That meant going slow south on the drive.
That meant going boutique to boutique.
That meant getting into tight little spaces where cover was minimal, and getting caught in another operator's fire was a genuine concern.
And behind any door, any counter, in any dressing room, could be a freak cooling. Waiting to do damage to the cop who was a little too slow with his trigger.
Haute urban warfare.
"Clear?" Raddatz called to his element.
Down the line, over throat mics: "Clear."
"Clear."
"Clear."
That was what, twelve boutiques down. Twenty-five to go? Plus a couple of restaurants. Just as cautiously as when they'd entered the joint, the element was as much so corning out. Had to be. Relax a split second, plane your own edge, that's when you were begging for trouble.
Gloved hand under his Fritz helmet, Tice whipped clear sweat that was spilling over his brow, filling his eyes.
Raddatz, calling his progress in: "West LA to Central."
"Go ahead, West."
"We're clear. Move D Platoon down another fifty."
"Copy that, West. D Platoon moving fifty yards."
D Platoon. Special Weapons and Tactics. They were good. Plenty of them had elevated to G Platoon. Problem was, the ones who hadn't, they were okay doing overkill on the disgruntled employee of the weak huddled up in some office building looking to hand out some payback for his pink slip. Those cops'd avoided going MTac for a reason. The reason was usually fear. So D Platoon- SWAT-being the only fail-safe against a freak that got past his element didn't help Raddatz feel any better about the situation. Just more pressure. Either they got the freak, or the freak was likely to not be gotten at all.
Next up: Harry Winston's.
The four MTacs went for it, eyes moving. Always moving, sweeping, looking…
Enhanced strength. That's what they were dealing with. The perp fused the vie with a wall from two hundred feet away. That takes some kind of muscle. With freaks, what you were going up against was never certain. But, yeah, probably it was a freak with enhanced strength. That meant not just looking for somebody. That meant keeping an eye out for a truck or a generator or a mainframe computer… whatever the thing might feel like picking up same as a kid's toy and tossing your way. That possibility was obvious. But the thing could just as easily flick a paper clip at you with enough force, even with a vest it'd tear through the Kevlar and hit like a Teflon bullet. Ana should you be lucky or unlucky enough to dodge what it was thrown, get close to it, if it got you in its paws, it could crush you. Rip clean your limbs. Snap you in two. Dealer's choice. The freak being the dealer.
Sirens. Getting closer.
Raddatz: "West LA. We've got sirens?"
In his earpiece, the OIC: "Car fire on Wilshire. Fire responding. Unrelated,"
Raddatz let a breath slip from his mouth.
Keep on your toes, keep your eyes roiling. Raddatz whispered as much over his throat mike to the rest of the element as they slipped into Harry Winston's.
The House of Winston.
The King of Diamonds.
Jeweler to the Stars.
There was, there had to be, fifty mill in rocks in the place easy. Necklaces, rings, earrings, pendants, gold settings, white gold, platinum… The actual market value of the gems was maybe half that fifty mill. The cheapest… the least expensive piece went in the neighborhood of forty grand. But if you bought at Harry's, you were paying for the name, the legend, the zip code, if you were a tourist, you paid. If you were a Hollywood wife, a kept girl, your sugar daddy paid for you. On that business model Harry's had been in operation a lot of years.
Raddatz's element paid zero mind to the bling. Getting caught up in it could get 'em killed. At any price was there a rock in the joint worth losing your life over?
A lot of glass. Display cases filled the center of the boutique, ringed the edge. Should've been an easy look-see, but the sunlight pouring in refracting of; the glass and the diamonds did tricks with the eyes. Dazzled. Was like doing recon in a kaleidoscope.
Raddatz: "Tice, hold back. Cover us from the door.'
Tice was schlepping the Benelli.
Raddatz put Carmichael and McCrae on the edges of the boutique. The pair toted HKs. Sexy in black.
Out front was Raddatz carrying just his Colt .45. Just the .45. A precision kill weapon that hit harder than a Glock. For most cops in most situations it'd be more gun than they needed. Against a freak, at best it was adequate.
Raddatz inched his way forward, every step feeling same as bait on a hook, if the thing was present, he was making himself available for it. Hope was he'd get it first. If not. the hope was one of the other operators could put it down.
On the walls: shimmers of light like sunshine kicked back from a pool. Constant movement. An optical distraction. In all Ms years Raddatz had never squeezed off a jumpy round by mistake. Today might be the day.
Forward, peeking, peeking around a display case.
Nothing. Jewels, riches. No freak. Forward. Forward some more. Eyes fluttering from dripping sweat. The heavy breathing of three other MTacs in his ear.
He should clear his sweat. Raddatz thought he should.
Light on the walls.
Thought he should. Probably not a good move.
His choices had come down to that: Take Ms hand off his gun to clear his vision. Have his vision cut by the sweat, but keep up a solid two-handed grip.
Breathing in his ear.
He hated self-debating; what to do or not. Just do it or forget it.
The light, the light dancing.
A door up ahead A storage room? Back office?
Raddatz, into his throat mike: "Going for the door."
Behind him the.sound of shifting bodies. Red dots slipped over die wall. Guns taking up new aim points.
And the sound of breathing.
Left hand out, reaching for the door. For the knob.
Raddatz took hold. Tested it. Unlocked. He opened it slightly Opened it…
There was a single scream split in two, both parts heard simultaneously. The vocalized one behind Raddatz. T h e transmitted one in his ear and stabbing into his heart.
Raddatz whipped around.
Tice was off the ground. Elevated inches above it by the thing. The freak. Elevated inches off the ground by the freak's hand jammed wrist-deep into Tice's chest.
Tice: squirming, screaming. Blood gushing.
Dying.
Raddatz didn't need to give the go. Carmichael, McCrae already doing work with the HKs. Thirteen rounds a second X 2. Flying hot. Scorching air with a ffft, ffft, ffft as the slugs sourced for the target. Missed the target. Both MTacs missed. The freak was already moving. The bullets it dodged rapid-punched walls. Little as they were, they dug out fist-sized divots. Bricks chipped. Powdered. Clouded the air.
All that was behind the freak.
The freak was leaping, hauling Tice-or Tice's body-with it. The freak landed on a display case. Shattered glass sent gems flying, scattered sunlight through the diffused space.
Pretty.
Then the freak leaped again, leaped for McCrae. Moving too fast for Raddatz to keep a bead.
Then it was bloody hell
Bare-handed, the freak tore, literally tore into McCrae. Fingers like hooks. Arms spinning like blades. Old-school Warner Bros, cartoon
Tasmanian. Without the fanny. Tore up McCrae, tore up what was left of Tice at the same time.
Fountains of crimson.
Chunks of meat.
Walls got painted.
Slaughterhouses were more genteel.
Screams coming, seeming to come from everywhere. Screams of death, of rage. Wails that begged God and woke the devil.
The freak was strong, was fast. Impossible. Freaks didn't own multiple abilities. One. All they had was one. If they had more than one… straight fear talking to Raddatz: If freaks had more than one ability, how was a cop supposed to have a chance in hell of going against it and living?
Carmichael held fire, didn't want to hit Tice or McCrae. Bad-cop fidelity. What was left of the cops was dead.
Raddatz jerked his trigger two, three times. The bullets took the target. Raddatz saw the hits, saw flesh rent, blood spurt.
To the freak three bullet wounds were nothing. Interfered with his continued violence none.
Carmichael got over his concerns, got to shooting. The low boom, the deep roar of his
Benelli. Hell coming for the hellion. Came too slow. By the time his slugs got to the freak, the freak was gone. The slugs beat the shit out of a wall. The freak was taking air, arching for Carmichael. A whoosh, a streak as it slashed an arm forward. Then Carmichael's head, separated from his body, was shattering through a glass display case. Coming to rest among a collection of eighty-plus-carat diamond pendants. Carmichael's body did about five seconds of a headless-chicken dance. Dropped to the floor. Danced a little more. Purged some more blood from the top of its empty neck. Joined Tice and McCrae in being dead.
Strength, speed. Nearly invulnerable. Freaks didn't have multiple abilities, Raddatz told himself. How was a cop supposed to have a chance in hell of going against it and-
The thing put feet to a wall, sprang off. Arching again. Arching for Raddatz.
Raddatz's finger jerking the Colt's trigger. Three more bullets for the freak. Two more hits. Same as before. No difference. The freak was not stopped.
The freak landed. The freak was right in front of Raddatz. Looking human, but so far removed from humanity. Chest blowing, eyes burning, bleeding but not dying. Hell-born, but a thing hell wouldn't want.
And then it moved. Fast, like before. Violent. With its hands it grabbed. With its teeth it bit, cracked. Tore away the bones of Raddatz's wrist. A sucking, popping sound.
And a scream from Raddatz. He saw his own hand, gripping his gun, flipping through the air.
And the freak: blood flesh-spilled from its mouth that curved with a smile.
Raddatz stepped back. Thought he was. Thought he was stepping back. He was falling backward. Took the ground hard. Instinct-a cop's instinct, plain survival instinct-told him to get up, get back into things. If you're gonna die, die. But die fighting. Die taking the thing with you. So Raddatz tried to scramble off, push himself back up. He slipped on his own blood. His stump useless for helping out in the effort to stand. Good for nothing except causing him pain, bleeding massively.
No getting up. No getting back into the fight. The next couple of seconds held nothing but the remainder of his life. Just time enough to consider: eyes closed or open? Does he go out like a man, watch death coming? Does he shut his eyes and pick, that one last image to ride to eternity with?
Eyes closed. He conjured his wife, his boys.
Please, God, let 'em know my last thought was of them.
He calmed none. Held his family tight in his mind. Took a quick hit of every emotion he'd ever felt.
Please, God.
Please…
Thunder is its own thing, he'd always thought. When Raddatz was a boy, when his father taught him, as good fathers do, to count the seconds between lightning and thunder to figure how far off a storm was, Raddatz just got it into his head thunder is different from lightning. And it is. But they're partners. It takes lightning to make thunder-the sound of a vacuum collapsing when air is riven by electricity. So when he felt it, when Raddatz felt the sharp bite of charged particles racing above him, he knew it was lightning when he heard the thunder. Heard the animal scream of the freak as it fried. Smelled flesh that was bone-roasted.
Tsui there was nothing but the sound of breathing.
His own. His own was all that remained.
His shaking, convulsing diminished. Volition returned. Raddatz used it to open his eyes. The world swam around him. A mile away, maybe just ten feet, was the freak. Burned, obviously. Skin charred where it wasn't just cooked away. Probably dead. It was motionless enough to be dead. There were bodies about, body parts about. Blood everywhere. All that remained of his former fellow cops. Raddatz's head moved in some direction. Actual geography was lost to him. Upside down to him was a woman. A female anyway. She was little older than a girl. A teen. She wore a shirt that both quoted some urbanism and showed midriff. Baggy pants that peekabooed the thong her parents must have hated her wearing. Such a normal girl. Other than the arc of electricity that crawled around her clenched fists. Three cops dead. Raddatz dying. The freak that had done all that stopped by a youth with tricky fingers.
Her mouth moved. She spoke to Raddatz, her voice lost to him. His senses failing him.
Fading. He was fading. Blood was flowing from him. Life was slipping from him.
As he traveled on, Raddatz caught up with the words of the girl as both her voice and his life headed for eternity.
The girl had said: "Don't be afraid."
There's something about dying, Eddi. There's something about it that-"
"That drives you insane?" Eddi talked through the pain in her head, the pain in her wrists; the cuffs biting into her flesh. "You didn't die."
Raddatz didn't take Eddi's acid as insult or sarcasm. He took it as point of fact.
"I died, Eddi. I did die. If not technically, then I had the NDE that changes you. How could I die and not get changed?"
"You're not changed. You're fucked-up!" Words delivered with a spray of the blood that filled her mouth.
"You've never been pushed to a state above and beyond every other thing you used to
believe, Eddi?"
"Stop saying my name!"
"There's never been a time you've done things never mind the consequences, others might find
…" From a picket: Eddi's .38. The gun that was meant to kill Raddatz. "You deserve to die."
"I do." No argument from Raddatz. Just an expression of sadness. "But not how you think. I deserve to die because… They aren't freaks, Eddi. They are different than us. They're-"
"They're fucking mutants!"
"They're not afraid."
"They ought to be scared. Kill me, but that's not going to stop us from taking out every last-"
"They're not afraid as we know fear. That girl: If she'd been identified by the police, what would have happened to her? A warrant would have been issued. She would have been hunted. Maybe killed. Her family sent inside just for being her family, for never having turned her in to the cops, but she knew she had to try and stop the metanormal that was in the middle of killing me. That is, if it didn't kill her. If the police didn't kill her. There's a difference between us and them. Not in their abilities. Not in being genetically better. What sets the best of them apart from us, sets them to a degree above us, is so basic, but beyond you and me. Metanormals, the ones who believe in good aren't scared of doing what's right. Facing persecution, without regard to self, no matter the law, they're not afraid of serving a higher cause. Serving mankind. Isn't that what lifts our species above common animals; to do good without regard? And isn't that what holds our species back; the inability to give selflessly? And I know you're thinking: Cops; we do that. Give of ourselves. We put our lives on the line to fight them. But we fight from a place of fear. Stop them, or they'll destroy us. Stop them, or they take over. Stop them.
"They don't fight from fear. They fight for right. For all They fight to end fear. That young girl, when she gave me life, she took my fear."
"You've got no fear. That makes you a, a traitor now? She saved your life, so you kill cops."
"They're using you, Eddi. Do you understand? They used Soledad, now they're using you."
Just the mention of her name. Soledad. Enough to slow Eddi down. No matter she'd been pummeled, no matter she was on the floor cuffed, for the first time since she'd gotten her sense back Eddi listened.
"What do we fear?" Raddatz asked. "What are we all scared of? A return to the days before San Francisco. The metanormals-the good, the bad-going at each other in the middle of Downtown LA, or New York, or Atlanta. We're scared of this 'cause we've been told to be scared."
"Because more than half a million people got killed on May Day."
"And do you think if Pharos hadn't gone after Bludlust, things would've turned out different, the city wouldn't have been torn in half? When that happened, we said to our leaders: Not again. Do what you have to, but never again. So there was the Executive Order, there were the MTacs and the deportations and the SPAs. The government could do what it wanted, when it wanted, in the name of security. I know, Eddi, I know what you're gonna say. It was, it is, a time of war. We need to protect ourselves and do so extraordinarily against an extraordinary enemy. But do you think the desire for power is limited to metanormals? Ordinary people want to be extraordinarily. What genetics hasn't given them, the law grants them. The Executive Order gave men power.
"But memories fade, Eddi. Every day the past slips farther and farther away. People don't remember May Day as much as they recall the sight of cops with HKs taking out metanormals in the middle of the street. You've seen it, the rise of what's called freak fuckers; the liberal fringe. How much longer before their voice takes hold, the Executive Order gets rescinded? Metanormals get rights again? There is that fear. It cuts deep among normal men who value their power. It's why someone like Soledad got persecuted for taking half a step outside the law."
"She got roasted because the brass was trying to cover up kickbacks."
"They tried to punish her to hide others' crimes. So you get it? People in power will do what they can to keep their power. Power never cedes except by force."
Eddi was getting the feeling she was going to be where she was for a while. She was losing the feeling in the arm. she was lying on. She rolled, tried to find comfort. All she found was more hard floor. More hurt.
"I'll tell you honest, Eddi. I've used my position to advance my objectives. I won't participate in hunting metanormals anymore. Not ones who aren't a threat."
"They're all a threat."
"If they were, I wouldn't be standing here,"
"And you decide that, you and your cadre? Which ones are trouble and which aren't."
"If we knew of a metanormal who committed a crime, was in the act of planning the commission of a crime, then we processed him. Got that Intel to MTac. Otherwise, we lost a number of metanormals in mountains of paperwork."
"You're protecting them."
No denial. Not even a modifier. "Yeah. Myself, a few others I was able to persuade."
He was doing a lot of talking. Giving up a lot of information. Eddi knew things were heading in one of two directions. Raddatz was going to offer her some kind of a deal, or he was going to kill her. As she wasn't dead yet, as Raddatz was rapping like a Buddhist monk on E, Eddi held out hope.
Raddatz: "Careful as we were, we couldn't keep ourselves off the radar forever. People were getting suspicious."
"People?"
"The department. IA."
For Eddi IA equaled Tashjian. She was hurting again. This time in her gut.
"And then," Raddatz went on, "the killings started. Metanormals, sympathizers. Fernandez, maybe."
"That wasn't your people?"
"No."
"If you're going to tell me it was IA…»
"It's not them. This is… we are on the edge of a whole other destiny."
"Quit fucking around!" Hurt. Humiliated. Whatever was coming Eddi was ready to get to it. Enough with the setup. "What's the situation?"
"Someone's killing metanormals. Those I'd call innocent. Harmless. But as harmless as they might be, they're not defenseless. It's a single perp. As far as I believe, one-on-one, it takes a metanormal to kill a metanormal. But if this went public-"
"Freaks going to war again."
"The fear of another San Francisco. That'd be the end of the liberal voice and the push for the return of metanormal rights. It would give more power to the guys in power."
"You, your little cadre: You hid this info."
"And we tried to find the killer. But somewhere, someone started to see a pattern: Intel they weren't getting, information that was being misdirected. They couldn't prove anything.
They seemed to believe they couldn't put any of their people inside to watch us."
"But Soledad was at DMI."
Raddatz nodded. Up and down, but the motion was sideways to Eddi's skewed view of the world.
Raddatz said: "She got the charge to get evidence, to shut us down. Or, better, if things worked out that way, to stop us with force."
"To kill you."
Nothing from Raddatz this time.
From Eddi: "That's bullshit. That's the most fucked-up… I've had perps popped red-handed who could spin better lines."
For a minute, for nearly that, Raddatz stood. Just stood. He took Eddi's words, her crack about all he'd said being bullshit, about as well as a boxer-beaten, beat up, struggling through round fourteen of fifteen-would take a long-delayed but well-laid blow. He was done. He was through. A husk that'd just had a hole riven through it exposing it as the empty vessel that it is. Raddatz could not reach Eddi, and that finished him.
He put Eddi's gun down on the floor. "Do you remember"-Raddatz empty in spirit, empty in voice when he spoke-"how you felt the day after May Day? The hate I had is still so clear to me." With his hook Raddatz pushed Eddi's piece toward her. "When the girl saved my life, everything I used to believe was taken from me. But what I believed in was hate. My hate was replaced with the burden to… not to do what the law said was right, but to do what I knew was right. I fucked that up, and my fucking up cost people their lives. Now I'm alone in my efforts. Maybe I've got a chance to make things correct, but If it's a chance at all, it's a slim one. Before the guys in power can make a grab for more I have to buy the metanormals time." 'Time for what?"
"For the truth to come. For revelation to set them free. But now's the time to do something, or do nothing. To do right or just let evil play. What's it gonna be, Eddi?" With her gun still lying on the floor before her Raddatz stepped around behind Eddi. She felt him work her cuffs. She felt the metal give up its bite.
The gun right there. A trick. Had to be.
"What's it going to be, Eddi?"
"I pick up the gun, I try to shoot you, what: Your superfriend's going to crush my skull?"
Ra shook his head no.
The gun.
"Maybe all this is just to test me, to see if I'd flip over to the freaks' side."
"Or maybe all this is the truth. Maybe, crazy as it is, you and me ended up here for a reason. Even if the reason Is just to kill me. And if that's the way things are," nodding for the gun, "pick it up, do your job. Tell your bosses you got a freak fucker. An insurgent. You've preserved the order of their world for them."
Eddi picked, up the gun. couldn't feel it. Just the throb of blood pumping back into her hands. Pumping hard. Her heart was exhausting itself. She was swimming in gore. Eddi was, In her head, back in the alley on the edge of doing what she'd come to do. Make things right, yeah, but make things right for Soledad.
The blood in her hands felt like it was going to purge from her flesh. Bust right through it.
Raddatz stood where he was. Gave off nothing. If this was it, this was it. Whatever was coming he was ready to take.
Not a trick. He was okay to die.
Kill him. For Soledad, kill him.
Her head, hands ached. Fucking ached. Eddi felt her hurt so clear…
But she did not feel… she could not sense what was outside, what was a mile away. She couldn't smell the fragrance of a freshly perfumed girl sitting in her car on Beverly Boulevard, or hear the whisker-snap of a shaving guy in Torrance. All that was lost to her. She was just in a little dark room somewhere. She was not hyperaware of anything. She did not sense or feel death. For the minute there wouldn't be any killing.
"One more time, Raddatz. Tell me everything."
She sat looking down at the tabletop, staring at it. Through it. It was glass. So, really, it was the floor at which she was staring. The kitchen floor. A stain from some Chef Boyardee ravioli that one of the kids had spilled onto the tile and she'd managed to miss since… Raddatz's wife asked herself when was the last time the kids had eaten Chef Boyardee?
She was calming down. But still she asked:
"Why?"
"Same as always. Nailing a perp is only half the job. It's the paperwork that-" "Why now?"
There was some world-saving to be done. Double-dealing by the establishment had to be put down. But before all that. Raddatz had to do some damage control with the missus. He was only supposed to have walked a few blocks to grab some magazines. A couple hours had passed. A couple of hours Raddatz had spent doing a nasty dance with Eddi Aoki in the basement of a half-built/never-finished apartment building in Studio City. A cop's wife, her man all of a sudden does a fade, no matter how many years she's been living, with possibilities, it's understandable if she goes a little nuts. So Raddatz had to tell a few lies about an incident that'd gone down in plain view. Lies about having to step in, assert himself as the law-as cops are never really off-duty-until some uniforms hit the scene.
Helena bought it. Through her love of her man, her fury at him for maybe having gotten himself hurt or worse, she bought the lie.
Raddatz did a quiet thanks to God. Helena being a cop's wife, he knew her intuition-or her enhanced suspicion from years of proximity to a DMI officer. There was a chance she wouldn't have gone for word one. Then would come questions and recriminations. Accusations. Was he off drinking, was it another woman… Raddatz really only had the time and temperament to douse a small fire, not to deal with a whole forest set ablaze.
So in a way it was a little ironic. She'd bought the big lie of her husband stepping in and helping out. What she couldn't get past: him telling her he had to go out and push paper. Right now.
"Somebody else can't do it?"
"I was a witness."
"So do it tomorrow."
"The time I sit here talking I could be done and back."
Head up, looking right at her husband: "You were dead." "I don't…»
"I said to myself he's dead. Not maybe, but… I wanted to accept it. Be done accepting it. I wanted to be ready for it."
"Those days are over. I'm not MTac anymore."
"It doesn't matter. If you know the feeling once, you never-"
"3 was gone a couple of hours."
"To me, Tucker, you were dead."
Just then he realized she was cupping his mangled wrist. Hook off. Raddatz was letting it breathe. His nerve endings were pretty much useless. The whole of It, the stump, the scars, the remnants of surgery-surgeries- was a hideous sight. Never, never once that Raddatz could remember had Helena ever recoiled from it or from its touch to her body. Never that he could recall did she hold back from making contact with it.
She was such a good woman. No pejorative there. No marginalization regarding her gender in relation to modem society. What was right and fine, what was the core of all vows that a man and woman take when joined before God and the law was what Helena owned and regularly put into practice.
Raddatz asked himself: Would she-if Helena knew the truth of things, if she knew that he was helping the kind who'd tried to turn her into a widow, had done as much as they could to turn the human race into a distant memory-would she finally recoil from him then? Would her anger still be a combination of love and rage, or just the rage?
Or maybe, know what might shove her away? The fact her husband didn't trust this "good woman," this woman ofher vows… he didn't trust his partner, his wife, the heart of his life enough to be honest with her. That would most likely set her back same as a fist to the face.
"I'm telling you those days are done." Raddatz hoped he'd go to his grave not knowing what the revelation of the lie would do to his wife. He could endure, had endured a lot of pain and loss and suffering and come away from it a version of whole despite his scars. What he could not take, what would leave him a wreck: breaking Helena's heart. "I'm not that kind of cop anymore."
"So you get in the middle of, of-"
"A punk acting like a man. A kid running around high with a knife. His knife, my gun. You don't need two hands to win that fight." An attempt at humor. It got Raddatz nothing. "I sat on the kid for a minute until the-"
"It wasn't a minute."
"I had to wait for uniformed cops. I told you."
"Go two hours without hearing from me when I'm supposed to just be running an errand. How would you feel?"
"Jesus. By the time it was all done-"
"How would you feel?"
Like he'd been hacked open. Like his insides were being lifted from him for no greater purpose than being spilled onto a floor. Like he was dying, which he might as well be because he wouldn't want to go on living. And all that would pretty much be his initial reaction.
But Raddatz said, calmly, evenly, covering his true concern: "I'd be worried as hell. But my worry wouldn't let me keep you from doing what you had to do in life." "Paperwork?"
Raddatz's exasperation was turning real. "I'm going to go to the station, I'm going to do some work, I'm going to come home. You need anything from Ralph's?" He was already moving for the garage.
Helena mumbled a no.
Raddatz gave the most casual good-bye he could. The kind a wife'd get from her husband cop off to do paperwork and a stop at the store on the way home. The land he'd given her a thousand times previous. Now he couldn't even be sure he was faking it well.
Raddatz pulled out of the driveway, rounded a corner, stopped his car and picked up Eddi.
Re: the time it'd taken Raddatz to deal with his wife: "Home issues?"
"Cop's life, cop's wife. Always issues."
"Where are we going?"
'To Hayden's."
"Who's Hayden?"
Raddatz kept mum to that.
Eddi, again: "Who's Hayden?" "You carry grudges well?"
"Why?"
"Hayden's the one who laid you out."
Eddi'd always wondered… not always. Not even sometimes. Occasionally, when she was taking the Sepulveda exit off the 405, the La Brea exit from the 10, almost any exit, off the 101 between Cahuenga and Sunset, Eddi wondered: the little apartments? Dirty, ratty apartments tucked close to the freeway that absorbed the continual roll of rubber on road, the noise pollution associated with it, the toxic fumes that came from it: Who lived in those? Who the hell would live in those?
The answer, obvious: anyone who couldn't live somewhere else, somewhere decent. The poor. The transient, The unbalanced. The undocumented.
And now Eddi knew to add to the list at least one superhuman who would otherwise, living normal, risk being exposed and hunted down. Killed.
Standing across from that superhuman, Hayden, standing in his shithole of an apartment, Eddi wasn't sure what she should be feeling. The hate she'd always felt for the kind that'd made her fatherless. Hate with some added resentment for this freak that put a single, unanswered punch on her that still left each pulse of her heart throbbing in her head. Some kind of awe that she was spitting close to a metanormal and they weren't actively trying to kill each other.
Or maybe she should be feeling pathos. Not so much for the freak, but for his wife and for his kid who was maybe three years old. Old enough he should be starting preschool. He should be outside playing, running, laughing. He was doing none of that. Probably never would. That kind of life was reserved for kids who didn't grow up hiding out in. crappy apartments near off-ramps 'cause at least one of their parents was a freak.
Not a social worker, Eddi told herself. She wasn't there to hand out pity. Contrivances were in need of being conceived. Conceive them. Make, things correct. Move on. Eddi told herself quite firmly: You are not part of this world.
"It's difficult sometimes." Hayden was doing the talking. "With my abilities, enhanced strength, it's difficult-"
"To know how hard is too hard to hit somebody?"
"I'm sorry,"
Eddi recognized him. Beyond being the wispy, reedy guy who'd knocked her loopy, Eddi recognized him as the guy Raddatz had chatted with a couple of times at the newsstand. Chatted. Passed information with. Eddi should've been a little more observant.
Queer. Here was a guy, Hayden… trim and slight as he might have looked, here was a guy who could punch his way through a concrete slab same as regular people could poke a finger through tissue. Here was a guy that could've taken off Eddi's head using any two digits of one hand. And here was this guy apologizing to Eddi. Standing back away from her. Cowering slightly, unconsciously, now that she stood opposite him. This is how badly the MTacs had freaks scared. This was the legacy of Soledad, of Yar, of Bo, of Reese, of every MTac that'd ever chalked a freak in the name of the law.
Eddi, making sure everybody's on the same page: "So you got freaks getting killed. You wanted to know if freaks're going after each other, starting back with their old ways."
Raddatz nodded to the affirmative. "But we've got no motive for the attacks."
"One superhuman wants to kill another. How much more reason do you need?"
"On the job, how many times did you come on really random violence? Guy robs a liquor store, he wants money. Guy jacks a car because he wants wheels. A girl gets killed because she jilted her man. I don't care what kind of powers metanormals have, you've got to look at the crime same as any other. Besides… " Raddatz looked to Hayden. "If one of their own went off, they would know."
They would know. Raddatz was acknowledging what the establishment feared: Metanormals weren't just hidden among the normals. They had a network, an underground. As far as the establishment cared, that was one step removed from having a resistance. Forming an army.
And Raddatz was actually trusting Eddi with this information.
If he was trusting her. If he wasn't handing her misinformation. Disinformation. But, really, wasn't the trust Eddi's to use or discard? She could keep on with Raddatz, hear him out, back his play. Or she could keep a metaphorical hand on her gun ready for betrayal.
"Okay, so this isn't random… " What was the phrase Eddi was looking for? "Freak-on-freak crime.'
"No," from Hayden. "Whoever it is, or they are, they've… they've made targets of us."
"The last guy to get killed, Anson Hall, he'd been stalked. We got out the word among the metas: Mind your back for anybody who's watching you, clocking you. That's how," Raddatz said, "we knew to stake the house where the last murder attempt was."
"Melinda thought-"
Eddi asked: "That was the intended vie?"
Hayden hesitated. He used her name in front of Eddi by accident. He'd just outed to an unknown quantity a fellow freak.
"It's all right." Raddatz vouched for Eddi. Went out further on the limb.
Hayden said: "Melinda Franklin. She has the ability to alter thermal degrees in a microclimate."
"A weather girl," Eddi slanged.
"She thought she was being watched. She got a message to some other metanormals, to me. I told Tucker."
Hayden was so insubstantial. He was in his mien, he was physically. Going from the gut, Eddi'd always figured a guy who was superstrong would have muscles the size of small bull calves. But if you could lift almost anything and everything that was set before you-from engine blocks to locomotives-how could you ever develop musculature? Couldn't. No more than pumping five-ounce weights would land Eddi on the cover of a fitness mag. Metagenetics had their own, odd rules. And admittedly, for Eddi, even in this short amount of time seeing them from the inside out held a certain fascination.
A semitrailer coming down the off-ramp took Eddi's attention. She looked to Hayden's wife. Hayden's wife had been watching Eddi stare at her husband. She didn't care for the way Eddi was staring, studying her man as if he were a control animal at a university lab. Hayden's wife made her feelings plain in expression alone.
Eddi to Raddatz: "Why are you involved? Besides your guilt or near-death experience or whatever. Freaks've got-"
"Do you like 'chink'?" That from Hayden's wife. "You call us freaks, do you like to be called a chink?"
"Chinks are from China." Eddi calm enough to be commenting on a recipe for soup. Directions to the mall. "My family tree goes back to Japan. So they've got all the power this side of God. Why don't they just take care of the problem themselves?"
"That's what the people up top want."
"They don't fight back they get killed. They fight back they get blamed for using their abilities and end up hunted." Eddi, flippant: "Kinda sucks to be a metanormal"
Hayden, not sarcastic, serious: "Yeah. Kind
of."
The boy, with his mother, just sat and listened. Grown people standing around talking about the thousandth variation on hunting season on the unique, and he just listened. The thing was, even if both his parents were metanormals, it wasn't a sure bet he'd have an active gene. Wouldn't know at the earliest until puberty. For most that's when the gene went active. And how would that be for this kid? Early teen years, getting zits and pubic hair and maybe the ability to rip sequoias from their roots or see through brick walls or have control over the metals of the earth… What do you do then? You try to live "normal," or do you take your abilities and pay back the normals for what they did to your kind? It occurred to Eddi that maybe this moment was merely a polite introduction to the boy. Their severe meeting was years and circumstance away. And what would the circumstance be? Violent, hopeful? Would it end in death or inspiration? Eddi was getting with the idea the future was beginning right then. And right then Eddi got, or was at least starting to feel, the weight of Raddatz's words: It is time to end fear.
Okay, so what did Eddi have? Eddi had nothing. Raddatz had little to give her beyond what was known. What was obvious. Freaks were being killed. Tashjian had given her that much coming in. All Raddatz had added was a long-winded assertion freaks were the vies in the situation. Backed it up with nothing more than the word of a freak itself. Eddi didn't take it. She didn't disbelieve Raddatz, but she wasn't going on trust anymore. She was also going to jettison the gut instinct that almost caused her to commit murder. She would start acting like a cop. A cop alone, for sure, but a cop.
And where'd that put her? Nowhere. The freaks were no help. No matter the underground they had going, they didn't know-at least the way Hayden told things-who might be responsible for the killings. And Raddatz really only knew-again, according to story-what the freaks were feeding him. Raddatz had been hiding intel, been chasing tips, but had been able to do little investigating. And what amounted to his investigating unit, the rest of the cadre, they were zero help where they were.
And yet, ironically, the only help Eddi had was coming from beyond the grave, Soledad. Her journal. Whether Tashjian was lying to her or not, using her or not, she'd come into the situation to collect intel-go back over Raddatz's work, be it honest or otherwise, vivisect it and hand the pieces to another. Like with everything else in her life, Soledad'd come at the chore with frigid dispassion. Sentimentality is fine when you're reflecting on things. But in Soledad's world attaining a point of reflection would have been impossible being sentimental. In the end, for Soledad, sentimentality wasn't possible anyway.
So here was Eddi hoping what Soledad left behind would give her the perspective Soledad never had.
Accurately, succinctly, on the pages of her journal were summaries of Soledad's conversations with Anson's wife, with Officer Hayes-a notation about him trying to hit her up.
There was her retracing of Anson's steps, his running from his attacker. The burns to his clothes, as well as the possibility the attacker had thrown Anson into a wall, actually tried to beat him with a motorcycle.
That was troubling. A freak displaying multiple abilities. The thing that had taken out Raddatz's old element, the berserker, had increased strength and speed, but it was just the meta version of a druggie on PGR A mutie that had actual separate, distinct abilities… It signaled the next step in evolution. It harbingered the end of normal humankind.
And wouldn't that be… ironic, poetic? As the freaks were a threat to normals, the superfreaks were now ready to wipe out the freaks.
But that was just theory. The very first one Eddi arrived at. Really, all that made it substantive was motive. It at least gave meaning to the murders.
Back in the day, in the age of heroes-Age of Heroes-those kinds of murders were easy to explain and so very public. One-Eyed Jack trying to prove he's a badass by taking out the Egyptian. Death Nell trying to pay back Red Dawn for what'd happened to the Burningman.
Every endowed evildoer on the planet trying to assassinate Pharos in the belief that if he fell, the Age of Heroes would pancake with him.
In a way, in the wake of San Francisco, that seemed true.
Eddi was getting sentimental. Hadn't she warned herself against it? Jesus, she wished she were Soledad. Maybe the first time she'd ever admitted that. Even to herself. Conflicted, yeah, but Soledad was rarely confused. Never distracted. She had her burden, but she carried her burden. Incorporated it. Eddi for all her toughness didn't take loss well. After May Day her development arrested. She'd forever remain daddy's little girl. And after the loss of Soledad… She knew she'd always be trying to prove herself to a woman who couldn't care less what Eddi did or how she did it as long as the execution was fuckup-free.
Christ, Eddi muttered. This wasn't an investigation. This was an exorcism. It was evidence that ignorance was the most blissful thing this side a hit of ketamine.
This was not something Eddi could at the moment deal with.
What she could deal with, what she needed or at least felt as though she needed…
Wouldn't it be nice to waste some time with Vin?
The hell of It was, it was so comfortable down there. The shag of Vin's carpet was fairly thick and took Eddi's body well. The lack of conversation stressed her none. And the liquor… Eddi'd only had a little, but a little was all that was needed to make her numb. She almost could have envied Vin's existence. But this was a treat for Eddi. A life lived oblivion-style on a daily basis, that's not really living.
Then again…
If you're oblivious, how do you know?
The alcohol was slackening her brain, allowing for elevated thought. Eddi felt herself caught in an ever-expanding yet closed loop of logic.
Wasn't good. She needed to pull out of It.
"How do you go on like this, Vin?" Assign negativity to the whole scene. That should crush it.
"Sweet, huh?"
Was like Vin was reading her mind. Or just feeling her true emotion.
Eddi, deflecting: "Not really."
"Haven't moved in forty minutes."
"How would you know? You've been passed out."
"Yeah, right. I'm a little bit too much of a pro for that."
"I'm serious, Vin. How do you take this? It'd be different if you were-"
"If I were what? I were really messed up?"
"Yeah." Not backing down. If anything, sobering some. "A hundred years ago… I'll even give you thirty years ago, missing a leg meant something. What you've got lying around here somewhere is almost better than human, and you mope like you were paralyzed from the teeth down."
"I love it when people like you show up telling me about me."
"People who are trying to get you back on your…»
Feet? She was drunk.
But Vin laughed at the near pun. Made the flesh of his face tight. And for a second, under the bit of flab, behind a growth of beard, Eddi could reconstruct Vin's good looks. Could see in her head again the senior officer who'd given her the nod for MTac. And the guy she'd accidentally shot in the chest. "Sorry."
"It's just a rum of phrase."
"I mean for shooting you."
From his expression it seemed he actually had to recall the event. It was more that he was confused as to why Eddi would even bring it up.
"I know I probably blurted it a thousand times in the moment," Eddi said. "But I don't know if I ever really looked you in the eye and told you that."
"I'm pretty sure you did."
And then the two of them were quiet for a moment.
And then the two of them were quiet for too
long.
"You want to ask me something," Vin said. Then prompted: "Ask," And when Eddi said nothing, he prompted again. "It's all right. Ask. Whatever it is, it can't be worse than that foot crack you were-"
"Do you like me?"
The feeling when Eddi's bullets hit him. The unexpected lack from a hundred mules. The rush of air from his lungs. Vin had that feeling again.
"Do I like you as a person? Do I-" "You know what I mean,"
"Do I…"
"Simple question."
"The hell It Is."
"Simple answer, then. One word. Two choices. Yes or no."
"Let me ask you a question."
"This is going to go on forever, isn't It?"
"Just one question, then I'll answer yours."
"Remind me what my question was, because I don't even-"
"You're putting on a dodge, Eddi. You asked the question, are you afraid of the answer?"
It was weird to Eddi how perspicacious Vin could be. Always had been. But now that he was still, as in a variation of nearly motionless in life, he seemed even more astute. The one-legged man in the chair was really a sage on the mountain. Maybe he wasn't wasting himself. Maybe the disregard he displayed for every other aspect of his outward being allowed Him to focus-and, yeah, this sounded a little ethereal to Eddi's own ears-on his inner self. Or maybe drinking just took away whatever filter he had
left.
It was really repugnant to Eddi that she found herself continually cruising by the conclusion that booze elevated rather than deflated.
"Ask your question," she said to Vin.
"If I said I liked you, would it make you feel good personally, or would it make you feel as though you'd outdone Soledad?"
Eddi's answer was quick and honest. "I don't know."
And Vin didn't need to rejoin the statement, as it was obvious Eddi knew the significance of her answer. He did, however, compliment her candor.
To which Eddi said: "Thank you."
"You're welcome. I like you," Vin said.
Eddi didn't, know how to take that since, as Vin had pointed out, she didn't know what she wanted from his answer. She really wished she owned Odin's eye the way Vin seemed to. She didn't. Probably never would. Settled instead on having a drink. Another couple of drinks.
And it got late. Vin slid to sleep right where he sat. Eddi began to drift as well. As she departed, light before her she saw the answer to her original vexation. She'd said as much to Vin, who was beyond response.
Eddi knew what she was hunting.
“Know what a No-Contact jacket is?"
Raddatz felt like it was a trick question. He was starting to learn that Eddi seemed tricky by nature. When they were done with "all this," she could do worse than stay with DMI.
"I don't know."
"It's a jacket, actually pretty stylish. Its major accessory is that it can surge an 80,000-kV pulse to anyone who tries to attack the wearer. The attacker gets fried, the person wearing doesn't feel a thing. Know what a Power-Assist suit is?"
"What you wear when your No-Contact jacket's at the cleaners?"
Not that the crack wasn't mildly amusing, but Eddi was on her way to something. "It's a digitally controlled exoskeleton that uses air pressure to enhance the wearer's strength by a factor of six. It's got a level detect to counterbalance the additi-"
"Where's this going?"
"The theory coining In was freaks were being targeted for murder from inside DMI. Made sense. DMI maintains surveillance on freaks, DMI would have the intel to take them out. Except the freaks seemed to have been killed by something with superhuman abilities. So your theory: A freak was going after other freaks. That it happens is a historical fact. But that left motive. That left your freak buddies not knowing what was going on. So, maybe, both theories are wrong. And both are kind of right."
Raddatz and Eddi were in a booth in Raddatz's sports bar. Good a place as any to do some talking away from any curious ears. Between sips of nothing stronger than coffee Raddatz was piecing together what Eddi "was handing him. Trying to. Was too anxious to do the work himself. "Explain."
"Metas are like gods on earth. What do normal people do every day, except try to imitate God? Fly in a plane. Cure the common cold. Prenatal transplant surgery…»
"We're not after a metanormal? A normal's doing this?"
"A normal who's geared himself up to be more than normal."
"I never heard of this stuff before. Where the hell does a guy get hold of a no-touch-"
"No-Contact jacket. A Power-Assist-"
"Where does he get 'em?"
A cocktail waitress making her rounds. The drinks she was hauling looked reeeeeal tasty to
Eddi.
Eddi said: "Might have gotten some prototypes, modified them. Probably, he just cooked up his own version of them."
"By himself, basement workshop, he comes up with stuff the rest of the world's never heard
of."
"They've heard of it if they've crawled on the internet. So, yeah, by himself, basement workshop or garage he docs it up. Same as the guys who invented the airplane, the better home computer, the intermittent wiper… Same as Soledad did with her O'Dwyer. Look, Raddatz, you know how it works with HIT: Everything goes through committee, gets bid out. the development cost gets jacked up so everybody can get their kickbacks, long ass approval process… By the time anything gets done there are new administrators who don't want anything in development from the old regime. So cops like you and me get shoved out onto the street with hardly better than our bare hands. Meanwhile, Soledad's gun is up, running, and evening the score."
"If you're right-"
"I am. That surveillance picture you had of the perp. That sweat suit? Just enough to hide the Power Assist under it. Add some Kevlar to that… Think about how your cadre got it. Beaten, ripped apart, burned. Soledad's head snapped nearly clean off. Multiple abilities aren't a trademark of freaks. It's the work of man. I'm right."
Raddatz appreciated the confidence, didn't fight it. "How'd you come up with all this?"
I was getting drunk with the ex-lover of the dead woman I'm in postmortem conflict with when I had a boozy thought about the superhuman/man-made leg he has but won't use? Was easier for Eddi to say: "Just did."
"That doesn't give us who."
"It points us in the right direction. The killer's still got to know his vies. If he killed Fernandez, that was an obvious target. But how did he know about other freaks living in hiding? Where would he get that kind of intel? Who's got the hardest ax to grind, then swing at freaks?"
"Somebody who's DMI."
"Is," Eddi said. "Or was."
“You wouldn't believe that someone who could reduce himself to the size of a microbe would be all that dangerous. Wagner didn't. Course, Wagner never thought anything was dangerous. He was such a roughneck. Was that way straight out of the academy. And let me tell you, when I was in the academy-"
"You were talking about-"
"One of those freaks with molecular-reduction abilities. Wouldn't think one of those was particularly dangerous. Wouldn't think that."
Eddi could hardly think at all anymore. More than an hour, almost an hour and a half of stories. Stories from Blake about Blake's days with MTac and Blake with his element going after this kind of freak and that kind of freak, and. following that Eddi and Raddatz got a recounting of Blake's exploits on DMI-though Raddatz could hardly recall Blake at DM! when their service overlapped. Blake was an older guy. No legs. Like Vin with an exponent. Good for little but sitting and talking. And talking.
That's how they differed, Blake and Vin. Vin hardly said a word. Blake wouldn't shut up.
" 'You go in,' Wagner says," Blake said, " 'and you step on the thing.' And that's what Wagner tried to do."
"Detective Blake…" Eddi tried to put a stop to things.
Didn't work. "So we're inside the building, Wagner steps on the freak… only, the freak shrinks even smaller, gets inside Warner's leg-"
"Detective…»
"Then expands again. Expands inside Wagner's leg. Can you imagine having a man pop out of your leg?"
Nardi-Frank Nardi, the ex-DMI cop they'd talked to before Blake-had been an easier interview. No nonsense. To the point. Helpful. Jack MacKay had been the easiest. MacKay was dead. Suicide. And there was Ed Blake and there were interviews yet to come with Houris Tynes and Marty Carlin. Raddatz and Eddi had profiled their suspect: ex-DMI cop. Ex allowed him a free hand to do his dirty chores and ex because the vies could all be cross-referenced with a DMI watch list that was four years stale. The suspect had no access to new intel-with a background in or knowledge of special weapons. That meant cops who'd worked A or D platoons or HIT.
Five guys fit the profile. Nardi, MacKay, Blake. Tynes and Carlin.
Wasn't MacKay.
Nardi had been easy, but maybe he was too easy. Too prepped. A guy with all the answers and ready to give 'em. To Eddi that made him hinky.
Blake wasn't hinky. Blake wasn't their guy. Unless he was out boring freaks to death.
Tynes was a strong possible, but if she had to take bets, Eddi was ready to bet on Carlin. Carlin's package… it was… well, it was interesting.
"I'll tell you what it was like having a guy pop out of his leg."
"Hold on one second." Raddatz did a hand-to-pocket, pulled out his cell. "Hello?" He listened, listened… "Jesus…" To Eddi: 'It's Donatell."
Donatell? Donatell was dead.
Raddatz was up and moving as he repocketed his phone. "Gotta go." A couple of pats to Blake's shoulder.
Blake: "Bad one?"
"Metal morpher in Carson."
"Plastic." Blake said. "Come at it loaded up with plastic and the thing'll run from you like a politician runs from responsibility."
Raddatz, Eddi headed out. Thanked Blake for the tip. Left Blake with a smile. The knowledge there were still cops out there kicking superass.
Outside the house, walking to their car, Eddi to Raddatz: "Donatell?"
"First name I thought of."
"Could've just told Blake we had to go."
"Guy's got nobody. He wants to tell stories."
"So you take a fake phone call. You're a softy."
"Not about being soft. When I get to be like Blake, stuck on a shelf and forgotten, I hope somebody leaves me with the illusion that what I did mattered."
“Now you fucking come? Now you're here? Where were you when I needed you? Where were you when he was pounding on me?"
Ramona Carlin sneered, bit at the thumb of the hand that held her cigarette that drifted smoke into her eyes. Red. Bleary. The redness, the bleariness were the cume effect of all the cigarettes she'd used methodically since turning fifteen. Twenty-seven hard years ago. She waited for Raddatz and Eddi to say something, defend themselves. She waited for them to open their mouths so she could take their words and shove them right back down their throats.
And they were hip to that. Same as any other wronged citizen who couldn't understand why they got such crappy police work for their tax dollars, Raddatz and Eddi got that Ramona was just warming up her rant. They didn't bother saying anything. And their passive-aggressiveness just got Ramona all the hotter.
"How many times did I call the cops, how many times did I try to get you involved? What'd you do?"
Nothing from Raddatz and Eddi.
Eddi figured Ramona to be in her early forties. Her looks offered up the proposition that she was years older. The smoking didn't help the texture of her skin. But the wrinkles her face displayed were more like stress fractures. Hard to tell in the two and a half minutes Eddi had been acquainted with Ramona if she had been born a touch high-strung. What "was clear was that her years with her husband had done nothing to help her become any less anxious.
His package: Carl in had been with a Harbor MTac element that served a warrant on a firestarter. Had attempted to serve a warrant on a firestarter. Two of the element ended up a slick of ash. One of the operator's legs was charred up like an overroasted chicken leg. And Carlin, most of the right side of his body between neck and torso looked like some kind of sick joke of nature. A patch of something that wasn't flesh, wasn't human. It was a scarred, twisted, nasty, barren wasteland. His arm was the limb of a tree burned and burned and burned but was, in the end, too stubborn to fall away.
After that, Marty Carlin was useless for MTac.
He was good for DMI. For a while. Then there was an incident. Eddi and Raddatz didn't know what the incident was. The facts were left out of Carlin's package. As a rule when shit goes down, suspendable shit, and the cops who are doing the suspending think it's best even sealed records shouldn't reflect the shit, the shit was serious. Seriously bad. Potentially damaging to the department image-wise. Legal-wise.
However it was, whatever he'd done, the PD didn't think Carlin was fit for duty.
To Eddi's way of thinking, unfit equaled unbalanced.
An assumption affirmed by poor Ramona. Hard enough being married to a cop. Hard enough being married to a cop who decides to go MTac. But being married to one who barely survives serving a warrant on a freak. Then he apparently goes nuts. Then he, again apparently, decides he wants to use you to work off some misplaced aggression… can't beat the freaks, might as well beat the missus.
Eddi could forgive Ramona for her nature. Forgive, yeah, but that still didn't make the woman any easier to deal with.
Ramona: "You didn't do anything, that's what you did. You didn't do anything because he was a cop. I can't even… " Hands shaking as she tried to take a drag on her smoke. She'd worked herself into a state. "He detached the retina in my left eye. Can't even see out of it. Can barely see out of it," she modified. "That's how hard he used to hit me. One goddamn arm, and he could still… And I call the police, and they're all 'You two just work it out. You don't want any trouble.' You're the ones who didn't want trouble. You were supposed to arrest him! That's what you're supposed to do, a man beats his wife. But he was a cop, so you all didn't do shit!"
Nothing from Raddatz and Eddi.
Ramona stared, stared at them. Kept her anger to do some aikido: redirect Raddatz's and Eddi's compassion against them. But they gave her nothing.
Ramona gave to them: "Hell with you."
She moved from them, across the room, sat down. Her non-cigarette-smoking hand ran over her face.
"We're sorry for what happened to you." Raddatz, his tone was calm. Assuring. "We're sorry other people didn't take action."
"Other people." Hand still manipulating her face, buffing her agitation, Ramona's words were slurred. "Always has to be other people. Nobody wants to take responsibility."
Addressing Ramona, but talking of things more sizable than her: "That's not always the case," Raddatz said,
"Yeah? Are you here to do something about what Marty did to me? Is that why you came around?"
It wasn't. Ramona knew it wasn't. Raddatz knew there was no point in lying that things were otherwise.
"I, you know, I stood by him." Ramona was cooling. Winding down. Her emotional fission had left her spent. "It was always about, our whole marriage was about what he wanted. Being a cop; that's what he wanted. Never mind what I… It wasn't about money. He could've been a FedEx guy for all I cared. What I cared about: that he came home every night. I cared he didn't have gang thugs taking shots at him because they were high, and that's what they do when they're high. But Marty wanted to be a cop.
He wanted to be a. cop, so I was there for him. Had an accident after a high-speed chase, fractured his pelvis-" Eddi: "Mrs. Carlin-"
If she heard Eddi trying to cut her off, Ramona didn't care. "When I went to the hospital, I would not cry in front of him. Wouldn't. Would not. I wasn't going to let him know how I worried. I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to let me being scared for him keep him from what he wanted. And then he wanted… the day he came home and told me he wanted to be one of those antifreak cops… I just, I sat there and I stared at him… When do you ever get it in your head you want to do something like that? You read the papers, you see what's going on, how people are dying going after those…," repugnant as she could make it, "things, and the person you love tells you that's how he wants to make a living?"
A long drag killed her cigarette. Ramona stubbed out the butt. Took another from the pack. Did not light it.
Ramona said: "You just… I mean, I shut down. I did. Might as well have told me he was going to kill himself. Somebody tells you that, how do you not turn off a part of you to them?"
Raddatz wondered. If somebody asked Helena, would she say the same about him?
Ramona: "But for a while I went on, like, okay, maybe he's going to be all right. Maybe nothing's going to happen to him. It wasn't even… maybe it was two months before…»
Ramona put the cigarette in her mouth. Took it out. It remained unlit.
"That thing," Ramona said, "whatever it was, it gave Marty third-degree burns over fifty-seven percent of him. I remember that. I remember the doctors telling me what percent of him was burned, and I remember thinking: How do you even measure that? That they knew how much of him was… how do you calculate that when so much of him was beyond just burned. Anyway, he lived. Obviously. But Marty, he should've died 'cause that was the end of him. As a human being he was done. He didn't even look human, and that's me, that's his wife saying that. He got moody and he got angry and he started… " Ramona touched her left occipital lobe. Then, finally, she lit up her smoke. "Called the cops, but you all didn't do anything."
Raddatz, Eddi; they remained settled. Made sure Ramona had gotten it all out, had let all her emotion spill.
She sat. She smoked. Seemed as though she was done.
Raddatz looked to Eddi.
Eddi said: "I'm sorry for what happened to you. I'm sorry the right people didn't get involved."
Ramona nodded. Sarcastic. "Yes. You said."
Eddi said: "But your husband, your ex-husband-"
"Still is. Never put the papers through."
Ramona took a drag on her cigarette.
"Do you know where he is?" Raddatz asked.
Ramona looked at her cigarette. Rolled it in her fingers.
That bit of active inaction, Ramona's irresolution. It was something Raddatz on domestic violence calls… as a cop he'd seen it before. But every time, in every circumstance, he could not process the divide between logic and emotion. Her husband had treated her like a punching bag. Her body, and mentally too. She'd screamed for help, screamed for it. Claimed she had. Now when someone comes around looking to wrap the bastard up, someone offers her the payback she'd been wanting… she rolls her cigarette in her fingers, has to think about things?
Eddi got it.
Eddi was blunt with it: "You still love Him." Ramona asked: "Are you in love?" In exchange of the question Eddi gave hesitation.
Ramona gave a bit of a laugh, a bit of a sneer, "You can come in here and ask me what you want. I ask you something simple…»
"We're asking what we're asking as part of a police investigation." Raddatz put authority behind a statement that was mostly false.
"Do I look like I give a damn?" To Eddi: "Yes or no; are you in love?"
"There was a guy. A cop. He was killed."
"But you still love him."
"I think the circumstance is extremely different."
"The hell it is. If it was death, or a well-placed blow, emotions don't care. They stay with you. Your man died. How you feel about him is unkillable. A guy like Marty… he hit me, and I felt it. I don't mean it hurt. I felt his touch. So what'd he do wrong? This time."
"At this point," Raddatz said, "he's only a person of interest. We just want to talk with him."
Ramona wasn't going for that. "Yeah, right. You just want to talk, so I should just give him
up."
"You should give him up because it's the right thing to do."
Ramona nodded, but it wasn't like she was acknowledging agreement.
"When he hit you," Eddi said, "maybe you felt something, and it was… I don't know. You took it. For whatever reason, you took it. Your choice. There are people being hurt and they don't have a choice about it. They're dying. They're being murdered. If your husband's got any information, we need it."
"You know what I said to him when it was over." Ramona talked on like whatever Eddi had to say wasn't worth listening to. "I told him he was a waste. I told him everything he thought he was, was nothing. He wanted to be a freak cop, and all he ended up was a freak not even good enough for going after his own kind. And he told me, you know what he said? He told me I was right. Said that, and just walked out that door. As many times as he hit me, when it came to it, I knew just how to hit him. That's the thing about being so in love with somebody. It gives you the secret knowledge you need to destroy them. You know the queer thing? Whatever you want Marty for, I think he's just trying to prove he's not nothing."
Eddi and Raddatz couldn't argue the point.
"We don't talk much. Every once in a while he sends me a letter, a little note. Tells me how sorry he is about what happened. That's what he calls beating me, abusing me. 'What happened.' I don't write him back. I'm not afraid of Him, you know. I'm not." Ramona let that hang for a moment, then: "I think if I did, I think if I talked to him… love; it's just unkillable."
Eddi rolled the paper around in her fingers. A talisman. Carlin's address.
"How you want to play it?" she asked. "Go after Carlin or take a run at Tynes first?"
"Finish up with Carlin."
"Can we get any kind of backup?"
Raddatz shook his head to the negative. "We get it by telling MTac we know what we know how?"
"Same way DMI always gets backup."
"By presenting a chain of investigation. Look, if we were going after a freak, maybe we could count on the review being lax. But to go after a normal, an ex-cop who's killing freaks, you don't think questions are going to get asked? And that's if we could even put Carlin on this for sure. All we've got now is a guy who's hinky."
"You don't like him for this?"
"I love him for it. But that doesn't prove nothing, and it doesn't get us backup."
"Then some of your superfriends?"
Eddi wasn't ready for Raddatz's lack of engagement with the meta community. "That's
it?"
"They're careful." "They don't trust you."
"They won't let me get into a position where I could be forced to compromise them."
"Like I said: They don't trust you."
Raddatz gave a shrug, let it go. "We'd still have the same problem we've always had: How good would that be for the other side that metanormals are acting as vigilantes?"
"How good is it going to be if we get killed and Carlin gets away?"
"He's human. No matter what he can do, he's a normal. What was wrong with the Age of Heroes: It wasn't that the metanormals were trying to act like gods. It was that we forgot how to stand up for ourselves. This one's ours. We've gotta take the lead."
There was logic there. Logic wasn't what swayed Eddi. What swayed her, when Raddatz added: "What Carlin may have done, the people he might've killed: I've got no problem paying him back for that on my own."
Eddi thought of Soledad. She didn't have a problem handing out payback either.
The capper from Raddatz: "You were going to kill me. I'd at least like to know you don't hate me so much you wouldn't give the same courtesy to somebody else."
She gave a laugh.
"What?" Raddatz asked.
"Me protecting freaks, that's funny as hell."
"Life's queer like that sometimes."
"Yeah." And then Eddi said: "Normal or not, if we're going to do this, there's something I want to have."
She got herself killed. I'm not going to let other cops go down the same way." This was a hard, hard lie from Eddi. Hard to give.
Just as hard for Bo to take. Bo wasn't accepting it. "Soledad didn't get herself killed." His voice was even, nearly quiet. His tone was unmistakable: Shut up. Go away.
Eddi would not. "Her gun didn't work. It failed to fire. She died."
"That happens with sidearms."
"It wasn't supposed to happen with Soledad's. That it happened with an experimental weapon-"
"How many freaks has that thing brought down?"
"That it happened with an experimental weapon suggests the gun shouldn't be standard issue."
Bo, head ticking side to side: "How long have you been with DMI?"
"What does that have to-"
"A couple of weeks? A month? You talk like one of them."
"Wherever I'm assigned, I do my job. I f you have prejudice for one division over another, then that's your issue." She was plain, simple. Direct and unflinching.
Her facade was. Behind that: Real clear to Eddi was her first call. Going after a speed freak, too anxious with her trigger, too anxious about going BAMF. Ending up sailing a couple of slugs into Vin. When her world was falling apart, when she thought on the good end of things she was facing Admin discipline, on the bad end she was looking at discharge from the force, who was there to back her up? Bo. Soledad and Bo. Now Eddi was selling Soledad out and shining Bo on, and as far as Eddi could tell, the deceptions were only starting.
But then…
Someone had killed freaks, had killed some of the best freak-hunting cops on the PD. Had done it with harsh science. Harsh science was needed to fight back. Soledad's gun was needed, and Eddi could not be honest about her reasons.
She'd already bitten a guy's ear to the cartilage and come this close to putting bullets into the back of another guy's head. So a couple of lies, what were a couple of lies even to and about people she really cared for?
Coming forward in his chair, leaning on his desk, locking eyes with Eddi: "Then how about this: How long have you been with DMI that you get to come around giving orders?"
"How long have you been 10-David you can't follow procedure? I'm not giving orders. I'm conducting an investigation."
"On Soledad's piece? That'd be for A Platoon."
"If Soledad's weapon had been issued by the department of the armorer. It wasn't, and it wasn't being tested under the auspices of HIT either. If it's an investigation pertaining to metanormal activity, then it belongs to DMI. The question is, did the freak"-Eddi made sure she threw in the word; she'd noticed she was using «metanormal» a lot. A lot more than most cops. She figured it'd be smart to make sure she talked the talk-"Soledad was surveying have some kind of an effect on her sidearm? The incident happened while she was detached to DMI, so it's a question for DMI to answer." Eddi was coming off like a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer. So slick she slipped and slid.
Problem was that cops hated lawyers, and Bo was cop to the bone.
"Then let me ask things this way…" That drawl of his made his subtext read: Maybe you think you can shine me, but I don't shine. "How long have you been at DMI you should be handling the situation?"
"I'm going to be fair."
A snide laugh from Bo.
"If the gun works, I want to know. If it doesn't, I want to know that too."
"Soledad always figured you were envious of her."
Beyond her playacting, Eddi bristled. She was hearing that too much; hearing people thought she was in competition with Soledad. Enough that it annoyed her. Enough that it might be true.
"Let's face things. You, well, you idolized her. Wanted to be her."
"If you're trying to make me feel something in particular…»
What Eddi felt: her breast. The sting of her tattoo. As fresh as the day she had it etched on the flesh of her chest.
"If you can't be as good as Soledad, might as well discredit her."
"You're better than that, Bo. I know you are. No reason to attack me. I miss her too."
Bo chewed the air in his mouth, chewed at it…
Bo asked: "Is there something I should know? As in why you're forcing the issue?"
To keep Bo at arm's length. To keep him from getting involved. Eddi was being the way she was because when things went south, and most likely they would, Eddi didn't want Bo heading down with her.
"These are… they're unique times. 'Unique' is hardly a strong enough word. All of us have to work from the gut now and figure out right and wrong later." It was veiled, but Eddi was speaking a truth beyond the subject. "But that's the point: later. Maybe we'll look back and see we made a mess of some things. A lot of things. But I'd rather be around five, ten years down the road to apologize then, knowing we bought ourselves the time now to be sorry about anything at all."
Veiled, yeah, but truth. And Bo was the sort, truth he always had to yield to.
"Okay, Eddi," Bo said. "Okay."
G Platoon had its own evidence lockup. Superfluous. For most crimes, if they went to trial, there might be questions. Reasonable doubt. Did that guy really rape that chick? Did that woman really pour gasoline on her husband while he slept, then toss a match on after? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, evidence. With freaks?
With freaks, if you were a freak, if you got caught being a freak-flying or shooting energy from your fingers or morphing metal-that and a little DMA sample positive with a meta gene was all the more evidence anyone really needed. «Anyone» being agents of the law.
So the evidence lockers for MTac were really more like souvenir storage. Leftover junk from calls gone bad. Slagged helmets. Uniforms shredded by animated steel. Punctured by hand-slung projectiles.
And there was Soledad's gun. And from her workroom in Parker Center all the prototypes, sketches and theory work she'd done in adapting her O'Dwyer. Eddi wasn't ready for that. It was nearly obsessive-compulsive the details Soledad put into the designing and the modifying and reworking and adapting the weapon. Yes. Eddi was aware Soledad had the background for it. Studied tech at Northwestern. But it was impressive taking into consideration that. Soledad was still «just» a cop. Not a hardcore techie. Not a scientist. Merely a chick with a gun who wanted to make a difference. Made Eddi angry when she considered neither the department of the armorer nor the money drain that was HIT had come close to putting together what Soledad had. It just made Eddi feel all the shittier for what she was perpetrating.
Put that aside, she told herself. Eddi told herself she'd deal with her ill feelings, her guilt..
Later.
Right now she wanted to do something for Soledad: find the thing that killed her. Make sure it never killed again.
Action.
People like action. To hell with sitting and thinking and planning and considering. People want guns coughing, muzzles flashing, random objects taking bullet hits and fragmenting spectacularly. Balls-to-the-walls action. Which is why, you go to a movie, you hardly ever see police doing police work-filling out duty logs, filing reports, working phones. You just see cops kicking in doors and letting their guns do the verbalizing. And miraculously, no matter movie cops never seem to do surveillance or shadow a suspect or engage in an ongoing stakeout, they always seem to know exactly which door to kick in. They never seem to let their guns get verbal with the wrong person.
It was getting cool at night. Cool for LA. Eddi's blood had thinned since she'd moved West from Philly. She kept the car windows roiled against the chill. Except sitting in a car for hours with another person's got a way of making the air rank. Stale. So every once in a while Eddi had to crack the window, let fresh air inside. But that just made the car cold. She'd have to close the window. The air'd get stale. She had to do her little ballet all over again.
Sixteen hours of that. Sixteen hours and twenty-three minutes of rolling the window up and down while she eyed Carlin's little house on Folsom Street.
Not really sixteen-plus hours continually. Her and Raddatz had been swapping little naps in shifts when they hadn't been eating shitty drive-thru food, when they hadn't been just staring at Carlin's house looking for signs of life that hadn't presented themselves in the previous three-quarters of a day.
Heading for the seventeenth hour, things were going to get hard. Eddi was going to get… she was antsy. If you're a cop, there's only so much sitting and staring and bad-food eating you can do before you want to kick in doors and have conversations spoken in hot ounces. Before you become like any other paying customer who wants to see some action.
Eddi poked Raddatz in the shoulder. He was fully awake instantly. Eddi gave a quick update on how little the situation had changed.
She said: "Nothing."
Raddatz nodded, looked to the house. A little place at the end of a cul-de-sac. Wood that looked weakened. Paint that was worn. A yard full of junk. That's what filled the yard. Junk. Unrecognizable beyond anything more than metal that had rusted reddish orange. The place was a dive. A deep dive where a guy who was sinking same as a weighted rock would end up.
"What do we do?" Eddi hated asking that. Made her sound like a newbie. A good cop would just sit tight. But Eddi was hoping Raddatz was getting antsy too. "Haven't seer: a thing. What do you want to do?"
"Guy's got no job, no life. No reason for him to go in and out of the place. Not if he's stocked. He could hole up for days. Longer."
"Or he could be out killing freaks." Even when she used the word, she was using it with less conviction. Putting on a show.
"Could be doing that."
"Only one way to know for sure."
Raddatz checked his watch.
"More than sixteen hours," Eddi informed.
Raddatz shook his head, told Eddi that wasn't what he was thinking. "Ought to call my wife." "If you want."
"More trouble than it's worth."
"The inquisitive kind."
"Never learned to be a good cop's wife."
Eddi, lightly sarcastic: "That's tough; you having to settle for a good regular wife."
Just for a second Raddatz took his eyes off the house, looked to Eddi. Gave a smile. "You'd like her."
"You think?" Eddi asked, but didn't really care. Wouldn't let herself care. Getting wrapped up in Raddatz's personal life was counterproductive. What she cared about, what she had to focus on: Carlin and how they were going to handle him.
"She'd like you." Raddatz looked back for the house. "You're both no-nonsense, you know? That's the thing with her, she never-"
"Helena, yeah?"
"Yeah. Helena. She never went in for the bullshit. Like I said, I could do without her playing twenty questions all the time, but you gotta like a woman who just eliminates the bullshit."
"I'd take that in most people."
"I had no interest in marrying most people. I found it in her, I said that's the one. You should get to know hen After this is done, it'd be good of you to get to know her."
Oh, shit. Eddi knew what was going on. Oh, shit. Get to know her. Get to know Helena. "After this is done," get to know Helena. What Raddatz was saying without saying: After we do the job, if I don't make it, go have a conversation with my wife. Give her all the post-death clack: He was a good guy, an honest cop, he loved the hell out of you…
Eddi hated that kind of thinking, prepping for things going way south. It invited bad luck. Bad luck had a way of spilling around. She didn't want to have to have a conversation with Raddatz's wife. Raddatz's widow. The only thing she wanted less was for someone to have a similar conversation with…
It came to Eddi if the job did go south, if she didn't make it, who the hell would miss her? Her mo-
No.
Vin she had a relationship with. To some degree. Maybe a couple of other cops'd miss her for a while before she was reduced to a photo on a memorial wall. Something schoolkids on field trips would look at with mild curiosity.
More and more Eddi realized how similar she was to Soledad. How much of that was nature, how much was nurture?
Moving off the thought, moving back to what's what: "How do you want to play things?"
"Knock, see who's home,"
"A guy who can kill freaks, and we're just
going to-"
"We're two regular normal humans coming around to ask questions. He lets us in, we look around, see what we're dealing with."
"Because as psychos go he's one of the nice ones. He's got manners and all that."
"You're the one getting antsy."
"You're not?"
Raddatz, a smirk. Appreciative. He asked: "No one answers, are you ready to go in?" "Whatever's next, I'm good for it." "You'd really like my wife."
The third knock on the door got the same response as Raddatz's first two. None. Except for the bark of the dog on the inside of the house.
The shades were drawn. Raddatz and Eddi couldn't see Inside, couldn't see what kind of dog if. was. The barking, its low octave, said it was sizable. Ill tempered. Pit or English bull terrier. Rottweiler.
The situation-the two of them standing around in plain sight for a returning Carlin should he be out-was less than good.
Raddatz pointed that out to Eddi.
Eddi agreed. Asked: "So?"
"I'd say bust In. Except for the dog."
"Not a problem." Eddi unholstered her gun.
"You are not going to shoot a dog."
"It's just a dog."
"You are not going to shoot a damn-"
"For Christ's sake, I get you've gone soft for freaks. It's a dog!"
Holding up a finger, slowing Eddi down: "That dog didn't do anything to anybody. It's got nothing to do with the job."
"You want in the house?"
Raddatz took a moment. Pressed his face to the front window, juked to see what little he could see past a slit in the shade. What he could see: straight through the house to a back door. "Break open the back door. The thing comes out around back, we head in the front."
"Nuts."
The two stood around awhile. Long enough Eddi got that Raddatz wasn't altering his position on things.
Eddi: "Freaking nuts."
"We knocked. A couple of times. If Carlin's here, he already knows we're looking for him. What happens next happens on the other side of this door, and I'm not letting a dog keep me from getting to it."
Shaking her head: "Easier just to shoot it."
"Never had a dog, have you?"
"Never."
"Talk to me after you've had one." "I'll go around back, make the run." "I'm missing my hand, not my legs. I can make the run."
"You can make the run like an old guy. I'll do it."
As she was heading around to the back of the house, as she was trudging around junk, Raddatz said to Eddi's
I'll make the run. That's what she'd told Raddatz. But Eddi hadn't factored in, hadn't even considered… how fast do dogs really run? They were tight on turns. They had, after all, four-wheel steering, so to speak. And Carlin had a yard full of shit. Crossing through the yard, Eddi saw the junk was pipes and rusted chairs, discarded appliances. A lawn mower that had given up the fight against grass that was wild with weeds and uncontrolled growth and ultimately very little grass. Eddi had to pick her way through all that to get to the rear door. There would be no time to step careful on the way back around.
Just pop the glass, open the door…
Yeah. Sure.
Her right hand brushed the butt of Soledad's bolstered piece. Its action echoing her true belief: It'd be so much easier to…
Eddi's hand quit its fantasizing, picked up a ruler-length, pipe from Carlin's junglized yard-She schooled herself: Pop the glass, clean the frame real quick so you don't slash yourself to the bone reaching in, flip the lock. Hopefully lock and not locks. Open the door. Run. Well, dodge all the crap in the yard and run.
The simple plan was getting amended by the second.
She couldn't see into the house from the back door any better than she could from the front. But what she could hear was Raddatz pounding on the front door, distracting the dog. The dog barking.
The fact that their operation thus far came down to them playing head games on a dog…
With the pipe Eddi popped the glass…
Raddatz, she thought, better have that front door open.
"Raddatz," she yelled.
Eddi swirled the pipe over the wood frame, cleaned it of glass. Hand in, she reached around and threw the dead bolt.
Already there was the scratch of claws on linoleum. The dog wasn't barking, it was snarling.
"Raaaddatz!"
Door open. Run.
Down the porch to the weeds.
Behind her the dog crashed the door.
An obstacle course lay ahead of Eddi. The pipes, the equipment, the mower, lawn chairs, a legless table… more shit than she could remember. More junk than she could easily navigate.
Not the dog.
The dog wasn't having any trouble, not from the sound of its growl. The thunder-yeah, the rhythm-of thudding paws on dry earth that was like a coke-high drum solo done up midconcert Keith Moon-style. It was gaining by the millisecond. Eddi's estimation of distance would have to rely on audible approximation. No way she was turning around. No way-no matter that she thought, honest-to-God thought, she could feel the dog's breath on her ankles-was she turning for a look. Pillar of salt? Piece of meat. Assume it's right there, she told herself. She told herself to run her ass off like the animal's right there. That, and keep from getting snagged on the mower or the lawn chairs or the pipes or the-
A hot hurt to her lower leg. She'd cut too close to something and it'd cut back. She was thinking when she should be running and moving and dodging. She wanted to think about something, forget the pain in her leg: the dog. Think about how bad that would hurt. How bad would a mauling hurt? Think about that, and book.
There was Soledad's gun…
No time to pull, to turn, to take aim.
More fire to her leg.
The dog?
The dog was still chasing, closing.
Phantom pain she was feeling. Or maybe another jagged laceration. Worry about it later. Once in the house or tomorrow or anytime, Eddi told herself, when she wasn't getting chased.
The porch.
Eddi grabbed right hand to railing, let centripetal force swing her. Went up the stairs, dived for die threshold like a wideout stretching to make the goal line. She crossed it.
"Close the fucking-"
Raddatz was already on it. Eddi heard the door slam shut, the lock get. thrown. Raddatz wasn't taking chances. Eddi lay, sucked air.
"Should've let me shoot it."
Eddi lay, looked at her leg. Fabric of her pant torn. Flesh of her ankle rent.
"Should've-"
"Heard you."
Hand out, Raddatz helped heft Eddi up, Eddi went to the door, peeled back the blind, looked to the dog jumping up, at the window. Throwing foamy spit at the window. A beast. It was much more beast than domesticated animal. Guessing as much as she knew for certain: It looked like a mastiff. It looked like how she'd imagined one of the hounds of the
Baskervilles when she'd discovered reading could actually be fun, not just a chore, back in her senior year of high school. Snout bleeding from where it tried to get through the pane Raddatz had shattered to do the B and E. That was its freshest wound. Flesh a jigsaw of scars except where its fur was bare to the skin from lashings, from burnings, from beatings. The sadistic fuck. Carlin didn't have Ramona to slug around anymore. He'd gotten himself a new whipping horse.
Jumping. Snarling, no matter its slashed snout.
"The dog," Eddi said as it did all it could to get through the door to kill her, "that thing was bred for hating." She felt sorry she hadn't killed it. She felt like she oughta put it out of its misery.
"Come on," Raddatz said to her. "Come on."
From her holster Eddi took Soledad's appropriated gun, flicked the safety off. Unlike just about every other gun in the world, the piece audibly confirmed it was hot.
"What kind of load you using?" Raddatz asked.
"Soledad's red clip. Slugs tipped with Semtex. Explodes on contact, so do yourself a favor and don't get caught in the cross fire."
"Do me a favor and don't get me caught in one."
The outside of the house-the junk, the weedy yard-was barely a primer for the level of charm the interior had been allowed to degenerate to. Newspapers everywhere. Magazines everywhere. Everywhere there were dirty dishes. Rotting food. Unseen but smelled was excrement. Maybe from the dog. Maybe from Carlin. Whichever. The stench was a sock in the face square to the nose. It was a funk so rank it actually hurt. The only smell Eddi had ever taken in more putrid was the stink of a decaying, rancid, bloated, gaseous floater she once had to stand watch over off the Santa Monica pier. She was a newbie. The vets made her do it, made her mind the body. The vets wanted to have some fun. Make Eddi puke. Eddi was not about to toss in front of "the boys." Eddi stood there. Took the smell. Told "the boys" if LACFSC wasn't around soon to pick up the body, they should order her some lunch. She'd eat it right where she was. The boys fucked with her much less after that. And if it weren't for that, if it weren't for that smell giving her a primer on how bad something could reek, at that moment Eddi might real well have lost it. Thank God, too, for the shaded windows of Carlin's house. The California sun roasting the rot in the joint would've made the air toxic as alien atmosphere.
"Nice," Eddi said, looking around. "Early American psycho."
"Guy's nuts," Raddatz assessed. "But that doesn't make him a freak killer."
"You're not thinking he's clean?"
Raddatz shook his head to the negative. "I just want to know it for a fact. Especially before he comes home and we have to figure how to explain breaking and entering on a guy just for being supersloppy."
"He beats his wife, beats his dog, lives like he thrives on shit-"
"You almost dropped me for the wrong reason. Let's just be sure."
Raddatz, Jesus… toeing the line between unilateral action and moral justification, to Eddi he was coming off like a badassed Quaker.
Again: "Lei's just be sure."
Raddatz pointed Eddi to a room off the entry that was, really, just a main trash area. He indicated he'd have a look into the kitchen.
All the while just outside, the dog-that poor kill-beast-barking. Snarling. Growling. Bleeding.
The room off the entry: papers, magazines and stench. Standard decor. And, in a corner, a tribe of roaches. The whole of it potential evidence to be sifted through.
And here was Eddi without any rubber gloves.
She started looking through some papers on a table. Might as well start high and work her way down. The paper at the very top of the mound was dated almost two years previously. So which was it: Carlin hadn't touched a paper in two years, or he read-actually sat and read-old papers? Eddi figured whichever was the crazier.
Digging through the mound: A paper sixteen months old. One that was outdated by another nineteen months. Five months. Sixteen, again. Four. Ten. Seven months. Not one fresher than three months. And not one that offered particular insight, that indicated a particular frame of mind. Nothing, that Eddi could see, regarding freak killings or MTac operations or cops getting hobbled by muties or obsessive consideration of any of that. Nothing more significant than yesterday's news.
Was there something else to be found? Elaborate plans for world domination merely left lying around? That was comic book stuff. That was the kind of thing La Femme would have done to taunt Nightshirt back in the day. It was the kind of thing disorganized serial killers did because they were too crazy, too sloppy in mind to do otherwise. But even the kookiest of criminals, shy of their desire for direct notoriety, generally liked being free of incarceration too much to just leave a pointing finger for the cops.
Still."..
Eddi kept looking. A Chicago Trib from, eight months prior. An old Time magazine. An older Better Homes and Gardens. Southern Living. Harper's. A Chinese take-out.
menu.
A paper fetish. Maybe Carlin just had a paper fetish. And a metal fetish to go with his junk fetish. All around, as there'd been in the yard, were pipes and rods and siding. Welded. Twisted.
Art?
Didn't look like art. At least, if it. had artistic value, it wasn't apparent to Eddi's eye.
Eddi, yelling across the space to Raddatz: 'Anything?"
Raddatz yelling back: "Nothing."
The thing about metal sculpting, to Eddi it always seemed like a loopy kind of art-word used loosely-in the first place. You've got paint, you've got pencils. Clay. Even marble if you're desperate to chisel something. And marble work looked good when you were done with it. Looked classic. Metalwork? Looked like something the stoner kids did in some high school detention class. And this, what Carlin had…? This crap- this crap on top of all the other crap he had lying around-was just… welded. Twisted. Bent and rent.
And Carlin called this…
Not art.
it wasn't art.
Twisted metal. Melted metal. It was practice.
Picking up a pipe, turning to Raddatz, moving for him: "Hey, this might be-"
The floor became ten thousand killer bees. In its instantaneous fragmentation it formed a swarm. Tiny piece of flying oak. Inanimate, but seeming to possess an instinct for delivering pain. The swarm rode a concussive wave for Eddi, stung her with their splinters. Slashed her with their jagged edges. Bare flesh was lacerated flesh. Bleeding flesh. Eddi's hands went on the defensive, jumped up, sacrificed themselves to protect her face from what hit with the force of a good-sized gas explosion. A small bomb. What it really was: Carlin irrupting up into the room from a crawl space. Up into the room through the floor.
His maximum arrival kicked Eddi back. She went limp, took the force. Didn't fight it, let it ride her down. Hit the floor. More unforgiving wood waiting for her.
The moment she landed Eddi was already making a move. Trying to get up. She did a simultaneous self-diagnosis. Nothing broken. Nothing broken so bad as to gimp her. Probably, she was cut pretty nastily on her exposed flesh; the splintered wood having worked like razors over her skin. Felt warm blood flowing from cuts. She didn't feel any hurt. Adrenaline was blocking her lower pain receptors. It was revving her heart, getting her ready for a fight.
She tried to look, tried to get her bearings. Eddi's right eye was functionless. Wouldn't open.
She hoped that was the deal: Her eye'd caught some wood and refused to uncover itself. The alternative was the eye was punctured. Or gone altogether. Either way at the minute it was useless. Staying alive meant working with the one good eye she had left.
Eddi was twisting, bringing Soledad's piece around. Taking aim…
Across the room: gray sweat-suited, hood up. Carlin. Carlin was bear-hugging Raddatz. Raddatz, without a weapon, was trying to fight, trying to fight back. Fighting back amounted to good-for-nothing flailing. Weak slapping with his hook and hand. Carlin's grip would not yield. Beneath the drape of his sweats, Carlin's Power-Assist suit. The hiss of air pumps. His grip constricted. The pain inflicted feebled further Raddatz's slaps. Then from Carlin, for good measure, an electric shock settled Raddatz the fuck down.
And Raddatz was right where Eddi didn't want him to be: in the line of fire. "Raddatz!"
Raddatz turned. His face, beaten-power-punched- busted, was like a bloody rag.
Carlin turned. His face, darkened by the hood, wore a smile Eddi's blinded eye could not see but could real well sense.
Carlin torqued and Raddatz twisted. A scream. Raddatz's snapping spine. Impossible to tell if one preceded the. other.
Raddatz oozed from Carlin. Puddled on the floor. His body was like that now. Hardly better than liquid. Hardly more sturdy than gelatin.
Eddi: "Fucker!"
Gone.
Before Eddi could pull the trigger of Soledad's gun Carlin jumped himself up through the roof of the house.
Up through the roof.
A rain of wood and shingles. The crumble of brick.
He was as much freak as he was normal. More. Quiet. Quiet.
Especially from Raddatz's body. Twisted up. No sound, motion. No breathing Eddi could hear.
Eddi looked up, looked at the hole in the roof. Light filling the darkness constricted her pupils. Her pupil. She held a hand against the sun. Saw nothing. Listened.
Just the quiet.
Nothing above her. No footsteps, not the creak and moan of motion.
Eddi eased for Raddatz. Newly acquired 2-D vision made her put effort into calculating proximity.
"Raddatz," she whispered, hand stretched for him. "Raddatz!" No response.
Pointless. She'd seen what Carlin had done to him. Carlin could kill freaks. Carlin had taken out an invulnerable. Snapping Raddatz, burning Raddatz amounted to clipping a nail.
"Raddatz!"
Eddi kept up a constant sweep of the place with her inherited gun. The muzzle hole a surrogate eye that was doing duty where Eddi needed the slack picked up. Part of her wanted to do some tough-talking. Wanted to go MTac macho. Faux testosterone wanted to taunt the unseen: C'mon, motherfucker! I'm right here!
But the hard-guy part of Eddi usually had a trio of MTacs backing her up. Something like a game plan to go with them. Now she was fifty percent blind. All alone.
Up the block she could hear someone praying in Spanish. She could whiff mother's milk being suckled by a newborn. And every beat of a hummingbird's wings was clear to her.
A hypersense of the world. She'd read about that in Soledad's journal. She called it a sense of death. Simpler just to call it fear.
Queer.
It was weird to Eddi. First time in a long time she could recall feeling fear and it was hunting a normal instead of a full-blown freak.
Hissing. Eddi heard hissing. Carlin's freak-faking suit? Ruptured pipes? A gas leak? Figure it out later, get out of the house befo-"
Not gas. A breath. Raddatz was breathing. Poorly, slowly. Shallow, but he was…
"Radda-"
The chaos this time delivered a hail of glass, brick and wood. Carlin busting back into the house through a wall, the frame of the structure screaming as it took the wound.
Eddi brought her gun around. Tried to. Carlin was already on her, had her. Threw her. Just a flick of his wrist. Didn't feel like hardly more than that. Geared up, it was all that was needed to manipulate Eddi's 128 pounds. Eddi took air, punched through the glass of a window. The transit pass a three-inch gash slashed into Eddi's thigh. The ground outside no more benign to her fall than the floor had been. It caught, her without kindness, with hard dirt, rocks slugging at her back and shoulders. Eddi rolled, still half blind. Now weaponless.
The earth shook. Carlin taking a leap from the house for Eddi.
Eddi clawed frantic.
The gun!
Her hand ripped at the ground, got ripped by the junk that booby-trapped the yard. The gun!
Eddi's leg got grabbed. Shin snapped. Busted tibia tore through her flesh.
She screamed. Her own body getting turned against her.
Carlin was reeling her in. She could feel the pleasure in the measure of his motions. He was going to get her. He was going to hug her. He was going to break her. He was going to kill her.
The gun…
Reality. She wouldn't find it before death was delivered.
Carlin's grip was tightening. Jasmine. Laughter. Tears. Death was coming.
A stay of execution carne leaping at Carlin. His dog. Whippings, beatings, burnings. Electrocutions for the sake of shocking something. The beast was looking for payback. The beast was serving it up with snapping jaws and tearing canines. Carlin wasn't its master anymore. There was a slave revolt. It was Juneteenth. The tortured was giving it to its tormentor.
The snarling was nearly hideous. The animal sounds… which was the dog, which was Carlin?
Eddi pulled herself, pulled her busted ankle along the ground. The gun…
The crack of electricity. The stink of burned meat. A pathetic yelp.
Carlin tossed the animal away. A toy grown tiresome to a belligerent child.
Carlin had another toy to fill his interest. Eddi. His curiosity: how to break her.
His hands on her. Back on her. digging into her. Hardly a beat skipped after killing the dog and Carlin returned to pulling Eddi for him.
Eddi wildly padding down the ground.
The gun…
Her hands-her left, fractured, but still doing work- whipping around frantic for the gun.
Technology to fight technology. If she had any chance at all of living, Eddi had to resurrect Soledad and put a bullet…
The gun?
Not the gun. Anything but the gun. She was suiciding herself by even trying for it.
Eddi's hand felt metal. A pipe. It held warmth from the sun of the day. Hot to Eddi's touch.
Heavy in her hand. It was just enough to do damage. Eddi swung it with purpose. She twisted in Carlin's grip. Her ankle gave her another injection of pain. She batted, batted at his midsection. Slugged at his ribs. Pointless. Carlin had sanctuary under his exoskeleton and Kevlar.
Eddi kept pounding. Two, three times. A fourth. The force of the hit running hand to shoulder. A major leaguer on GHB, Eddi was swinging for the fences.
Carlin's head took the strikes, recoiled. He slowed none. Under his hood, a helmet? He wasn't wearing the hood for nothing. He wouldn't be stupid enough to go after freaks naked upstairs.
He couldn't all be armored. Achilles had his heel. Carlin had some weak spot.
A blow to the shoulder, the chest, the gut, the neck, the-
A grunt from Carlin. He staggered.
The hum of batteries. He was charging up to juice Eddi.
Now. Eddi told herself: Now's the time to get macho.
"Let's go, motherfucker! C'mon, bitch! Do me like you did Soledad! Try and fucking ki-aaaah!"
Eddi's right wrist caught, then snapped twig-style. The pipe tumbled to the ground. Her brain had the natural reaction to the hurt, wanted to shut down.
Carlin pulling her close. An augmented hand on her neck. The squeeze was slow and steady. The flow of blood to Eddi's brain was dammed. For a moment she floated. Started to. Then her head throbbed like her brain was beating against the sides of the skull that was, second by second, becoming its casket.
… this is what I wanted…
Her thoughts going gray. Gray to black.
I wanted… I wanted him to kill me? I wanted…
Gray to black. Black. Just black.
I wa… wanted him to pull me close. I wanted…
A flop, a flop of her hand. A grab with her left hand. Wrist fractured, the grab would be weak. Decrepit. It had better be good 'cause it was the only one Eddi would get.
Hand to her belt. Hilt in her hand.
Deep in the black, one word slipped past her lips: "Daddy."
She brought the knife, the Hibben Bowie, out of its sheath. Drew it, thrust it in an upward arch taking aim as best her one eye, her fading vision would allow for Carlin's vulnerable throat. She felt the blade catch, jam against bone. Eddi let her body fall forward, drive her arm upward. It was all about the follow-through. Like a golf swing. Like a tennis backhand. Like a deathblow. She pushed. Eddi pushed. The blade doing battle with Carlin's cervical vertebra. The knife lost the fight. Snapped off. Remained lodged. Then again, looking at it mat way, having a piece of metal in his throat: Really, it was Carlin who was the loser.
He lost the battle.
He was losing Ms life.
He was losing it in a mist of blood that hissed from his carotid artery in a seemingly ceaseless spray.
Tangled together, Eddi and Carlin did a little tango to the ground.
Eddi lay among the junk, the oxidizing metal. She lay with a dead dog. The dying Carlin. Blood still geysering.
Less, less. The spray subsided.
Was gone.
The end of fear.
No sirens.
All the ruckus done and no one in LA, at least in this part of LA, cared enough to call a first responder.
Eddi wouldn't be making the call.
She was broken up and she was bleeding out, and her abilities were at the moment limited to lying right where she was.
She could hear a child just pulled from its mother's womb take its first breath.
Eddi could hear the lips of two lovers meeting.
Eddi could feel the air generated by the flap of a butterfly's wing in China. Guiyang, to be precise.
Eddi had a sense of the world.
Loss of blood made her very relaxed. But she was also very sad. She did not wish to die. Obvious. Does anybody really want to die? Like cloudy skies on the day of a parade, it's just one of those things that happen. One of those things you can do nothing about.
One thing she could do.
She put on that grin of hers.
So how did you know?
What's that?
How did you know, Eddi?
I just… in the moment, I knew.
In the moment, while a guy Is trying to snap your head clean from your body, you just-
When Raddatz took the cadre after Carlin their radios just happened to go down? Anytime Carlin was anywhere near a surveillance camera they just happened not to work? Cars just stalled? Technology vs. technology. Carlin… I figured he must have had a low-level electromagnetic pulse coming off Ms suit. Just enough to mess with electronics, digital cameras… Enough to mess with Soledad's gun. That's why it misfired. Even if I'd found, it, if I'd tried to use it, it would have done the same. I quit trying. I went for my knife.
Ah, bullshit.
Look, I'm not a techie. I don't know how all that electronic stuff works. Bet I took a chance, and it-
That's not what I'm talking about. You figured all that out in one split second while somebody was working on separating your head from your body? Nah. What I think: When it came down to it, you wanted out of you know who's shadow. Wasn't going to happen dropping Carlin with that gun.
Wait…
So you went for your knife. Carlin could've killed you, but you went for it.
Wait, am I… I'm not having this conversation. I'm not… I'm talking, but I'm not… I'm dead. In Carlin's yard with the junk and the dog. I'm-
You had a better place of dying. Although, guess there's no perfect place.
I don't want to-
Glad you could make it, Eddi…
I don't want to die.
Even for just a minute. I'm proud of you.
The average human can survive about eight minutes without heartbeat before the brain, starved of oxygen-rich blood, begins to suffer permanent damage.
Eddi's heart stopped beating for nine and three-quarters minutes on the operating table of Valley Presbyterian Hospital. It would have remained still eternally except she'd lucked out, gotten an ER doc who was only in his second year. Jaded by the sight of people dropping off the face of the earth, he worked that extra minute and three-quarters to bring her back to this side.
No brain damage.
None that the docs could find with their MRIs and CAT scans. None that the psychologists could find testing her mind. Except…
There was a conversation had that was absolutely indisputable in Eddi's mind. The words and tenor were vivid to her. The only thing she wasn't sure of: who she'd spoken with.
She told this to no one. Told no one about her conversation. She didn't need anyone thinking her head was messed up, her gray matter was fractured. Despite her snapped wrist, her snapped ankle, a left eye that's usability would be diminished by at least thirty-five percent, a face that would forever carry a lightning scar from left brow to right jaw… and possible but clandestine brain damage, Eddi still had designs on being a cop. Back in MTac if doable. DMI if she had to. She wasn't ready to quit the fight. The fight was just starting. And it was nothing like what Eddi thought it would be when she'd first suited up.
The question, the questions now as she rested, re-habbed, got ready to get back into things:
What is she going to do?
Who's she really fighting?
Who does she trust?
Who could Eddi even talk to about the new knowledge of the struggle? Not to Vin. Not that she couldn't trust his council, not that she couldn't trust him with the truth. Or the version of it she was carrying this week. Vin was beyond caring about anything that didn't pour from a bottle. Much like the city of Las Vegas, what happened with Vin would stay with Vin. But Eddi had no idea how to begin a deep meaningful politically dicey conversation with him. In her heart she didn't want one. Her feelings about him, for him were confused. Confusion was a thread not to be trifled with for fear of unraveling. So all the days Vin sat with Eddi, endured her recuperation with her, she said nothing to Vin of the incident.
That's the way it was talked about within the department. What other euphemism is there for cops going after an ex-cop who'd souped himself up so he could kill freaks? Wasn't one. Wasn't a good one. So it got called "the incident," and a lot of brass spent sweaty nights hoping no one at the LA Times got wind of the truth.
They didn't. It was Oscar season in Hollywood and the Times flooded the zone on that.
There were conversations to be had.
With Raddatz. That conversation was difficult. Carlin had done a job on him, had come up shy of killing him. Busted Raddatz's back, his spine at T9. His body was dead from the abdomen down. He was bed-bound. For a while. He had to wear diapers because he had absolutely no control over Ms bladder and bowels.
Other than all that…
Actually, other than that, Raddatz was still a prideful fighter. In private moments he would tell Eddi that what they had done together was perhaps the single most significant act in the real struggle between normals and metanormals since San Francisco.
Eddi worked really hard at cheering him up, cheering him on. The world at large didn't know the truth. The world at large still hated freaks as much as they did the day before Raddatz's body got busted.
There was a conversation to be had with Helena, Raddatz's wife. It wasn't quite the "he was a good man" chat Eddi was afraid she was going to have to have. It was an ugly cousin to it. He is a good man. You should be proud of him for what he did, even though we can't tell you what it was.
And Helena was all right with that. Not with… there was no part of her that wanted her husband to be a paraplegic. No part of her. But what she had wanted for so long, two things: That her husband should live to see their boys grow. That he would no longer be a cop.
Not like she'd hoped, but finally, she'd have both.
There was the talk Eddi had to have with Bo, the one where she came around and told him that all was good with Soledad's weapon. Bo, being MTac and not DMI, didn't know all the specifics of "the incident" beyond the rumors that bounced around inside the blue wall. Eddi gave no clarifications other than to say that with modifications Soledad's piece should be able to eliminate its only fault. Excel was a weapon. As dismissive as she'd previously been, Eddi was now effusive in praise for the gun. For Soledad.
For all that Bo didn't know of the reality of things, Eddi's contriteness was not lost on him.
As she began her hobble from his office. Bo said to her: "Why don't you do it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Work on Soledad's piece. Modify it."
"I don't have the background for it."
"You got all her work as a starting point. You could do it in conjunction with A Platoon or HIT. And I can't believe you couldn't finish something Soledad started."
Bo tossed that line like bait. Not to antagonize. To encourage. Albeit encourage with a taunt. Bo believed the department-normals, period-needed cops like Eddi. The Eddi he thought he knew. And if he had to play her ego to keep her around, keep her in the fight, he was ready to play.
And there was one other conversation to be
had.
Eddi took another sip of her Pom. A merchandised version of pomegranate juice. It was supposed to be good for her, but she wasn't sure how. The nutritional benefits were vaguely stated on the bottle. But Eddi was working on eating more healthfully as her physical activity was going to be greatly curtailed for the near future. Her ankle and wrist were quite jacked, and in her physical therapy she was still working on mobility. That is, a so-called therapist who was little more than the devil in disguise traveling among the unsuspecting under the obsequious name of Bonnie would spend about twenty minutes heating Eddi's mangled joints while talking Eddi through the slight increase in degree she was going to manipulate Eddi's injuries over the previous day. And then Bonnie would do the manipulating.
Eddi would do some screaming.
She'd taken a lot of hurt as an MTac, and more than she'd expected in her short time at DMI. She could remember grunting and groaning at various times. Couldn't recall any out-and-out screaming. Not that she was a tough guy. She chalked up lack of shrieks to adrenaline, focus- getting hurt but not letting the hurt take her off her game. Or maybe she'd screamed like a girl time and time again, but had excised the memory to make herself feel tough.
She'd remember, always, tribulations under the touch of Bonnie.
Then came Tashjian. Walking up the street for his house, not breaking stride as he saw Eddi parked on the steps of his porch. No matter what'd happened last time she greeted him, what she'd done to him, no matter his ear was a fright-looked like the pull toy of a junkyard dog-he did not visibly react to Eddi's presence other than to say, regarding her drink: "Is that stuff any good? I see it all the time, but I can never quite get myself to try it."
"You're a cool customer, know that?"
"How exactly should I react, Officer Aoki? Are you going to maul my other ear? Out in public, top of the evening, are you going to pistol-whip me again, threaten my life? It's not that I wouldn't put it beyond you. Killing me. But I think you'd pick a better opportunity than here and now."
Eddi quietly conceded Tashjian was right.
He took up a spot next to her.
Eddi asked: "Were you trying to give Soledad payback for squirreling away from you before? You put her in a situation with bad intel hoping she'd get killed. I mean this was… this just worked out perfect for you."
"I did not want Officer O'Roark dead."
"'Whatever you really knew about what was happening at DMI you held it back from Soledad. Held it back from me."
"That's assuming you regard Tucker Raddatz with complete trust."
No doubt from Eddi. "I do. No matter how he was going about the job, right or wrong, I know for a fact his version of things is the true version."
"He led a cadre inside the Los Angeles Police Department, that was friendly to metanormals."
"You've always known. I don't, have to tell you. All I'm trying to figure: Did you want Soledad dead. Raddatz dead, or best of both worlds, they cancel each other out?"
"There is one other possibility."
A little laugh. Eddi settled back as much as the concrete would allow. This, Tashjian's reality, she wanted to hear.
"There is the possibility I knew that Raddatz was, is, sympathetic to metanormals. There is the possibility I knew that whatever Raddatz and his cadre were proceeding against was… well, it was beyond them. Did I know, did I suspect the perp was a self-enhanced normal human? Absolutely not. Regardless, that Raddatz was working above his station was obvious. But how to help Raddatz without exposing the fact that he was aiding those, he was supposed to be enforcing the law against? Send in another player. Perhaps the most formidable one in the Los Angeles Police Department. Give her enough information to make the situation seem plausible and hope against hope that once inside, if not converted by Raddatz, she would be in position to aid him. What I could not count on, but I guess I should have realized: There was something even superior to Soledad O'Roark. What I also could not count on, but I guess I should have hoped; There was someone superior to both. I did not plan on you, Officer Aoki. But I do thank God for you."
Eddi heard that last part but didn't take it in any particular way. Really, before Tashjian was halfway through with his spin Eddi already knew what she was going to come back at him with.
"The problem with that," she said like she was stating the obvious (to her she was), "is that you'd have to be soft for metanormals."
"Didn't you used to refer to them as freaks?"
"I think if it was to your advantage, you'd have sympathy for them. You've sold your soul so many times the devil wouldn't want it. But there's no advantage to backing them. There's nothing for you to gain, no reason for you to be on their side. So I think you're full of shit."
"Eddi…»
His being familiar with her sounded very weird to Eddi's sensibilities.
Tashjian said: "There's so much to be gained, and there is so very much to be lost. Revelation is coming… " He turned his head slightly, peeled back the bandage that covered his ear. The ear Eddi had mangled with her dentition. Gave Eddi a real good look. Tashjian put forth the slightest amount of effort-a kid making faces on the school yard-and the torn, misshapen lobe filled itself out, formed new cartilage and flesh and blossomed fresh. It held an intact shape for a moment-for just a moment-then reverted to looking as Eddi had re-created it.
"The truth," Tashjian said, "will set us free."
Tashjian took Eddi's Pom bottle, took a. drink of the stuff. The twist of his lips said he didn't particularly care for It.
Eddi kept up a stare at his ear.
To Eddi: "I will see you later. Officer Aoki."
Tashjian got up from the steps, got himself inside his house.
I'm not going to say.. I'm not going to say I'm stunned, I quit being stunned years ago. I quit having my sense blocked from me that day about three months after San Francisco when the government announced that they were going to stop trying to do any DNA testing to identify remains because there basically were no remains to get tested in the devastated part of the city. I'd lost my father, but I'd never really have any.… closure is a word I've come to hate. The psychologists always sling that around as if at some point you can shut the book on tragedy, on loss. Do this and you can break with your hurt. Do that and you can move on from the past. Anyone who talks about closure is either some unfeeling bastard or someone who s never once in their life truly suffered loss. My intimate relationship with the incredible will forevermore be unaltering.
So something getting the best of Soledad, Raddatz working with the metanormals, a human making himself over into a metanormal, Tashjian being a metanormal. Me using metanormal over the F-word…
None of that is incredible to me.
It's only daunting.
Like Raddatz'd said: Power always is. And information is power. And I had a lot more, a shitload more info than most people walking around.
What to do with it? That's the question.
You don't go into the fight asking questions. You can't. You can't hesitate, you can't think too hard. There's a call to duty, you do your duty. You trust the people who are sending you to do the fighting, the killing, have already spent a lot of nights not sleeping hut up thinking. Worrying. Considering.
Then the fight goes on a little too long. Then you start asking questions. You start thinking the people who sent you to do battle don't have one idea in hell what the battle 's about. Or maybe they know too well what they 're doing. Maybe their fight isn't really what you're fighting for. It's not about Archduke Ferdinand or the Tonkin Gulf or WMDs.
Excuses. Not reasons.
But by the time people like me start asking questions it's way too late for going back. All there is, is slogging forward in the normal as we know it.
So the struggle continues. Of course it does. Probably will beyond my lifetime. But in my lifetime how do I engage-how do I reengage-the struggle? Who am I fighting for? What am I fighting against? Even if I knew what the end objective was, I've got no idea what I've got to sacrifice to achieve it: the law or morality?
As I write this, I feel, I feel like a pugilist between rounds. Beaten about badly, trying to get bearings. Knowing no matter my hurt, when the bell sounds I've got to take center ring.
Okay.
That's okay.
Every other round I took to the fight with my fists, my balls and my father's knife. They've gotten me this far. But next time I go do battle I'll have one thing more.
I've got Soledad's gun.