to the academy."

"What you do-"

"Got a gun and badge high-bidding on eBay. The rest was a free ticket."

"What you do, what you did, I've done it. I've worked both sides, O'Roark. MTac and DMI. So don't think you know more than me, know better than me. You don't. Doesn't matter how much legend you built in G Platoon. This isn't G Platoon. This is a whole other thing."

And Soledad let that sit for a while, not caring one bit for being talked to-talked down to-like that. And if they were in G Platoon, if they were on an MTac element…

But they weren't.

They were stuck in a pool car going nowhere.

So Soledad could, should, just let things go

instead: "Why am I here?" "You busted your knee, you put in for the hours."

"Are you obtuse, or do you just want to see what it takes to-"

Raddatz made an awkward cross-body reach for the radio, reached to turn it up.

Before he finished the motion. Soledad had slapped the radio completely dead.

"Because if you're trying to set me off," she said. Soft and low. The quiet adding its own emphasis, "you're doing it. Why am I here? Why are you bringing me along for the ride?"

"Testing the waters. You say you're done with MTac."

"The doctors say I'm done with MTac."

"However it is, it's a new beginning. So now it's a matter of are you up for this, or are you just doing things to do things?"

Raddatz and Soledad roiled up on the accident that was slowing a good portion of LA to a crawl. Squad cars. Flares. A BMW welded by its own fire to a tree.

The sight, the smell of the burn. Sense memory came on hard to Soledad.

She said: "Here's the thing: I've been tested every way you can think of. I've passed all of them, so throwing me any more of them is a waste of time. Mine and yours. I'm gonna be here. If I'm part of your cadre or not-"

"I don't have a-"

"If I'm a pariah, I don't give a fuck. Honest; you, all of you and your supercreep attitudes get on my nerves. I'm keeping freaks in check however I've got to do things."

"That's a good speech, Soledad."

"Christ…»

"Is it done? Is that it?" "Yeah, that's it."

"Procedure; that's what you were talking about, right?"

Soledad and Raddatz slid past the accident. Traffic picked up. Most of the drivers went right back to speeding.

"Here's procedure," Raddatz said. "ID the John Doe. Run his prints, try to match him up to a missing person report, take things from there."

" 'K." A fraction of a word that stood for: whatever.

Raddatz turned up the radio. Flooded the car with old-school rock.

Soledad moved up-or down, depending on how you looked at things-from crutches to a cane. Cheapest thing she could find at a medical supply store. An old-man cane. Wasn't very cool. As unaffected as she liked to think she was, she still figured if she was going to have a cane, maybe she oughta get a cool one. For a hot second Soledad thought about getting one of those canes that have a sword hidden in them. But then she thought she might end up using it. Worrisome. Not that she'd somehow get in a situation that was cane-sword necessary. That didn't worry her. What was worrisome: She'd use the sword and people would start comparing her to Eddi and her knife. She could live without the comparison. She could live real well without that. She got the old-man cane.

No getting past the feeling of clandestineness. The hour was odd, the location obscure. One-forty in the morning, a bar in Hollywood. Mot a glam bar. A small joint off Ivar where drinking was done by a select few night, morning and high noon. Drunks who couldn't remember their names, let alone unfamiliar faces. Perfect for clandestineness. The. meeting Soledad was having with Tashjian was on the extreme DL. IA cops were not cops that cops wanted other cops to peep them talking with even if all they were rapping about was the price of tea in China.

Soledad didn't like playing in the shadows. Up until recently her cop life had been about being in the open, being direct. A show of force. That- coming on strong about things-was as much of a weapon for MTacs as their HKs and Benellis and Soledad's own home-brewed piece. Working

DMI was all about rooting around, rooting around. Being a mole for IA on top of that was

It was what?

If DMI was about kicking over stones, was IA the slug under the rock?

Only days Soledad had been perpetrating a lie. Already she was sick of it.

"It does take getting used to," Tashjian counseled.

"I'm not going to be doing this long enough to get used to it."

"My hope was, in time, you would at least see the value in what you're doing."

"I see the value, but to me it's like seeing value at Kmart. Taking advantage and taking pride are two different things."

"I miss that, O'Roark." Tashjian tipped his glass to her. "I miss that sense of humor of yours. So slight as to be unique."

Whatever Tashjian was drinking-a mixed, lime-greenish thing-it was the girliest drink Soledad'd ever seen. A queer alky mick going dry on St. Paddy's Day wouldn't touch the stuff.

Yet…

The drink fairly glowed, was nearly hypnotic. Hard drinkers-and the few flies in the bar at that hour were nothing but-stared at Tashjian each time he raised his glass. Watched him as he lowered it. Licked their lips in sympathetic pleasure. Whatever Tashjian was drinking, before the night was done, everybody in the joint would most likely have one.

"I mean"-Tashjian returned the glass to the bar-"I'm assuming you're joking. I can't imagine you having something against value-priced shopping."

"We're talking about the job." Soledad kept on point. Soledad didn't want to string things along, spend one more minute where she was and doing what she was doing any more than necessary.

"We're talking about the job," Tashjian echoed. "Tell me about the job."

"You heard about the invulnerable John Doe?"

"Very slightly. I know the ME has the body, but DMI is in control of the situation."

"It's being… I guess it's being investigated. I'm not sure how the hell things work at DMI. Anyway, I'm on it."

"How did you manage that?"

"A senior lead was going to check out the body, I got an invite."

"And it went all right?"

"All right how? All I did was look at a body."

Tashjian stroked the condensation on his glass. "This senior lead; he trusts you?"

"He doesn't like me. My experience, someone doesn't like me, they're taking me at face value."

"I'm glad for that. Don't agree, though. I don't take you at face value, and I like you quite a bit."

"Don't get ideas. I'm engaged."

"I have none. But I'm flattered you think enough of me you have to put me off."

"I'm not… I don't have to put you off. I'm just telling you."

"And all the protest you're putting into the telling: Is that for me or for you?"

Fucking with her. Tashjian was fucking with her. Some guys golfed. Some built ships in a bottle. Tashjian's hobby, Soledad was pretty sure, was fucking with her.

"Can we talk about the freak?"

Tashjian nodded. "Has anything come to

light?"

"I've been out one time on this, and I was lucky for that much."

"Do you have a sense of the circumstances? Was it murder?"

"It's inconclusive. No poison, at least as far as the ME can tell. But how else you'd kill an invulnerable freak I don't know."

For a minute Soledad and Tashjian said nothing.

The sound track playing in the bar was ESPN from a TV. Ice kicking around in glasses. Hacking coughs.

Soledad didn't like being there, in the bar. She wasn't a drinker. Drinking reminded her of Vin. And that didn't feel real right; that she didn't want to be reminded of her instant fiance.

"Tashjian, how long you been with the PD?"

"Thirteen years."

Something funny about that to Soledad. Figures. Tashjian's been around thirteen lucky years. "Seen a lot in thirteen years?"

"My share."

"But not a dead invulnerable." "Can't say that I have."

"So if you did, If you did see one, it'd get your attention."

"And, finally, your point?"

"Seeing a dead invulnerable didn't much get Raddatz's attention."

"Raddatz? Tucker Raddatz is the senior lead you're working with?" Tashjian's thumbnail scratched at his chin: acknowledgment of the curiousness.

"Something I should know about him?" Soledad asked.

"Very distinguished officer. A short but memorable stmt with MTac. Memorable mostly because he was the sole survivor of a warrant served on… what's the colloquialism for metanormals with accelerated production of adrenaline?"

"Berserkers."

"Tore through the rest of his element as though they were rice paper. He was lucky to get away with just losing a hand. I think that's all he's lost."

"I can think of one other thing: any and all regard for freaks whatsoever."

"Is there something hinky to you?"

"I'm not a detective." Soledad, no permission asked, reached over, took Tashjian's glass, took a drink. Girliest thing she'd ever had. And it was good. "But I'm not sure I blame somebody who's been torn up by a freak for having absolutely nothing but hatred for them."

"Careful with your sympathies."

"I know what's at stake. I'll do the job."

"You misunderstand me. Whoever is responsible for the killings feels personally threatened by metanormals and is acting upon his or her feelings. And if they have no fear of freaks, do you think they would be afraid to deal with you? For your own sake, I would be gentle with this Raddatz."

The threat of things getting physical. The threat of violence and possible death that would have to be met in kind. Suddenly, Soledad was starting to like her new job.

Might as well have been talking with God. Maybe not God. How about the Holy Ghost? If nothing else, Officer Tom Hayes felt like he was talking with that one model on the cover of all those fitness magazines he was desperate to meet. Not that he felt sexual toward Soledad. But in a cop's life that was less than he'd dreamed of, sitting across from one of the most talked-about operators on the LAPD was a dream come true.

He wanted to ask Soledad about some of her exploits. Not fan boy-style. He honestly wanted a firsthand breakdown of truth from fiction. He wanted, he wanted to get her take on the job, on being MTac. He wanted very badly to know-her opinion-the best way to work up to G Platoon. Tom Hayes had a thousand questions for Soledad.

Sitting with him in the coffee room at Hollenbeck station, Soledad had only questions about the John Doe Officer Hayes had found.

The first had been: How'd you find him?

"Didn't really. Some kids had gone down in the river, were doing some boarding on the concrete. Saw the body, made the call."

"Your report said his clothes were burned away."

"Yes, ma'am. Looked like it."

"But not his flesh. Wasn't that weird to you?"

Officer Hayes flipped his hands up but wasn't flippant. He tried to be respectful with the gesture. Added a look that said: "Didn't think about it." He would have said as much himself but was afraid Soledad'd pick up the crack in his voice. He was nervous. Soledad was the kind of cop who could, down the road, have sway over his getting into G Platoon. And the way she was asking questions: How come he didn't do this, didn't do that… He shouldn't be nervous, Hayes told himself. Maybe he should have been more observant, but wasn't like he'd fucked up. Right? He hadn't. Had he?

Hayes said: "He looked like a vag to me. He looked like he had on, you know, bum wear. Half the time stuff that's burned or torn is the best they've got. I thought he died of exposure or drink. He was stiff as hell. Thought it was rigor at the time."

Soledad felt stares. She'd always been sensitive to other people's eyes. The locked looks she was getting now didn't, they didn't feel like the ones she was usually most attuned to. The "it's a black woman!?" ogles she got when she had the audacity to slick herself right where somebody thought a black woman didn't belong. Still, she felt eyes rolling over her. Probably 'cause in the open and out of uniform she was having a chat with a uniformed cop. Some of the cops staring maybe thought Soledad was just a friend. A chick friend who'd come around for some palaver with Hayes which he'd get some good-natured shit about later. But some probably considered Soledad was official in some sense. Admin or IA.

That made every other cop in the joint instantly, reflexively reassess their relationship with the blue who was having a sit-down.

Hayes didn't hardly seem to care. To Soledad he came off a little nervous, but other than that, his head was level all around. Soledad figured if he ever had his shot, he'd make a good MTac. A real solid one. His odds of surviving serving a warrant on a freak were probably 60/40 in favor. Better than the 70/30 most MTacs rated.

"Anything," Soledad asked, "at the scene that'd make you think it was foul play?"

"Nothing. But LA River, if there was anything, it might have gotten washed away. I imagine DMI gave a look once they found out it was a mutie."

"They didn't find anything."

"What about at one of the other incident sites?"

Soledad looked right at Hayes. She didn't answer the question. The question didn't make sense.

She asked: "What incident sites?"

"One of the other… well, you know, where he was hit by the train. It was in my report. You read it, right?"

Soledad went back to just giving a stare to Hayes. The question didn't make…

"Just walk me through everything," she said. "Take me through it."

Officer Hayes didn't bother with any orientating. Soledad had questions, he gave her what he knew to be fact. "Got the call on the John Doe. Went over, spotted the body, called it in. Right?"

Right, meaning: We on the same page so far? "Right."

"Previous to that, the station had taken a report from the MTA, Something got struck on the Gold Line. Engineer thought maybe he'd hit somebody, but couldn't find a vie. No blood or flesh on the car. Way the train was tore up, engineer thought some joker might've put a store mannequin on the track or something. It's LA. Wouldn't be the craziest thing somebody ever did. I found out later the John Doe was a mutie. Did the math. The mutie must've been the one that got clipped by the train. I know DMI handles investigating freaks. But it's my beat. I know the neighborhood. Thought it couldn't hurt to do some talking to people, see if anybody saw anything, heard anything. If they did, maybe they were more likely to talk to a cop they knew than one they didn't."

And it was a good way for a beat cop to score some points too, Soledad thought. And she thought: Hayes was all about the ambition. Forget MTac. He was going to be brass.

Prompting him to go on: "So you talked around, talked to some people."

"One witness said he saw someone running through the area on foot. Another guy thought he saw someone fall off a building. Fall or jump. Thought he did, but the guy got up and ran off." "Our John Doe."

Hayes nodded. "Way I see it, our freak was going crazy. Tearing up buildings, walls… looks like he slagged part of a mailbox on one street. I don't know. He was drunk, I guess. Maybe high. Lucky the only thing that happened was he ended up dead. Anyway, that was all in the report I gave to DMI. Should have been."

Yeah. Soledad thought. Should have been. But not a word of it was.

Jealousy. That was the thought for Soledad's drive home. Jealousy was the logical reason she'd come up with for Hayes's report getting redacted. DMI officers were resentful that a beat cop'd done a better job investigating things than they had. So left out what he'd said- removed what he'd written-from their report.

But the jealousy theory required some serious denial. There wasn't a cop in the PD who wasn't territorial about his or her department. But you'd have to believe that DMI cops-grown men- would get bitch jealous of a flatfoot doing some flatfooting in the first place. And say they were, whatever, jealous or resentful of the work Hayes'd done. No reason they couldn't just stick his work in their report, claim it as their own, and that would be that about that.

Irrelevance. That was another possibility. What Hayes had come up with, those additional incident sites didn't merit inclusion. But to not at least reference them was sloppy police work. In her short time at DMI sloppy wasn't something she found the cops there to be.

Reality: What Officer Hayes had offered up had been purged from the DMI report.

Why?

Did Soledad have to ask herself why? Yeah.

Because she didn't care for the obvious answer. The freak had died a questionable death. Probably, it was murder. So the obvious, the unsettling answer to the question why was that the people who purged the report were conspirators after the fact. Or worse. They're the killers.

East LA was a fairly shitty place. Drugs tree-flowed up and down the streets. A bromide against the better life that wasn't so much better for the people who'd risked everything- everything being their wives, their lives, their well-being-to get to America so they could clean toilets or clean pools, stroller around rich people's babies or hang out on street comers hoping some shifty contractor would roll by offering work at cut-rate pay before the INS came around offering an all-expense-paid trip back to their country of origin. A few weeks, a few months, a few years of that and, yeah, you'd be a hophead too. So, in East LA, there were drugs. There was everything that came with drugs: guns and gangs and stealing to get drug money and whoring to get drug money and the shooting of people because they got in the way of drug money being exchanged. It was shit cops should've handled. But in East LA the cops worked out of Rampart. Comparing the two, Rampart cops made East LA gangs look like castrati.

Soledad was a cop. But no matter her badge and gun, or maybe because they were of principal significance, her current proximity to East LA — looking at it on a map in her office — was as close as she cared to get to that part of town. But in her head, at least, she had to get close to it. She had some concepts to calculate.

Soledad was a cop, but she wasn't a detective. She didn't have years of know-how when it came to asking questions. She had instinct. She had a nurtured ability to look at things a couple of times in a couple of different ways asking each go-round: What's wrong with this deal? Under the circumstances that'd have to pass for being a detective.

Soledad backtracked the final hours and last minutes of the mutie John Doe. His place of dying, or at least where the body was found, got an X on Soledad's map. The action made physical her thoughts, gave her focus. Made it feel like she was doing something besides waiting for answers to come. The Gold Line.

JD got clipped by a train crossing the track. Maybe that was enough to put down an invulnerable. Maybe this freak, maybe JD was only kind of invulnerable. Titanium skin wrapped around garden-variety innards. Gets hit by the train. Internal damage. Dies.

The Gold Line got highlighted.

But Officer Hayes had said a witness saw him drop from a window. Jump from a window? If that didn't kill him, would a train?

And what was JD doing on the tracks? This guy wasn't a bum scrounging for food, looking for shelter. So what was he doing on the tracks?

He was crossing the tracks.

To?

"To the river" wasn't answer enough. To the river for what? Crossing the track to the LA River. Why go to the river?

Why go from point to point to point?

Along the way something happens. He ends up slamming into a wall. Soledad had dug up a photo of the wall. Cement. Graffiti-tagged. Now with a body-sized divot where the Doe's invulnerable self took out a chunk of it.

And the mailbox Officer Hayes'd told her about. She had a photo of that too. The mailbox used to be a big blue stump same as you'd find on the comer of any street in Anytown, USA. It used to be a symbol of a citizen's right to communicate in the slowest way known to man that didn't directly involve animals. The unit was wrecked, bent, misshapen.

So… what? The Doe goes nuts, has an emotional meltdown, slams a wall, wrecks a mailbox, takes a run across the tracks…

Maybe he wasn't just going nuts. Maybe he was scoring. In need of a score bad.

Sounds very dull for an event involving a freak.

But the first freak Soledad ever took a warrant call on was a flamethrower jacked up on crack. Maybe they were the next step in evolution, but a percentage of them, no different from a percentage of normal people-be they lowlifes living in the hardest urban centers, be they lofty talk radio hosts-just wanted to get high.

The burned clothes?

Maybe if the freak was freebasing, he lit himself up. But Officer Hayes didn't report any paraphernalia around the body, and Officer

Hayes had proven himself to be ass-kissing thorough. And who the hell freebases anymore?

Jumping from a window, running the streets, crossing the tracks, running… He was running.

Why do people run? "Cause they're getting chased.

The Doe was getting chased.

Somebody wants to kill a freak, so they give it a gas bath, flick a match at it.

Reasonable if it was some don't-know-any-better hate group. But if it was murder, if it was the cadre, if they had targeted the Doe, wouldn't they know he was invulnerable? Wouldn't they know gas and fire wouldn't do much more than scrub him clean?

With her pen Soledad drew circles on the map. Circles overlapping circles. Lines of confusion. There were bits of nonlogic, but that the JD was targeted was clear. A police report had been sanitized. The only people in position to do both were cops from DMI.

The really ugly part of all that: If it was true, Tashjian had been right.

Tucker Raddatz had a decent life. He had a decent little place in Studio City. Nice lawn. Some trees. A pool. Little but decent. He had a very decent wife: Helena. She was from Spain. Born there. Grew up in America. She was pretty. Or rather, decent-looking. Two kids, boys, seven and five. They weren't at the age yet where everything their father did embarrassed them. They actually liked being around their dad. and on the surface, at least, didn't seem to be moving toward a time when they wouldn't. There was none of the gloom around the edges of Raddatz's homelife that he seemed to slog with him in his cop life, In the life Soledad was familiar with. A palpable lack of affliction was the first thing Soledad noticed when she rolled up to Raddatz's house. She noticed that, and she noticed Raddatz didn't come off as being real happy to see her.

Helena didn't pick up on the agitation. Or If she did pick up on it, could act the hell out of seeming to welcome the unwelcomed to her home. She greeted Soledad, walked Soledad out to the pool to wait while her husband finished up whatever Soledad'd interrupted with her arrival. Helena brought out some lemonade. Homemade and fresh. Offered it to cool Soledad's wait.

And Soledad sat, sat some…

She'd left her sunglasses in the car. Mistake. The sunlight kicking off the water of the pool was nearly painful.

The patio door opened. Raddatz's kids. Not him.

They jumped in the pool, the younger boy wearing orange floaties. Splashed wildly. So much happiness. So much, despite the fact they would never know a world in which a full and whole city of San Francisco existed. What was such joy, unfiltered and undamaged? The bliss of ignorance? The resurrection of hope? Kids who just didn't know better than to be happy, splash and play? That was the thing, wasn't it: that life was malleable, able to conform itself around its circumstances? Simply: No matter how fucked-up shit was, people thrived. In example was modern history, as within modern history is when man's come the closest to- remained within reach of-making himself extinct. But even when Europe was mustard-gassing itself into oblivion, when Hitler was Final Solutioning everybody in sight, when it was about the Greater Southeast Asia Coprosperity Sphere, when it was all about the cold war or ethnic cleansing or the war on terror, up to the war between normals and metanormals you could still pick up the paper and read about how the local team had blown a ten-point "lead and gotten eliminated from the play-offs. You could still turn on the eleven o'clock news and catch a piece about the dog or flower or auto show coming to town. There was a girl somewhere with her girlfriends all giddy with themselves as she tried on wedding dresses. There was a guy at a newsstand, eager, because the latest FHM had just rolled off the presses with a neatly airbrushed ass shot of that month's It Girl. Even at the edge of forever there were attempts at normalcy. Forays into happiness. The human spirit conforming to chaos.

What had Tashjian called them? Acts of life.

Acts of the human spirit. Human spirit. Not the metahuman spirit. Human spirit survived. Humanity survived.

It would if Soledad had. anything to say about it.

The patio door again. Raddatz. Hook off, stump showing. He crossed right to Soledad, sat next to Soledad on an adjoining lounge.

No preamble: "What?"

For a second Soledad thought about cracking wise on Raddatz not even giving her a hello. But she didn't feel like jokes, and jokes weren't about to buy her anything.

So getting right to it: "Know a beat cop named Hayes?"

"No."

Lie. Didn't even think about it. An absolute assertion needs consideration. A lie you know is untrue. What's there to think about?

Soledad: "He's working out of the Hollenbeck station. Same area the John Doe was found. Know him now?"

"What's the problem, O'Roark?"

He'd gone from lying to evading.

"Here's what I need: I need people to be straight with me. I show up at DMI, nobody wants to touch me. Then you give me the hand.

You and your cadre. I know about them; the guys you keep tight. You take me out to look at a dead freak, only that's all you do. You don't let me in on any investigation, if there is one. Then I find out a cop's report has been purged. Why?"

Raddatz looked off somewhere. Nowhere in particular. Just not at Soledad.

Soledad didn't care for that. "When I said be straight with me, I meant now, not when you felt like it."

"Or…?"

"Do not fuck with me."

The sound of the words shrieked against the air. Chop. Chop. Chop. A swinging blade that metronomed in a manner not to be ignored.

Raddatz: "I feel like, why do I feel like this is a Setup?"

"You think this is more than me just asking for answers, then send me walking. Whatever the reason: I don't fit in, I'm a pain in the ass, I've got no skills for this, I'm a crazy black chick… whatever. Don't admit to anything, don't say anything. But give me a way out before I get buried with the rest of you. I've been down IA road. Didn't care for it. All I'm looking for is a little self-preservation."

Raddatz looked away from whatever it was he wasn't really looking at. Not back to Soledad, but to his two boys going nuts in the pool.

"What do you want, Soledad?" Only time she could recall Raddatz using her first name. "I don't mean why are you here right this minute. What's your big objective? Why'd you go MTac?"

"Could ask you the same-"

"But that wouldn't get us any closer to anything, so I'm asking you. Why?"

"To…" How to say it? How to put into words what she felt, but so rarely articulated? "Save lives. To save life. Human life."

"And that's what's most important, right? That the… the. I don't know. The cloud of death that's been hanging over us since San Francisco, since before that, that it gets blown away."

Soledad looked to where Raddatz was looking, to his boys.

She said: "Yeah."

"And would you try to carry out that objective without holding back?"

"If I could keep freaks from taking any more lives? I'd go after that any way I had to." The statement only at its outer edges was any kind of cover for Soledad's current career as a provocateur for IA.

"Then what we're working toward is the same thing."

"You and me?"

"You, me. Others who are like-minded. How are you on trust?" "I suck at It."

For the first time since he'd sat down next to her, maybe since they'd first crossed paths, Raddatz showed anything like lightness. With a smile: "You and me both," he said. "But I've got to ask you for some. You have a problem with allocating a little trust, well, then here's the out you were looking for."

And for a sec Soledad considered things. Considered how many lies she was living. The cop lies. The personal-life lies. If she had any honesty left in her, anything similar to trust, if she felt it, would she know it?

"What," she asked Raddatz, "are your boys' names?"

"John. Jason. John's the older one." "You like being a father?" "Love it."

"Like being married?" "I love my wife."

"Not what I asked. Like being married?"

That question didn't get answered so quick.

When it did: "You get married, it's like taking a picture. It's two people at one point in time, and same as a picture nothing's supposed to change. Maybe that was all right when somebody invented marriage ten thousand years ago, or whatever. Ten thousand years ago people lived until they were fifteen. Nineteen. You get married, it's not good… fuck it, you're dead in a couple of years anyway.

"People don't typically die anymore at fifteen or nineteen, O'Roark." Back to using her surname. "People go till they're eighty, ninety years old. I don't care how much you love somebody, you try going fifty or more years of navigating being who you are and who your partner's looking to make you into."

"Your wife, what did she want you to be?"

"A guy who cared more about living than changing the world."

Soledad, bringing things back around to the issue at hand: "And if I can show a little, show some trust?"

"You get to witness something amazing."

"Something…?"

Raddatz, looking right to Soledad: "You get to witness the end of fear."

There's no cure for cancer. All the docs can do is sledgehammer it into submission. Remission. But even when it's gone, it's not really gone. It's always there. A sleeper agent waiting to be activated same as an embedded terror cell. And that's the thing: It's waiting. It's patient. Cancer is death. A form of It. Death In all its forms Is hard to beat. Ultimately impossible to beat. Life is finite. Death's got all the time in the universe.

Taking that into consideration, Gin's surgery, her early phases of recovery looked good. The docs thought they'd gotten all the malignant cells out. All that science. Best they could say was they thought they'd gotten them all out. Anyway, they were happy with the probability.

Gin'd always prided herself on looking as healthy as she was for her age. Not looking young for her age. Looking young was an illusion. She was healthy and she liked looking healthy. Fit and relatively trim. So along comes the chemo. There goes her hair. And how chemo makes most patients lose weight, it worked opposite for Gin. Gin ballooned. The thing that kept her alive distorted her nearly beyond recognition.

The ironies of life.

Soledad got all that from e-mails her mother sent. E-mails. Very complete, and completely removed from any kind of emotion.

E-mails.

And Soledad used to think a once-a-week phone call was cold.

Your husband disappears. You go to the cops, file a missing person report. Unpleasant. Unsettling. But that's what you do. It's what you do if you ever want to see your man again. You do that. And you pray.

For Diane Hall, filling out that report must've been the hardest thing in the world. She did the job with two competing hopes: that her husband would be found, but not found out.

The finding took a while. At least, it took a while for all the paperwork to line up, for the people who track bodies and names and fingerprints and dental records to realize that a John Doe cooling at LACFSC was Anson Hall, reported missing six days prior by his wife. They finally had a name to go with the body and the one other known fact regarding it. The John Doe was a freak.

Normally, a missing person comes up dead, a loved one can expect as sympathetic a dial-up as you're likely to get from cops who make bereavement calls three or five times a week. Maybe, if things are slow, someone on the city payroll might actually swing out to the survivor's place and deliver the news in person. As death goes, things are rarely slow in LA.

What Diane Hall got, Diane Hall got an MTac unit rolling on her house backed by a full complement of uniformed cops. A police bird overhead. Diane got ordered from her house hands up. Diane almost got shredded because she came out of her house clutching her six-year-old son rather than, as cops had ordered, with hands skyward. MTacs moved in, Diane got shoved to the ground, the muzzle of an HK pressed-jammed- against the side of her head. She and her boy got cuffed. The six-year-old got cuffed. put into separate ApCs and whisked to a secure lockup in East LA. The only part of town that allowed for a temporary holding facility of metanormals. Not coincidentally, East LA had the highest population of illegal immigrants who were just trying to get by in life, but couldn't much complain about super-people getting incarcerated in their backyards because if they did they were likely to get a little incarceration thrown their way prior to being shipped off to whatever country they'd border-hopped from.

DNA tests got done on Diane and on her son. Both came back negative. Diane was transferred to the county lockup. Her son got sent to Children's Services.

A cop came by at some point and informed Diane of all the laws she had broken that revolved around harboring a person she had known to have metanormal abilities. She'd pretty much broken all those laws twelve years prior when, in a chapel in Vegas, she said before immediate family and God "I do."

The knowledge itself, the knowledge she was cohabiting with a metanormal, was illegal. But a senator from Texas was sponsoring an amendment to the Constitution banning the whole concept of such unions. Turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. The only thing the citizenry disliked more than freaks was the Constitution getting fucked with.

A public defender came by at some point and informed Diane her best bet was to cop a plea, cooperate with investigators and inform on any other metanormals she was aware of.

Diane asked the lawyer when she was going to be able to see her son again.

The lawyer didn't know when. Or if.

Diane spent the following just-shy-of-a-day crying, and did a real poor job of trying to kill herself by swallowing a spoon that came with her next meal. The spoon got removed.

Diane got removed to a hospital ward, strapped down and put on meds.

Her mind floated. Vegas. I do. Happiest day of her life. C-sections hurt like hell. Do it again. She'd do it all again. Even the spoon down the throat.

Raddatz and panama and Soledad came by at some point and informed Diane they were from DMI and they had questions for her. They had questions and she, for her sake, better hope they liked her answers.

And in the private visitation room in the county jail Diane said to the three cops:

"I think we were… it must have been about two years we were dating. Even though that was back in the Age of Heroes I think he, I think Anson was scared. I think he thought I wouldn't.

In the room were a table and four chairs. Raddatz and Diane were the only ones who sat.

Diane looked too empty of strength to do anything but sit. Raddatz had been through enough interrogations to know they could go for hours. Might as well take a load off early.

Soledad was on her feet. Sitting made her feel relaxed. She'd gotten hip even in the most innocuous of situations- especially in the situations that seemed to hold the least amount of peril-being chill could get you killed.

Panama was on his feet because it allowed him to slink around the room, edge the perp up by his ever-shifting presence. Tough-Guy Cop one-oh-one. And pointless. Diane, looking like she'd been poured into her chair, had all the edges worn from her. To Soledad, Panama going to one wall of the room then crossing to lean on another came off like a monkey making its way around a cage.

Diane, finishing her thought: "It was so silly the way I found out. Saturday on an afternoon. He was making lunch, cutting meat. The knife slipped, ran across his fingers. I gave out this yelp, but when I went to Anson… the blade of the knife was bent. Not a scratch on his hand. I remember holding his hand. I remember, no matter what I had seen, his flesh felt normal to me. I knew regardless what he was, to me he was, all he was, was just a man. Just a man I loved."

From his spot behind Diane, Panama: "I think you misunderstood the question. We didn't ask about your love life. We asked if you knew what happened to your husband."

"He's dead." She was fiat with that. Beyond acceptance. It didn't matter. Nothing did. The fact that her husband wasn't around to share her life made life not matter.

Without him, without their son, she didn't have a life. They were all, in a way, dead together.

To herself Diane wondered if she could get another spoon. Diane wondered if she could get another spoon or a sharpened comb or maybe she should just take her bedding and… then they really could be dead together.

But that, that was the thing. They weren't really dead together. Their son was alive. Somewhere. He was being processed by some municipal agency. He was at some location being given all the perfunctory love and attention a minor could get from a civil servant who was just trying to rack enough hours to make retirement worthwhile.

Diane was going to leave him to that? She was going to leave their son to the city? The moralists and the demagogues could label her an unfit parent. They could assail her for breaking the law. The law. Yeah, she broke it. She broke it in favor of a promise made before God. But only a truly unfit parent would abandon their child to a system that did not recognize love. That legislated, that institutionalized bigotry. A system that gave birth to, and moved to the sway of, the euphemized organisms of hatred. The White Citizens Council. The Moral Majority. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Focus on the Family.

So in the room, sitting in the chair, wearing her county lockup jumper of bright, bright orange, Diane gave herself strength with a thought, with a mission: Keep it together. For our son, keep it together. And get him back.

"Do you have any idea how?" Raddatz asked.

"What?" Diane had lost track of the questioning.

Raddatz reminded himself the flightiness of interviewees is the reason he'd taken a seat. This shit could go on for hours. "How your husband died; do you know how?"

"You told me. The police did. The other ones. They told me he was dead, and that's all. How would I know anything more?"

"You're good at keeping secrets." Panama, from a corner of the room different than the one he'd most recently occupied. "You kept it secret your husband was a freak."

A scoffing sound from Diane. A pitying sound.

"Kept that a secret, maybe you're keeping other secrets."

"Why did you file a missing person report." Soledad. "You knew if he was found, your husband could be exposed. You could be."

"I was worried about him."

Panama: "Guy's bulletproof, and you're worried about him?"

Soledad, to Panama as he wandered: "Only four corners in the room. How about you pick one?"

The look from Raddatz to Soledad: Be cool. Panama kept on. "Something must've given you concern."

Diane asked: "You're not married, are you?" Soledad laughed.

"He's, he was my husband. I don't need any other reason to be concerned about him."

"You'd have reason to be concerned if he was involved in-"

"Where is our son?" "Don't worry abou-"

Raddatz cut off Panama with: "Your son is in protective custody."

"Being taken from his mother, he's protected how?"

"You go for a ride in the car, you don't put your kid in a child seat"-Panama kept up a stroll as he talked, did the walking just to be contrary to Soledad-"you get pulled over, the state can take your kid 'cause you kind of suck as a parent."

"I am not a bad-"

"You leave a kid around a freak-"

"Stop calling him a-"

"You leave a kid around a goddamn freak, what do you-" Diane was crying.

Soledad's cane was covered with blood, as was one wall of the room. Panama's head was literally split open. Really, really, it was more cracked open, or crushed but In a way that left a separation in his skull. Soledad was ready to run a marathon. Compete an entire triathlon. She had that much energy. That much power. Killing

Panama had been that invigorating. As much violence as she had delivered in a limited lifetime, this violence was positively delicious. In her head it was.

In the room where she and Raddatz were, where Diane was crying and Panama was leaning against yet another wall, all the more violence Soledad would allow herself was to say:

"She's a mother. Leave her alone."

"I don't care if she's-"

The sound of her flesh twisting up around the cane in her grip, her own blood ripping through her veins. Soledad was going hypersensitive again. Death was coming.

"Take a walk." Raddatz giving orders to Panama.

Even from Raddatz, Panama didn't take orders well. "What do I need to-"

"Chuck, go get some air."

The sound of Diane sobbing.

Panama stood around. His way of showing he didn't let himself get pushed around. The more he stood, the more ball-less he looked.

That became obvious to him. Eventually. The flat of his hand slapped the room's steel door. A CO opened it. Panama went his way muttering slurs.

Diane cried on.

Soledad had said, talking about-defending- Diane: She's a mother. The emotional connection to a mother, as Soledad was in the process of maybe/maybe not losing hers, is where the compassion for, the defense of Diane came from, Soledad told herself. The woman had knowingly maintained a long-term relationship with a freak. Put how many lives at risk just to satisfy her own base emotions? There wasn't any other compassion to be had for her. How could anybody ever love a…

So what Soledad was about to do wasn't about compassion, she told and told and told herself in the span of a couple of seconds. It was about, it was just a bone being tossed.

What Soledad tossed: "Mrs. Hall, if you cooperate with us, we can make your cooperation known to the right people."

Soledad got eyebrow from Raddatz.

Diane asked: "The right people? What does, what does that-"

"People with authority. People who could get you back with your son."

"O'Roark."

"I can't make guarantees. But if you help us, I will talk to somebody. Just so you know, my word carries weight."

Raddatz's hand worked his jaw, rubbed all around it, wiped down his mouth. Maybe he was suppressing a scream. Maybe he was trying to keep from saying anything because Soledad seemed to be on to something.

"Help you how?" Diane's voice was no longer flat. It was raised just slightly by hope.

"We've got reason to think your husband was murdered."

Raddatz stepped back in, took over again before Soledad could hand out any more freebies.

Soledad was wordless. That Raddatz was openly backing a murder theory was news to her. For the minute she was just listening.

"It'd take a hell of a lot to kill a man like your husband. We need to try and find out exactly what."

"I don't know what I can tell you."

"You can tell us the names of the other freaks he hung around with." Raddatz was direct with that, sure in tone. For him there wasn't any doubt Anson consorted with others of his own kind, no matter Diane said otherwise.

"He didn't-"

"You want to see your kid again or not?"

Like a knife to Soledad's gut. That Raddatz had taken the hand she'd extended Diane and was using it to slap her…

"He didn't talk with other metanormals. He wouldn't take a chance like that."

"Like that?"

"A chance letting anybody know he was different.

Even others like him. When you people arrest them, when you torture them-"

"'We don't torture-" Soledad started to say.

Regardless of the bridge of fidelity Soledad was trying to build, Diane didn't care about Soledad's POV of the world. "When you do whatever you do. When you do to them what you're doing to me now, he didn't want to take the chance his name would ever be given, or that he would name names. Mostly, he didn't want to take the chance you people would take Danny from us."

"Danny," Soledad said. "Your son?" she asked.

Diane said: "Do you know what…" She had to take a couple of seconds, get herself back together. "Anson used to wear bandages. Every three or four months or so he'd put a little bandage on the back of his hand or a finger or one on his neck. Never made a big deal out of it. But he wanted people… he wanted it in their minds they'd seen him cut, hurt. He never wanted people to suspect he couldn't be hurt. He was that careful. I know there are other metanormals in the city. Everybody knows it. If Anson ever talked with them, that I don't know about."

If Diane was a liar, she was a helluva one. But knowing you could close the separation from your child with a lie well told could give any mother a tongue of gold.

"All I can tell you," Diane continued, "I think he knew."

"Knew?" Soledad asked.

"That he'd been found out. Or… or something bad was going to happen."

"Why? Why do you say that?"

"Maybe I'm just using hindsight. But Anson had been carrying… concern. For weeks it seemed. It seems. And more than what I'd come to accept as normal."

"What" Raddatz asked, "were his normal concerns?"

"That he'd he exposed, hunted down by the police. You see on TV every other month, somewhere someone is being exposed as a metanormal, assaulted by police-"

"They can turn themselves in." Maybe she had some compassion, but for Soledad it stopped short of allowing for police-bashing. "How many years after San Francisco, they can still do what's right. If they don't…"

Yeah. If they don't. Diane nodded. Didn't rejoin the argument. She wasn't going to win hearts and minds in an interrogation room. Why bother trying?

Diane went on with: "All those were his usual concerns. He had his brighter days. Always he was bright with Danny. But mostly, he lived in fear. But these last few weeks, month… he was quiet, distant. But I guess I'd say serene also. Like he'd accepted… whatever. Whatever there was for him to accept."

Acceptance.

Soledad thought: the last stage of death. Anson knew there was a chance he was going to die. Was he aware of the other murders? Does that kind of chatter bleed through the underground freak community? Had he seen Death in his mind? In his heart? Had he seen Death watching him, following him? To a freak, to an unkillable freak, how does Death appeal^-?

Soledad looked to Raddatz.

"He tried to hide it from me," Diane said. "But in the quiet moments, in the moments he thought I wasn't watching him… you know the regard of someone you care for. You know when it's wrong."

Raddatz came forward in his chair, leaned on the table. "Do you remember how long he'd been feeling that way?"

"I think, really, since Israel Fernandez was assassinated."

"He died in a car accident," Soledad pointed out.

She didn't laugh, but Diane had a sick humor to her. "Sure. One of those accidents where a man loses control of his car on a dry road in good weather and crashes into a tree."

Raddatz: "Happens all the time."

Diane agreed. "It does happen all the time. It happens to political leaders, people who want change. An accident. A lone gunman. A hightech lynching because the people who don't-"

Raddatz was up out of the chair moving for the door.

"The people who don't want change make accidents-" "Guard!"

"They make them happen!"

For a minute Raddatz's hand slamming on the metal door, Diane's voice nail-on-chalkboard screeching in the air, fought each other to a draw.

A CO opened the door.

Raddatz bulled his way out of the room. Soledad merely followed.

Diane, alone, wanted to cry. Was too spent for tears. She just sat. Until a CO took her back to her cell.

Soledad and Raddatz made their way through the lockup, through sliding steel doors and partitions and past guards and surveillance cameras… All that to keep normal people incarcerated.

She'd never been to the SPA.

She'd bagged a lot of freaks, but Soledad was thinking right then she'd never been to the spot in the desert with the sweet-sounding acronym that housed freaks brought in off the streets. How you keep them from getting back on the streets… it must boggle the mind. Soledad figured at some point she ought to take the trip.

Her mind could stand to get blown every now and then. Or at least reassured.

Panama wasn't around. Soledad and Raddatz would run into him sooner or later. The later, for Soledad, the better.

As they walked, to Raddatz: "Who would he have called attention to?"

"What's that?"

"if Kail wasn't consorting with other freaks, if this guy felt like he was in for some trouble, the trouble didn't come from nowhere. He must have at least felt like he'd caught somebody's eye. Whose?"

"People who want freaks dead."

Feeling Raddatz out: "A hate group?"

"Enough of them around."

"My experience is they're full of talk. They march, they bum their symbols, but what yokels in White Trashville don't do is go after vies that might actually fight back."

" 'Yokels in White Trashville.' But you're not biased."

"I'm not PC with shitheads, and shitheads don't have what it takes to bag a freak."

"Yeah? What's your theory, O'Roark?"

With her nonresponse Soledad made it plain she didn't, have one. Not one she'd articulate.

"Then forget about leading," Raddatz told her. "Learn to follow."

Up at a CO's check-in Panama was talking with a couple of corrections officers. From the body language he was being confidential. Soledad approaching. The COs looked up, gave a look: Shh, shh. Here she comes.

Part of Soledad wanted to give a grin to their frat-boy antics. Part of Soledad wanted to walk up, coldcock one as a roundabout way of wiping the shine off all their smirking ivory faces. Even the one Latino CD was right then ivory to her.

Raddatz collected Panama. The trio started heading out. Before they cleared the joint Raddatz pulled off. Said he had to pee. Soledad thought more likely he wanted to give her time with Panama. Let things get hashed now so they wouldn't have to be dealt with on the drive back.

A couple of seconds of standing around before Panama looked like he was working his way, working his way toward clocking Soledad.

And right when he was at the very least going to smack her with every hard word he could think of, Soledad cut him with: "Good play in there; you taking it rough, me looking soft. Scared of you, Panama. She was scared to hell of you. Soon as you left she opened up like a wet paper sack. Don't ever think I've seen a cop play things so smooth. You know what you're doing. I don't have to tell you that, but you know what you're doing."

Panama stood where he was. Flesh pink. Rage useless. No way to get satisfaction. A eunuch watching a porn flick. So he huffed and puffed at Soledad. Balled a hand into a fist.

Soledad took a stick of gum out of her pocket and unwrapped it and started to give it a chew. Then, finally, she gave Panama some attention. Both eyes straight to the face. Her forbearance mocking his fury.

By the front of the building, back from his faux piss, Raddatz called to Panama, to Soledad.

Panama, Soledad; they wouldn't take their eyes off of each other. It's like they were worried in a moment's flinch the other would reach for their gun.

Soledad said: "Go. You don't get to walk behind me."

"You're a fucking cunt."

"Respect it. It's where you came from. Go."

Panama went, went right past Raddatz, out for their car.

As Soledad arrived to him, Raddatz asked: "You two done?"

"Done. Unless we're just getting started."

I live for simplicity. MTac afforded me a very simple lifestyle. Find a freak. Kill a freak. Unless it kills you first. Simple.

Your life's not cluttered with a lot of friends because civvies don't understand you and coworkers tend to die off with regularity.

Simple.

You shut down, you close up, you isolate. By yourself in your apartment, on the Santa Monica promenade high noon on a Saturday. Either, or. You're alone.

That makes your life all about you.

That makes life simple.

So all this complexity is driving me crazy. Sensing death, knowing it's coming for me, only to find out it's hitting my mother instead. Working undercover against guys who might be doing a more proactive version of what I believe in.

Dealing with a woman separated from her kid. That hurts. I know. My mother had separated herself from me.

And, oh yeah, I'm getting married.

I would say it's looking like a Vegas wedding, but I think it'll take more than a couple of quick "I do's" at the Little White Chapel to cover the sham of things.

But making my situation with Vin legal's the least complex part of my life. I don't really love him, I'm just going to marry him. So really, I'm just like a thousand other chicks who've quit love and are only looking to graduate to a state of blind permeance in their lives.

What's complex:

A cop whose head I wanted to beat with my cane, a freak sympathizer I actually feel sympathy for. Violence and death unseen but all around. It's all that which I can't figure.

I don't care for my inability to navigate my own

life.

As I approach thirty, I don't need for my life to require an ever-increasing amount of attention.

But then, as I approach thirty, I realize I never thought I'd live this long.

A shower. Hot water. Some kind of a soak. She had, Soledad had a tangible urge to physically do something about the dirty way she

felt. Felt.

Felt, just from the "you so smart, Joe"-ing she'd done with Panama. The cowering, the virtual bootlicking to avoid conflict and maintain good graces had left in her mouth the taste of Panama's filth. On top of that the tack hadn't particularly worked.

Jesus.

This wasn't, she was sure, the way Tashjian operated. Tashjian, Soledad was damn sure, didn't lower himself for anybody for any reason.

But Tashjian came at people head-on.

Soledad was working a cerebral Delta Force, coming up out of the mud on someone's intellectual rear to…

To stab 'em in the back.

Right when Soledad was coming to grips with her choices, she had an annoying way of queering her own deal.

So, she proffered herself, here's the new bargain: do your work, Soledad. Get to the real. If real was Raddatz and his cadre were on the bad end of things, well, then, take 'em out. Then kick 'em.

What the hell? They're down, right? Might as well get a few shots in. To Panama for sure.

Panama was top of Soledad's list of people to which she'd hand out a few nasty blows.

But that was for later.

For now: the truth, and getting to it.

“Officer O'Roark?"

"Yeah?"

"This is Officer Hayes. I was the one who found the freak," he said in case Soledad couldn't put name with face. Wasn't an issue. He'd very much been in her thoughts.

"What's doing, Officer?"

"I… I wanted to give you a call. Wasn't sure if, if this is strictly right."

Soledad gripped the phone. Her anxiety: A request for a date was coming.

"I wasn't sure, but there's some things going on I think you should know about."

The call wasn't about the two of them getting together. Some other kind of shit was imminent. Shouldn't be a surprise. Soledad couldn't recall, seemed like she couldn't remember the time the phone had ever rung with some good news.

She asked: "What's going on?"

"I'm not real sure, ma'am. That is, I know what's going on, but I don't know what it means. If it means anything."

"Just play things back for me."

"Is it safe to talk or: the phone?"

Jesus Christ. Soledad hadn't even thought about that. And the fact that Hayes had…

Shit was most assuredly coming.

For any ears that might be listening, playing things oil; "Course it is, Officer."

"Of course it is," Hayes parroted. "I only meant-"

"Just play tilings back."

"Had an investigator come around the other day, asked me if I had ever talked with you." "An Investigator?"

"DMI."

"What was his name?"

"It was Raddatz, ma'am."

Soledad held down her phone for a sec. She brushed the antenna over her teeth. Finished with that, with a mindless act that bought her space to think, putting the phone back to her ear:

"… O'Roark? Officer O'Roa-"

"Yeah, I'm here. So Raddatz comes around, talks to you. Asks you what?"

"Asks me if you and I ever talked, and about what. I told him."

"You were straight with him?"

"Straight all the way. No reason I shouldn't have been."

"No. No reason."

"But I don't go in for the DMI types. I don't care for them. You're decent and all, Officer O'Roark."

"Thanks." Kiss ass, she thought.

"But the rest of them… So I figured I give you a heads-up because something about him stank."

"Yeah. Like Old Spice."

Soledad gave her thanks and good-byes. Started to.

Hayes cut her off with a query as to whether or not Soledad liked to shoot pool.

Soledad said she did, but that her leg was still barely in fair shape. Now wasn't a real good time to go stand around shooting a few games. But, and this she stressed, she really appreciated Hayes having her back.

Hayes said he understood. Maybe another time.

Maybe. Soledad hung up her phone.

Raddatz coming around behind her, asking questions.

No matter what she was putting out, Raddatz wasn't taking it at face value. Same as he'd said he was short on trust, she was going to have to be long on caution.

And right then among other stuff she was thinking, Soledad realized in her excuses to Hayes as to why she couldn't go out with him, the fact that she was getting married wasn't one of them.

The earth is a beautiful thing. Mother Earth, Gaia, depending on what land of Old Age hippie, New Age guruism you believed in. However you called her, she's a real decent home. Not just the green and the blue and the white of the trees and the sky and the clouds. A modest girl, her true beauties are hidden.

The earth moves.

Around the sun, through the universe. The earth was in a constant state of adjustment. Of resonance. The seismic plates, the fissures, the volcanic rings. Moving. Shifting. For billions of years. Creating, as it created topography, a song of folklore that spoke, almost cried in longing for a time before man and machine and clear-cutting and chemical dumping and toxin pumping. And the song was beautiful.

If you could hear it.

People couldn't hear it.

Normal people couldn't hear It.

Metanormals couldn't hear it.

Except for metanormals with the ability to terraform. The ability to touch the resonance, affect the resonance. Alter the land. Move rock and stone. Literally the ability to make a mountain out of a molehill. It was an art. Magic. Here's the trick: Terraformers didn't actually do anything. Like geologic Dr. Dolittles, they encouraged the earth to alter herself. There had been a few, a very few, heroes who terraformed-used their abilities to move earth to fight wrongs. But mostly, terraformers had been, were, pacifist. They felt, they felt the violence earth had known since her birth. The impact of massive meteors. The extinction of entire species. The attempted extermination of whole races. It was all in the song. If you heard the song, if you felt the song, you didn't much want to cause anyone, anything, the slightest tribulation.

But the thing about nonviolence: It's a good concept, but it doesn't much stand up to the need for self-preservation.

Tiesto Moore was just finding that out.

He found that out, really, about eight minutes prior when… when It came after him throwing off electricity, throwing bricks and metal and whatever It could get Its hands on and pick up and whip at speeds which turned the objects into deadly projectiles. Speeds that forced the projectiles through the earthen walls Tiesto yanked from the ground for his protection.

That was before he completely quit his pacifism.

That was before Tiesto started ripping rocks and then boulders from the earth. Moving them like buried marionettes. Making them rush for It. What else was there to call… If!

Maybe… Tiesto was getting delirious. He was starting to think maybe he ought just call it fear. Call it, maybe, Death.

Delirious. The running, the shifting of the earth he was doing. Was doing. Too tired now. Too tired to move earth anymore. Just run. Just stumble. Just keep ahead of It.

Just keep alive.

He'd miss the song. Tiesto thought about an empty eternity without the song. And the thought was pretty shitty. And It was rushing up somewhere behind him. It was coming to end things.

Really going to miss the song.

And Tiesto came stumbling around a corner.

And there it was waiting for him. Death. Four MTacs. Weapons ready. Fingers on triggers.

Eddi: "You are in violation of an Exe-"

Tiesto raised a hand for the MTacs. Maybe to attack. Maybe to defend himself. Maybe to use the flesh of Ms palm to shield himself, feebly, from the inevitable. In that sliver of a second his thoughts too capricious to discern.

The MTacs took it as an act of aggression.

The MTacs opened fire.

Tiesto was dead before he touched earth.

Raddatz did the talking. He was the one who asked the questions. He handled or at least took the lead of the debrief. Standard. It was Raddatz and Panama, Soledad third-wheeling it as they went through the call with Eddi Aoki. Her written report would follow. But it was SOP to have a face-to-face with the senior lead of an element soon as possible after a warrant was served. Originally, on-site debriefings'd been established to wring every piece of intel there was out of the responding officers while memories were fresh. Guns are good, but knowledge is power. And any piece of info could be the key piece when it came to going after a similar mutie on some future occasion.

But…

More and more the on-sites were done to get an official story out quick as possible to placate the freak fuckers and, worst case, contradict any altered version of the incident bleeding hearts might try to virus through the liberal media.

The call had been fairly standard as warrants go. Someone had 911 "d about a freak. Pacific MTac rolled. A terraformer, but Pacific got the drop. Chalked the kill.

Soledad was humiliated.

Standing there, Raddatz and Panama doing the talking, Soledad fell unpurposed. Added to that they were talking with Eddi. It was Eddi being witness to Soledad's lack of purpose that elevated her disconcert to humiliation. Every second that passed sank her with shame.

About three-quarters of the way through the debriefing Raddatz got a call from back at DMI- Donatell was Soledad's best guess-and stepped off to talk. Panama, not looking to kill downtime with Soledad, took a minute to go do something. Go pretend he was doing something.

Soledad and Eddi.

Soledad offered: "Nice job on the freak." "Wasn't much, but I'll take the easy ones." It didn't overly show, but Soledad rated Eddi's modesty as false.

Eddi asked: "How's things with you?" "Different. All different." "Like it?"

"it'll take getting used to."

"Good thing is you won't have to." Eddi did some cheerleading. "Your leg gets good, you'll be right back where you belong."

"We'll see." Then, one more time: "We'll see."

"I was actually glad to see you today."

"Actually? You make it sound-"

"A little backhanded, yeah, but I mean it. Worst thing about serving a warrant is you've got to deal with the DMI creeps afterward."

"Worst thing besides getting killed, you mean."

A little bit of a smile from Eddi. "Maybe not even.

Swear, there're days I'd rather let a freak go than have to sit across from DMI."

Soledad shared the feeling. Maybe it was just departmental fidelity for G Platoon, but since malting the transfer the feeling'd gotten stronger, not weaker. She was ready to agree with Eddi.

But Soledad had put work into looking loyal to the new boss no matter how sincere or fake they gauged that loyalty to be. There was no sense in queering things with loose lips, on having her true feelings come back to bite her in the ass.

She said: "They're not creeps."

"Yeah. They're normal guys who-" "They're not creeps."

The smile slipping from Eddi's face: "Just joking around, Soledad."

"Except what we do," hitting the "we," making it very much come off as "not you," "isn't a joke."

"You get DMI branded on your ass too?"

"I've worked both sides. Maybe you ought to before you start making judgments."

From Eddi, a cold, cold look. Then a smile, but that, too, was frozen. And sharp.

"Know something, Soledad? One day you and me are going to talk. Maybe not long. Couple of minutes. But we're going to talk about something. And when we get done talking, we're going to realize we went that couple of minutes without just about getting into a fistfight. Then we'll go out and celebrate. Only, it won't be much of a celebration because, I'm guessing, before we get to the champagne you and me'll get into an ass-kicking contest."

"Other than I think champagne is for little girls, I'm looking forward to it."

'The lack of argument or the ass kicking?"

"Sweetie, we get into some ass kicking, you'll be too busy getting your ass kicked to argue."

And that turned Eddi's smile warm.

Raddatz came back around. Seeing that, Panama felt comfortable enough to quit faking like he was doing something else and reengage.

Raddatz asked of Eddi: "Anything else for us, Officer?"

A moment's thought. A shake of her head. "I was saying to Officer O'Roark this one was pretty average. We got it, and everybody gets to go home. They should all be this good."

"Write it up and get it in."

"By tomorrow."

Raddatz departed without salutation. Panama and Soledad followed. "Soledad."

She turned back to Eddi.

Eddi didn't say anything else, made no move to close the distance between her and Soledad.

By her lack of action Soledad got that whatever else Eddi had to say wasn't for other ears. She made the cross back.

"This is going to sound a little weird. If it was some other DMI cree… If it was some other cops besides you, I wouldn't bother."

A little shrug, a little shake of the head from Soledad. She'd take it as it came.

"When we hit the terraformer, it looked scared." Eddi stood close to Soledad, went quiet.

For eyes that might be watching she tried to come off like she was being casual: a little leftover girl talk that had to get finished. "I don't mean the kind of scared four hot MTacs put into a mutie."

"Then scared how?"

"If I knew how, it wouldn't be weird to me." "Why are you telling me this and not Raddatz?"

Rocking on her heels, Eddi faked like she was without concern. "I guess I've got ego the same as anybody. So making something out of nothing; I can do without DMI thinking I'm all hysterical. But I've looked in the whites of enough freaks to know this one was, was scared of something besides us. Maybe it means something. Maybe it doesn't. More than those guys, I trust you to come to which is which. Get healthy, Soledad." A flick of her hand as a wave good-bye. "However you feel about me, I feel better when you've got my back."

Watching Soledad limp away, Eddi got an ill feeling. Her insides real quick got morbid and unwell. Eddi'd never seer. Soledad so busted up. Wasn't just that she was watching Soledad cane away with an odd rocking gait that was same as Vegas neon announcing Soledad was jacked. Wasn't just that Soledad'd been injured at all. Plenty of times Soledad had gotten the bad end of things. Less, maybe, than some MTacs, but enough so that the image wasn't alien to Eddi.

Soledad was busted in another way. She'd been always to Eddi a single-minded MTac out kicking ass. She was still emotionally myopic, was still putting her foot to tailbones. But she wasn't an MTac and didn't seem to be one in the most severe way possible. In a change-a-day world, Soledad had been a constant. The extreme variations between life and death Eddi was pretty sure she could handle. But in the dayto-day, aside from being extant or extinct, it was nice that some things always remained. Lucy was always going to screw things up, Ricky was always going to forgive her. Politicians were always going to set aside the public trust for cash or whores. Soledad was always going to be an MTac. Or not.

And what really made Eddi's ill feeling putrid, it wasn't going a few rounds with a mutie that changed things. It was not looking both ways when Soledad ran across a street.

It was extreme chance. It was real bad luck. It was not much of anything that changed everything.

Eddi was ready for major life changes. Eddi'd been through the sudden loss that robs survivors of good-byes, makes closure a quaint notion. That kind of shit makes every other unchanging thing a minor miracle.

Soledad limping away was one less miracle in Eddi's life.

Thursday was off for Soledad, She got up late thanks to the little white pill she took to help induce the sleep that otherwise rarely came to her. She went swimming. Worked out her bum leg. Hurt like hell. But she wasn't about to let herself go to waste. Laundry. She gave thought to going to a movie but couldn't find one she figured she could sit through without later regretting the two hours of her life, the nine dollars of her hard-earned she'd tossed away. She gave thought to calling Vin. Couldn't particularly think of anything to say to him different or new or somehow meaningful that wasn't covered in their last pseudo-conversation three or four days prior. She did send off an elongated e-mail to her mother. Soledad had plenty to say to her mother. A dark part of Soledad wondered if her mother was even really sick, or had just tumbled onto a grotesque way to build a relationship with her daughter. Errands were run and Soledad ate and watched the news. She eked out a few more pages of the Mailer book she'd spent closing In on a year and half "reading." She fucked around on the Internet for a while.

Eight months after his seventy-third birthday a guy fell in love for the first time all over again. A mother was told her child would not live to see the morning. An NBA hoops star who hadn't started let alone finished college, but still managed to pull in more than twenty mill a year, was refusing to take no for an answer from some girl he'd known all of three and a third hours. A guy who'd never wanted kids was taking his sons to the amusement park for the third time this year thanking God for them every step of the way as, ironically, they were the only things that gave his life meaning.

All this was happening across town, somewhere across the country. Somewhere beyond Soledad. Physically beyond her. Emotionally. In her time and space it was the most ordinary of days that passed utterly without significance. The kind of day, in another forty-eight hours, there would be little of it she would be able to recall with distinction if at all.

With absolutely nothing else to do, having wrung herself empty of every approximation of purpose, she lay in bed and let sleep come.

Sleep ignored the invitation.

Soledad debated taking a little white pill. Wasn't worried about getting hooked. She was worried only that when she ran out, more would be hard to come by as more required a prescription she didn't have. And taking the pills built up a resistance. As it was, beyond just the sleep they gave her, Soledad dug the knockout that came with the drugs. Made her think that death… yeah, it had to be respected, but there was no reason to fear it.

That quick, that easy, Soledad was thinking about death again.

Getting her mind off that, she settled on skipping the pill. Better to go a few sleepless nights than have them lose their sweet, sweet effect.

Soledad Say in bed. Ignored the urge to check and check and recheck the clock. Over a few hours maybe she slept a little, but probably she didn't. The phone rang. It was late. Or really early. Either way Soledad knew she wasn't going to care for what was waiting on the other end of the line.

"It's Raddatz."

"Hey."

"What kind of shape are you In?"

"Tired. I can function if I have to."

"What I talked about before: the end of fear. Do you want to be part of that? Is that something you want to be part of?"

"Well, I don't know what it is. I can't say I want to be part of something when I don't know what it is."

"It's the right thing, Soledad." He was being oblique. "You've got to know, inside you, the truth is you want to do what's right."

She lay in the dark. Not a word. Not a sound. The day had come so close to being insignificant. Now it was on its way to being monumental. An invite 'from a rogue cop to be part of "what's right."

"Soledad…?"

"It's a bullshit question. Yeah, I want to do what's right."

"I'm going to come around. Be ready. And, Soledad.

"Yeah?"

"Have your piece ready too."

Not that Soledad had ever put much thought to such things, but in passing she never figured a clandestine meeting regarding murder-murders that had occurred, murders that might- would take place in a Jamba Juice.

That's where she was with Raddatz, with Panama, with Donatell, with Shen. All of them with their scars and missing digits. And Shen with his… his head. It was where a head goes on a regular body. Right up there on top of the neck. That's where its similarity to normality ended. Shen's was all stoved in on the sides. Pushed in at the front. Features violently asymmetrical. At some point something had crushed it severely. And all the king's horses and all the king's men… The kid clerking the counter unable to keep eye contact with Shen while he took Shen's order for a Mango-a-Go-Go. Donatell had been right about Shen. Shen did make him look good. Sitting around as they were, they looked like busted war vets come out to drink smoothies, reminisce and try and convince each other the sacrifice they'd made in some desert or jungle or European city thousands of miles away'd been worthwhile.

Except for Soledad. In the company she kept, the bums on her neck made Soledad look like a security guard who'd gotten scratched breaking up teens scuffling at the mall.

Somber. The group was somber as they took a minute to put down their blends of fruit and ice and nonfat yogurt, and it would have been hi-F'n-larious to Soledad- grown men, boozers all probably, drinking their girlie drinks-except their avoidance of liquor and caffeine signified they were keeping clean for work. And not a one of them was at the minute on the city's clock. The work that was coming was extracurricular.

A little bit of bullshit was slung back and forth. Home talk. Cursory personal matters. There was subtext to it. Reminders to all: There's something I've got to go home to; a family, a life. Somebody. Something. So when we hit it, I got your back. Make sure you got mine.

From an envelope Raddatz slipped a photo. Surveillance photo. Black-and-white and very, very grainy. Very snowy. The camera that took it was apparently shit. In relation to the doorway he was passing through, the subject was a man of average size, though his weight appeared above median compared to his height. Vague as that was, it was also as detailed a description to be gotten from viewing the photo. Wearing a sweat suit, a hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head, all the more to be said was that he (or she; it was impossible to be absolutely certain of the subject's gender) resembled those.FBI sketches of the Unibomber, and those FBI sketches of the Unibomber never quite resembled anybody, which is why the FBI caught the Unibomber only after the Unibomber's brother ratted him out.

The photo got passed and passed and passed. Everybody took a look. Nobody said a thing. Except Soledad.

Soledad said: "Who's This?"

"It's the guy," Raddatz answered, "we're looking for."

"Didn't know we were looking for a guy."

Shen hit the bottom of his cup, slurped up the last of his drink.

Soledad said again: "I didn't know we were-"

"He's a person of extreme interest."

"That says a whole lot. How do we find Mr. Interest? If this is all we've got to go on…" Soledad flicked the picture over the table back to Raddatz.

"Run a watch." Panama made it sound like Soledad's lack of savvy was tightening up the muscle around his neck and head, causing him pain.

"We're going to watch over the whole city? The five of us?"

Donatell: "We know where to look."

"How do we know where to look, 'cause I don't know shit except for what you're telling me."

"You gonna give her everything?" Shen asked of Raddatz.

Raddatz kept quiet.

"Good Intel. That's what DMI's all about." Panama gave DMI one-oh-one. "You get good intel, you get your freak."

She wasn't trying to be contrary. For the sake of her true objective, Soledad was trying to front acceptance of the offered vagaries. She nodded a little. But the reality she wasn't buying what was being passed off didn't need articulation, was obvious beyond words.

"I think what we wanted was to give you a taste of how DMI works." Panama was coming across, was trying to come across soft. Not. one time before had he been anything less than tough with Soledad. Every word he was saying now: bullshit. "This is just us processing a tip." He didn't trust her. He was trying to shove her

off.

"Middle of the night in a smoothie store is where you all process your info." She made it all sound stupid, wanted Panama to know how stupid he sounded. "If I'm in or I'm out, that's up to you. But if I'm out, don't call me up and drag me around way after dark anymore."

As he got. up from the table, Raddatz to Soledad: "You ride with me."

So here was Soledad In a car parked off a street in Westlake. Waiting. Watching, supposedly. But she knew she was on the hunt. No matter the convolutions Raddatz was taking her through, she knew that she and the cadre were on the edge of a badness. At the low end was acting without authority. The far end was targeting a metanormal for execution. Simply, murder.

To Raddatz: "This guy we're watching, is he a freak or is he a freak fucker?" Raddatz said nothing.

To Raddatz: "If this is a freak, if you're thinking about doing more than just watching him, we need to call In MTac."

Raddatz kept looking straight ahead. Right out the windshield. His gaze went down the block, over the horizon. It was that distant.

"If you've got solid Intel, it needs to get passed to-"

"We're getting a little more."

"It takes the five of us to eyeball a freak? They only send four MTacs when it's time to take one out."

"I'm taking a chance bringing you along."

There were a lot of ways to take that. Best, Soledad thought, not to take it any one way in particular. No assumptions. Let Raddatz explain himself. Let him help her figure what to do.

"You're good-cop, Soledad. From what I know, as a cop, there's not one thing wrong with you. You remind me of me."

"You complimenting me or you?"

"If it's a compliment, it's backhanded. When I imply I was a good cop, I was the kind who didn't ask questions. I believe… I believed in the job-"

Believe. Believed. The tense shift stuck out to Soledad.

"I believed, and I followed orders. I didn't question things. I could be trusted to do right."

"That's what good cops do." Soledad slouched against her door. Kept up the outward appearance of being relaxed. She eased, very much eased, a hand for her piece. For whatever was coming she'd feel better gripping it.

Raddatz: "It's also what your average Nazi did: act without consideration. Just follow orders."

"That's not a backhanded compliment. That's back-fisted."

"As much against me as you. But same as me, I think you can change."

"Change to what? The opposite of good cop is

bad."

Her fingers brushed the butt of the O'Dwyer. "Being a better one." "What's better than doing right?" "Keeping from doing wrong." "Jesus Christ, it's like talking to a fortune cookie."

"Leave your gun."

Soledad quietly gave props to Raddatz's good eyes. His hand was resting on the steering wheel. His hook was in his lap. Unless he started swinging it, he wasn't a threat.

Soledad, getting a strong grip on her O'Dwyer: "It's too late for that."

"Never too late." Raddatz, looking to Soledad: "You've got a reputation for being cold and hard. More so than most of the MTacs."

Soledad didn't take that badly. It was fact, one she'd gotten comfortable with a long time ago. She got a comfortable grip on her gun too. It was carrying her green-tipped load. Slugs gel-capped with contact poison. Soledad wondered, if she had to take the shot, would it put Raddatz down before he got off one in return? In close quarters what were the odds Soledad would get back-splashed by her own poison? Right then she kinda wished for a regular gun. Didn't have to be big. Just deadly in a conventional fashion. While she was thinking that. Soledad checked her back side. Made sure none of the cadre were creeping on her.

"But only once," Raddatz went on, "have I seen you quick to anger. When I threatened Hall's wife to keep her son from her."

Before she could even process the thought an answer fell out of her: "A kid needs his mother." "So you see."

"See what? I throw somebody a break, you think I can't do what's-" "You see the gray."

Soledad flicked her free hand like she was deflecting a useless thought.

She said: "The law, justice, doing the job; there's gray all over those. If this is supposed to be an academy primer, it's years too late."

"You believe in a better world? Hell, you know you do. You want a better world, it starts now. Tonight."

An invitation. An open invitation. With her hand on her gun, knowing she was ready to kill him anyway, Raddatz was still offering her to join the cadre.

If just in theory she took the offer, if she jettisoned her expressed obligation to Tashjian and threw her allegiance to the cadre, what she did this night wouldn't be her first kill. Not hardly. But it'd be her first without sanction. Without the letter of the law backing her. And that, that «little» thing-the law-made the difference. Maybe not ultimately a true moral difference. That's what cable TV shoutfests were for: pundits to go back and forth on right and wrong before the moderator got in the last word after the final commercial break. But the law gave Soledad and every other cop justification. And justification, under the circumstances, after San Francisco, allowed her to execute her obligation: protect normal humans.

It allowed her to protect normal humans and still sleep the sleep of the innocent. On the occasions she slept at all.

This night she couldn't let things go to murder and feel the same way. Clean.

Could she?

Unbelievable. The situation had advanced to the brink, and still Soledad was conflicted. She would have complicity, or she would be duplicitous. One or the other. And only just then could she even vaguely pick which.

"I don't believe In vigilantism." Fuck being a rat. She'd pick Tashjian's side, but she wasn't going to be surreptitious. "Being a better person means we're not like them. We follow the law. We don't make our own rules. We're not gods. We don't hand out life and death whenever we please."

"You're with us more than you know, I've got a high regard for life and death," Raddatz said.

"The power to take it is awesome. The power to preserve it is humbling. And the ability to know which to apply scares the hell out of me. If I could explain this in a word… I need you here."

"That's a strong way to put things."

"I need your skills, but if you don't want to use them, I need to know where you are. I can't take a chance."

"Not when you're going to do some coloring outside the lines. How about we do this: How about we start up the car; head back to DMI?"

"I can't."

"I hate them as much as you, as much as a person can. But all this does-"

A laugh from Raddatz. Snide.

Soledad rode over it. "AH this does is give the power back to the freaks."

"It's not about power, except the power to do what's right. And I honestly believe in the crucial moment you'll do what's right. I believe. I have to, you can't do otherwise. But I need your trust. I need-"

A little electronic chirp. It was muffled under the fabric of Soledad's coat, but she and Raddatz both heard it. It was audible confirmation from Soledad's gun the safety had been flicked off.

There was her trust.

She said: "I'm telling you one last time: Start the car and-"

Raddatz's radio came up weakly, barely able to read Shen's call.

"… spotted… pretty sure…"

"Shen!" Raddatz did a one-handed fumble with the radio, adjusted dials, tried to squeeze life from it. The movements so quick Soledad nearly pulled out and took the shot. "Shen, you're coming in weak. Repeat."

Static. A little. Then not even that.

"Raddatz, it's Donatell, you read?"

Soledad: "Raddatz…»

Ignoring her: "Donatell."

"I read." Donatell's voice came strong, the radio signal clear. "You get that last from Shen?"

"Negative. It came garbled. Crawl up Union toward him." Raddatz lit the car's engine. "Keep your mike hot."

"Roger that."

"Raddatz, call it in."

Raddatz looked to Soledad. In the look he made himself naked emotionally. He cast off anger, any trace of a tough-guy stance. The irradiate musings that had dominated his tone. All that, all that was set aside. It was quite a trick, though it was not an illusion. It was replaced by a sincerity beyond honesty.

"Soledad," Raddatz said, "shoot me or get out."

Wasn't an order. It was a request to do one or the other.

Soledad had to let him be. Or she had to let him die. If he could not complete his task, then- and this she got from his tone-all there really was, was for Raddatz to be dead.

Shoot or get out.

Soledad did neither.

Raddatz put the car in gear, drove. He took the street at a solid creep. Even at the hour there was activity. People coming and going from something that was open all night. A pharmacy. A club. A porn store.

Rounding a comer where Shen's car should be but wasn't: "Where is he?" A useless question, but it fell out of Raddatz's mouth just the same. "Shen?" No response to Ms call over the radio. "Shen, it's Raddatz, you read?"

Nothing.

To Panama: "Panama, anything?" "… on the… back around… " More static than words.

Soledad's grip on her gun stayed constant, though the gun itself had moved from beneath her coat to a spot in the clear where it would be more ready for action.

"Eyes open" was Raddatz's order to Soledad. She didn't need to be directed. That things were hinky was obvious.

Raddatz kept up the creep of the car, kept it up, but even as it slow-rolled, it rolled with an urgency. Something was not right. Very close by, some things were ill. Heading for terminal.

Soledad spotted it. Parked on a cross street facing opposite of traffic. Shen's car.

"There!"

Raddatz was already angling for it. Both cops cut of the car before it stopped roiling. Raddatz drew out.

Two-handed grip. Gun forward, muzzle down. Soledad came around the car. The car in drive. Engine dead. Door open.

Raddatz did a quick assess: The target wasn't on the street or sidewalk.

An alley behind an apartment block. Raddatz took it, Soledad right behind.

Creep, creeping along. Cautious, but not too slow. Things were happening somewhere. Raddatz, Soledad had to get to them.

And mariachi music played from a radio and candlelight danced from a low window and a baby made its hunger or tiredness or displeasure known by its wailing.

The world was one sizable distraction.

Creep, creeping…

An odor. The odor was…

Puddled water. Shadows. A stray cat with a wound on its leg that was home to an extended family of maggots.

Shen.

Up ahead in the alley Shen sat on the ground. Legs splayed. Arms dangling at his sides. A gun spilled from his right hand. That odor: The air was sick with cordite. He'd gotten off a bunch of shots. No blood on the ground. If Shen had hit the target, the bullets didn't slow it any. The bullets didn't stop the target from getting close enough to Shen to punch a hole into his chest.

Into his chest.

Torn flesh and busted bone and flattened organs bent in on themselves like the heart of a black hole. That's what it was. The center of Shen was just a hole into which life had collapsed.

The expression on Shen's face, the one he wore when he exited existence: disbelief. He knew in his last half seconds he was going to die in a spectacularly horrid way. He wasn't ready.

Who is?

Soledad, voice above a whisper: "What is it?"

Raddatz didn't have an answer.

Unmistakable. The rapid, successive pops of nine-mil gunfire. The echo effect of the alley working against pinpointing the shots.

Raddatz, Soledad took their best guess. Ran.

On the street: screams and scurrying civvies.

Soledad, waving her badge at a tattooed cholo who was running like a muchacha.

"Esa manera! Esa numeral" And the cholo kept running.

The two cops went In the direction they were given, Soledad hobbling hard against her bad knee. Didn't have far to go before they saw what the running and screaming was about. Two people. One a corpse, one nearly.

Panama. Skull crashed. Dead. And Donatell'd be joining him shortly. A few wheezes-dying breaths-from his tamed body. Freshly, very badly burned. Even for Soledad, rock-hard Soledad, what a horrible, horrible…to take on fire once, to live, just so fire can catch up to you, give you all its hurt again.

The wheezing quit.

Shen. Panama. Donatell.

Soledad to Raddatz: "You fucking ass!" Cadre or not, Raddatz had gotten them killed.

Raddatz took a step, a step for Soledad.

Soledad's hand rushed up, out-swinging from her shoulder. Her shoulder's where she felt the impact. Back of her fist, center of Raddatz's face. She felt the cut of his teeth through the flesh, the commingling of their blood.

He dropped, Raddatz dropped straight down popping up only some when Soledad's swinging foot caught his jaw.

Most of that was straight anger. Three cops dead. Part of the aggression was self-preservation. She'd rather pursue the freak solo than have to keep one eye on Raddatz.

Swapping the green clip for the orange. Semtex-tipped slugs. No fucking around. Soledad was going to blow the shit out of the freak.

To her left, civvies standing, gawking. Something had gone by them eastbound.

Back to running. Yelling as she ran: "Police! Get on a phone. Nine one one. Get an MTac to this location!"

LA. Maybe the good citizens would make the call. Maybe they wouldn't.

Bum leg be damned, Soledad tore north on Union. Rounded the corner onto Shatto.

Apartments. Apartments. Apartments. Boles to shovel humans. Built tight to each other. No space to run, to hide. Windows barred. Doors locked, gated.

Soledad's thought: This is what comes of being a rat, a mole-running in the dark in the Valley, three dead cops behind you. A freak in front of you. At your side a cop you can't trust and the only thing you can-your piece.

Apartments. Apartments…

… construction.

A new building going up. Multi-unit. Bordered by chain-link. Part of it torn away. Wasn't damage a human had done.

It was Inside.

No hesitation. Soledad pursued. If inside was where it was, inside was where she'd kill it. Inside:

No light except what the moon was giving off. The moon wasn't giving up much.

Her knee was stiff, wasn't throbbing. Should've hurt like hellfire. Soledad's adrenaline was high. Kept the pain low.

Oughta keep steady. Oughta wait for MTac. Soledad thought she ought to…

Oughta what?

Back down? Hold off? Let a freak run wild, kill some more people?

Nan. Her adrenaline was BAMF high. Too high for fear. Too high for reason. She started to creep.

Fuckin' Raddatz, Soledad thought. What In the hell had he stirred up?

She brushed something. Jumped back, turned. Didn't fire. Just a work light. Minor miracle. Groping for it, groping a wire, she flipped it on. A string of lights went hot. The visual improvement marginal. The space was strung with thick plastic sheets. Dustcovers. Dust shields. They muted the light. Perception got messed with. Everything opaque. Gave the space a fun-house quality. Minus the fun.

Inching along. Gun out.

Like being wrapped in a chrysalis. Like moving through a fog of substance. Like living In oblivion. The unreal. It was all unreal. Except for the three uniquely dead bodies. The thought of those made everything truly real again.

Something moving through the plastic haze, moving for Soledad. Big and heavy, but it didn't lumber. Big and heavy, but it traveled with speed.

She turned, sidestepped. Twisted to take aim.

What Soledad felt: a punch by a hand so big it could drape her body in a single hurt. Make her twitch, lurch. Make her spasm. Make her see a serpent that ate and ate and ate its tail.

Wasn't a punch.

What it was:

What it was, was an electric charge popping- slamming-the air all around her. Picked her up. Threw her down.

Was only seconds that she jerked, flopped across the kind-of-finished floor. Only seconds that she could feel the tight of the muscles that clinched her jaws. Felt her eyes zipping around their sockets.

Only seconds that residual electricity flowed through her. Long enough the thing that was big and strong and fast should've been on her, finishing the job of trying to clean her clock.

Hearing coming back to her: the sounds of stumbling and grunting. The thing caught up in the sheeting.

Now. Shoot it. Kill it.

Shoot it, but she couldn't see.

Shoot it, but Soledad could barely command her movements.

The thing stumbling close, grabbing. The sound… the sound of a hiss. A whine. A hiss and a whine with its movement.

Soledad moved to shoot. The thing gave in return a blow. Physical this time. This time not electrical. The blow lifted Soledad, sent her slapping, slapping, slapping through the hanging plastic. Wrapped her up, but was no insultation from the splintering wood that waited to collect her. Puncture her. Or maybe it was just a busted rib ripping through her flesh. The agony of breathing was the same either way.

Slipping on the plastic, slipping on her own blood.

And then it was on Soledad, pulling Soledad close. Pulling her tight, tighter. A rash of air forced from her. Sounded like the collective wailing gasp of raving, exed-out youths losing themselves in the first shared bliss of an oncoming tsunami of euphoria. With that: popping, snapping. More ribs busting. Arms pinned, Soledad couldn't get her piece up, couldn't get a shot. Too close anyway. The Semtex going off: Wouldn't it kill her?

Did it matter?

Kill the beast.

Both thoughts running in her head: Did it matter? Kill the beast.

If she had to go, she'd take It with her. Get your arm up…

Squeezing tighter. Crashing her. Killing her. Not going to die today. Get your arm up. Kill the beast.

Use your head, she self-counseled. Use your fucking head.

She used it. Soledad reared her head back, drove it forward. Drove it.

Cartilage snapped, blood sprayed her face. The beast wasn't so tough.

Its grip slipped. Soledad slid, tried to slide away.

The beast still had speed. It took her by the throat with a hand like steel. It got back to squeezing, added twisting to the action.

Soledad felt the bones of her neck collapsing.

But the beast had her arm's length away. She could take the shot. Probably she'd live.

Didn't matter.

Her arm came up.

Kill the beast.

There was a click. The gun did not fire. There was a snap. Soledad's head being torqued until her spine broke. She heard that.

Soledad survived just long enough, just the fraction of a moment of time that was required for her ears to fill with the sound of her own death.

Eddi thought about going to the gym. Thought about lifting. But the weather was decent. A good day for cardio, for some outdoor running. But Fred Segal was having a sale and better-in LA-to get there early than try to go late, have to fight the crowds, the traffic. No matter. Nine point eight million people in the city. If a fraction had the same thought, the store'd be sick with bodies. So skip shopping. Skip cardio too. It was going to be the gym, then on to IHOP for a little…

Then Eddi remembered. Soledad was dead.

Soledad was dead.

Soledad was…

Eddi could repeat it as much as she cared, as many ways as she could. Her brain wouldn't take to what it rationally knew.

Soledad was dead.

Whatever else in Eddi's world that would evolve, grow, differ from day to day, what would not change was the reality of Soledad. That was beyond alteration.

Just awake, Eddi hadn't gotten out of bed. The thought of Soledad dead fresh again in her head, she couldn't exit the sheets.

She wanted to cry.

Wasn't going to happen.

Eddi had bartered off her emotions a long time prior. Tears for fearlessness. Softness for survival. The amputation of her frailties kept her, ironically, whole. Gave her the ability to act and react without the burden of emotion. Such a condition had kept Soledad alive too. For a while. For Soledad "a while" ended. Then what? Literally ashes to ashes. Soledad cremated. Tears Eddi couldn't cry. A feeling seeping through her that regular people call sorrow and that Eddi, hard-guy cops like Eddi, passed off as nothing more than an inner call for activity. Cops needed to be working, doing, enforcing. What she was feeling was just the malaise of passivity that all cops got when they had too much downtime, and not when they lost one of their own.

That feeling: How do you shake it?

Ten days since Soledad's death. Four since she'd been cremated. And every time Eddi did that count in her head- adding a couple of hours, adding a day to the bottom line-it still hit her like she was getting bitch-smacked with the news for the first time as it was hand-delivered from a drunken wife beater.

Soledad was dead.

How do you shake that ill feeling? Most times, most other cops she'd known and lost the feeling never even came. Death was sad, yeah, but it was part of the job. It was a done deal before you even put on a badge and blues, so why go crying little girl-style after the fact? You didn't. You didn't take on feelings, you didn't have to get rid of them.

And as much as she… not hated, Eddi didn't hate Soledad. As much difficulty as she'd had with the girl, as much friction, what Eddi felt now was like a shiv to the soul delivered with a quick, vicious, surreptitious jab. Unexpected, and unexpectedly painful

How do you, how do you shake such an ill feeling?

There had to be something. Some way more than just the cop send-off Soledad'd gotten. The obit that'd run deep in the LA Times.

Nothing that Eddi could figure at the minute. At the minute she couldn't figure anything besides lying in bed a little bit longer. A little bit longer being, like, the rest of her day off. The month. The reminder of her life, which, considering Soledad was one of the heaviest hitters MTac ever birthed and she didn't make it past thirty years of age, seemed like it might not be too much longer.

But Eddi wasn't going to ditch the effort. She'd figure out something to do for Soledad.

She'd figure it out.

Later.

Eddi rolled over, tried to sleep off her malaise.

Eddi rested her hand on the door. It was slightly open. The door. Her hand too. Splayed over the wood. From beyond the door came sounds. Things scraping against cardboard. Objects being packed. A life being put away. No voices.

Her hand on the open door. It opened no wider.

Eddi had kicked in how many doors on the job? Solid wood, steel-lined. Rarely, though sometimes aided with a ram, had she ever had a problem knocking her way through any of them. This door, already partly open, she couldn't pass through. She knew what was on the other side. Soledad's mom and dad. The primary grievers. Eddi liked to think she was in, or at least she self-elevated herself to, the number three spot.

A distant third.

And she knew she really had no business being in breathing distance of numbers one and two.

But…

There was a but. Always is.

But Eddi had already called the O'Roarks, offered condolences. Had wanted to keep things brief but didn't know what to say and ended up saying way too much. Blathered on and on about what a good person Soledad was and what a good cop she was and how much Soledad would be missed and couldn't be replaced and would not be forgotten and shut up already, Eddi. But they, Soledad's mom at least, had been so gracious on the phone. Had said they would be in Los Angeles to collect the remains of their daughter. The consumed remains and the remains of her life. The clothes and the photos and the books and the this and the that. They- Soledad's mom said "they"-very much wanted to meet Eddi, put a face with the voice that spoke with such grace and regard for her daughter.

Grace?

So in that phone call Eddi had formed a loose bond with people she had only one connection to. They had among them Soledad's death. As much as she did not want to go into the condo, tenuous as it was. breaking the connection was beyond Eddi.

Hand on the door, she pushed it open.

Inside the condo: a man kneeling before some cardboard boxes; a woman standing taking knickknacks from a shelf. The woman was a little on the heavy side. Or, or the bloated side? Wore a scarf covering her head. The mars, although of a height and girth that would be considered above that of an average man and though his health seemed well for a man of his age, his presence was weak and tired. As a life had been taken from him, liveliness had been drained from him.

From the man: "Yes?"

"I'm Eddi Aoki." Looking to the woman. "I think I spoke to you on the phone. I'm a friend of Soledad's."

"Soledad didn't have friends." A little mournful smile on the woman's lips. Gallows humor.

"Well, next best thing, then."

"Thank you for coming," Gin said.

"I wanted you to know your daughter will be missed. She was a good person, and she sacrificed herself for her convictions. Anybody would tell you Soledad was one of the best cops to ev-"

"I'm going to take this down to the car." Soledad's dad, Richard, hefted a box, brushed passed Eddi without a word, left the apartment.

A chill lingered.

In her mind Eddi damned her blather.

"My husband doesn't think Soledad died for her convictions. That she died for any good reason, really."

"I'm sorry. I didn't come here to upset anybody."

"The thing about losing someone, I'm learning," a little laugh, "is dealing with other people's sympathy. Everyone wants to tell me that things are all right or that Soledad's gone to a better place. Things are not all right. I've lost my child. She is not in a better place. She's dead. And all the well-wishes just remind you of what's gone."

Eddi didn't know what to say, didn't want to say she was sorry. Again. She did not want to be where she was. She was not touchy-feely. She wasn't a people person. It was as if she'd inserted herself into the heart of a painful situation for pain's sake, the hurt inflicted as a substitute for the ache she couldn't otherwise feel for herself. Trying to make peace with Soledad's mother for Soledad was a losing proposition.

"You come to give me your sympathies, and I reject them. It's not very polite. I think my own guilt is working on me."

"Guilt?"

"I've been ill. I told my daughter… I told Soledad I'd rather her not be around while I was recovering. But it wasn't… I didn't know if I would recover. I didn't want her to watch me die." Gin could read the look on Eddi's face, answered the question there. "The surgery went well. The doctors think I have a good chance of surviving."

"You wanted to save her some hurt. You shouldn't feel guilty for that."

A shake of her head. "That's not why I feel guilty. If I'd let her come home, let her be there for me-"

"She'd still be dead." That was harsh and sharp, maybe more than Eddi had meant it to be. Definitely more. If she'd thought about it, she would have planed the edge off the. statement. But maybe in her self-pity Gin could use a reality slap. "Soledad was going to fight this fight long as she could, and long as she could would be right up to her end. I know that doesn't make losing her any easier. I work the same job, and having a like mind doesn't make… God, Soledad was a tough one… " One tear from Eddi. Just one. But it was one that up till that moment wouldn't come to her at all. "It doesn't make her not being around any easier for me."

"A parent shouldn't outlive their child. It should not be this way." The depth of the observation was matched by a dispassionate delivery. The summary of a grad-level thesis. A truth that could not be equivocated.

And the quiet returned.

Fat, uncomfortable quiet.

Gin asked: "Would you like something, something to remember her by?"

"I couldn't."

"I don't know how to do this." Just heavy with a certain "Jesus, end this" defeat. "I don't know how to close out a life. All of this," nodding to the boxes in various stages of being packed, "we'll just take all this home, put it in a room and never touch it again."

Eddi understood that.

"You were her…," lightly, "friend. It would be a nice way to help keep her memory alive."

Gin started for the door. "I'll give you some privacy. And thank you."

She left.

It was like, it was like being in a museum exhibit. A room set up to approximate the real world, but empty of actual life. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where Officer O'Roark would have sat and watched television. Right here is where she is believed to have lain on the floor and read a book or a magazine. Over there, the supposed location she partook breakfast. And to our best estimation, this very location is where she developed her modified O'Dwyer VLe that was one of the most effective weapons in the fight against the hegemony of the muties. Right up until it misfired and cost Officer O'Roark her life. Soledad's ghost was all over the place. Warm and vibrant. Quite present. It felt to Eddi she could, with patience, wait out this dark, sick joke Soledad was playing-'cause that's all it was-and catch her sneaking from a hiding place in a closet into the kitchen for a sandwich.

Just a feeling.

Soledad was dead.

And how to keep her alive? What thing was there that would remind and inspire and comfort and not depress too severely? A photo? A book?

Soledad's favorite book? How the hell was Eddi supposed to know what Soledad's favorite, book was? Yeah, there were books around, but did Soledad particularly read any of them? Like Eddi. did she just buy books because it made her feel not so bad about wasting nights watching reality TV? Maybe something Soledad had made herself, some craft or something.

Weren't any around. Probably, Soledad wasn't a craftsperson. Except for her gun. With her gun she'd been real crafty.

On a table was a book, but not one that had been published. Eddi reached for it, opened it. Not a book. Soledad's journal. Eddi read for a few pages. Stopped.

Held the book, clutched it. Clutched it tight in her hands, then to her breast.

This.

If Gin was gracious enough to share her daughter, this-Soledad in her own words-is what Eddi would take.

The end of fear.

Sounds good. That's the problem with catchphrases and manicured sound bites: They sound good, but they don't add up to anything. They sound good because they 're honed and shined by politicians and zealots with badges, but with sophistry like that, all you end up with is shine.

I 'm getting shined. Getting shined three-sixty.

Raddatz is perpetrating with his "end of fear. " Don't know what or exactly how or why, but I can feel in my gut it's below the boards, not above. Problem is, that's the shine I came into things being told to expect.

The shine I can't divine: Tashjian. Maybe it's a false reading that I could, I should pass off to our history. My natural distrust and paranoia. But the feeding I have is that there's no way Tashjian's being straight with me. Yeah, freaks are getting killed and somehow Raddatz, the cadre, they 're part of it. But that I should so conveniently find myself in the middle of it, that so quick I was able to hook up with the guy Tashjian needed to put in his sights… there's something else, something more going on and I don't know how the hell I'm supposed to figure what. And I'm thinking, maybe, maybe that's the point. Why put an MTac cop and not an IA investigator into the mix, and I'm not going for Tashjian's "they'd smell 'em coming" line. Why is because the MTac cop can't-at least she isn't supposed to — figure things. Or maybe it's 'cause she's got a way of being a lightning rod, and it's time for lightning to strike.

That's cute.

Lightning rod.

How about target? How about dupe?

Whatever. People are trying to fuck with me, not the first time I've been fucked with. I've been had at plenty by freaks and normals the same. With freaks, I got technology for them. With normals, well, the rearview mirror of my life is tittered with people who made the mistake of getting on my bad side.

That was it. That was the last of Soledad O'Roark. Eddi read her journal again. Not, as with the first time, in a sitting. The second time there was a good deal more flinching involved. The second time Eddi had to read until she was full up with, with all she could take. Toss the journal aside. Then allow herself over a period of time to gravitate closer, closer to it, almost throwing off a front of indifference-I can handle this, I can handle it-before picking up the journal, reading to her level of tolerance and going through the process again. Reading to completion a second time.

And when she had, Eddi said: "Fuck."

Eddi wanted to meet outside somewhere. It'd been nice to walk on the beach, along the Santa Monica promenade. It just would've been nice- not nice, but more tolerable-to deal with bleakness under some daylight.

Vin wouldn't have It.

Yeah, he wanted to see Eddi. Would love to hang with her. But go out of doors'? Han, he didn't much feel like going out.

Why don't you come on over? he invited. C'mon, we'll sit. We'll talk.

Eddi had come to know Vin liked to sit and talk. Sit and watch TV. Sit and veg, and especially to an increasing degree sit and booze. She'd got that reading Soledad's diary. Journal. No way Soledad would've ever called it a diary. Eddi'd gotten Soledad's take on Vin's descent and wanted to avoid the opportunity to support his further degeneration by being audience to the cheap theatrics of his one-man drunk show.

Wasn't gonna happen.

So Eddi came around to Vin's.

Vin hobbled from the door after opening it. One leg. Too lazy, too drunk to put on his prosthetic. A technological wonder purchased through the generosity of others, and it did nothing more spectacular than prop itself against a wall.

A look around the apartment upon entering. You gotta, Eddi thought, be kidding. A scattering of newspapers that worked as something of a floor guard, as a layer of receptacle for whatever rubbish Vin seemed to feel had to be discarded right there. And Vin seemed to feel there was a lot of rubbish that needed to be discarded right there. Fast-food wrappers. A gang of empties. A bad stink was all around. All of that was noticed after Eddi got past, finally got past how bloated Vin had gotten. A repository of bad eats, fermented drink, with nothing like ambition to bum any of it off.

Once Eddi found a spot to settle, Vin got into some dry crying remembering Soledad: Can't believe she's gone. Iron woman. She was like some kind of… Christ, never thought she… I can't imagine life without…

And Eddi just sat where she was, sat and gave a couple of "C'mon, don't do that's." She was patient with Vin's drunken exudation of woe. Patience was a chore. At the core Eddi got his hurt, had once shared it, but she had already put it on display with Soledad's mother. Wasted it on Soledad's father. Eddi couldn't go back to that well a third time. Now her needs were more practical than cathartic. What she needed, she needed information. Vin probably had some, and she didn't feel like slogging along miles and miles of self-pity to get at it.

Swatting aside all of Vin's blubbering: "What was Soledad doing over at DMI?"

"… Wha…»

"At DMI. You know what she was doing, what she was working on?"

Vin sat a moment. He was waiting for a translation. From English to… whatever it was he was capable of comprehending in his state.

"She was… it was DMI stuff. I guess it was. If she was at DMI, what else is she going to-"

"But what? What kind of an assignment? Did she talk to you about it at all?"

"No."

Brushing fingers across her lips, taking a minute to think. "What about… you ever hear her say anything about the end of fear?"

"… I don't…"

"C'mon, Vin. A phrase like that? You'd remember if you heard It."

"I can't-"

"You're a cop. Think. Remember." Mopping a hand over his sweaty face. "Vin, remember!" Nothing from Vin.

Eddi was up, moving around the room. Newspaper crunching under her feet. Riding wild frustration. Working at keeping from kicking down a wall.

Vin knew he was the eye of her ire. Like a kid that'd done wrong, he tried to explain away his delictum.

"It's a bad time for me," Vin said. "You come in here demanding shit. And I'm, I'm going through-"

"What are you going through that nobody else is except a dry-out?"

"I lost my wife." The words left a trail of saliva that flopped around on his lower lip, dripped to the floor.

"She wasn't your wife."

"She was gonna be!"

"You know why?" Moving right at Vin, rolling right up on him. "She felt sorry for you. She felt so fucking sorry for you and your one-legged booziness she would waste her freedom on marrying you. Not even marrying you-"

Vin tried to get up, move away. One leg. He wasn't going anywhere. Eddi, hot, grabbing him, throwing him back in the chair that was his domicile. No, he wasn't going anywhere at all.

"She wasn't marrying you, she was throwing you a lifeline. And what do you do with her memory? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing."

"Don't fucking say that!" Vin squirmed around in the cushions same as if he was trying to dodge Eddi's words. "She loved me. She did. I lost her, lost, lost my body," rubbing at his stump, "lost everything. You stand there, shit, you stand, and you tell me how I gotta feel? You don't know how much she meant to me. You didn't lose what I lost."

She moved. A step back. One more. Eddi slipped off her jacket. Without hesitation, preparation, pulled up her shirt. Reached behind and unhooked her bra.

Vin didn't look, couldn't look. Scared of Eddi, naked but standing unashamed.

She said: "Look at me." Vin could not. "Vin, look at me."

His head came up, a tangle of his hair was foreground in his vision. The wet in his eyes made Eddi look so slick she glistened. A warrior princess with a Hollywood shine.

Eddi capped her hands over her nipples. Her left breast was pulled back slightly. Along the curve, tattooed in simple letters: we don't need

another hero.

From Reese to Soledad. Soledad to Eddi.

"Told her she should've checked you more carefully," Vin said. "She would've hated that. She hated hero worship."

"I don't worship her."

"Just woke up one morning with that on your

tit?"

Eddi slipped back on her bra. She put back on her shirt. "I know what you've lost, Vin. I've lost as much. But I'm not going to be careful with your hurt, hand you any soft, feel-good bullshit about her. I've read her dia… journal. Whatever. And the shit that's in there… Soledad was, she was empty. She was an empty human being. It's like emotion was beyond her.

Only thing that filled her was guilt for being lucky enough to live when half of San Francisco died. Can you imagine that, Vin, haling yourself because you're not dead? And it was killing her. Guilt was killing her. Before that freak snapped her neck, guilt took her life way back."

A very lonely thought. Lovely in its pathos.

"I admire what she stood for. But don't tell me I worshipped that." Eddi asked again: "Tell me everything you can about Soledad and DMI."

"Soledad…" Vin pulled back his hair. Tangled. Dirty. Uncombed. It just flopped over his eyes again. "I don't know any more than you. They were doing surveillance on a freak. The cops got caught out. The freak killed three of them. And Soledad."

"You know a cop named Tashjian?"

Vin shook his head.

"He's IA."

There was a thick booze haze Vin's memory was nearly useless against. He hacked at it, hacked at it…

What came to him: "He was… he investigated her. It was before you were MTac."

"She was cleared. The investigation was over. Why was Tashjian back in her life?"

Vin didn't know.

"The end of fear: You never heard that?" "You asked me already."

"I'm asking again. Did you ever hear that from

her?"

"I don't…" Vin realized: "She didn't talk to me. Not really. She'd spend all day sitting around with me, but she never… " And he knew: "She didn't love me."

"No, she didn't." Moving straight on from that: "Soledad wasn't working DMI just to work DMI. She was there for a reason."

"Why would you, why would you say-"

"Because it's the truth." Eddi refused to care about Vin's feelings, only wanted to know: "What was the reason Soledad was working DMI?"

" 'Cause her leg… I was… her leg was messed up. That's why."

"Yeah, getting hit by the car was an accident. Her being at DMI; Tashjian was taking advantage of the situation. She didn't trust him."

"What, what situation?"

"If I knew, I wouldn't be here. Christ, dry up and help out."

"Help what? Help you be bitter?"

"I'm trying to find out what happened to Soledad."

"She died. She got herself killed!" Vin's delivery dived in and out of rage and extreme sorrow. "And you can't deal with that. You can't deal that your goddess was dark and cold and a brute. You can't handle she let a freak get the best of her. So you've gotta start dressing things up different than they are. Gotta, gotta get it in your head the same guys who took out the Kennedys and King got Soledad. Otherwise she was nothing but normal, and all the time you spent jerking to her was wasted." Vin was taking a spiral right for sloppy, starting to process the truth about Soledad: Her affection for him was just more of her own guilt. "Well, here's the deal, Eddi: Soledad was just like the rest of us, life-sized and not an inch bigger. She was a cold bitch and she fucked up and now she's dead. That's all there is."

Fighting Vin's belligerence with evidence: "It was in her journal."

" 'There's a big fat conspiracy going on, and I'm in the middle of it.' That what she wrote?"

"She wrote… she'd written-'"

"I'll tell you…" Vin curled up in the chair, tired from the effort of dealing with Eddi. It was a reminder of all the effort that had gone into dealing with Soledad. "There is no way Soledad'd ever have anything to do with Tashjian."

"You barely remembered his name."

"I remember her. I'm sitting here crying over her. That's more than you're fucking doing."

Kinda lit or not, Eddi could've gone across the room, put a fist to Vin's head. Done it again. Then one more time.

Vin was oblivious to Eddi's passions. The only thing tangible to him was the need to freshen his melancholy.

"Let's remember her, Eddi. Sit down, have a drink. Let's recall the girl."

All folded up, Vin was a little mass in the chair. Wanting a drink, too messed up to be able to go get one.

Eddi would have none of it.

"She didn't love you, Vin, but she cared a hell of a lot about you. If you felt any of the same for her, you'd clean up."

Eddi took off.

Eventually, Vin got himself up, got himself that drink he was wanting.

Years working IA had inured Tashjian to a lot or things. Dirty cops. Dirty cops ratting out other dirty cops. Dirty cops ratting out clean cops 'cause they've got to give up a name, any name, to keep from doing hard time. Cops eating bullets as a substitute for doing any time at all. Never understood that. A cop's tough enough to kill himself, but not tough enough to do a stretch inside? Didn't seem equitable.

The dirty, the greedy, cops with holes they'd put in their own heads: Tashjian had gotten real used to all that. A sad comment on his life was that he was very unaccustomed to a woman calling his name.

"Hey, Tashjian."

He turned, looked behind him.

Heading in his direction from across the street as he made the walk to his house was an Asian woman. Though hardly tiny-for a female she was probably just above average in height-her presence far exceeded her stature. Her mien bulled toward Tashjian over the width of the street. Formidable at a distance. It was, to Tashjian's sensibilities, an attractive quality.

The woman asked: "Tashjian, yeah?"

As if he were required to, Tashjian gave the woman careful visual exam and then, sure of things: "I don't know you."

"Eddi Aoki. I'm an officer with MTac."

"I still don't know you."

"I'd like to talk."

"Is this official? If it's official, then it needs to go through the bureau." "It's not official."

Tashjian's features seemed to be double-jointed in that he made an expression yet expressed nothing at the same time.

"It's not official," Eddi said again, "but if you've got a minute, I'd like to talk."

"And what would you like to talk about?"

"Soledad O'Roark."

Another look from Tashjian equivocal as the previous.

"You had a run-in with her, yeah?" Eddi tried to make herself as unguessable as Tashjian. Had to work at it.

"I had business with her once."

«Well…» A look up and down the street. A casual look, not to spy anything in particular. Physical action, no matter how slight, gave Eddi a moment to do some mental calculations. "This is just personal stuff, okay? She was a friend-"

"O'Roark didn't have friends."

"Been hearing that a lot. Anyway, I call her, I called her a friend. Just some blanks I want to fill in. Maybe you can do it."

Hesitation. He shouldn't bother with her. Tashjian should not bother with this woman. But how many times did he ever have a woman call his name? She had some questions, he'd give her what answers he could. That'd be the total of their interaction. Tashjian knew it would. But he liked the way his name sounded coming from her. it compelled against his better judgment.

"There's a diner up the block."

"Don't you live here?"

A smile from Tashjian. Suspicious, not salacious. "An unfamiliar woman alone in my house? I can see my name all over a harassment suit."

"All you IA guys have as little trust?" "I'd say."

"I'm just here to talk. If you want me to sign an affidavit…"

Tashjian's smile remained constant. Remained constant. Then it changed. How, Eddi couldn't say. But it changed.

Tashjian went for his keys.

He said: "You'll have to forgive the place. I don't usually have company over."

Tashjian's house-decent-sized, decent-sized for LA, Mediterranean style-was, to Eddi, spotless. A place for everything, everything in its place. So either his comment to her re: its state had been a joke, or to him the place was a wreck, meaning his mind was obsessively-compulsively beyond anal.

Tashjian didn't offer Eddi a beverage, didn't offer her a seat. His unspoken way of making i t quite clear he didn't expect her to be around

long.

He asked, very much to the point: "What is it you want to know?"

"Most people," Eddi said, "they meet somebody who's just lost a friend, they offer condolences."

Tashjian said, again: "Officer O'Roark didn't have friends." And, again, very much to the point: "What is it you want to know?"

"You were handling Soledad. Why?"

No confirmation. No denial. Just: "It's time for you to leave."

From under her sweat top, from the holster on her hip, Eddi slipped out her off-duty piece. A Glock 17. A harder weapon than a whole gang of on-duty pieces some cops toted. If the sight of it had any sway on Tashjian, if it evoked unease or anxiety or any kind of concern, in tine with every other emotion he seemed to own, it wasn't evident.

He said to Eddi with all the knowing condescension of an ivy League professor to a first-year student: "That's not particularly smart."

The blow was hard enough to rattle a man of typical heartiness. The blow, Eddi's gun to Tashjian's jaw, was more than hard enough to stretch Tashjian out on the floor. To send his eyes rolling back in his head for a good fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds when his senses took a little vacation. When they finally returned to him, auditory being the first to get back to work, they heard:

"… how it starts. That's just how it starts. From here it gets worse."

"Made a… you made a…" Talking with blood in his mouth, inhalation made him choke on his own fluids. Tashjian learned, quickly, he had to spit first, keep his mouth faced toward the floor, then try to talk. The day was filled with new experiences. "You have made a sizable mistake." Better. It'd be a while before he had the act down cold. His mouth bleeding as it was would offer him time to practice.

"Yeah, 3 was just thinking that while I was watching you flop all over the floor."

"I'm going to have you swimming in char-aaaaaah! ahhhh! ahhhhhhh!

One hundred and twenty-eight pounds of Eddi. All of it converged on her knee. Her knee converged at the center of Tashjian's groin. Not for nothing was he screaming.

And screaming.

Loud, long and hideous.

But he was screaming in his house in Los Angeles, in West Hollywood. A lot of men go screaming in that part of town. With pain. With pleasure. Tashjian's screams went unnoticed.

When her knee got sore, Eddi got up from Tashjian, stood over him.

She said: "It's my day off. I've got nothing but time and desire. We can talk about you handling Soledad, or we can, well, not talk."

"… lost your mind…"

"I lost my friend. And if I'd just lost her going against a freak… that's what happens. But this wasn't about some freak. It wasn't only about that. She was into something, and you put her there."

"I ca-I can't…"

"Yeah. You can. 'I put Soledad at DMI because The thing about pain-and Eddi was thinking from personal experience-quick, sharp pain you can deal with. It's already dissipating by the time your receptors even register its peak. A lower grade of hurt that's prolonged over time… that's when real agony begins.

She wanted to give Tashjian some agony.

What Eddi did was guttural. Straight National Geographic animal. But Eddi was in an animal state of mind. Instinct, base emotion, had more claim to her than higher thought. She'd come to talk, not torture. Talking, as little as she allowed for, was proving futile. So, yeah, she got animal.

She got on her knees.

She bit, and bit, and bit, and she bit at Tashjian's earlobe.

More screaming.

No lights. No sirens. No cops. Nobody cared.

In forty-eight minutes Eddi would look at herself in a mirror in the bathroom of her duplex, see blood on her sweatshirt, caked at the corner of her mouth. Her mouth? She would wonder what the hell she had done. What the hell had she let herself do, let herself… her mouth? And she enforced the law? She was given governance? She would look at herself and she would see that her professed obedience to order was a suit she labored herself into daily. Ill tailored and convenient, and the moment she didn't need it anymore…

Her fucking mouth?

In just short of an hour's time Eddi would consider all that as she rinsed herself. The water in the basin tinged red.

Now…

She wiped the blood from her face with one hand, threatened toward Tashjian with her gun in the other. "I'll hurt you any way I… Tashjian. Tashjian!"

He held down his whimpers. Listened.

"Any way I have to, I will hurt you. You understand?"

A nod from him. Blood seeping from the hand that clutched his torn ear. A dam of digits useless against the tide. But it made Tashjian forget about the blood from his mouth.

"There… there are, there're… " A bad motor sputtering itself started. "There are cops in DMI, we believe they've, we believe they're a hit squad targeting muh-metanormals. The media, the liberals find out before we can clean it up It'd make us all look like killers, not cops."

"Why Soledad? She wasn't IA."

"That's the point!" Pain made Tashjian impatient. "They never would've seen her coming. Nuh-never should have."

"But they did?"

"You knew her, knew what she was like. I'll never believe sub-some freak got the best of her."

Like a riptide. Concepts coming so strong Eddi could hardly think against them. Had to force herself not to just accept them.

"What aren't you telling me?"

"That's all there is."

It was like her gun jumped out, jumped at Tashjian, at his head, and her hand just went along for the ride.

From Tashjian, a corresponding scream to the blow.

From Eddi: "What else?"

"There is nothing else! I sent her inside DMI, she didn't come back."

"What's 'the end of fear'?"

"The end of fear is when we get every freak there is off the streets of every city in America. Be they live, or hub-be they dead. That doesn't happen if the bleeding hearts… if they can turn things against us."

Heavy breathing. From Tashjian, yeah. But Eddi, chest working hard, was just then realizing how much labor was required to make even a weak man submit.

From where she stood, she said: "I know you think when I'm gone, a couple of hours from now, tomorrow at worst, you're going to crush me. You're going to get IA all over me, if you don't just go ahead and swear out a warrant, I know you're thinking that."

Heavy breathing from Tashjian. Just the breathing.

"Nothing's going to happen to me, okay? Nothing. Something happens to me, I don't get a chance to find out what happened to Soledad, I swear to Christ, swear on my father's grave…

you hearing me, Tashjian? I swear I will put a bullet in you. I have to do five to fifteen for taking a piece of your ear, I might as well do twenty-five to life for killing you. Got that?"

Just the breathing from Tashjian.

Eddi bolstered up. She made her way from the house, to the street, to her car.

Traffic was bad.

The nine miles to her place took thirty-four minutes to drive.

A little bit later Eddi was looking at herself in her bathroom mirror, looking at the blood on her sweatshirt. Her mouth.

She took up a spot on the bathroom floor. Her head dropped between her legs.

It'd been forty-nine minutes since she'd taken a bite out of Tashjian.

The shower had been pointless. The kind of cleaning Eddi needed wasn't going to come from tap water. Standing on the balcony of her duplex, letting the sun and the air do work on her hair, the thing Eddi recalled most about the last few days-trying to give condolences to Soledad's parents, spending time with a boozed-up Vin, talking to Tashjian. Attacking Tashjian- the thing she recalled from all that was being told time and again by people connected as well as could be with Soledad was that Soledad didn't have any friends.

So why did Eddi care what happened to Soledad? Why travel the road that'd started with a pistol whipped against Tashjian's head and a hunk of meat pulled from his ear?

Because, she answered herself, someone somewhere ought to give a fuck about Soledad's passing same as when her time came-and Eddi knew sooner or later her time was going to come-she'd hope to God someone somewhere'd give a fuck about her. But giving a fuck-

Blocks away, a siren. Moving in Eddi's direction. She could tell by the pulse it was a cop's, not fire or EMS. The feeling teeming just under Eddi's flesh: It was coming for her. She swore at Tashjian for being ballsy enough to call her bluff, put the heat on her. Five to fifteen for losing herself, for losing control. Doing battery on a cop. The only thing-the siren seconds away-that was killing Eddi was that now probably she'd never know what really happened to…

The siren passed. Diminished. Faded.

The balcony railing. Eddi consciously loosened her grip that had tightened without her being aware.

So she had been thinking…

"Giving a fuck" about Soledad meant getting even closer to the whys of the situation. Getting closer to DMI.

And getting closer to DMI…

Getting inside DMI.

What Tashjian had said: They'd see an IA cop corning a mile away. They'd smell a rogue before he got planted. And, anyway, Eddi didn't have the authority, was never going to get the authority to do a job against DMI.

On her own, how was she going to get close? Get inside?

And then she had the answer, the answer being absolutely ridiculous. But the ridiculousness of it was immediately shoved aside by the very logic of the irrationality. No one would know. No one would suspect. No one could contest. No one could stop her. Except Tashjian. If he was going to, she'd be in cuffs already.

Then it was too late for debate. It was too late for trying to figure another, better way to do things. Eddi was already over the edge of her balcony and sailing for the ground a couple of stories below.

I've never done anything like this before. Actually, I'm doing a lot of stuff I've never done before. In particular I've never previously expressed myself to myself in writing. And I'm not doing this because Soledad did it. I'm only doing this because it seems like a good idea, a good way to keep track of things. Seemed like a good idea until I realized the first thing I had to document is that I'm losing my mind. To jump from the balcony of my place? for a while, in the hospital while I was getting X-rayed I tried to sell myself that by dumb luck I'd stumbled off the balcony right when I'd come up with the idea of taking a header. But the self-denials just made me think I was all the crazier. So just admit it. I'm losing my mind. At least, I've lost direction. Direction, previously, had been easy and obvious. Straight ahead. Don't think about anything else, don't look around for some other road to travel. Just keep straight on because dead ahead for me was MTac. Ahead for me was a chance to pay hack the freak community for killing my dad on the first day of May all those years ago.

And for a long time, for me, there wasn't much distraction. A couple of guys I'd call boyfriends. A couple of days thinking about the beach or skiing or something besides the knife my dad'd once given me that I swore, improbably, I'd use to kill at least one mutie. Beyond that… there wasn't a beyond that. Just school, the academy, whatever assignments I could pull that'd better position me for MTac.

And then I heard about Soledad.

It was like hearing about the heroes again. Only, she was our hero, not some mutie.

Then I made MTac and I met Soledad. It was like meeting the queen bitch. She was cold and single-minded. She was also genius enough to make her own modifications to an O'Dwyer. She was unstoppable by any freak that'd been stupid enough to show its face to her. And I thought, damn. Really. That's what I thought: daaamn! That, and how much I wanted to be like Bullet. Only, don't let her hear you call her that. Don't let her know you respect, admire … call it what it was. Don't let her know you worship her and want to be a third of the cop she was so you can be a thousand times the cop most others are.

And I knew she wasn't really cold as she played. I knew, or at least I figured when I got to know her, I'd see the soft to her. Hadn't she cut me major slack when I accidentally put a couple of slugs into Vin?

But I never got the chance to really know Soledad. Don't know anyone could.

Then I read her journal. Should've taken something else when her mother offered. Should've taken her favorite sweatshirt, a hat. Should've taken something that wasn't page after page of bitterness and scorn and loneliness and guilt and a whole lot of self-hate.

That fucked me up. Not reading Soledad's true nature in her writing. What fucked me up, what I read, I could've been reading my own words. It was my life she was writing, lived at arm's length and by rote. I had to actually look in the mirror, had to stare at myself and tell me that I wasn't like her. Bristled when Vin insinuated I was. I was human and normal and functional. Then I reminded me I'd thrown myself off my own balcony trying to collect an injury. I'd lost my mind. I'd lost my direction. I had gone on an excavation looking for signs of life and found nothing but a warning from beyond the grave in the here and now.

Someday a freak could very well kill me. But it was my own life I was taking.

Page after page after page after page. I expected something more from Soledad. Something better. I expected, in her private moments., she didn't owe me anything, but I expected where I thought she was callow for callowness' sake toughness because tough is what an MTac, a black woman MTac in particular, needed to survive.

What I didn't expect.…

Page after page, after page after page of more of the Soledad I already knew. From the day she started keeping a journal it was filled with entries about her hate of the freaks, her disdain for freak lovers, her adherence to the law because the lack of law gave rise to the freaks in the first place.

I'd hoped maybe there'd be some levity, some light. Some life.

I wanted that from her.

I wanted it for me.

I wanted to know we could do what we do, hut remain whole and human. I wanted those things.

But I had bitten nearly clean off the ear of someone I wanted Intel from.

To be like Soledad? I had evolved-devolved-way beyond that.

Soledad only carried the guilt of living through May Day. My loss was tangible. M y wounds deeper. I didn't need to worship Soledad to have my rage.

Reading her journal helped me to see all that I could do with it. Or all the rage could do to me.

It could help me become one of the best MTacs to ever job on the LAPD.

It could also turn me into a cop who dies wondering if there's anyone anywhere who gives a fuck about her.

Here we watch, we wait, we note. We fight with our heads, not our fists. The grunt mentality stays with MTac."

Couldn't be sure, but Eddi was willing to make book this was the same speech Soledad, same speech every ex-MTac got when they arrived for duty at DMI. Abernathy's perfunctory delivery like the corporate-approved greeting at a Holiday Inn or the requisite «bye-bye» as you disembark a major carrier's jetliner. It was made all the more passionless by Abernathy's movie-announcerish voice. It was like preparation for watching a once active career go stale.

Not stale. Doing Intel on freaks was important work. To Eddi it just wasn't as significant as being an MTac. And Eddi would double down her bet that rather than smiling and nodding to the sentiment, when Soledad'd gotten "the speech," she'd opted to make her true feelings known to Abernathy.

Eddi said nothing.

Eddi threw off a serious, by-the-book, "I get your meaning" expression. Tightening of the eyes. Furrowing of the brow. A hearty nod of her head. She exuded all indicia she was DMI-ready. It was like doing theater. It was like Eddi'd studied and studied a part, then walked out onto a stage. Before a self-fractured wrist landed her there, Eddi had never been to DMI HQ. Only knew a few DMI cops in passing from the job. But she knew from her journal these were the hails Soledad had limped along with her bad leg. One of these offices had been used by Soledad to push paper. Soledad'd worked very briefly with Raddatz. and a small group of cops. Those cops, Soledad chief among them as far as Eddi cared, were dead. Tucker Raddatz was alive. Raddatz was center of Eddi's sights. From what she could take from Soledad's journal he was most probably a thug. And he had almost certainly killed Soledad. A freak had taken her life, but Raddatz had maneuvered her into that situation. Eddi wasn't buying it was just a surveillance gone south. The stats were against it. The circumstances just toe convenient.

A DMI inquiry said otherwise. How F'n surprising was that; cops clearing their own?

A court. A review board. The law. They weren't about to come down on Raddatz. But if Eddi proved things to her satisfaction… Used to be all she wanted was to drive her daddy's knife into the heart of a freak. A farewell to her father. Holding on to that pledge, Eddi'd crawled from a life of devastation to a new normalcy. She wasn't feeling normal anymore, was thinking taking her knife to Raddatz would cure the feeling.

But as close as she was, close as Eddi was to the edge, that's all she was. Close. She wasn't over all the way. She wanted blood, but the want was a base desire. What she needed, to confirm what she believed: Raddatz killed Soledad or got her killed or had her killed. Whatever variation was truth, the truth Eddi wanted to know. To know, she had to get next to the one person who'd walked from the incident. To get next to him, she had to fake like she was a good little DMI cop.

"I understand, sir." Keeping up the by-the-book, "I get your meaning" expression. Eddi said: "I know, at least I think I know what's going to be required for me to make the grade. I just hope I live up to it." Might as well have had her thumb on a page in a script.

"You have to be aware of the situation," Abernathy said. "Your post here is temporary. We get temporary posts. "We get them constantly. But when the arriving officer only looks at their post as temporary, circumstances can become problematic. Do you understand?"

"I do, sir."

"I'm sure you must have felt distance coming from some of the other officers." "A little."

"It's not personal," he said. Abernathy said: "Can't take it personally. DMI cops: Their life is about being suspicious."

"Appreciate that. I hope I get a chance to show while I'm at DMI, I am DMI." Looking Abernathy dead in the eye. Liars have shifty eyes. Liars look around a room when they're lying. Eddi was speaking from her heart. Or so she perpetrated. Eddi did not lose contact with Abernathy. Eddi would not be, wouldn't let herself be farmed out or shunted to one side. She needed to be in the heart of things. And compared to grinding a knee into a man's balls, amputating part of his body with her own teeth, what was a little rallying around the flag?

Slightly, Eddi smiled.

Eddi's welcome to DMI: paperwork. Sorting and filing, transferring from hard copy to digital file. What she got was a taste of the struggle against the freaks waged from the very bottom of the totem pole. The part that was stuck in the mud. And this is what Eddi got for being the «good» transfer, the obsequious MTac arriving to the brave new world. She could only imagine what Soledad, filterless Soledad, got handed. She couldn't imagine Soledad putting up with busywork. They were very crappy chores.

Also eye-opening. The numbers. The stats on the freak population. Eye-opening in the way your eyes spring wide in the bloody climax of a horror show. Eddi was giving consideration to the Idea that Abernathy was at least partially correct in his assessment of MTacs: They were nothing but grunts. Eddi'd never really thought about how many freaks might be in Greater LA, how much they might be communicating with each other. What those communications could be. Like, some kind of call to arms. DMI thought about that kind of stuff. Ran through all manner of threat matrixes. Worst-case scenarios.

Calculated for every sort of bloody encounter. All the thinking, the considering and predicting made Eddi long for MTac. Just point your gun, pull your trigger.

She felt comfortable in G Platoon. Eddi felt like she belonged. No matter that she was hiding her designs, her sense was to a person DMI had no trust of her.

And they shouldn't. They shouldn't trust her. But they didn't know they shouldn't. Or maybe they did. Maybe they were that good. They could suss the untrustworthy. Or maybe in their job it just paid to not trust strangers. Which was fine to a degree. Eddi was sure in time she could earn trust.

Despite lingering animosity, she'd earned Soledad's.

Just needed time.

But Eddi didn't have time. Really, she had time, but she didn't have patience. Didn't have the desire for her abhorrence to diminish. She had to get into Raddatz's sphere. But at the end of nineteen days of trying she'd gotten to file and sort. She'd gotten hit on by a double amputee. She gotten told "Don't worry about it" when she'd asked a couple of officers how exactly they postulated their threat assessments. She had not gotten anywhere close to knowing the truth about Raddatz. She had been unable to surreptitiously work her way close to him, and he certainly had not approached her. No reason. Unlike Soledad, Eddi brought no real celebrity with her.

Raddatz remained a distant, lonely cipher. A cop on the job going through recovery after the toss of fellow officers. The rest of DMI cut him a wide swath as he worked his way back to zero.

All the while Eddi was sure he wasn't going through shit. Was pretty sure he was only faking his remorse.

Unfortunately, pretty sure didn't cut it.

Waiting around wasn't working.

So forget subterfuge. Forget doing things on the sly. Navigate the situation, Eddi coached herself, like she'd handle a call. Straight ahead and in the open.

Tell me about Soledad."

In his chair, in his office. Tucker Raddatz turned from the window he was staring out of, looked over his desk,

across the room. Eddi was in the doorway.

"Tell me," she said again, "about Soledad O'Roark."

"You a friend of hers?"

"She didn't have friends. I operated with her on MTac."

"Then you know her good as me. Probably better."

"She had a way of-"

"You're Aoki, right? Just came on."

"Eddi Aoki."

"Tucker Raddatz. You were saying?" "She had a way of pushing people off. A habit more than a trait."

What Eddi was noticing: Raddatz wasn't paying any more attention to her than to whatever he'd been looking at out his window. He was slow, unfocused. A guy permanently waking up.

Sure he was.

He was weighted down. He was slogging around the burden of murder.

Eddi asked: "What happened?"

Raddatz went back to looking out the window.

"You all were surveying a freak. Then what happened?"

"I've been through all that with a review panel."

"I wasn't on the panel."

"You've been on calls that've gone south."

"Yeah."

"You want to spend your time rehashing the bad ones?"

Truth was, Eddi didn't.

"You tell me about her," Raddatz said, redirecting.

"Curious what kind of cop I lost."

I lost. Eddi considered that a queer way of putting things. Queer in the sense Raddatz sounded more like a man guilty of error rather than volition.

She said: "I told you, we weren't friends. Not in any real sense."

"Whatever you recall. Anything."

"I recall…" Eddi let herself into the office, took a seat. "I recall Soledad didn't want me on her element. She didn't… I gotta tell you, she didn't care for me."

"Didn't care for you how?"

"On the force, you're a woman, you're a minority, yeah it's hard, but you can stake your own territory. You work your way up to MTac, you can pretty much be a celebrity. I don't think she cared to share the spotlight."

"She didn't strike me that way; the kind that wanted attention."

"You're not a woman. Or a minority."

As if to say otherwise, Raddatz held up his missing hand.

"Yeah, well, around here that pretty much puts you in the majority. Look. I don't think Soledad wanted attention. I think deep down she wanted to make a point. The point gets muted when there's somebody like you doing the same thing."

Raddatz said: "What changed with you and Soledad?"

"What makes you think anything did?"

Raddatz's phone rang, rang, rang. It rang itself quiet.

Taking up the conversation where it'd been left, Raddatz: "I think, I thought. I thought she was the kind who could change. I hoped for it."

He was being cryptic. Eddi wondered If it was a dodge. Was he being veiled to get something out of her? Did he have something to say and wasn't sure in what way she would take it? "How did you hope she'd change?"

"She came with a mind-set. I hoped she'd see things another way."

"Yeah, but what way do you-"

"There is a line of thinking: In a republic only soldiers should have certain rights. Only people who've served their country should be allowed Ml and complete suffrage. It's, uh, extremist, you know. But I'd say I understand the philosophy. The philosophy being only those who've defended the republic can really appreciate the responsibilities that come with running it."

"If you want to enjoy freedom, you've got to pony up."

Sort of a nod, sort of a shrug from Raddatz. "Sounds kind of Spartan." "Look at our country. We're in a time of crisis. It's almost cliche to say we're in a state of war,

but we are. It's a struggle for our survival. You know that And yet, what are the concerns of the people, the citizens? Their concerns are whether or not they can get their meals supersized. How big of an SUV they can drive by themselves on their long commutes over smooth-paved roads to work and back. They forgo news for reality shows that are anything except real. They can't tell you the name of the vice president, but they can tell you to the person every character on their favorite sitcom. They are invested in the having, but couldn't care less about what it takes to earn what they have, protect what others have earned. They've never known sacrifice. Not self-sacrifice. So how could they ever really appreciate the sacrifice of others? They can't. Once you understand sacrifice, once you're willing to sacrifice, it changes your perspective. How many times have you been driving, you've been shopping in a mall and you find yourself angry at the sight of a regular American? The overweight-by-sloth, underinformed-by-choice American? I sound bitter, don't I? I am. I'm bitter that I've had to put good cops in the ground when indifferent people keep on being indifferent But I'm also… I guess I'm defiant. We've earned the right to do as needed in the interest of all. We have to. Because even if we win this war, without change, what chance do we really have to survive?"

For all his rhetoric, Raddatz had been easy to follow. But at that moment he was drifting lanes. Eddi, trying to get perspective: "You don't think we have a chance against the freaks?"

"Do you know what it takes to survive?"

"What does it take?"

"Inspiration. The belief there's something better."

"How would you inspire?"

"I would take away the thing that people fear."

Eddi knew.

She sat in Raddatz's office nearly eight minutes more small-talking about DMI and what she would need to get acclimated. But as Raddatz finished his dissertation, his high-minded babble, she knew. His words were his manifesto. It was all like Tashjian had said. Raddatz was an elitist. An extremist. He thought he could kill freaks as he pleased. Was privileged to the right. Soledad, for all her faults, was the law. The law got in Raddatz's way.

Fine. Fuck the law.

Eddi knew.

Raddatz killed Soledad.

She was going to kill Raddatz.

It was the lack of internal debate that was most queer for her. That she had the capacity to take a life, Eddi had long since gotten over. Third week on the job. Still in uniform. Responding to a two-eleven at a convenience store on La Brea. Perp comes out, perp swings a gun in Eddi's direction. Perp took two in the chest, one in the throat, was dead less than thirty seconds after hitting the pavement. Not the day after, not in the years since, Eddi never once felt bad about the circumstances of the shooting. If a guy's got a gun, if the guy points the gun at you, you drop him. That's it. End of story. No issues. You make the choice to be a cop, you better already have made the choice to take a lite.

And being MTac, that reality was merely magnified. Long before she hit G Platoon she'd heard all the rhetoric, all the back-and-forth about the EO, whether it was constitutional, unconstitutional… Always, when she even bothered to do an internal debate, Eddi came back to the same thing: She didn't know constitutionality. Was hazy on morality. But Eddi knew it was wrong for her father to have died because a couple of muties felt like getting into an ass-kicking contest in San Francisco.

So Eddi went MTac and never had guilt when she was standing over the writhing husk of an expiring freak.

With Raddatz she figured she might've had some questions for herself: Is this the thing to do? Is there any other way? She knew it wasn't lawful, but was it right?

She had no questions.

If it wasn't about reprisal for Soledad, and it very much was, then it was merely about stopping Raddatz before the left could hold him up as a poster child for their perceived gestapoism of a system broken. Tashjian couldn't touch Raddatz. Legal channels had been useless and probably would be for lack of hard evidence and fear of public opinion. The only thing that would really be effective was a bullet. Maybe two. However many it took to kill Raddatz.

She really had gone animal. The truth of that didn't matter to Eddi in the least. The consequences didn't matter.

If she went to prison for the crime, as she had said and meant to Tashjian when she'd… done what she'd done to him, that was all right. Acceptable, at least. She would have committed a crime. And little as she cared for Raddatz, she knew the law would feel different.

Eddi did have a problem with getting caught for killing a cop in a state where she'd be looking at taking a poison needle for the act. She didn't mind killing, she could handle prison, but the strength of Eddi's convictions stopped way short of giving up her life to square things for Soledad.

So Eddi planned.

A murder is predicated on three things: means, motive and opportunity.Motive Eddi had.

Means. Her knife was off the list. There would, be visceral pleasure in the act of putting steel to flesh and watching the results. There'd also be a lot of blood. And unless Eddi struck with speed and stealth there'd be a lot of screaming. Probably, she could complete the job without the screaming. But then where's the pleasure? What's the point?

She had to sit for a moment, let that thought pass. Going animal was okay. Going insane was unacceptable.

But Raddatz was taking her there. Taking her there with his talk of citizen soldiers and a higher objective and the end of fear. All he was saying: a police state. A final solution. All he was doing: taking what she believed in, believed was hard but necessary, making it into genocide.

So means. A gun. Not her own. She'd have to get another. South Central. East LA. Either was good for it. Gangs loaded up with rods they were looking to unload. Rods with history, stolen rods. But getting a piece down there also made it real easy to get caught up in some unpleasantness. To get caught between gangs or between gangs and cops. Eddi didn't need high drama. Just a gun.

She'd do it Beverly Hills-style instead. In BH there were all manner of rich kids-or at least kids who lived well under the wing of their parents-who needed some extra cash of their own to score OxyContin and were more than happy to lift one of their daddy's guns and put it up for sale. The BH police were weak. Eddi was less likely to run into an SPU running a sting there than in Compton. And rich white kids? To them all Asians looked alike. Even one identifiable by her busted wrist. If things really went south, the chances of one of them picking her out of a lineup were just about nil. So Eddi took a trip to BH. A CI Eddi was tight with told her just where to spike herself. She ended up copping a .38 off a teen girl. Her parents shelled out eighteen thousand a year for her private school, but her last John had shorted her and she needed some ready to pay off her pimp.

Wasn't Eddi's problem. Really, better-Eddi propagandized-she had gotten ahold of the piece and not some crackhead. What Eddi would do with the gun, it wasn't a crime. It was justice.

Means, motive…

Finding the opportune time to hit Raddatz- when no eyes were looking, a moment she could wrap an alibi around-wasn't going to be easy to come by. Would take charting. Watching. Watching Raddatz. Where he went and when he went there. That meant sitting on him, tailing him, timing him. That meant opening herself to getting spotted watching him. Not by Raddatz. Eddi was sure she could elude him. Pretty sure. But with eyes focused forward there's always the chance some neighbor, some merchant… somebody would notice that one particular car with that one particular driver with a bad wrist who seemed to be hanging around all the time. It was a chance, yeah, but murder… the administration of justice was a chancy thing to begin with. Still, the odds favored Eddi. The stats in LA said seventy percent of murders went unsolved. Seven zero percent, higher or lower by some margin depending on what part of town the killing took place. Still, better odds you couldn't get in Vegas.

So, chancy as it was, it was a chance Eddi was going to take.

She held her conviction. She held on to her new gun. She watched Raddatz. She clocked him on duty, his comings and goings. Clocked what time he hit DMT on watch and what time he left. When he was working a watch, he was punctual. Same time in. Same time out. Every time. Raddatz was almost military-like with his adherence. Good for her. When Eddi finally figured the right moment to do things, Raddatz would most likely keep his appointment in Samarra.

Occasionally, after work and before going home Raddatz would stop to take a drink alone at a sports bar in the Valley. An actual sports bar. Not a strip club sports bar. Eddi didn't go in.

Besides not wanting to make herself obvious, she couldn't watch him in the act of consumption. She had no interest in taking a read on what kind of solitary drinker Raddatz was. If he needed a little something to help him unwind, or a boost to help him through what remained of the day. She didn't know if it was a happy drink or one laced with bitterness. If the booze in the glass was really just a reflecting pool- something for Raddatz to look down into and see what stared back.

Eddi watched Raddatz at home. What Eddi found out, what she figured but wasn't previously sure of: Raddatz had family. Wife and two boys.

The first time Eddi got any kind of conscience about what she was planning was when she learned that about Raddatz, learned he had family. Was she really going to make a woman a widow, take away some kids' dad? Probably, at some point on some call she'd already done as much to the family of a freak. But under the circumstances she had the law backing her. She had the reasoning that the freak could've chosen to turn itself in, but did things a different way. A family had ended up husband-less, fatherless for the choice it'd made.

This time there was no law backing Eddi's play. Still, what she was doing was purely predicated on Raddatz's choices. He'd decided to set himself aside from the law. Jeopardize the war against the freaks. He'd put himself in this place.

That his family would suffer… well, would they? Honest, Eddi thought, they'd be better off without him.

Yeah. Right. Like she was better off without her dad.

She was comparing Raddatz to her own father?

She wouldn't have that. Not even from her own conscience.

Conviction was good, conscience was unacceptable.

Sundays.

Sundays, early evenings-at least three of them running-Raddatz took himself a walk to the newsstand on Laurel Canyon blvd. It was a couple miles there and back. A little exercise, a little air. The streets were mostly quiet, mostly residential. But there was an alleyway, a shortcut behind a block of shops. Two hundred yards. Maybe. But back there, there were few eyes. Back there, there was less light, more shadow and a better op for Eddi to shoot a guy and escape conviction for it. Back there, the alley behind the block of shops, was where justice would get put into the back of Raddatz's head at 111 feet per second.

The waiting. That was the part that cut. From the Sunday she decided when and how to kill Raddatz to the Sunday she would do it were seven days in which she would pull three watches with Raddatz. With him. Watch by watch she knew what he did not. That he was a dead man. Seeing him, seeing him go through the motions of living not knowing that the time and place of his death had been stamped… for Eddi it was like watching a documentary of a life famously lost. King or Lennon or pretty much all the Kennedys. You see some footage of them at some innocuous moment laughing or smiling. Living, with no idea there was a bullet milled and waiting for them in Dallas or Memphis or just outside the Dakota. It was like watching a slasher flick and wanting to scream at the screen, useless as it was. Even with Raddatz, even knowing why she was doing what she was doing, Eddi nearly wanted to tell the man to get out of the way of the badness coming.

She had to avoid him. Three watches out of seven days a guy she previously barely crossed paths with on the job Eddi had to work at avoiding for fear Raddatz'd be able to decipher the look in her eyes, gain warning from it. But she wouldn't let herself avoid him too much, paranoid he could read her evasion as well.

One watch down. Another watch down. The third watch down.

She kept way clear of him on that last watch. Totally. She felt like a bride giving distance to her groom. She felt like she was dodging some kind of ill karma. They'd meet up later. Sunday evening. Sunday evening they'd consummate things.

Friday night. Saturday. Saturday night. Eddi had no idea what navigating those hours would be like. Rough. Anxious. Full of impatience. Reality was, it wasn't any of that. Eddi was less, much less keyed than she thought she'd be.

She also drank more than she usually did. Easy to do as she mostly never drank. But she was home, alone. It gave her an activity.

She thought about calling Vin. If she was going to drink, you know, why drink solo? Why let some other guy be an alcoholic by himself? But weak boozer that she was, what she didn't need was to put down one too many, get weak with her mouth and start spewing her plans. Much as Vin loved Soledad, as much as he regarded the struggle against the freaks, Eddi didn't figure he'd get with the idea of killing Raddatz. He wouldn't rat her out. out what Eddi could live free of was hours and hours of Vin throwing liquored reasoning against her plans. A waste.

She'd worked.herself up. She was ready for the kill. There was no going any other way.

Sunday. It felt like Christmas was coming. Not a child's Christmas with the static electricity of excitement permeating every single element of life. It was an adult's Christmas. Everything seemed rushed, harried, and no matter all the preparations Eddi felt horribly unprepared. Incredibly, though she slept poorly, she woke up late and felt as if even with taking a life the only thing on her calendar, she was running behind all day.

Then the day was gone.

It was getting on evening.

Eddi got in her car and drove to the Valley and parked a short distance from the alley off Laurel.

Shoot him in the head, walk to the car, go.

That was the plan. What little there was. What little was needed.

Shoot him in the head. Walk to the car. Go.

More waiting. Close now. Eddi could feel, could feel the passing of each second. No need to look at her watch. The sweep of her internal second hand was a razor to flesh, hacking off the time. Literally keeping score. Raddatz would come. Just wait. Be patient. He'd come.

Shoot him in the head, walk to the car. go.

The scent of arriving moonlight. The sound of clouds in the air. The laugh of a child who wasn' t even born yet. In her journal Soledad had written about her sense of death: an elevated level of perception that made the world hyperreal. As many calls as Eddi had been on, as many times as she'd walked with mortality- hers, other operators', freaks'-Soledad's words were, to Eddi, just inflated talk. Eddi'd never felt anything of the kind. But now things beyond the normal senses were coming real and real clearly to Eddi.

What she did not sense was Raddatz at the newsstand. Her essence spread across the city, Eddi hadn't seen him arriving. Didn't notice when he started thumbing a copy of Road & Track. She'd only caught him as he picked up a copy of Evo, flipped through it, put it aside knowing there was nothing in there for him.

He shared some friendly talk with another browser, got a copy of In Style magazine. It was probably for the wife, but that purchase alone of glamorized vogue-trash wrapped around the cult of celebrity was enough to remove any qualms Eddi had about what was to come.

Raddatz moved from the newsstand.

Eddi moved across the street.

Raddatz jammed the magazine under an arm.

Eddi put hand to pocket. She closed on Raddatz. Not too quickly. Casually. Steadily. Just a girl out. for a stroll. Keep a little distance. Let him make the alley. Let him hit the center of it. Then give it to him.

Hand on the .38's grip.

Give it to him quick.

Her finger brushed the trigger. Feathered. Easy to pull one-handed.

Give it to him twice, to be sure of things. right in the…

He kept going. Raddatz didn't make the turn up the alley. He kept north on Laurel Went west on Maxwellton where cars passed at a steady clip, where 9 couple of old women walked their dogs. Eddi watched Raddatz walk off, toss off a wave to some guy in-line skating. She stood there hand in pocket, hand gripping gun, watching a man who was supposed to be dead walking home.

She was… what was Eddi feeling? Disappointed. Queer as hell, but that's how she felt: spending so much time working up to something that didn't happen even if what didn't happen was… Pissed. She was pissed Raddatz took a walk, literally walked from justice.

Eddi sat in her apartment. Lay on the floor. Lights low. Assessing herself, her feelings. Scared.

Eddi was real scared that Raddatz had switched up his routine, would never again head down that alley. Scared not that she wouldn't get to take another run at Raddatz. She'd make that opportunity. She was scared she'd have to take a run at him somewhere less clandestine. Somewhere she'd be more likely to get caught. And something she hadn't even considered: When she got caught, what was her story going to be? Not the truth. Taking things public defeated the purpose. Shit, she didn't want to rot in jail. The only thing she wanted less was to go out as a crazy cop who killed for no good reason. It came to Eddi maybe a hotshot was the better way to go. Twenty-five to life in a California prison? A ruined rep? Better she should ride out on a mix of state-approved, lethally applied meds.

Eddi felt tired, and that feeling was an emotional preview of the week to come. Another week of waiting. Another week of three watches she'd have to work around Raddatz. Another week of psyching up, of fore-playing toward the real deal. The thought, just the thought of it wore the shit out of her. But the juice to do the job was already building in her. It was seven days, at best, away and Eddi was already fidgety. Antsy.

She needed, this time she really needed a drink and did not need to drink by herself.

Eddi wound up at Vin's. She didn't bother calling first. No need. He'd be home. And he was. In the dark. In the same chair he'd been in that last time she'd come around. At least, he'd done a one-legged hobble over to the chair after letting Eddi into his joint. But Eddi figured he was just returning to his roost.

If he was surprised to see Eddi, Vin didn't show it. If he was surprised by her request for some liquor, it was covered by a casual "Help yourself." Mostly, Vin registered nothing greater than numbness.

So Eddi did as offered, helped herself to a selection from Vin's ample collection of drink. A hit of Stoli vanilla. Downed the flavored vodka. Poured another, taking just enough time to open a window. The recycled air was killing her.

She polished her second drink, then Eddi took up a seat in Vin's general vicinity.

Be cool. Eddi told herself to be cool. Drink what you like, what you need, but keep your mouth shut. Keep your designs to yourself. Vin served his purpose-a little human connection. A reminder of the whys of what she was planning: too many having given too much for the struggle to get fucked-up by a guy like Raddatz-just by being around. Beyond that, talk was not needed.

The two sat. The only thing going on between them the occasional clink of ice in a glass.

"This is how we used to be."

"What's that?" Eddi asked. In her head she'd been watching Raddatz walk up the street instead of down the alley.

"With Soledad. Hours like this. Sitting. Not saying a word."

"Hell of a thing you had going."

"Best kind of thing. Two people so tight they don't need words."

Eddi lay back on the floor, looked up at the bad Spackle job on the ceiling. "You're positively delusional."

"If you're going to take my booze, then fuel my lies. Soledad called it…"

"What?"

"Some Japanese thing. You don't know it?"

Eddi turned her head. Free juice or not, she shot Vin an "oh, fuck you" look for the assumption that because of her heritage she was supposed to be aware of all things Japanese. Vin missed the visual chastisement. He was slouched, face half buried in the fabric of the chair. The way he was, head up he still probably couldn't see ten feet in front of himself.

He said: "They've got this thing in Japan, people talk without talking."

"Talk without talking. That's not talking, then, is it?"

"Anyway, that's what she told me." "Where'd she get that?"

"I think it was from her guy. She was seeing a guy before we started… started whatever. She was telling me about that Japanese thing, rambling about it. When she realized what she was saying, she got all quiet. Bitter. Bitter for her even. Just figure, you know, thinking about her guy set her off."

"His name was Ian."

Head coming up from the chair. "How do you know?"

"Her journal."

"What'd she say about him?"

"Not much. She wrote about him steady for a while how she felt about him. Then nothing. From one page to the next it was like he didn't exist anymore."

"He must've broke her bad."

"I guess."

"Did she…" Vin paused, didn't want to sound too jealous. But then, hell, he was a one-legged drunk. Who was he saving his pride for? "Did she love him? Not like she loved me, did she really-"

"Yeah."

They went back to two people quietly sharing space.

Eddi poured another drink. Drank it. Fixed another before going back to the floor. "You look butch, Eddi." "Excuse me?"

"Not dyke, butch. Tough. That cast-" "Not a cast. It's a splint."

"Looks like a gauntlet. Looks tough. That leather?"

"Yeah. It's comfortable. And I figure if I'm going to be a victim, might as well be a fashion-

"I think she cared about me some," Vin said.

"She did."

"I think she really did. Her eyes used to go green. She thought I wanted to have sex with you."

"Maybe she wasn't jealous of you. Maybe she was jealous of me."

And Vin melted some. "Jesus, Eddi. Let me have one fantasy."

"Was she right?"

"Right about-?"

"Do you want to have sex with me?"

A yes-or-no question. But Vin's answer was: "I think you've got nice tits. I was never a small-chest guy. I was always, I mean, guys are guys. They go for girls who've got it. But yours-"

"There a compliment in there somewhere?"

"Yours are beautiful."

"What about, my stomach?"

"That's tight. Serious. That's, like, fitness-model good-looking."

"And my butt?" Eddi was definitely drunk. But she wanted to know. She wanted to feel wanted.

"Yours is… I don't think of women's asses sexually."

"C'mon."

"No, I mean, I look at them, but I was never… some guys are into them in a hard-core sexual sense."

"Some guys?"

"A lot of guys. Whatever. Not me. But yours… it makes me think about it."

"What's my cootchie make you think about?"

After about eighteen seconds of silence, after Eddi's brain was able to process that time had passed in silence, she looked to Vin. Vin was looking at her. Just looking at her.

Eddi: "What?"

"What tire you doing?"

"Asking you what you think of me."

"Are you getting off? This a, this a tease or something?"

"When you talk about me, you sound alive. I like it when you sound alive. And… I like how I feel when a guy is talking about me. It makes me feel… I don't want to be Soledad. Having a guy like me, knowing I could like him back; it makes me feel not like Soledad. It makes me feel like I got some human in me, and I'm not… I don't know that I got much left."

"What's that mean?"

Like she feared, Eddi was on her way to saying too much. So she followed it up by saying nothing.

Vin, remembering: "Haragei it was called. In Japan when people talk without… whatever, without talking. Uaraqex is what it is."

Eddi stayed with Vin a little less than two hours more. They engaged in a little less than two of haragei.

Life in reprise. Waiting was the repetition, was the slow torture. One watch down. Another watch down. The third down.

No diminishing of desire. No cooling off. If anything, like a frat boy that'd been cock-blocked, frustration made Eddi hungrier for the act than previously.

Friday night. Saturday. Saturday night.

Eddi was back to drinking. Back to drinking alone.

Vin'd been a good booze buddy. But getting comfortable with him was not her desire. Vin's inclination was downward. Clearly, when this- «this» being murder- was over, Eddi was going to have issues to deal with. Getting caught up in Vin's wake wasn't going to help her deal.

She smiled. The first she could remember in a while. The first, she could remember since… the phone call. The news. Soledad was dead.

Eddi smiled and realized it was thinking of Vin that'd brought it on. An alky with no desire to be anything other. But Eddi thought of Vin and she smiled.

Sunday.

Eddi sat on the floor of her joint, played some Chicane on her multitasking CD/DVD system. Watching the sun pass through the sky was all the more assignment she'd given herself.

The sun in the sky.

What was it she'd learned? Long time ago. High school was it? Not even the sun … How did it go? Not even the sun will transgress his orbit hut the Erinyes, the ministers of justice, overtake him.

And she rubbed her left tit. Beneath the gray cotton of her undershirt, through her bra, Eddi could feel, could feel her tattoo. That hyper sense again. Death was coming.

In the nightstand was a photo book. In the photo book was a picture of her father. She kept it close. No matter tough little MTac she was, she didn't have the fortitude to display it, keep it in constant view. She could barely ever look at it. But it remained always near. Near enough that in the middle of the night she could reach out and take hold of it and clutch it to her chest and cry in secret. She'd done that Done it plenty.

The sun made its way to the edge of the sky.

The ministers of justice, overtake him.

Day was gone.

It was getting on evening.

Eddi got in her car and drove to the Valley and parked a short distance from the alley near the newsstand.

Shoot him in the head. Walk to her car. Go, Same as the Sunday previous. Except she expected more substantial results.

Eddi was vigilant this Sunday, saw Raddatz heading up the block, hitting the newsstand. She had a fear that the hitch this week would be Raddatz'd have his kids with him. She wasn't about to do the job with his kids close. That much, or that little-that sliver of morality- humanity Eddi had left.

Raddatz was consistent.

He arrived on schedule. Without family. He flipped through Esquire. Flipped through, again, Road & Track. Same as with just about all newsstands the automobile magazines were displayed next to the porn. One-stop shopping for a demographic. Two Sundays in a row Raddatz had looked at the car mags without so much as considering the porn. That bumped her some. Maybe it was stereotyping, but it seemed to Eddi a guy like Raddatz should have more visible vices.

Raddatz stood, stood reading an article. It felt to Eddi, timewise, he was reading The Fountainhead in a sitting.

He stood reading.

He stood reading.

Raddatz put back the magazine.

He chatted some with somebody.

He started off from the stand.

Eddi made the cross.

Raddatz stopped. Looked at another magazine. The Week.

Eddi didn't want to double back on herself in the middle of Laurel Canyon, call attention to herself. She kept up the cross, landed on the far north end of the newsstand. The porn mags Raddatz had skipped over. Eddi gave them a perusing. That she was making herself seem engaged in other women's bare bodies was lost on her. Head down, face hidden, she let her senses travel, touch and feel Raddatz as he read through the newsweekly, took it to the cashier, paid, started his walk again. Giving him a bit of a lead, Eddi fell in behind him.

This Sunday Raddatz took the alley.

Shoot him in the head. Walk to her car. Go.

Eddi closed on him.

in her pocket, hand on the .38's grip.

Give it to him quick.

Her finger brushed the trigger.

Give it to him twice.

Eddi pulled out, picked up the pace. Kept her hand down, gun at her side, hidden. Hidden, but ready to do work.

Raddatz oblivious

Shoot him in the head.

On him, nearly on top of him. Close enough she wouldn't miss. Close enough she couldn't help but kill.

A sound, behind her.

A witness?

Eddi turned.

A man. Wispy. Reedy. He barely registered, yet somehow reeked menace. Not a witness. Something bad.

Eddi brought her hand around, started to bring her gun up. The guy caught it, caught her wrist. Wispy. Reedy. But his grip was like getting caught up in steel rails. Couldn't move. Eddi could not even start to move her aim.

The wispy guy twisted her wrist. A machine going to work on her. The hurt the same as her limb getting torqued by mechanical rotors. Pain made her open her hand, her gun clanking to the ground. Her grunt drowning out the gun.

From behind her, from Raddatz: "No, no!"

Eddi's left hand came up, whipped out, caught the thin man hard in the head. Square in the face. Her fractured wrist fractured a little more. There was blood from the guy's nose, from his mouth. On impact his head hardly moved.

The thin man made a fist.

Sleepy time for Eddi.

Eddi was cognizant. She wasn't sure how long it took her to figure that out. A while.

She realized she was awake, that it was dark. The room she was in was a basement, a cellar. If it was day or night outside she didn't know. Couldn't tell She'd taken a blow to the head. Beyond the accompanying hurt she didn't feel as though she'd been drugged or otherwise roughed up. Probably, she'd been loopy only a short time at most. Probably, it was still Sunday evening. Sunday night.

So she'd narrowed the time frame. Like that was some F'n victory.

The space was windowless. And it stank. The choking stink of rotting flesh. Vermin probably. Maybe, Eddi considered, human.

Eddi realized she was staring up close at the print of a magazine. She lifted her head. Tried to. Her head told her real loudly to lay it the hell back down. Eddi didn't argue. She asked her eyes if they wouldn't mind focusing and, eventually, they responded.

The magazine: The Week. It'd been shoved under her face as a pillow. Or a drool cloth. Eddi had, she was coming to notice, done a lot of that while she'd been out.

She was coming to notice she was cuffed too. The steel of the restraints particularly painful to her already fractured wrist.

The cuffs. The Week. Eddi only had to do a short replay to catch herself up to things: Her trying to kill Raddatz. The thin man who threw a punch like he was throwing a small car.

She'd fucked up. Raddatz knew she was coming. Or just, rat that he was, had his back continually covered. However it was, Eddi had fucked up. And now there'd be some kind of very nasty retribution. If Raddatz was just, going to turn her over for attempted murder, she'd be in custody already. That he had no problem killing she knew already. But she wasn't dead. To Eddi that meant her death was going to come at a particular time and very likely none too quickly.

So she was going to die for her actions. It'd always been a possibility, though she'd thought it'd come by way of the state, not at private hands. She was going to die. Okay. Not okay, but… more immediate, more important, in her passing was there anything she could do to trip Raddatz up? Get him caught? Anything, same as setting a delayed fuse, that would after she was gone do to Raddatz what he was going to do to

her?

If there was-if- Eddi's head was in no shape to think on It. Anyway, that kind of logic was Movieville superspy thinking; the incredibly complex trap sprung from beyond the grave. Eddi was no superspy. At the moment she was little better than a screw-up cop.

A padlock popped. The rattle of a chain. Eddi couldn't tell in which direction the door was. Her senses were not working in concert. She heard the door open. She heard it close. She heard it lock again. Footsteps. Couldn't see from where they traveled. A voice came from directly above her.

The voice, Raddatz: "I'm going to tell you something; something that happened a few years back. I'll tell it to you, then we can talk about the way things are."

As long as he'd lived in LA Raddatz couldn't remember spending any significant time on Rodeo Drive, Why should he? It was Beverly Hills. It was the priciest bunch of blocks in LA County. Sick with high-end boutiques. Not stores, not shops. Boutiques. Armani, Gucci, Christian Dior, Chanel, Ralph Lauren. Valentino, Carrier and Tiffany. The priciest store on the planet-according to its own press-was on Rodeo. Bijan. Don't show up without an appointment. Don't show up without expecting to pay a min of a hundred grand. A pair of socks starts at fifty bucks. The rich bought on Rodeo. Tourists threw away good money on Rodeo so they could say they bought where the rich buy. Angelenos, regular Angelenos. didn't go anywhere, near the street. Unless they had to. Unless, for instance, they were MTac cops and somebody'd put in a call on a sighted freak.

Somebody'd put in a call. Raddatz was leading Ms element south on Rodeo.

The call had come in as a two-forty, an assault. That part was sketchy. What wasn't: One of the combatants picked up the other one and threw him a couple hundred feet. The area of eventual impact being the side of a store.

A boutique.

Threw him hard. What was left of the vie was still splattered, some kind of sick art, over the brick facade. There were a couple of the BHPD cops on patrol. They drew out, opened fire. Boxed the freak, but then backed off. It was Beverly Hills. BH cops rousted the homeless, kept the blacks and Hispanics from wandering the flats. What they didn't do, they didn't handle freaks. For that they called the LAPD.

LAPD sent MTac.

The streets'd been cleared. The civvies had been evacuated. The area was a quarter mile in circumference of ghost town. Maybe the freak had slipped away in the initial confusion. Maybe it was holed up in a dark corner next to overstocked, overpriced goods. It was up to West LA MTac-Raddatz and Carmichael and McCrae and Tice-to figure out which.