What I didn’t expect . . .
Page after page after page after page of more of the Soledad I already knew. From the day she started keeping a journal it was filled with entries about her hate of the freaks, her disdain for freak lovers, her adherence to the law because the lack of law gave rise to the freaks in the first place.
I’d hoped maybe there’d be some levity, some light. Some life.
I wanted that from her.
I wanted it for me.
I wanted to know we could do what we do, but remain whole and human.
I wanted those things.
But I had bitten nearly clean off the ear of someone I wanted intel from.
To be like Soledad? I had evolved—devolved—way beyond that.
Soledad only carried the guilt of living through May Day. My loss was tangible. My wounds deeper. I didn’t need to worship Soledad to have my rage. Reading her journal helped me to see all that I could do with it. Or all the rage could do to me.
It could help me become one of the best MTacs to ever job on the LAPD.
It could also turn me into a cop who dies wondering if there’s anyone anywhere who gives a fuck about her.
Here we watch, we wait, we note. We fight with our heads, not our fists. The grunt mentality stays with MTac.”
Couldn’t be sure, but Eddi was willing to make book this was the same speech Soledad, same speech every ex-MTac got when they arrived for duty at DMI. Abernathy’s perfunctory delivery like the corporate-
approved greeting at a Holiday Inn or the requisite “bye-bye” as you disembark a major carrier’s jetliner. It was made all the more passionless by Abernathy’s movie-
announcerish voice. It was like preparation for watching a once active career go stale.
Not stale. Doing intel on freaks was important work. To Eddi it just wasn’t as significant as being an MTac. And Eddi would double down her bet that rather than smiling and nodding to the sentiment, when Soledad’d gotten “the speech,” she’d opted to make her true feelings known to Abernathy.
Eddi said nothing.
Eddi threw off a serious, by-the-book, “I get your meaning” expression. Tightening of the eyes. Furrowing of the brow. A hearty nod of her head. She exuded all indicia she was DMI-ready. It was like doing theater. It was like Eddi’d studied and studied a part, then walked out onto a stage. Before a self-fractured wrist landed her there, Eddi had never been to DMI HQ. Only knew a few DMI cops in passing from the job. But she knew from her journal these were the halls Soledad had limped along with her bad leg. One of these offices had been used by Soledad to push paper. Soledad’d worked very briefly with Raddatz and a small group of cops. Those cops, Soledad chief among them as far as Eddi cared, were dead. Tucker Raddatz was alive. Raddatz was center of Eddi’s sights. From what she could take from Soledad’s journal he was most probably a thug. And he had almost certainly killed Soledad. A freak had taken her life, but Raddatz had maneuvered her into that situation. Eddi wasn’t buying it was just a surveillance gone south. The stats were against it. The circumstances just too convenient.
A DMI inquiry said otherwise. How F’n surprising was that; cops clearing their own?
A court. A review board. The law. They weren’t about to come down on Raddatz. But if Eddi proved things to her satisfaction . . . Used to be all she wanted was to drive her daddy’s knife into the heart of a freak. A farewell to her father. Holding on to that pledge, Eddi’d crawled from a life of devastation to a new normalcy. She wasn’t feeling normal anymore, was thinking taking her knife to Raddatz would cure the feeling.
But as close as she was, close as Eddi was to the edge, that’s all she was. Close. She wasn’t over all the way. She wanted blood, but the want was a base desire. What she needed, to confirm what she believed: Raddatz killed Soledad or got her killed or had her killed. Whatever variation was truth, the truth Eddi wanted to know. To know, she had to get next to the one person who’d walked from the incident. To get next to him, she had to fake like she was a good little DMI cop.
“I understand, sir.” Keeping up the by-the-book, “I get your meaning” expression. Eddi said: “I know, at least I think I know what’s going to be required for me to make the grade. I just hope I live up to it.” Might as well have had her thumb on a page in a script.
“You have to be aware of the situation,” Abernathy said. “Your post here is temporary. We get temporary posts. We get them constantly. But when the arriving officer only looks at their post as temporary, circumstances can become problematic. Do you understand?”
“I do, sir.”
“I’m sure you must have felt distance coming from some of the other officers.”
“A little.”
“It’s not personal,” he said. Abernathy said: “Can’t take it personally. DMI cops: Their life is about being suspicious.”
“Appreciate that. I hope I get a chance to show while I’m at DMI, I am DMI.” Looking Abernathy dead in the eye. Liars have shifty eyes. Liars look around a room when they’re lying. Eddi was speaking from her heart. Or so she perpetrated. Eddi did not lose contact with Abernathy. Eddi would not be, wouldn’t let herself be farmed out or shunted to one side. She needed to be in the heart of things. And compared to grinding a knee into a man’s balls, amputating part of his body with her own teeth, what was a little rallying around the flag?
Slightly, Eddi smiled.
Eddi’s welcome to DMI: paperwork. Sorting and filing, transferring from hard copy to digital file. What she got was a taste of the struggle against the freaks waged from the very bottom of the totem pole. The part that was stuck in the mud. And this is what Eddi got for being the “good” transfer, the obsequious MTac arriving to the brave new world. She could only imagine what Soledad, filterless Soledad, got handed. She couldn’t imagine Soledad putting up with busywork. They were very crappy chores.
Also eye-opening. The numbers. The stats on the freak population. Eye-opening in the way your eyes spring wide in the bloody climax of a horror show. Eddi was giving consideration to the idea that Abernathy was at least partially correct in his assessment of MTacs: They were nothing but grunts. Eddi’d never really thought about how many freaks might be in Greater LA, how much they might be communicating with each other. What those communications could be. Like, some kind of call to arms. DMI thought about that kind of stuff. Ran through all manner of threat matrixes. Worst-case scenarios. Calculated for every sort of bloody encounter. All the thinking, the considering and predicting made Eddi long for MTac. Just point your gun, pull your trigger.
She felt comfortable in G Platoon. Eddi felt like she belonged. No matter that she was hiding her designs, her sense was to a person DMI had no trust of her.
And they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t trust her. But they didn’t know they shouldn’t. Or maybe they did. Maybe they were that good. They could suss the untrustworthy. Or maybe in their job it just paid to not trust strangers. Which was fine to a degree. Eddi was sure in time she could earn trust.
Despite lingering animosity, she’d earned Soledad’s.
Just needed time.
But Eddi didn’t have time. Really, she had time, but she didn’t have patience. Didn’t have the desire for her abhorrence to diminish. She had to get into Raddatz’s sphere. But at the end of nineteen days of trying she’d gotten to file and sort. She’d gotten hit on by a double amputee. She gotten told “Don’t worry about it” when she’d asked a couple of officers how exactly they postulated their threat assessments. She had not gotten anywhere close to knowing the truth about Raddatz. She had been unable to surreptitiously work her way close to him, and he certainly had not approached her. No reason. Unlike Soledad, Eddi brought no real celebrity with her.
Raddatz remained a distant, lonely cipher. A cop on the job going through recovery after the loss of fellow officers. The rest of DMI cut him a wide swath as he worked his way back to zero.
All the while Eddi was sure he wasn’t going through shit. Was prett
y sure he was only faking his remorse.
Unfortunately, pretty sure didn’t cut it.
Waiting around wasn’t working.
So forget subterfuge. Forget doing things on the sly. Navigate the situation, Eddi coached herself, like she’d handle a call. Straight ahead and in the open.
Tell me about Soledad.”
In his chair, in his office, Tucker Raddatz turned from the window he was staring out of, looked over his desk, across the room. Eddi was in the doorway.
“Tell me,” she said again, “about Soledad O’Roark.”
“You a friend of hers?”
“She didn’t have friends. I operated with her on MTac.”
“Then you know her good as me. Probably better.”
“She had a way of—”
“You’re Aoki, right? Just came on.”
“Eddi Aoki.”
“Tucker Raddatz. You were saying?”
“She had a way of pushing people off. A habit more than a trait.”
What Eddi was noticing: Raddatz wasn’t paying any more attention to her than to whatever he’d been looking at out his window. He was slow, unfocused. A guy permanently waking up.
Sure he was.
He was weighted down. He was slogging around the burden of murder.
Eddi asked: “What happened?”
Raddatz went back to looking out the window.
“You all were surveying a freak. Then what happened?”
“I’ve been through all that with a review panel.”
“I wasn’t on the panel.”
“You’ve been on calls that’ve gone south.”
“Yeah.”
“You want to spend your time rehashing the bad ones?”
Truth was, Eddi didn’t.
“You tell me about her,” Raddatz said, redirecting. “Curious what kind of cop I lost.”
I lost. Eddi considered that a queer way of putting things. Queer in the sense Raddatz sounded more like a man guilty of error rather than volition.
She said: “I told you, we weren’t friends. Not in any real sense.”
“Whatever you recall. Anything.”
“I recall . . .” Eddi let herself into the office, took a seat. “I recall Soledad didn’t want me on her element. She didn’t . . . I gotta tell you, she didn’t care for me.”
“Didn’t care for you how?”
“On the force, you’re a woman, you’re a minority, yeah it’s hard, but you can stake your own territory. You work your way up to MTac, you can pretty much be a celebrity. I don’t think she cared to share the spotlight.”
“She didn’t strike me that way; the kind that wanted attention.”
“You’re not a woman. Or a minority.”
As if to say otherwise, Raddatz held up his missing hand.
“Yeah, well, around here that pretty much puts you in the majority. Look, I don’t think Soledad wanted attention. I think deep down she wanted to make a point. The point gets muted when there’s somebody like you doing the same thing.”
Raddatz said: “What changed with you and Soledad?”
“What makes you think anything did?”
Raddatz’s phone rang, rang, rang. It rang itself quiet.
Taking up the conversation where it’d been left, Raddatz: “I think, I thought. I thought she was the kind who could change. I hoped for it.”
He was being cryptic. Eddi wondered if it was a dodge. Was he being veiled to get something out of her? Did he have something to say and wasn’t sure in what way she would take it? “How did you hope she’d change?”
“She came with a mind-set. I hoped she’d see things another way.”
“Yeah, but what way do you—”
“There is a line of thinking: In a republic only soldiers should have certain rights. Only people who’ve served their country should be allowed full and complete suffrage. It’s, uh, extremist, you know. But I’d say I understand the philosophy. The philosophy being only those who’ve defended the republic can really appreciate the responsibilities that come with running it.”
“If you want to enjoy freedom, you’ve got to pony up.”
Sort of a nod, sort of a shrug from Raddatz.
“Sounds kind of Spartan.”
“Look at our country. We’re in a time of crisis. It’s almost cliché to say we’re in a state of war, but we are. It’s a struggle for our survival. You know that. And yet, what are the concerns of the people, the citizens? Their concerns are whether or not they can get their meals supersized. How big of an SUV they can drive by themselves on their long commutes over smooth-paved roads to work and back. They forgo news for reality shows that are anything except real. They can’t tell you the name of the vice president, but they can tell you to the person every character on their favorite sitcom. They are invested in the having, but couldn’t care less about what it takes to earn what they have, protect what others have earned. They’ve never known sacrifice. Not self-sacrifice. So how could they ever really appreciate the sacrifice of others? They can’t. Once you understand sacrifice, once you’re willing to sacrifice, it changes your perspective. How many times have you been driving, you’ve been shopping in a mall and you find yourself angry at the sight of a regular American? The overweight-by-sloth, underinformed-by-choice American? I sound bitter, don’t I? I am. I’m bitter that I’ve had to put good cops in the ground when indifferent people keep on being indifferent. But I’m also . . . I guess I’m defiant. We’ve earned the right to do as needed in the interest of all. We have to. Because even if we win this war, without change, what chance do we really have to survive?”
For all his rhetoric, Raddatz had been easy to follow. But at that moment he was drifting lanes. Eddi, trying to get perspective: “You don’t think we have a chance against the freaks?”
“Do you know what it takes to survive?”
“What does it take?”
“Inspiration. The belief there’s something better.”
“How would you inspire?”
“I would take away the thing that people fear.”
Eddi knew.
She sat in Raddatz’s office nearly eight minutes more small-talking about DMI and what she would need to get acclimated. But as Raddatz finished his dissertation, his high-minded babble, she knew. His words were his manifesto. It was all like Tashjian had said. Raddatz was an elitist. An extremist. He thought he could kill freaks as he pleased. Was privileged to the right. Soledad, for all her faults, was the law. The law got in Raddatz’s way.
Fine. Fuck the law.
Eddi knew.
Raddatz killed Soledad.
She was going to kill Raddatz.
It was the lack of internal debate that was most queer for her. That she had the capacity to take a life, Eddi had long since gotten over. Third week on the job. Still in uniform. Responding to a two-eleven at a convenience store on La Brea. Perp comes out, perp swings a gun in Eddi’s direction. Perp took two in the chest, one in the throat, was dead less than thirty seconds after hitting the pavement. Not the day after, not in the years since, Eddi never once felt bad about the circumstances of the shooting. If a guy’s got a gun, if the guy points the gun at you, you drop him. That’s it. End of story. No issues. You make the choice to be a cop, you better already have made the choice to take a life.
And being MTac, that reality was merely magnified. Long before she hit G Platoon she’d heard all the rhetoric, all the back-and-forth about the EO, whether it was constitutional, unconstitutional . . . Always, when she even bothered to do an internal debate, Eddi came back to the same thing: She didn’t know constitutionality. Was hazy on morality. But Eddi knew it was wrong for her father to have died because a couple of muties felt like getting into an ass-kicking contest in San Francisco.
So Eddi went MTac and never had guilt when she was standing over the writhing husk of an expiring freak.
With Raddatz she figured she might’ve had some questions for herself: Is this the thing to do? Is there
any other way? She knew it wasn’t lawful, but was it right?
She had no questions.
If it wasn’t about reprisal for Soledad, and it very much was, then it was merely about stopping Raddatz before the left could hold him up as a poster child for their perceived gestapoism of a system broken. Tashjian couldn’t touch Raddatz. Legal channels had been useless and probably would be for lack of hard evidence and fear of public opinion. The only thing that would really be effective was a bullet. Maybe two. However many it took to kill Raddatz.
She really had gone animal. The truth of that didn’t matter to Eddi in the least. The consequences didn’t matter.
If she went to prison for the crime, as she had said and meant to Tashjian when she’d . . . done what she’d done to him, that was all right. Acceptable, at least. She would have committed a crime. And little as she cared for Raddatz, she knew the law would feel different.
Eddi did have a problem with getting caught for killing a cop in a state where she’d be looking at taking a poison needle for the act. She didn’t mind killing, she could handle prison, but the strength of Eddi’s convictions stopped way short of giving up her life to square things for Soledad.
So Eddi planned.
A murder is predicated on three things: means, motive and opportunity.
Motive Eddi had.
Means. Her knife was off the list. There would be visceral pleasure in the act of putting steel to flesh and watching the results. There’d also be a lot of blood. And unless Eddi struck with speed and stealth there’d be a lot of screaming. Probably, she could complete the job without the screaming. But then where’s the pleasure? What’s the point?
She had to sit for a moment, let that thought pass. Going animal was okay. Going insane was unacceptable.
But Raddatz was taking her there. Taking her there with his talk of citizen soldiers and a higher objective and the end of fear. All he was saying: a police state. A final solution. All he was doing: taking what she believed in, believed was hard but necessary, making it into genocide.
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