Static. A little. Then not even that.
“Raddatz, it’s Donatell, you read?”
Soledad: “Raddatz . . .”
Ignoring her: “Donatell.”
“I read.” Donatell’s voice came strong, the radio signal clear. “You get that last from Shen?”
“Negative. It came garbled. Crawl up Union toward him.” Raddatz lit the car’s engine. “Keep your mike hot.”
“Roger that.”
“Raddatz, call it in.”
Raddatz looked to Soledad. In the look he made himself naked emotionally. He cast off anger, any trace of a tough-guy stance. The irradiate musings that had dominated his tone. All that, all that was set aside. It was quite a trick, though it was not an illusion. It was replaced by a sincerity beyond honesty.
“Soledad,” Raddatz said, “shoot me or get out.” Wasn’t an order. It was a request to do one or the other. Soledad had to let him be. Or she had to let him die. If he could not complete his task, then—and this she got from his tone—all there really was, was for Raddatz to be dead.
Shoot or get out.
Soledad did neither.
Raddatz put the car in gear, drove. He took the street at a solid creep. Even at the hour there was activity. People coming and going from something that was open all night. A pharmacy. A club. A porn store.
Rounding a corner where Shen’s car should be but wasn’t: “Where is he?” A useless question, but it fell out of Raddatz’s mouth just the same. “Shen?” No response to his call over the radio. “Shen, it’s Raddatz, you read?”
Nothing.
To Panama: “Panama, anything?”
“. . . on the . . . back around . . .”
More static than words.
Soledad’s grip on her gun stayed constant, though the gun itself had moved from beneath her coat to a spot in the clear where it would be more ready for action.
“Eyes open” was Raddatz’s order to Soledad. She didn’t need to be directed. That things were hinky was obvious.
Raddatz kept up the creep of the car, kept it up, but even as it slow-rolled, it rolled with an urgency. Something was not right. Very close by, some things were ill. Heading for terminal.
Soledad spotted it. Parked on a cross street facing opposite of traffic. Shen’s car.
“There!”
Raddatz was already angling for it. Both cops out of the car before it stopped rolling.
Raddatz drew out.
Two-handed grip. Gun forward, muzzle down. Soledad came around the car. The car in drive. Engine dead. Door open.
Raddatz did a quick assess: The target wasn’t on the street or sidewalk.
An alley behind an apartment block. Raddatz took it, Soledad right behind.
Creep, creeping along. Cautious, but not too slow. Things were happening somewhere. Raddatz, Soledad had to get to them.
And mariachi music played from a radio and candlelight danced from a low window and a baby made its hunger or tiredness or displeasure known by its wailing.
The world was one sizable distraction.
Creep, creeping . . .
An odor. The odor was . . .
Puddled water. Shadows. A stray cat with a wound on its leg that was home to an extended family of maggots.
Shen.
Up ahead in the alley Shen sat on the ground. Legs splayed. Arms dangling at his sides. A gun spilled from his right hand. That odor: The air was sick with cordite. He’d gotten off a bunch of shots. No blood on the ground. If Shen had hit the target, the bullets didn’t slow it any. The bullets didn’t stop the target from getting close enough to Shen to punch a hole into his chest.
Into his chest.
Torn flesh and busted bone and flattened organs bent in on themselves like the heart of a black hole. That’s what it was. The center of Shen was just a hole into which life had collapsed.
The expression on Shen’s face, the one he wore when he exited existence: disbelief. He knew in his last half seconds he was going to die in a spectacularly horrid way. He wasn’t ready.
Who is?
Soledad, voice above a whisper: “What is it?”
Raddatz didn’t have an answer.
Unmistakable. The rapid, successive pops of nine-mil gunfire. The echo effect of the alley working against pinpointing the shots.
Raddatz, Soledad took their best guess. Ran.
On the street: screams and scurrying civvies.
Soledad, waving her badge at a tattooed cholo who was running like a muchacha.
“Esa manera! Esa manera!” And the cholo kept running.
The two cops went in the direction they were given, Soledad hobbling hard against her bad knee. Didn’t have far to go before they saw what the running and screaming was about. Two people. One a corpse, one nearly.
Panama. Skull crushed. Dead. And Donatell’d be joining him shortly. A few wheezes—dying breaths—from his burned body. Freshly, very badly burned. Even for Soledad, rock-hard Soledad, what a horrible, horrible . . . to take on fire once, to live, just so fire can catch up to you, give you all its hurt again.
The wheezing quit.
Shen. Panama. Donatell.
Soledad to Raddatz: “You fucking ass!” Cadre or not, Raddatz had gotten them killed.
Raddatz took a step, a step for Soledad.
Soledad’s hand rushed up, out—swinging from her shoulder. Her shoulder’s where she felt the impact. Back of her fist, center of Raddatz’s face. She felt the cut of his teeth through the flesh, the commingling of their blood.
He dropped, Raddatz dropped straight down popping up only some when Soledad’s swinging foot caught his jaw.
Most of that was straight anger. Three cops dead. Part of the aggression was self-preservation. She’d rather pursue the freak solo than have to keep one eye on Raddatz.
Swapping the green clip for the orange. Semtex-tipped slugs. No fucking around. Soledad was going to blow the shit out of the freak.
To her left, civvies standing, gawking. Something had gone by them eastbound.
Back to running. Yelling as she ran: “Police! Get on a phone. Nine one one. Get an MTac to this location!”
LA. Maybe the good citizens would make the call. Maybe they wouldn’t.
Bum leg be damned, Soledad tore north on Union. Rounded the corner onto Shatto.
Apartments. Apartments. Apartments. Boles to shovel humans. Built tight to each other. No space to run, to hide. Windows barred. Doors locked, gated.
Soledad’s thought: This is what comes of being a rat, a mole—running in the dark in the Valley, three dead cops behind you. A freak in front of you. At your side a cop you can’t trust and the only thing you can—your piece.
Apartments. Apartments . . .
. . . construction.
A new building going up. Multi-unit. Bordered by chain-link. Part of it torn away. Wasn’t damage a human had done.
It was inside.
No hesitation. Soledad pursued. If inside was where it was, inside was where she’d kill it.
Inside:
No light except what the moon was giving off. The moon wasn’t giving up much.
Her knee was stiff, wasn’t throbbing. Should’ve hurt like hellfire. Soledad’s adrenaline was high. Kept the pain low.
Oughta keep steady. Oughta wait for MTac. Soledad thought she ought to . . .
Oughta what?
Back down? Hold off? Let a freak run wild, kill some more people?
Nah. Her adrenaline was BAMF high. Too high for fear. Too high for reason. She started to creep.
Fuckin’ Raddatz, Soledad thought. What in the hell had he stirred up?
She brushed something. Jumped back, turned. Didn’t fire. Just a work light. Minor miracle. Groping for it, groping a wire, she flipped it on. A string of lights went hot. The visual improvement marginal. The space was strung with thick plastic sheets. Dustcovers. Dust shields. They muted the light. Perception got messed with. Everything opaque. Gave the space a fun-house quali
ty. Minus the fun.
Inching along. Gun out.
Like being wrapped in a chrysalis. Like moving through a fog of substance. Like living in oblivion. The unreal. It was all unreal. Except for the three uniquely dead bodies. The thought of those made everything truly real again.
Things got realer.
Something moving through the plastic haze, moving for Soledad. Big and heavy, but it didn’t lumber. Big and heavy, but it traveled with speed.
She turned, sidestepped. Twisted to take aim.
What Soledad felt: a punch by a hand so big it could drape her body in a single hurt. Make her twitch, lurch. Make her spasm. Make her see a serpent that ate and ate and ate its tail.
Wasn’t a punch.
What it was:
What it was, was an electric charge popping—slamming—the air all around her.
Picked her up.
Threw her down.
Was only seconds that she jerked, flopped across the kind-of-finished floor. Only seconds that she could feel the tight of the muscles that clinched her jaws. Felt her eyes zipping around their sockets.
Only seconds that residual electricity flowed through her. Long enough the thing that was big and strong and fast should’ve been on her, finishing the job of trying to clean her clock.
Hearing coming back to her: the sounds of stumbling and grunting. The thing caught up in the sheeting.
Now. Shoot it. Kill it.
Shoot it, but she couldn’t see.
Shoot it, but Soledad could barely command her movements.
The thing stumbling close, grabbing. The sound . . . the sound of a hiss. A whine. A hiss and a whine with its movement.
Soledad moved to shoot. The thing gave in return a blow. Physical this time. This time not electrical. The blow lifted Soledad, sent her slapping, slapping, slapping through the hanging plastic. Wrapped her up, but was no insultation from the splintering wood that waited to collect her. Puncture her. Or maybe it was just a busted rib ripping through her flesh. The agony of breathing was the same either way.
Slipping on the plastic, slipping on her own blood.
And then it was on Soledad, pulling Soledad close. Pulling her tight, tighter. A rush of air forced from her. Sounded like the collective wailing gasp of raving, exed-out youths losing themselves in the first shared bliss of an oncoming tsunami of euphoria. With that: popping, snapping. More ribs busting. Arms pinned, Soledad couldn’t get her piece up, couldn’t get a shot. Too close anyway. The Semtex going off: Wouldn’t it kill her?
Did it matter?
Kill the beast.
Both thoughts running in her head: Did it matter? Kill the beast.
If she had to go, she’d take it with her.
Get your arm up . . .
Squeezing tighter. Crushing her. Killing her.
Not going to die today. Get your arm up. Kill the beast.
Use your head, she self-counseled. Use your fucking head.
She used it. Soledad reared her head back, drove it forward. Drove it.
Cartilage snapped, blood sprayed her face. The beast wasn’t so tough.
Its grip slipped. Soledad slid, tried to slide away.
The beast still had speed. It took her by the throat with a hand like steel. It got back to squeezing, added twisting to the action.
Soledad felt the bones of her neck collapsing.
But the beast had her arm’s length away. She could take the shot. Probably she’d live.
Didn’t matter.
Her arm came up.
Kill the beast.
There was a click. The gun did not fire.
There was a snap. Soledad’s head being torqued until her spine broke. She heard that. Soledad survived just long enough, just the fraction of a moment of time that was required for her ears to fill with the sound of her own death.
Eddi thought about going to the gym. Thought about lifting. But the weather was decent. A good day for cardio, for some outdoor running. But Fred Segal was having a sale and better—in LA—to get there early than try to go late, have to fight the crowds, the traffic. No matter. Nine point eight million people in the city. If a fraction had the same thought, the store’d be sick with bodies. So skip shopping. Skip cardio too. It was going to be the gym, then on to IHOP for a little . . .
Then Eddi remembered. Soledad was dead.
Soledad was dead.
Soledad was . . .
Eddi could repeat it as much as she cared, as many ways as she could. Her brain wouldn’t take to what it rationally knew.
Soledad was dead.
Whatever else in Eddi’s world that would evolve, grow, differ from day to day, what would not change was the reality of Soledad. That was beyond alteration.
Just awake, Eddi hadn’t gotten out of bed. The thought of Soledad dead fresh again in her head, she couldn’t exit the sheets.
She wanted to cry.
Wasn’t going to happen.
Eddi had bartered off her emotions a long time prior. Tears for fearlessness. Softness for survival. The amputation of her frailties kept her, ironically, whole. Gave her the ability to act and react without the burden of emotion. Such a condition had kept Soledad alive too. For a while. For Soledad “a while” ended. Then what? Literally ashes to ashes. Soledad cremated. Tears Eddi couldn’t cry. A feeling seeping through her that regular people call sorrow and that Eddi, hard-guy cops like Eddi, passed off as nothing more than an inner call for activity. Cops needed to be working, doing, enforcing. What she was feeling was just the malaise of passivity that all cops got when they had too much downtime, and not when they lost one of their own.
That feeling: How do you shake it?
Ten days since Soledad’s death. Four since she’d been cremated. And every time Eddi did that count in her head—adding a couple of hours, adding a day to the bottom line—it still hit her like she was getting bitch-smacked with the news for the first time as it was hand-delivered from a drunken wife beater.
Soledad was dead.
How do you shake that ill feeling? Most times, most other cops she’d known and lost the feeling never even came. Death was sad, yeah, but it was part of the job. It was a done deal before you even put on a badge and blues, so why go crying little girl-style after the fact? You didn’t. You didn’t take on feelings, you didn’t have to get rid of them.
And as much as she . . . not hated, Eddi didn’t hate Soledad. As much difficulty as she’d had with the girl, as much friction, what Eddi felt now was like a shiv to the soul delivered with a quick, vicious, surreptitious jab. Unexpected, and unexpectedly painful.
How do you, how do you shake such an ill feeling?
There had to be something. Some way more than just the cop send-off Soledad’d gotten. The obit that’d run deep in the LA Times.
Nothing that Eddi could figure at the minute. At the minute she couldn’t figure anything besides lying in bed a little bit longer. A little bit longer being, like, the rest of her day off. The month. The reminder of her life, which, considering Soledad was one of the heaviest hitters MTac ever birthed and she didn’t make it past thirty years of age, seemed like it might not be too much longer.
But Eddi wasn’t going to ditch the effort. She’d figure out something to do for Soledad.
She’d figure it out.
Later.
Eddi rolled over, tried to sleep off her malaise.
Eddi rested her hand on the door. It was slightly open. The door. Her hand too. Splayed over the wood. From beyond the door came sounds. Things scraping against cardboard. Objects being packed. A life being put away. No voices.
Her hand on the open door. It opened no wider.
Eddi had kicked in how many doors on the job? Solid wood, steel-lined. Rarely, though sometimes aided with a ram, had she ever had a problem knocking her way through any of them. This door, already partly open, she couldn’t pass through. She knew what was on the other side. Soledad’s mom and dad. The primary grievers. Eddi liked to think she was in
, or at least she self-elevated herself to, the number three spot.
A distant third.
And she knew she really had no business being in breathing distance of numbers one and two.
But . . .
There was a but. Always is.
But Eddi had already called the O’Roarks, offered condolences. Had wanted to keep things brief but didn’t know what to say and ended up saying way too much. Blathered on and on about what a good person Soledad was and what a good cop she was and how much Soledad would be missed and couldn’t be replaced and would not be forgotten and shut up already, Eddi. But they, Soledad’s mom at least, had been so gracious on the phone. Had said they would be in Los Angeles to collect the remains of their daughter. The consumed remains and the remains of her life. The clothes and the photos and the books and the this and the that. They—Soledad’s mom said “they”—very much wanted to meet Eddi, put a face with the voice that spoke with such grace and regard for her daughter.
Grace?
So in that phone call Eddi had formed a loose bond with people she had only one connection to. They had among them Soledad’s death. As much as she did not want to go into the condo, tenuous as it was, breaking the connection was beyond Eddi.
Hand on the door, she pushed it open.
Inside the condo: a man kneeling before some cardboard boxes; a woman standing taking knickknacks from a shelf. The woman was a little on the heavy side. Or, or the bloated side? Wore a scarf covering her head. The man, although of a height and girth that would be considered above that of an average man and though his health seemed well for a man of his age, his presence was weak and tired. As a life had been taken from him, liveliness had been drained from him.
From the man: “Yes?”
“I’m Eddi Aoki.” Looking to the woman. “I think I spoke to you on the phone. I’m a friend of Soledad’s.”
“Soledad didn’t have friends.” A little mournful smile on the woman’s lips. Gallows humor.
“Well, next best thing, then.”
“Thank you for coming,” Gin said.
“I wanted you to know your daughter will be missed. She was a good person, and she sacrificed herself for her convictions. Anybody would tell you Soledad was one of the best cops to ev—”
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