A couple of seconds of standing around before Panama looked like he was working his way, working his way toward clocking Soledad.
And right when he was at the very least going to smack her with every hard word he could think of, Soledad cut him with: “Good play in there; you taking it rough, me looking soft. Scared of you, Panama. She was scared to hell of you. Soon as you left she opened up like a wet paper sack. Don’t ever think I’ve seen a cop play things so smooth. You know what you’re doing. I don’t have to tell you that, but you know what you’re doing.”
Panama stood where he was. Flesh pink. Rage useless. No way to get satisfaction. A eunuch watching a porn flick. So he huffed and puffed at Soledad. Balled a hand into a fist.
Soledad took a stick of gum out of her pocket and unwrapped it and started to give it a chew. Then, finally, she gave Panama some attention. Both eyes straight to the face. Her forbearance mocking his fury.
By the front of the building, back from his faux piss, Raddatz called to Panama, to Soledad.
Panama, Soledad; they wouldn’t take their eyes off of each other. It’s like they were worried in a moment’s flinch the other would reach for their gun.
Soledad said: “Go. You don’t get to walk behind me.”
“You’re a fucking cunt.”
“Respect it. It’s where you came from. Go.”
Panama went, went right past Raddatz, out for their car.
As Soledad arrived to him, Raddatz asked: “You two done?”
“Done. Unless we’re just getting started.”
I live for simplicity. MTac afforded me a very simple lifestyle.
Find a freak.
Kill a freak.
Unless it kills you first.
Simple.
Your life’s not cluttered with a lot of friends because civvies don’t understand you and coworkers tend to die off with regularity.
Simple.
You shut down, you close up, you isolate. By yourself in your apartment, on the Santa Monica promenade high noon on a Saturday. Either, or. You’re alone.
That makes your life all about you.
That makes life simple.
So all this complexity is driving me crazy. Sensing death, knowing it’s coming for me, only to find out it’s hitting my mother instead. Working undercover against guys who might be doing a more proactive version of what I believe in.
Dealing with a woman separated from her kid. That hurts. I know. My mother had separated herself from me.
And, oh yeah, I’m getting married.
I would say it’s looking like a Vegas wedding, but I think it’ll take more than a couple of quick “I do’s” at the Little White Chapel to cover the sham of things.
But making my situation with Vin legal’s the least complex part of my life. I don’t really love him, I’m just going to marry him. So really, I’m just like a thousand other chicks who’ve quit love and are only looking to graduate to a state of blind permeance in their lives.
What’s complex:
A cop whose head I wanted to beat with my cane, a freak sympathizer I actually feel sympathy for. Violence and death unseen but all around. It’s all that which I can’t figure.
I don’t care for my inability to navigate my own life.
As I approach thirty, I don’t need for my life to require an ever-increasing amount of attention.
But then, as I approach thirty, I realize I never thought I’d live this long.
A shower. Hot water. Some kind of a soak. She had, Soledad had a tangible urge to physically do something about the dirty way she felt.
Felt.
Felt, just from the “you so smart, Joe”-ing she’d done with Panama. The cowering, the virtual bootlicking to avoid conflict and maintain good graces had left in her mouth the taste of Panama’s filth. On top of that the tack hadn’t particularly worked.
Jesus.
This wasn’t, she was sure, the way Tashjian operated. Tashjian, Soledad was damn sure, didn’t lower himself for anybody for any reason.
But Tashjian came at people head-on.
Soledad was working a cerebral Delta Force, coming up out of the mud on someone’s intellectual rear to . . .
To stab ’em in the back.
Right when Soledad was coming to grips with her choices, she had an annoying way of queering her own deal.
So, she proffered herself, here’s the new bargain: do your work, Soledad. Get to the real. If real was Raddatz and his cadre were on the bad end of things, well, then, take ’em out.
Then kick ’em.
What the hell? They’re down, right? Might as well get a few shots in. To Panama for sure.
Panama was top of Soledad’s list of people to which she’d hand out a few nasty blows.
But that was for later.
For now: the truth, and getting to it.
Officer O’Roark?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Officer Hayes. I was the one who found the freak,” he said in case Soledad couldn’t put name with face. Wasn’t an issue. He’d very much been in her thoughts.
“What’s doing, Officer?”
“I . . . I wanted to give you a call. Wasn’t sure if, if this is strictly right.”
Soledad gripped the phone. Her anxiety: A request for a date was coming.
“I wasn’t sure, but there’s some things going on I think you should know about.”
The call wasn’t about the two of them getting together. Some other kind of shit was imminent. Shouldn’t be a surprise. Soledad couldn’t recall, seemed like she couldn’t remember the time the phone had ever rung with some good news.
She asked: “What’s going on?”
“I’m not real sure, ma’am. That is, I know what’s going on, but I don’t know what it means. If it means anything.”
“Just play things back for me.”
“Is it safe to talk on the phone?”
Jesus Christ. Soledad hadn’t even thought about that. And the fact that Hayes had . . .
Shit was most assuredly coming.
For any ears that might be listening, playing things off: “Course it is, Officer.”
“Of course it is,” Hayes parroted. “I only meant—”
“Just play things back.”
“Had an investigator come around the other day, asked me if I had ever talked with you.”
“An investigator?”
“DMI.”
“What was his name?”
“It was Raddatz, ma’am.”
Soledad held down her phone for a sec. She brushed the antenna over her teeth. Finished with that, with a mindless act that bought her space to think, putting the phone back to her ear:
“. . . O’Roark? Officer O’Roa—”
“Yeah, I’m here. So Raddatz comes around, talks to you. Asks you what?”
“Asks me if you and I ever talked, and about what. I told him.”
“You were straight with him?”
“Straight all the way. No reason I shouldn’t have been.”
“No. No reason.”
“But I don’t go in for the DMI types. I don’t care for them. You’re decent and all, Officer O’Roark.”
“Thanks.” Kiss ass, she thought.
“But the rest of them . . . So I figured I give you a heads-up because something about him stank.”
“Yeah. Like Old Spice.”
Soledad gave her thanks and good-byes. Started to. Hayes cut her off with a query as to whether or not Soledad liked to shoot pool.
Soledad said she did, but that her leg was still barely in fair shape. Now wasn’t a real good time to go stand around shooting a few games. But, and this she stressed, she really appreciated Hayes having her back.
Hayes said he understood. Maybe another time.
Maybe. Soledad hung up her phone.
Raddatz coming around behind her, asking questions. No matter what she was putting out, Raddatz wasn’t taking it at face value. Same as he’d said he was short on
trust, she was going to have to be long on caution.
And right then among other stuff she was thinking, Soledad realized in her excuses to Hayes as to why she couldn’t go out with him, the fact that she was getting married wasn’t one of them.
The earth is a beautiful thing. Mother Earth, Gaia, depending on what kind of Old Age hippie, New Age guruism you believed in. However you called her, she’s a real decent home. Not just the green and the blue and the white of the trees and the sky and the clouds. A modest girl, her true beauties are hidden.
The earth moves.
Around the sun, through the universe. The earth was in a constant state of adjustment. Of resonance. The seismic plates, the fissures, the volcanic rings. Moving. Shifting. For billions of years. Creating, as it created topography, a song of folklore that spoke, almost cried in longing for a time before man and machine and clear-cutting and chemical dumping and toxin pumping. And the song was beautiful.
If you could hear it.
People couldn’t hear it.
Normal people couldn’t hear it.
Metanormals couldn’t hear it.
Except for metanormals with the ability to terraform. The ability to touch the resonance, affect the resonance. Alter the land. Move rock and stone. Literally the ability to make a mountain out of a molehill. It was an art. Magic. Here’s the trick: Terraformers didn’t actually do anything. Like geologic Dr. Dolittles, they encouraged the earth to alter herself. There had been a few, a very few, heroes who terraformed—used their abilities to move earth to fight wrongs. But mostly, terraformers had been, were, pacifist. They felt, they felt the violence earth had known since her birth. The impact of massive meteors. The extinction of entire species. The attempted extermination of whole races. It was all in the song. If you heard the song, if you felt the song, you didn’t much want to cause anyone, anything, the slightest tribulation.
But the thing about nonviolence: It’s a good concept, but it doesn’t much stand up to the need for self-preservation.
Tiesto Moore was just finding that out.
He found that out, really, about eight minutes prior when . . . when It came after him throwing off electricity, throwing bricks and metal and whatever It could get Its hands on and pick up and whip at speeds which turned the objects into deadly projectiles. Speeds that forced the projectiles through the earthen walls Tiesto yanked from the ground for his protection.
That was before he completely quit his pacifism.
That was before Tiesto started ripping rocks and then boulders from the earth. Moving them like buried marionettes. Making them rush for It. What else was there to call . . . It?
Maybe . . . Tiesto was getting delirious. He was starting to think maybe he ought just call it fear. Call it, maybe, Death.
Delirious. The running, the shifting of the earth he was doing. Was doing. Too tired now. Too tired to move earth anymore. Just run. Just stumble. Just keep ahead of It.
Just keep alive.
He’d miss the song. Tiesto thought about an empty eternity without the song. And the thought was pretty shitty. And It was rushing up somewhere behind him. It was coming to end things.
Really going to miss the song.
And Tiesto came stumbling around a corner.
And there it was waiting for him. Death. Four MTacs. Weapons ready. Fingers on triggers.
Eddi: “You are in violation of an Exe—”
Tiesto raised a hand for the MTacs. Maybe to attack. Maybe to defend himself. Maybe to use the flesh of his palm to shield himself, feebly, from the inevitable. In that sliver of a second his thoughts too capricious to discern.
The MTacs took it as an act of aggression.
The MTacs opened fire.
Tiesto was dead before he touched earth.
Raddatz did the talking. He was the one who asked the questions. He handled or at least took the lead of the debrief. Standard. It was Raddatz and Panama, Soledad third-wheeling it as they went through the call with Eddi Aoki. Her written report would follow. But it was SOP to have a face-to-face with the senior lead of an element soon as possible after a warrant was served. Originally, on-site debriefings’d been established to wring every piece of intel there was out of the responding officers while memories were fresh. Guns are good, but knowledge is power. And any piece of info could be the key piece when it came to going after a similar mutie on some future occasion.
But . . .
More and more the on-sites were done to get an official story out quick as possible to placate the freak fuckers and, worst case, contradict any altered version of the incident bleeding hearts might try to virus through the liberal media.
The call had been fairly standard as warrants go. Someone had 911’d about a freak. Pacific MTac rolled. A terraformer, but Pacific got the drop. Chalked the kill.
Soledad was humiliated.
Standing there, Raddatz and Panama doing the talking, Soledad felt unpurposed. Added to that they were talking with Eddi. It was Eddi being witness to Soledad’s lack of purpose that elevated her disconcert to humiliation. Every second that passed sank her with shame.
About three-quarters of the way through the debriefing Raddatz got a call from back at DMI—Donatell was Soledad’s best guess—and stepped off to talk. Panama, not looking to kill downtime with Soledad, took a minute to go do something. Go pretend he was doing something.
Soledad and Eddi.
Soledad offered: “Nice job on the freak.”
“Wasn’t much, but I’ll take the easy ones.”
It didn’t overly show, but Soledad rated Eddi’s modesty as false.
Eddi asked: “How’s things with you?”
“Different. All different.”
“Like it?”
“It’ll take getting used to.”
“Good thing is you won’t have to.” Eddi did some cheerleading. “Your leg gets good, you’ll be right back where you belong.”
“We’ll see.” Then, one more time: “We’ll see.”
“I was actually glad to see you today.”
“Actually? You make it sound—”
“A little backhanded, yeah, but I mean it. Worst thing about serving a warrant is you’ve got to deal with the DMI creeps afterward.”
“Worst thing besides getting killed, you mean.”
A little bit of a smile from Eddi. “Maybe not even. Swear, there’re days I’d rather let a freak go than have to sit across from DMI.”
Soledad shared the feeling. Maybe it was just departmental fidelity for G Platoon, but since making the transfer the feeling’d gotten stronger, not weaker. She was ready to agree with Eddi.
But Soledad had put work into looking loyal to the new boss no matter how sincere or fake they gauged that loyalty to be. There was no sense in queering things with loose lips, on having her true feelings come back to bite her in the ass.
She said: “They’re not creeps.”
“Yeah. They’re normal guys who—”
“They’re not creeps.”
The smile slipping from Eddi’s face: “Just joking around, Soledad.”
“Except what we do,” hitting the “we,” making it very much come off as “not you,” “isn’t a joke.”
“You get DMI branded on your ass too?”
“I’ve worked both sides. Maybe you ought to before you start making judgments.”
From Eddi, a cold, cold look. Then a smile, but that, too, was frozen. And sharp.
“Know something, Soledad? One day you and me are going to talk. Maybe not long. Couple of minutes. But we’re going to talk about something. And when we get done talking, we’re going to realize we went that couple of minutes without just about getting into a fistfight. Then we’ll go out and celebrate. Only, it won’t be much of a celebration because, I’m guessing, before we get to the champagne you and me’ll get into an ass-kicking contest.”
“Other than I think champagne is for little girls, I’m looking forward to it.”
“The lack of argu
ment or the ass kicking?”
“Sweetie, we get into some ass kicking, you’ll be too busy getting your ass kicked to argue.”
And that turned Eddi’s smile warm.
Raddatz came back around. Seeing that, Panama felt comfortable enough to quit faking like he was doing something else and reengage.
Raddatz asked of Eddi: “Anything else for us, Officer?”
A moment’s thought. A shake of her head. “I was saying to Officer O’Roark this one was pretty average. We got it, and everybody gets to go home. They should all be this good.”
“Write it up and get it in.”
“By tomorrow.”
Raddatz departed without salutation. Panama and Soledad followed.
“Soledad.”
She turned back to Eddi.
Eddi didn’t say anything else, made no move to close the distance between her and Soledad.
By her lack of action Soledad got that whatever else Eddi had to say wasn’t for other ears. She made the cross back.
“This is going to sound a little weird. If it was some other DMI cree . . . If it was some other cops besides you, I wouldn’t bother.”
A little shrug, a little shake of the head from Soledad. She’d take it as it came.
“When we hit the terraformer, it looked scared.” Eddi stood close to Soledad, went quiet. For eyes that might be watching she tried to come off like she was being casual: a little leftover girl talk that had to get finished. “I don’t mean the kind of scared four hot MTacs put into a mutie.”
“Then scared how?”
“If I knew how, it wouldn’t be weird to me.”
“Why are you telling me this and not Raddatz?”
Rocking on her heels, Eddi faked like she was without concern. “I guess I’ve got ego the same as anybody. So making something out of nothing; I can do without DMI thinking I’m all hysterical. But I’ve looked in the whites of enough freaks to know this one was, was scared of something besides us. Maybe it means something. Maybe it doesn’t. More than those guys, I trust you to come to which is which. Get healthy, Soledad.” A flick of her hand as a wave good-bye. “However you feel about me, I feel better when you’ve got my back.”
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