John Ridley_Those Who Walk in Darkness 02

by What Fire Cannot Burn

  Coming up off his haunches: “Make it sound like we’re a consolation prize, and not much of one.”

  She wasn’t an expert on such things, but common sense told Soledad the best deceptions are the ones that aren’t deceptions. The best deceptions are truths that hide lies.

  “If you’re asking me, yeah, it is a consolation prize.” Soledad modified herself none. Didn’t plane any edges. As such she sounded as though she spoke with honesty. “But a prize is a prize. And a job where I can still help do something about muties is a whole hell of a lot better than working security at the Beverly Center. I’m still in the fight. If this is the way it’s got to be, I’m good with that.”

  She put up the window on Raddatz. She went back to sitting alone. She was pretty sure the lie about her knee would stick. And just that quick she was working for Tashjian. That quick she had purpose again.

  The thing is, the thing is how right she was.”

  “Mothers have a way of being annoyingly correct.”

  Soledad was with Vin. In his place. Lying on his couch. Staring at his ceiling.

  Vin was across the room, in a chair. Same chair he’d been sitting . . . planted. As much time as he spent there, “planted” was the better, was the more accurate word. Same chair he’d been planted in last time Soledad’d been over. If Vin hadn’t opened the door for her, Soledad would’ve figured Vin and the chair were never apart.

  “And the way she said it.” Soledad giving color to the context of her conversation with her mother. “‘I don’t want you to come home.’ So to-the-point. So . . . harsh.”

  “The apple doesn’t fall far from the—”

  “Don’t give me that shit.”

  Vin kind of mumbled something. Back when he had two legs, when he had two legs he didn’t mumble. His comments, always sharp, were never gagged by self-pity.

  And then he kind of eked out: “She wanted to make it stick.”

  “She could have just—”

  “Just what? If somebody told you to breathe, you’d suffocate yourself just to be your own man.” Force to the thought, but not much to his tone. “She doesn’t want you to watch her die.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “That she’s going to die or that she doesn’t want you around?”

  “Any of it. Take your pick.”

  Vin’s head dropped back, sort of lolled around. “I didn’t. Didn’t say it. She, she did.” That last bit was slurred slightly as it gimped its way off Vin’s tongue. Something besides pity was washing out his words.

  Soledad looked to Vin. He was slumped some in the chair. Was as if, even sitting, he needed all of the furniture to keep him propped up. A little sweat was on his brow, collecting on his upper lip. It was there never mind the AC being on.

  Vin, like he was waking up from a snooze, realized he’d caught Soledad’s eye. “So . . . so what are you going to do?”

  “Stay on the job. Stay here. Mom made it real clear what she wants.”

  “Do you care? If someone told you to, to breathe—”

  “You said that. You said that, Vin. You said it already.” Soledad drifted where she lay. She drifted to the day prior, to her lunch with her mother. Before, like a little girl who’d messed her best dress, Soledad feared having to explain her damaged leg to her mom. But at lunch . . . “She didn’t even ask about my leg. Barely she did.”

  “She’s got cancer.”

  “Cancer’ll kill you. It doesn’t stop you from being a mother. Nothing does. She knew I didn’t want to talk about my leg; she knew the boundaries I’d set.”

  “So she knew.”

  “All this time I’d been pushing her away. Didn’t have to. She knew to keep some distance. But I kept pushing when I should’ve been—”

  “Soledad, you’ve got a unique ability to make everything about you.”

  Vin’s words didn’t set Soledad right. Just made her more morose. “The death I was feeling . . . thought it was mine. It was hers.”

  Vin: “How is your leg?”

  “Good. Recovering good. Moving to a cane in a couple of weeks. I could put in for active duty.” And on the subject of limbs: “Where’s your leg?”

  Vin flipped a finger, indicated across the room. Through a doorway Soledad could see the prosthetic lying, surreal, on the floor. Some kind of exhibit on loan from MOCA.

  She said: “Doesn’t do much good parked there.”

  “Doesn’t do much good at all unless I’ve got somewhere to go. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “If you had it on, maybe you would.”

  “And one day I’m going to put your little theory to a test.”

  That was that. So Soledad moved the conversation on by returning to the central subject. “I couldn’t even cry. I sat there feeling like I should. Feeling it, knowing it. Was like I went through a checklist—heartache, guilt, denial—but I couldn’t finish the emotion.”

  “You’re shut down. That’s what we . . .” Vin was mealymouthed with that, feebled the word “we” as if ashamed at the attempt to equate himself with working cops. Doing an edit: “That’s the way you get through things.”

  “This isn’t cop shit. I’ve been shut down since May Day. Since San Francisco I’ve been about taking a stand against the freaks to the exclusion of every other thing around me. It’s like I was so set on dying I took out a scorched-earth policy on the rest of my life.”

  Pathos with such pretty words.

  Putting spin on it, Vin: “And good for it. Well, not good, but . . . good came, came out of it.” He stumbled a little. “If you hadn’t taken out that telepath—”

  “Some other cop would have.”

  “Without that gun you put together? Doubt it. And even if . . . we only lost Yarborough. How many cops would’ve been lost if things were different?”

  Despite what Vin was putting out, Soledad’s lament stayed constant. “My own mother . . . Tell you something: You’re looking at the end of things, you realize you weren’t even decent with your own mother . . . Sometimes, Vin, sometimes I feel like—”

  “Don’t get sentimental. You’ll regret it tomorrow.”

  “Sometimes, sometimes I feel like I’m fighting for normal humans and I traded my humanity in the deal.”

  “And you talk about me going soft. Act like you don’t know what love is just ’cause some guy broke your heart.”

  It was as if, what it was like was Soledad had been gored from gut to chest. Some guy. Ian. He was unaware, but Vin wasn’t just talking. For Soledad, he was séancing demons. And the twist in her Soledad felt . . . it wasn’t that she had her heart broken. What was hurting her was the how of her heartbreak. It’s one thing to fall in love and have love not work out. It’s a very, very different thing to fall in love, have the love force you to question yourself to the core, only to find out who you love is the thing you hate most.

  Soledad had fallen in love—she’d use the word in the quiet inside her, but she’d never speak it, regarding Ian, aloud—she’d fallen in love with a freak.

  “How’d you know?” Soledad asked regarding Vin’s knowledge of Ian.

  “You make a big deal about a guy for months, then all of a sudden you don’t so much as speak his name. Not since I got out of the hospital. Maybe you’re being sensitive to me, knowing how I feel about you. But the next time you’re sensitive to how I feel’ll be the first time.”

  “Fuck you.” Playful with that. Relieved, really. Vin didn’t know the specifics of Ian, was just tossing out suppositions on some vagaries of Soledad’s heart. Coming back at Vin, deflecting things from herself: “You want to be a detective, put your leg on and get back on the force.”

  Just a little smirk from Vin that said he didn’t want to play anymore. From the way his shoulders slouched, his body hunched, he didn’t want to do much else than sit where he was for another hour. A couple hours. Seven years. It was all the same for Vin.

  But it was okay Vin didn’t want to play. Soledad was ready to get s
erious about things as well.

  She said: “Were you for real about what you asked before?”

  “What I . . .”

  “Do I want to get married? Do I want to marry you?”

  “Yeah,” Vin said.

  “Okay,” Soledad said.

  My motivations are screwed.

  I know that.

  I don’t know if I came out of the box screwed up, or if I got that way after San Francisco when getting sick kept me from taking a trip to the city. Kept me alive when 600,000 other people got killed.

  That’s a shitload o’ guilt to be carting around.

  So I quit living for me and started living for the giveback. Paying off a debt I didn’t really owe to people I’d never met. And from day one, if that wasn’t wrong, I knew what I was doing at least wasn’t quite right.

  Thing is, knowing you’ve got a dysfunction and doing something about your dysfunctionality sound the same, but are nothing alike. Maybe with years of therapy and religion, tons of medication you can break patterns.

  I didn’t go in for any of that.

  So the pattern repeated.

  With MTac.

  With the tattoo I wore for Reese.

  And now, again, with Vin.

  I didn’t love him. I liked him, cared about him. The little bit I understood of love, I know I didn’t feel that way for Vin.

  What I felt . . .

  Pathos.

  I felt it for this cop, used to be so strong, who’d let himself devolve to the point of being a gimp. Not just physically. There were all kinds of people, fewer body parts than Vin, who amounted to so much more.

  That sounds harsh, but sometimes the truth hits like Ali.

  What was damaged on him, it was his spirit that was handicapped. The most obvious indicator was he’d casually, quietly become a lush, thinking his slowed movements and slurred speech went unnoticed. Same with the perpetual glisten of sweat that he now wore. Or worse, he knew the signs were obvious and didn’t care.

  I think, really, Vin’s romantic about the idea of being cliché: the busted cop who melts to an alky.

  Not romantic. Just pathetic.

  I couldn’t let Vin be pathetic.

  No matter saving Vin is an unactionable task. Like the costumed freaks from years prior who I’ve come to hate so well, I felt I had to—had to—try some difficult heroics. So I tested Vin. Took his offer of marriage. Any other man, receiving a belated yes to a proposal right after talking about a woman’s former love would say two things to her. The second is “you,” the first, “fuck.” Any man wouldn’t let himself, so obviously, be relegated to sloppy seconds.

  Any real man.

  Any self-respecting man.

  Any man who hadn’t let himself devolve into a one-legged drunk.

  But Vin, Vin had said okay. Vin passed the test. Or flunked it. Vin needed saving. So here’s Soledad the antihero to the rescue.

  God, do I need more religion.

  Or medication.

  Soledad was crutching through DMI, crutching to her office. Raddatz was on his way somewhere else.

  Their paths crossing, Raddatz stopped. Said to Soledad: “Got anything pressing?”

  “No.”

  Raddatz said: “Want to head over to LACFSC?”

  “Sure.”

  Humanity is self-modifying. It adjusts to constants of its environment.

  Death.

  See a dead body once, be shocked. Revulsed.

  See another body, a few more. You might be revulsed, but shock’s no longer part of the deal.

  A few more bodies, revulsion is a quaint notion that’s remembered, if at all, with effort.

  See a dozen bodies or more, no matter they’ve been shot, no matter they’ve been burned, regardless of the decay or level of stink, the viewing sensation is nothing more spectacular than seeing a late-model Ford creeping along in the slow lane on the 405.

  But even the jaded could be, if not astounded, affected. There are, after all, a lot of ways to die. But Soledad didn’t know, wasn’t sure until she hit the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office at the Forensic Science Center, that there was any way to kill an invulnerable metanormal.

  Michael Han, the county ME, found it all fascinating as hell. Fascinating enough he didn’t pawn the inquest off on some junior on his staff.

  Raddatz . . . ? Hard for Soledad to tell how he took things. Maybe he was shocked into submission by the confirmation of an invulnerable’s mortality. Maybe he didn’t care just as long as the freak was dead. But if there was a spike in him emotionally one way or the other, it was indistinct beyond normal curiosity. By choice or by accident he was tough to read as a player at the big table at the World Series of Poker.

  Raddatz asked: “How did it happen; an invulnerable dead?”

  “Dead by a means other than natural causes.” Han tossed out the obvious.

  Hard to say if an aptitude for working with the corpses was a product of nature or nurture. The Hans could’ve been a case study. Michael’s father, Chise, had jobbed in the Coroner’s Office. As an assistant ME, but never as the coroner. That left a way for the son to surpass the father. Assuming being better at dealing with the dead than your old man was an aspiration. For the Hans, for a generation of Hans, apparently, yeah, it was.

  “Other than natural causes,” Raddatz acknowledged.

  “If you were,” Han continued, “to consider which superability would be the most desirable, I think many would say invulnerability. Skin that’s impregnable. Bones that are little different from titanium.”

  Han gave an odd gaze to the thing on the examining table below him. It was the longing look of reverence. Han was all about death. With the John Doe, he’d almost met something that could kick Death’s ass.

  Almost.

  Han, continuing: “It’s about as close to immortality as can be achieved. You would never need fear a traffic accident, a plane crash, let alone slipping on a patch of ice. Only age. Only God’s work itself. And even that may not come on a schedule normal humans are accustomed to.”

  “And this one, it didn’t die of natural causes?” Soledad was circling the examining table, giving herself a guided tour of the freak, the examining light overhead raining down a harsh luminescence. There’s your God light: the light people who’ve had near-death experiences claim they’ve floated toward. The light of the guy who looks at your body with a cold disinterest before he cuts it open ’cause that’s what his paycheck tells him to do.

  A shake of the head from Han. “Not that we can determine, Miss O’Roark.”

  Soledad stopped, looked up. Looked to Han. Miss O’Roark. Not Officer O’Roark. Not operator. Not Bullet. Miss O’Roark. When was the last time she’d heard that? Long enough ago that hearing it now sounded pleasant.

  “What about poison?” Raddatz asked. “Poison’d take it out, yeah?”

  Han answered: “We were able to empty the contents of its stomach, run a tox screening. It came back negative.”

  “Suicide?” Soledad asked.

  “A possibility.” Han leaned back against a wall. He looked up, looked at the ceiling as if he were giving the question a little thought. “If anyone would know how to kill such a thing, it would be . . . it would be the thing itself. But that adds why to the question how.”

  Raddatz: “You’re a freak, you’ve got no prospects, the law says you’re not human. You end things.”

  Soledad: “We should be so lucky the muties start taking themselves out.” Soledad added harshness to a sentiment she already held, put the edge there for Raddatz to see how he’d take it.

  Nothing. No effect she could read on him.

  On the freak, on its side, on its bare flesh: defects. Soledad saw them as she circumvented the body. Little . . . little divots. Four on one side.

  Soledad: “What are these?”

  Han stepped around, took a look at what Soledad was talking about. “Actually, I was hoping you might know.”

  “How am I goin
g to know what you don’t?”

  “If it was any other metanormal, I wouldn’t expect you to. But as you can imagine, not a great many invulnerables make their way to my part of the world. And not too many officers have had as much experience with metanormals as you have.”

  Soledad gave a careful look to the defects. She said to Raddatz, guessing: “Scar tissue?”

  Raddatz shrugged.

  Soledad split her focus between the freak and Raddatz. Here they were checking out a dead invulnerable, and all Raddatz could do was shrug? Was he one of those cops who said little but took in all they saw? Was he a cop that had prior knowledge of what he was looking at and was therefore bored by questions he knew the answers to?

  “It’s a possibility. The meta gene,” Han said, “becomes active in most metanormals around puberty. He might have been injured as a child.”

  Soledad asked: “Has the body been cleaned?”

  “Before the autopsy. Before,” Han corrected, “the attempted autopsy.”

  “Where the scar tissue is, was there any flaking?”

  Han picked up a notepad, flipped through it. “Yes.”

  “A lot, a little?”

  “Minimal amount.”

  “But there was, there was flaking there?”

  Han said to Soledad: “Yes.”

  “Dead flesh,” Soledad said. She said: “This wasn’t an old wound.”

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

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

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