John Ridley_Those Who Walk in Darkness 02

by What Fire Cannot Burn

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

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

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

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

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

  The lawyer didn’t know when. Or if.

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

  The spoon got removed.

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

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

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

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

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

  In the room were a table and four chairs. Raddatz and Diane were the only ones who sat. Diane looked too empty of strength to do anything but sit. Raddatz had been through enough interrogations to know they could go for hours. Might as well take a load off early.

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

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

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

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

  “He’s dead.” She was flat with that. Beyond acceptance. It didn’t matter. Nothing did. The fact that her husband wasn’t around to share her life made life not matter. Without him, without their son, she didn’t have a life. They were all, in a way, dead together.

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

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

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

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

  “Do you have any idea how?” Raddatz asked.

  “What?” Diane had lost track of the questioning.

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

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

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

  A scoffing sound from Diane. A pitying sound.

  “Kept that a secret, maybe you’re keeping other secrets.”

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

  “I was worried about him.”

  Panama: “Guy’s bulletproof, and you’re worried about him?”

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

  The look from Raddatz to Soledad: Be cool.

  Panama kept on. “Something must’ve given you concern.”

  Diane asked: “You’re not married, are you?”

  Soledad laughed.

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

  “You’d have reason to be concerned if he was involved in—”

  “Where is our son?”

  “Don’t worry abou—”

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

  “Being taken from his mother, he’s protected how?”

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

  “I am not a bad—”

  “You leave a kid around a freak—”

  “Stop calling him a—”

  “You leave a kid around a goddamn freak, what do you—”

  Diane was crying.

  Soledad’s cane was covered with blood, as was one wall of the room. Panama’s head was literally split open. Really, really, it was more cracked open, or crushed but in a way that left a separation in his skull. Soledad was ready to run a marathon. Compete an entire triathlon. She had that much energy. That much power. Killing Panama had been that invigorating. As much violence as she had delivered in a limited lifetime, this violence was positively delicious.

  In her head it was.

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

  “She’s a mother. Leave her alone.”

  “I don’t care if she’s—”

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

  “Take a walk.” Raddatz giving orders to Panama.

  Even from Raddatz, Panama didn’t take orders well. “What do I need to—”

  “Chuck, go get some air.”

  The sound of Diane sobbing.

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

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

  Diane cried on.

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

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

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

  Soledad got eyebrow from Raddatz.

  Diane asked: “The right people? What does, what does that—”

  “People with authority. People who could get you back with your son.”

  “O’Roark.”

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

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

  “Help you how?” Diane’s voice was no longer flat. It was raised just slightly by hope.

  “We’ve got reason to think your husband was murdered.”

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

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

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

  “I don’t know what I can tell you.”

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

  “He didn’t—”

  “You want to see your kid again or not?”

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

  “He didn’t talk with other metanormals. He wouldn’t take a chance like that.”

  “Like that?”

  “A chance letting anybody know he was different. Even others like him. When you people arrest them, when you torture them—”

  “We don’t torture—” Soledad started to say.

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

  “Danny,” Soledad said. “Your son?” she asked.

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

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

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

  “Knew?” Soledad asked.

  “That he’d been found out. Or . . . or something bad was going to happen.”

  “Why? Why do you say that?”

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

  “What,” Raddatz asked, “were his normal concerns?”

  “That he’d be exposed, hunted down by the police. You see on TV every other month, somewhere someone is being exposed as a metanormal, assaulted by police—”

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

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

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

  Acceptance.

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

  Soledad looked to Raddatz.

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

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

  “I think, really, since Israel Fernandez was assassinated.”

  “He died in a car accident,” Soledad pointed out.

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

  Raddatz: “Happens all the time.”

  Diane agreed. “It does happen all the time. It happens to political leaders, people who want change. An accident. A lone gunman. A high-tech lynching because the people who don’t—”

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

  “The people who don’t want change make accidents—”

  “Guard!”

  “They make them happen!”

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

  A CO opened the door.

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

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

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

  She’d never been to the SPA.

  She’d bagged a lot of freaks, but Soledad was thinking right then she’d never been to the spot in the desert with the sweet-sounding acronym that housed freaks brought in off the streets. How you keep them from
getting back on the streets . . . it must boggle the mind. Soledad figured at some point she ought to take the trip. Her mind could stand to get blown every now and then. Or at least reassured.

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

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

  “What’s that?”

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

  “People who want freaks dead.”

  Feeling Raddatz out: “A hate group?”

  “Enough of them around.”

  “My experience is they’re full of talk. They march, they burn their symbols, but what yokels in White Trashville don’t do is go after vics that might actually fight back.”

  “‘Yokels in White Trashville.’ But you’re not biased.”

  “I’m not PC with shitheads, and shitheads don’t have what it takes to bag a freak.”

  “Yeah? What’s your theory, O’Roark?”

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

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

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

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

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