John Ridley_Those Who Walk in Darkness 02

by What Fire Cannot Burn

  Wasn’t gonna happen.

  So, for another week, Soledad would put the dodge on her folks. Give them a callback when she was pretty sure they wouldn’t be home.

  From her integrated cordless phone/digital answering machine Soledad erased the message from her mother.

  Couldn’t see it.

  Think about it.

  You hold a magnifying glass over an ant on a hot day, you can’t see the sharpened sunlight that fries it.

  So . . .

  If a person has the ungodly—extra-godly—ability to refract the light collected by their retinas into focused shafts of intense heat, you cannot see the hot death coming at you.

  You can in movies.

  In movies, people with heat vision are always lighting up the area around them with their death-beam eyes.

  But that’s movies.

  Movie audiences have to have their fleshy minds entertained for them. The excitement’s got to be obvious.

  In real life, feeling your flesh start to heat up when a fire-eyes freak looks your way: That’s all the excitement you need.

  But you always got extra excitement thrown in gratis.

  In a parking garage in the Bridge, in the middle of a firefight with a fire-eyes, Eddi and her element got melting glass and warping metal and bursting tires and instant heat damage to everything that was in the general direction of where the fire-eyes looked.

  Good thing: In a parking garage, there was ample steel for the element to put between itself and the fire-eyes’ killer stare.

  “Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” the freak screamed.

  Bad thing: All that cover made it hard for the element to get off a clean shot. They swapped fire for fire, but they couldn’t drop the thing.

  “Reload,” came the call from Tipden.

  A hail of .45 Colt auto covering fire was Eddi’s response. It was her present for being upped to the element’s point in Soledad’s absence. The most ferocious handgun in existence. One of ’em. Didn’t hardly feel enough in Eddi’s hand. And to think her max dream had been to thread every freak she crossed with her pop’s knife. That she’d managed sharp-force trauma on any freak ever . . . Luck? A miracle? Stupidity.

  Glass melting.

  Metal renting.

  Tires popping.

  She wasn’t going bitch, but Eddi couldn’t put enough cover between herself and this freak.

  “His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed,” the freak yelled, “I cannot.”

  “Reload,” Eddi yelled.

  Tipden and Allen picked up their rate of fire. Eddi crouched, popped the Colt’s clip. Fed it another. She missed hefting an HK.

  She sure as shit missed Soledad’s O’Dwyer.

  And she was up. She was firing. Three guns against a fire-eyes. Odds weren’t hardly good. Three against one, and the MTacs were getting pushed back.

  “He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants!”

  That was . . . Even as she jerked her the Colt’s trigger, signaled Tipden and Allen to drop back, Eddi was working to remember. Sundays. Church with her mother, her father. “Winds his messengers.” “Flames of fire his servants.” Psalms.

  And if Eddi could dial her rage, up it went. She wasn’t the most Christian person. Not even close. Never much cared for church on Sundays. But her parents, her father, tried to put some God in her. Freak’s acting like God had taken her dad.

  And now this one was spouting the Word?

  Unacceptable.

  But just about unstoppable.

  Eddi could feel the heat of the thing pressing closer. Cutting closer.

  “Reload!” she yelled.

  The freak just kept spouting pseudo-Bible. No reloading for him. No ammo out. No stovepiping, stoppages, jamming.

  Just heat billowing. Steel bending. An Escalade sagged, bowed down before it.

  The freak: “After me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry.”

  Bad call. Eddi was starting to think she’d planned wrong.

  “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit . . .”

  Planning wrong was gonna get her killed. Not so bad. She could take it. What made her feel like shit: Tipden and Allen were gonna get dead too. She saw the concrete of a vertical support char. She saw Allen make a move as hot light punched its way through the side of a German car.

  How, Eddi wondered, would Soledad have played it?

  “And he will baptize you with fire! Revelation is coming! The truth will—”

  The standing theory with freaks, the one few normals were ever hoping was proved otherwise, was that the vast majority of muties only owned one significant fetish. They had one superpower. And it would be a very bad day for the normal human race when freaks started developing a second ability.

  For a split second the fire-eyes looked like it had suddenly acquired the ability to rent open its chest and spit its innards outward. Would’ve been a useless superpower had it been a superpower. In fact it was a one-ounce slug fired from Alcala’s Benelli punching its way through the freak’s front carrying a good-sized mass of the freak’s back and spine and lungs and whatever else it could grab up before heading out its chest.

  And then it was like the freak was rushing to scoop up what it’d ejected from itself. Making a quick move to avoid a spill like some guy who’d accidentally dumped his martini at a cocktail party. Really, he was just falling over. Crashing into the garage floor. Splashing into a puddle of his own insides.

  The fire in his eyes was out.

  The freak was dead.

  And then there was this moment, this blessed moment that occurs only rarely and only when a call goes good. When the freak gets dropped, there isn’t an operator down and what’s left of the element’s screaming into a radio for a bus. After the guns quit talking in their particular vernacular there is just quiet. Calm, halcyon quiet that is a harsh counterpoint to the raging hell that existed in the same space an instant earlier.

  It made Eddi think or realize that it was just that much or just that little between chaos and calm. An instant.

  And then the quiet was gone.

  Tipden was calling in an all-clear to Command.

  Alcala, easing for the freak—the Benelli giving the body a stare-down—called for Eddi: “Dropped it.”

  “. . . Yeah . . .” Eddi’s racing heart and spinning mind were a couple of gears that wouldn’t sync.

  “Dropped it, Eddi.” Breathing hard. Words pitched between excitement and fear. Alcala sounded like a bull rider who’d just made his seven seconds. “Didn’t even see me coming.”

  “Took your damn time.”

  “Only had one shot, wanted to make it count.”

  “Good call,” Allen to Eddi. “Letting Alcala circle around like that.”

  Eddi to herself: It wasn’t a good call. It was a gamble that turned out good. Most points would never hold a gun back against a freak. But she figured if three could keep it distracted, one could get the drop.

  “Hell of a good one,” Allen said, “for first time on point.”

  Alcala added: “Bullet wouldn’t’ve called it any better.”

  She could see it. Beyond the dry prose of the perfunctory reporting in the Daily News, in the theater of her mind Soledad could see Eddi leading Pacific MTac—the element Eddi’d been elevated to point of upon Soledad’s leg getting jacked—against a freak that could generate and discharge heat from its eyes. And they had taken it out sans casualty to the operators on the element, according to the Daily News. Usually, the News, the Times, local TV, didn’t much bother reporting the details of warrants served on freaks, since warrants being served on freaks, no matter some flew and others spat fire, had grown over the years to be reasonably commonplace. Like gang shootings. Like politicians and their whores. Like Hollywood leading men getting outed. In this day and age what else was new?

  What was new: a twenty-two-year
-old cop, female on top of that, taking out a freak that could shoot heat beams with not much more than a knife.

  That knife. That knife of Eddi’s . . .

  There was absolutely nothing in the article about the MTacs’ procedure, about how they took out the freak. It was in her head Soledad saw Eddi putting it down, solo, with her blade. And Soledad could hear, again in her head, she could hear Eddi chiding: How about that, Soledad? Chalked a freak and didn’t even need your fancy little gun.

  That knife of hers . . .

  Undoubtedly, it’d been multiple clips emptied by all of the element into the freak that’d dropped it. But Soledad, her feelings of uselessness that had festered in her leg and were now infecting her imagination, couldn’t help but score the victory to that knife.

  And Soledad’d been worried about Eddi worshipping her? Why should Eddi? Probably, Eddi made a better MTac than Soledad.

  What was that Soledad was feeling now? Obsolescence doing an insect’s crawl on her flesh?

  Eyes.

  It was eyes rolling over her, sensed so strongly they came to her as an actual feeling.

  Beyond the doorway, in the corridor, the one-handed, one-hooked cop—that particular cop with one hand, one hook—was standing where he had a couple of weeks or so prior. Staring as he’d done previously.

  And, same as before, Soledad: “Yeah?”

  “O’Roark, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People talk about you.”

  Soledad gave a shrug indicating how much—how little—she cared about other people’s talk.

  “People are saying—”

  “Whatever.” Soledad had no interest in the conversation and aborted it before it was fully formed.

  The one-handed, -hooked cop kept up his stare, kept it going. And Soledad returned one. She maintained her intensity, not mocking him or imitating the guy. She was actively staring him down.

  Then the cop came into Soledad’s space. “Tucker Raddatz.” He held out his left hand, offering an awkward shake.

  Soledad joined his left hand with her right hand, didn’t bother with her name. Obviously, it was known to him.

  Raddatz said: “Welcome to DMI.”

  Where a thank-you would’ve been fine Soledad said, too honest for her own good: “You’ve got to come around, stare at me twice, two weeks apart, just to offer a hello?”

  “Wanted to be sure.”

  “Of?”

  “That you’d still be working here in two weeks’ time.”

  Another shrug from Soledad. “Here’s where I want to be.”

  “Which is why you waited until you got your knee messed up before making the move from G Platoon to DMI. A temp transfer at that.”

  “If I’d known the cops here liked to stand outside office doors like peeping pervs, I would have been here years ago.”

  Not so much as a smile from Raddatz. “Some gave a lot to be here.” Signifying. He was obviously talking about his lost hand. Maybe some other wounds unseen. Those of other DMI cops. “Hard to take the sort-of-

  injured coming around for a temporary visit.”

  “I don’t know if I’m supposed to feel a certain way because you’re disabled.”

  “I’m not disabled. One hand, and I can still do more than—”

  “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel that you’re a gimp; if I’m supposed to feel guilty, or sympathetic, or what. Mostly, I don’t feel anything. Not for you guys. You got the way you are because you were messing with freaks. Mess with freaks, sooner or later you get messed up. So I don’t feel anything because, same as the rest of us, you knew the risk and you took it. And I don’t feel anything because, well, how would you take the sympathy of a stranger anyway? Not well at all.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I wouldn’t take it well. I wouldn’t want it.”

  Their mutual stare remained in a locked loop. Stayed that way.

  Raddatz said: “Want to get coffee?”

  Soledad said: “Sure.”

  Soledad felt better about Raddatz after he’d directed her to a Norms. Norms were diners. Old-school. Trapped in a Googie era. Value-priced. Highlights of the menu: a patty melt and a fajita salad and a California Reuben sandwich and a chicken-fried steak that Soledad had never had—she had never had anything of the kind anywhere—but promised herself to try before her death. She didn’t care about seeing the Eiffel Tower. She didn’t care about going skydiving one time before she bit it. She just wanted to try the chicken-fried steak. Only, not today.

  Norms’s coffee, porcelain-cup-served, varied only by the cream and sugar the drinker dumped in it.

  Raddatz, deftly, used a combo of hand and hook to rip open his sugar, his little packets of cream. How many years of practice did it take to get good at mixing coffee like a two-handed person?

  Soledad had tea. Regular Lipton. Lot of milk. Lot of sugar.

  Panama had nothing.

  Raddatz had brought a tagalong with them. Another cop. Chuck Panama. About Raddatz’s age. Not a bad-looking guy. Only, he knew he wasn’t a bad-looking guy and it had probably gotten him a lot of play in his younger days. So now he slung around his “ain’t I fine” attitude same as some high-trading currency that ought to automatically buy him something.

  Bought him nothing from Soledad except instant contempt.

  And he was nondisfigured. He had no visible defect. No limp. No scars that could be seen. For a DMI cop that was remarkable to the point of being unique. Soledad’s neck alone owned a souvenir—a palm-shaped scar of burned flesh—of her very first call. Panama’s flawlessness was a curiosity to Soledad.

  For a minute the three talked, mostly Raddatz and Soledad doing the talking. Panama seemed slightly above engagement. The talk was about nothing. The way smog was making a comeback in the city, the way the Clippers weren’t and probably never would. They spent time on insignificance, but their talk wasn’t about the conversation. Their talk, seeing who stood their ground, who held their convictions over matters of little consequence, served the function of a couple of sparring partners going around and around the squared circle waiting for the other to demonstrate if things were going to be gentle or if there was some pugilism to be done. In the process Raddatz gave a little primer on himself. Married, a couple of kids. Boys. Was with West LA MTac four years ago. Twenty-first call, eighth on point—and he remembered the exact number it was—a freak got the best of them. Got three of the operators, got his hand.

  Three cops dead, one gimped.

  And here was the kicker. As the cops were fighting for their lives—more rightly, as they were losing their lives in a slaughter—one of the cops squeezed off a round that went stray and did a through-and-through to some guy a coupla blocks away. The guy died.

  The LA Times ran an op-ed piece. Heavy-handed. Anticop. Anti-MTac. MTacs were offing innocent people in their cross fire. Israel Fernandez led a protest rally. Not even a hundred people showed up. But that was a start.

  Three cops dead. And the Times, the liberals were saying the cops were out of control?

  Raddatz did his hand/hook thing, put cream and sugar in some fresh coffee.

  He took a sip, took in some of the brew. He let out nothing but bitterness.

  Raddatz said: “That damn Fernandez.”

  Panama nodded to that.

  Soledad got where that came from. Here Raddatz was with one hand, and other people with two good ones wanted to wrap them around the freaks and give them a big, sloppy, “oh, you poor victims” hug. And of them, of that bunch of freak fuckers, the worst had been “Damn Fernandez,” Raddatz said again.

  Soledad said something to the effect that it had been how many . . . how few, really. How few years since San Francisco? Already people were starting to forget.

  “That’s the thing,” Raddatz said. “You try to make people remember, they say you’re wallowing in tragedy. You do nothing, they just let it slip out of their minds.”

  “Month
after May Day, everybody’s like: Yeah, we want the Feds to do something; yeah, we want DNA testing.” By the string, Soledad bobbed her tea bag in an empty cup. Something for her hand to do. “A couple of years go by, people were already bitching the Executive Order’s not constitutional. DNA testing’s an invasion of privacy.”

  “How about we just let freaks back into the country? All of you in Europe, c’mon home.” Raddatz’s sarcasm was high. “How about we give them their spandex back? Let them fly around, get in fights . . . start knocking over buildings again. Shit, if we’re just going to act like San Francisco never happened . . .”

  Panama gave a laugh.

  She knew he was just going off, agreed with Raddatz’s core philosophy, but still Soledad shook her head to all that. “They think that way, the bleeding hearts; they just want to roll back the clock in their heads to the day before yesterday ended.” Soledad got the psychology of the liberal fringe. At least, she was able to articulate the thought process she ascribed to them. “They want to believe, they want to make themselves believe . . . some of them, maybe they actually think they’re doing right. But I think most of them just want to make themselves believe San Francisco could never happen again.”

  “How the hell could they—”

  “They just want to feel safe. Ignorance and bliss, right?”

  Panama: “Bullshit.”

  “Yeah, it’s bullshit. Absolutely it is. So people like us, not only do we never forget what happened, we’ve got the added chore of having to remember for the bleeding hearts.”

  “That why you went MTac?”

  “There another reason to try and arrest things that can make you burst into flames with a look in your direction?”

  “Some operators are just action junkies.” Panama was accusatory in tone. Slightly, but just enough. “They get off thinking they’re BAMF.”

  “And those operators mostly never get past SWAT.” Soledad was adamant about the point, having worked with enough jarheads, youth wasted on PlayStation and thinking cop work was nothing but a video game, to last a lifetime. A lifetime that was likely to get fractionalized when the jarhead found out too late that when you’re going after a freak you don’t get do-overs. “They can play badass all day, all night. Doesn’t make them anything of the kind. Every other cop job, the odds are you’re going to live, retire, get fat off your pension. MTac, every day you survive you’ve beat the odds. You know that. And you know, a job where being dead is the norm, you’ve got to be down for the cause.”