“Asking you what you think of me.”
“Are you getting off? This a, this a tease or something?”
“When you talk about me, you sound alive. I like it when you sound alive. And . . . I like how I feel when a guy is talking about me. It makes me feel . . . I don’t want to be Soledad. Having a guy like me, knowing I could like him back; it makes me feel not like Soledad. It makes me feel like I got some human in me, and I’m not . . . I don’t know that I got much left.”
“What’s that mean?”
Like she feared, Eddi was on her way to saying too much. So she followed it up by saying nothing.
Vin, remembering: “Haragei it was called. In Japan when people talk without . . . whatever, without talking. Haragei is what it is.”
Eddi stayed with Vin a little less than two hours more. They engaged in a little less than two of haragei.
Life in reprise. Waiting was the repetition, was the slow torture. One watch down. Another watch down. The third down.
No diminishing of desire. No cooling off. If anything, like a frat boy that’d been cock-blocked, frustration made Eddi hungrier for the act than previously.
Friday night. Saturday. Saturday night.
Eddi was back to drinking. Back to drinking alone.
Vin’d been a good booze buddy. But getting comfortable with him was not her desire. Vin’s inclination was downward. Clearly, when this—“this” being murder—was over, Eddi was going to have issues to deal with. Getting caught up in Vin’s wake wasn’t going to help her deal.
She smiled. The first she could remember in a while. The first she could remember since . . . the phone call. The news. Soledad was dead.
Eddi smiled and realized it was thinking of Vin that’d brought it on. An alky with no desire to be anything other. But Eddi thought of Vin and she smiled.
Sunday.
Eddi sat on the floor of her joint, played some Chicane on her multitasking CD/DVD system. Watching the sun pass through the sky was all the more assignment she’d given herself.
The sun in the sky.
What was it she’d learned? Long time ago. High school was it? Not even the sun . . . How did it go? Not even the sun will transgress his orbit but the Erinyes, the ministers of justice, overtake him.
And she rubbed her left tit. Beneath the gray cotton of her undershirt, through her bra, Eddi could feel, could feel her tattoo. That hyper sense again. Death was coming.
In the nightstand was a photo book. In the photo book was a picture of her father. She kept it close. No matter tough little MTac she was, she didn’t have the fortitude to display it, keep it in constant view. She could barely ever look at it. But it remained always near. Near enough that in the middle of the night she could reach out and take hold of it and clutch it to her chest and cry in secret. She’d done that. Done it plenty.
The sun made its way to the edge of the sky.
The ministers of justice, overtake him.
Day was gone.
It was getting on evening.
Eddi got in her car and drove to the Valley and parked a short distance from the alley near the newsstand.
Shoot him in the head. Walk to her car. Go. Same as the Sunday previous. Except she expected more substantial results.
Eddi was vigilant this Sunday, saw Raddatz heading up the block, hitting the newsstand. She had a fear that the hitch this week would be Raddatz’d have his kids with him. She wasn’t about to do the job with his kids close. That much, or that little—that sliver of morality—humanity Eddi had left.
Raddatz was consistent.
He arrived on schedule. Without family. He flipped through Esquire. Flipped through, again, Road & Track. Same as with just about all newsstands the automobile magazines were displayed next to the porn. One-stop shopping for a demographic. Two Sundays in a row Raddatz had looked at the car mags without so much as considering the porn. That bumped her some. Maybe it was stereotyping, but it seemed to Eddi a guy like Raddatz should have more visible vices.
Raddatz stood, stood reading an article. It felt to Eddi, timewise, he was reading The Fountainhead in a sitting.
He stood reading.
He stood reading.
Raddatz put back the magazine.
He chatted some with somebody.
He started off from the stand.
Eddi made the cross.
Raddatz stopped. Looked at another magazine. The Week.
Eddi didn’t want to double back on herself in the middle of Laurel Canyon, call attention to herself. She kept up the cross, landed on the far north end of the newsstand. The porn mags Raddatz had skipped over. Eddi gave them a perusing. That she was making herself seem engaged in other women’s bare bodies was lost on her. Head down, face hidden, she let her senses travel, touch and feel Raddatz as he read through the newsweekly, took it to the cashier, paid, started his walk again. Giving him a bit of a lead, Eddi fell in behind him.
This Sunday Raddatz took the alley.
Shoot him in the head. Walk to her car. Go.
Eddi closed on him.
In her pocket, hand on the .38’s grip.
Give it to him quick.
Her finger brushed the trigger.
Give it to him twice.
Eddi pulled out, picked up the pace. Kept her hand down, gun at her side, hidden. Hidden, but ready to do work.
Raddatz oblivious.
Shoot him in the head.
On him, nearly on top of him. Close enough she wouldn’t miss. Close enough she couldn’t help but kill.
A sound, behind her.
A witness?
Eddi turned.
A man. Wispy. Reedy. He barely registered, yet somehow reeked menace. Not a witness. Something bad.
Eddi brought her hand around, started to bring her gun up. The guy caught it, caught her wrist. Wispy. Reedy. But his grip was like getting caught up in steel rails. Couldn’t move. Eddi could not even start to move her arm.
The wispy guy twisted her wrist. A machine going to work on her. The hurt the same as her limb getting torqued by mechanical rotors. Pain made her open her hand, her gun clanking to the ground. Her grunt drowning out the gun.
From behind her, from Raddatz: “No, no!”
Eddi’s left hand came up, whipped out, caught the thin man hard in the head. Square in the face. Her fractured wrist fractured a little more. There was blood from the guy’s nose, from his mouth. On impact his head hardly moved.
The thin man made a fist.
Sleepy time for Eddi.
Eddi was cognizant. She wasn’t sure how long it took her to figure that out. A while.
She realized she was awake, that it was dark. The room she was in was a basement, a cellar. If it was day or night outside she didn’t know. Couldn’t tell. She’d taken a blow to the head. Beyond the accompanying hurt she didn’t feel as though she’d been drugged or otherwise roughed up. Probably, she’d been loopy only a short time at most. Probably, it was still Sunday evening. Sunday night.
So she’d narrowed the time frame. Like that was some F’n victory.
The space was windowless. And it stank. The choking stink of rotting flesh. Vermin probably. Maybe, Eddi considered, human.
Eddi realized she was staring up close at the print of a magazine. She lifted her head. Tried to. Her head told her real loudly to lay it the hell back down. Eddi didn’t argue. She asked her eyes if they wouldn’t mind focusing and, eventually, they responded.
The magazine: The Week. It’d been shoved under her face as a pillow. Or a drool cloth. Eddi had, she was coming to notice, done a lot of that while she’d been out.
She was coming to notice she was cuffed too. The steel of the restraints particularly painful to her already fractured wrist.
The cuffs, The Week. Eddi only had to do a short replay to catch herself up to things: Her trying to kill Raddatz. The thin man who threw a punch like he was throwing a small car.
She’d fucked up. Raddatz knew she was coming. Or just, rat that he was,
had his back continually covered. However it was, Eddi had fucked up. And now there’d be some kind of very nasty retribution. If Raddatz was just going to turn her over for attempted murder, she’d be in custody already. That he had no problem killing she knew already. But she wasn’t dead. To Eddi that meant her death was going to come at a particular time and very likely none too quickly.
So she was going to die for her actions. It’d always been a possibility, though she’d thought it’d come by way of the state, not at private hands. She was going to die. Okay. Not okay, but . . . more immediate, more important, in her passing was there anything she could do to trip Raddatz up? Get him caught? Anything, same as setting a delayed fuse, that would after she was gone do to Raddatz what he was going to do to her?
If there was—if—Eddi’s head was in no shape to think on it. Anyway, that kind of logic was Movieville superspy thinking; the incredibly complex trap sprung from beyond the grave. Eddi was no superspy. At the moment she was little better than a screw-up cop.
A padlock popped. The rattle of a chain. Eddi couldn’t tell in which direction the door was. Her senses were not working in concert. She heard the door open. She heard it close. She heard it lock again. Footsteps. Couldn’t see from where they traveled. A voice came from directly above her.
The voice, Raddatz: “I’m going to tell you something; something that happened a few years back. I’ll tell it to you, then we can talk about the way things are.”
As long as he’d lived in LA Raddatz couldn’t remember spending any significant time on Rodeo Drive. Why should he? It was Beverly Hills. It was the priciest bunch of blocks in LA County. Sick with high-end boutiques. Not stores, not shops. Boutiques. Armani, Gucci, Christian Dior, Chanel, Ralph Lauren, Valentino, Cartier and Tiffany. The priciest store on the planet—according to its own press—was on Rodeo. Bijan. Don’t show up without an appointment. Don’t show up without expecting to pay a min of a hundred grand. A pair of socks starts at fifty bucks. The rich bought on Rodeo. Tourists threw away good money on Rodeo so they could say they bought where the rich buy. Angelenos, regular Angelenos, didn’t go anywhere near the street. Unless they had to. Unless, for instance, they were MTac cops and somebody’d put in a call on a sighted freak.
Somebody’d put in a call.
Raddatz was leading his element south on Rodeo.
The call had come in as a two-forty, an assault. That part was sketchy. What wasn’t: One of the combatants picked up the other one and threw him a couple hundred feet. The area of eventual impact being the side of a store.
A boutique.
Threw him hard. What was left of the vic was still splattered, some kind of sick art, over the brick facade. There were a couple of the BHPD cops on patrol. They drew out, opened fire. Boxed the freak, but then backed off. It was Beverly Hills. BH cops rousted the homeless, kept the blacks and Hispanics from wandering the flats. What they didn’t do, they didn’t handle freaks. For that they called the LAPD.
LAPD sent MTac.
The streets’d been cleared. The civvies had been evacuated. The area was a quarter mile in circumference of ghost town. Maybe the freak had slipped away in the initial confusion. Maybe it was holed up in a dark corner next to overstocked, overpriced goods. It was up to West LA MTac—Raddatz and Carmichael and McCrae and Tice—to figure out which.
That meant going slow south on the drive.
That meant going boutique to boutique.
That meant getting into tight little spaces where cover was minimal, and getting caught in another operator’s fire was a genuine concern.
And behind any door, any counter, in any dressing room, could be a freak cooling. Waiting to do damage to the cop who was a little too slow with his trigger.
Haute urban warfare.
“Clear?” Raddatz called to his element.
Down the line, over throat mics: “Clear.”
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
That was what, twelve boutiques down. Twenty-five to go? Plus a couple of restaurants. Just as cautiously as when they’d entered the joint, the element was as much so coming out. Had to be. Relax a split second, plane your own edge, that’s when you were begging for trouble.
Gloved hand under his Fritz helmet, Tice whipped clear sweat that was spilling over his brow, filling his eyes.
Raddatz, calling his progress in: “West LA to Central.”
“Go ahead, West.”
“We’re clear. Move D Platoon down another fifty.”
“Copy that, West. D Platoon moving fifty yards.”
D Platoon. Special Weapons and Tactics. They were good. Plenty of them had elevated to G Platoon. Problem was, the ones who hadn’t, they were okay doing overkill on the disgruntled employee of the weak huddled up in some office building looking to hand out some payback for his pink slip. Those cops’d avoided going MTac for a reason. The reason was usually fear. So D Platoon—SWAT—being the only fail-safe against a freak that got past his element didn’t help Raddatz feel any better about the situation. Just more pressure. Either they got the freak, or the freak was likely to not be gotten at all.
Next up: Harry Winston’s.
The four MTacs went for it, eyes moving. Always moving, sweeping, looking . . .
Enhanced strength. That’s what they were dealing with. The perp fused the vic with a wall from two hundred feet away. That takes some kind of muscle. With freaks, what you were going up against was never certain. But, yeah, probably it was a freak with enhanced strength. That meant not just looking for somebody. That meant keeping an eye out for a truck or a generator or a mainframe computer . . . whatever the thing might feel like picking up same as a kid’s toy and tossing your way. That possibility was obvious. But the thing could just as easily flick a paper clip at you with enough force, even with a vest, it’d tear through the Kevlar and hit like a Teflon bullet. And should you be lucky or unlucky enough to dodge what it was thrown, get close to it, if it got you in its paws, it could crush you. Rip clean your limbs. Snap you in two. Dealer’s choice. The freak being the dealer.
Sirens. Getting closer.
Raddatz: “West LA. We’ve got sirens?”
In his earpiece, the OIC: “Car fire on Wilshire. Fire responding. Unrelated.”
Raddatz let a breath slip from his mouth.
Keep on your toes, keep your eyes rolling. Raddatz whispered as much over his throat mike to the rest of the element as they slipped into Harry Winston’s.
The House of Winston.
The King of Diamonds.
Jeweler to the Stars.
There was, there had to be, fifty mill in rocks in the place easy. Necklaces, rings, earrings, pendants, gold settings, white gold, platinum . . . The actual market value of the gems was maybe half that fifty mill. The cheapest . . . the least expensive piece went in the neighborhood of forty grand. But if you bought at Harry’s, you were paying for the name, the legend, the zip code. If you were a tourist, you paid. If you were a Hollywood wife, a kept girl, your sugar daddy paid for you. On that business model Harry’s had been in operation a lot of years.
Raddatz’s element paid zero mind to the bling. Getting caught up in it could get ’em killed. At any price was there a rock in the joint worth losing your life over?
A lot of glass. Display cases filled the center of the boutique, ringed the edge. Should’ve been an easy look-see, but the sunlight pouring in refracting off the glass and the diamonds did tricks with the eyes. Dazzled. Was like doing recon in a kaleidoscope.
Raddatz: “Tice, hold back. Cover us from the door.”
Tice was schlepping the Benelli.
Raddatz put Carmichael and McCrae on the edges of the boutique. The pair toted HKs. Sexy in black.
Out front was Raddatz carrying just his Colt .45. Just the .45. A precision kill weapon that hit harder than a Glock. For most cops in most situations it’d be more gun than they needed. Against a freak, at best it was adequate.
Raddatz inched his way forward
, every step feeling same as bait on a hook. If the thing was present, he was making himself available for it. Hope was he’d get it first. If not, the hope was one of the other operators could put it down.
On the walls: shimmers of light like sunshine kicked back from a pool. Constant movement. An optical distraction. In all his years Raddatz had never squeezed off a jumpy round by mistake. Today might be the day.
Forward, peeking, peeking around a display case. Nothing. Jewels, riches. No freak. Forward. Forward some more. Eyes fluttering from dripping sweat. The heavy breathing of three other MTacs in his ear.
He should clear his sweat. Raddatz thought he should.
Light on the walls.
Thought he should. Probably not a good move.
His choices had come down to that: Take his hand off his gun to clear his vision. Have his vision cut by the sweat, but keep up a solid two-handed grip.
Breathing in his ear.
He hated self-debating; what to do or not. Just do it or forget it.
The light, the light dancing.
A door up ahead. A storage room? Back office?
Raddatz, into his throat mike: “Going for the door.”
Behind him the sound of shifting bodies. Red dots slipped over the wall. Guns taking up new aim points.
And the sound of breathing.
Left hand out, reaching for the door. For the knob. Raddatz took hold. Tested it. Unlocked. He opened it slightly. Opened it . . .
There was a single scream split in two, both parts heard simultaneously. The vocalized one behind Raddatz. The transmitted one in his ear and stabbing into his heart.
Raddatz whipped around.
Tice was off the ground. Elevated inches above it by the thing. The freak. Elevated inches off the ground by the freak’s hand jammed wrist-deep into Tice’s chest.
Tice: squirming, screaming. Blood gushing. Dying.
Raddatz didn’t need to give the go. Carmichael, McCrae already doing work with the HKs. Thirteen rounds a second X 2. Flying hot. Scorching air with a ffft, ffft, ffft as the slugs sourced for the target. Missed the target. Both MTacs missed. The freak was already moving. The bullets it dodged rapid-punched walls. Little as they were, they dug out fist-sized divots. Bricks chipped. Powdered. Clouded the air.
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