John Ridley_Those Who Walk in Darkness 02

by What Fire Cannot Burn

  Eddi: “Mrs. Carlin—”

  If she heard Eddi trying to cut her off, Ramona didn’t care. “When I went to the hospital, I would not cry in front of him. Wouldn’t. Would not. I wasn’t going to let him know how I worried. I wasn’t going to, I wasn’t going to let me being scared for him keep him from what he wanted. And then he wanted . . . the day he came home and told me he wanted to be one of those antifreak cops . . . I just, I sat there and I stared at him . . . When do you ever get it in your head you want to do something like that? You read the papers, you see what’s going on, how people are dying going after those . . . ,” repugnant as she could make it, “things, and the person you love tells you that’s how he wants to make a living?”

  A long drag killed her cigarette. Ramona stubbed out the butt. Took another from the pack. Did not light it.

  Ramona said: “You just . . . I mean, I shut down. I did. Might as well have told me he was going to kill himself. Somebody tells you that, how do you not turn off a part of you to them?”

  Raddatz wondered. If somebody asked Helena, would she say the same about him?

  Ramona: “But for a while I went on, like, okay, maybe he’s going to be all right. Maybe nothing’s going to happen to him. It wasn’t even . . . maybe it was two months before . . .”

  Ramona put the cigarette in her mouth. Took it out. It remained unlit.

  “That thing,” Ramona said, “whatever it was, it gave Marty third-degree burns over fifty-seven percent of him. I remember that. I remember the doctors telling me what percent of him was burned, and I remember thinking: How do you even measure that? That they knew how much of him was . . . how do you calculate that when so much of him was beyond just burned. Anyway, he lived. Obviously. But Marty, he should’ve died ’cause that was the end of him. As a human being he was done. He didn’t even look human, and that’s me, that’s his wife saying that. He got moody and he got angry and he started . . .” Ramona touched her left occipital lobe. Then, finally, she lit up her smoke. “Called the cops, but you all didn’t do anything.”

  Raddatz, Eddi; they remained settled. Made sure Ramona had gotten it all out, had let all her emotion spill.

  She sat. She smoked. Seemed as though she was done.

  Raddatz looked to Eddi.

  Eddi said: “I’m sorry for what happened to you. I’m sorry the right people didn’t get involved.”

  Ramona nodded. Sarcastic. “Yes. You said.”

  Eddi said: “But your husband, your ex-husband—”

  “Still is. Never put the papers through.”

  Ramona took a drag on her cigarette.

  “Do you know where he is?” Raddatz asked.

  Ramona looked at her cigarette. Rolled it in her fingers.

  That bit of active inaction, Ramona’s irresolution. It was something Raddatz on domestic violence calls . . . as a cop he’d seen it before. But every time, in every circumstance, he could not process the divide between logic and emotion. Her husband had treated her like a punching bag. Her body, and mentally too. She’d screamed for help, screamed for it. Claimed she had. Now when someone comes around looking to wrap the bastard up, someone offers her the payback she’d been wanting . . . she rolls her cigarette in her fingers, has to think about things?

  Eddi got it.

  Eddi was blunt with it: “You still love him.”

  Ramona asked: “Are you in love?”

  In exchange of the question Eddi gave hesitation.

  Ramona gave a bit of a laugh, a bit of a sneer. “You can come in here and ask me what you want. I ask you something simple . . .”

  “We’re asking what we’re asking as part of a police investigation.” Raddatz put authority behind a statement that was mostly false.

  “Do I look like I give a damn?” To Eddi: “Yes or no; are you in love?”

  “There was a guy. A cop. He was killed.”

  “But you still love him.”

  “I think the circumstance is extremely different.”

  “The hell it is. If it was death, or a well-placed blow, emotions don’t care. They stay with you. Your man died. How you feel about him is unkillable. A guy like Marty . . . he hit me, and I felt it. I don’t mean it hurt. I felt his touch. So what’d he do wrong? This time.”

  “At this point,” Raddatz said, “he’s only a person of interest. We just want to talk with him.”

  Ramona wasn’t going for that. “Yeah, right. You just want to talk, so I should just give him up.”

  “You should give him up because it’s the right thing to do.”

  Ramona nodded, but it wasn’t like she was acknowledging agreement.

  “When he hit you,” Eddi said, “maybe you felt something, and it was . . . I don’t know. You took it. For whatever reason, you took it. Your choice. There are people being hurt and they don’t have a choice about it. They’re dying. They’re being murdered. If your husband’s got any information, we need it.”

  “You know what I said to him when it was over.” Ramona talked on like whatever Eddi had to say wasn’t worth listening to. “I told him he was a waste. I told him everything he thought he was, was nothing. He wanted to be a freak cop, and all he ended up was a freak not even good enough for going after his own kind. And he told me, you know what he said? He told me I was right. Said that, and just walked out that door. As many times as he hit me, when it came to it, I knew just how to hit him. That’s the thing about being so in love with somebody. It gives you the secret knowledge you need to destroy them. You know the queer thing? Whatever you want Marty for, I think he’s just trying to prove he’s not nothing.”

  Eddi and Raddatz couldn’t argue the point.

  “We don’t talk much. Every once in a while he sends me a letter, a little note. Tells me how sorry he is about what happened. That’s what he calls beating me, abusing me. ‘What happened.’ I don’t write him back. I’m not afraid of him, you know. I’m not.” Ramona let that hang for a moment, then: “I think if I did, I think if I talked to him . . . love; it’s just unkillable.”

  Eddi rolled the paper around in her fingers. A talisman. Carlin’s address.

  “How you want to play it?” she asked. “Go after Carlin or take a run at Tynes first?”

  “Finish up with Carlin.”

  “Can we get any kind of backup?”

  Raddatz shook his head to the negative. “We get it by telling MTac we know what we know how?”

  “Same way DMI always gets backup.”

  “By presenting a chain of investigation. Look, if we were going after a freak, maybe we could count on the review being lax. But to go after a normal, an ex-cop who’s killing freaks, you don’t think questions are going to get asked? And that’s if we could even put Carlin on this for sure. All we’ve got now is a guy who’s hinky.”

  “You don’t like him for this?”

  “I love him for it. But that doesn’t prove nothing, and it doesn’t get us backup.”

  “Then some of your superfriends?”

  “You’ve met my superfriend.”

  Eddi wasn’t ready for Raddatz’s lack of engagement with the meta community. “That’s it?”

  “They’re careful.”

  “They don’t trust you.”

  “They won’t let me get into a position where I could be forced to compromise them.”

  “Like I said: They don’t trust you.”

  Raddatz gave a shrug, let it go. “We’d still have the same problem we’ve always had: How good would that be for the other side that metanormals are acting as vigilantes?”

  “How good is it going to be if we get killed and Carlin gets away?”

  “He’s human. No matter what he can do, he’s a normal. What was wrong with the Age of Heroes: It wasn’t that the metanormals were trying to act like gods. It was that we forgot how to stand up for ourselves. This one’s ours. We’ve gotta take the lead.”

  There was logic there. Logic wasn’t what swayed Eddi. What swayed her, when Raddatz added
: “What Carlin may have done, the people he might’ve killed: I’ve got no problem paying him back for that on my own.”

  Eddi thought of Soledad. She didn’t have a problem handing out payback either.

  The capper from Raddatz: “You were going to kill me. I’d at least like to know you don’t hate me so much you wouldn’t give the same courtesy to somebody else.”

  She gave a laugh.

  “What?” Raddatz asked.

  “Me protecting freaks, that’s funny as hell.”

  “Life’s queer like that sometimes.”

  “Yeah.” And then Eddi said: “Normal or not, if we’re going to do this, there’s something I want to have.”

  She got herself killed. I’m not going to let other cops go down the same way.” This was a hard, hard lie from Eddi. Hard to give.

  Just as hard for Bo to take. Bo wasn’t accepting it. “Soledad didn’t get herself killed.” His voice was even, nearly quiet. His tone was unmistakable: Shut up. Go away.

  Eddi would not. “Her gun didn’t work. It failed to fire. She died.”

  “That happens with sidearms.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen with Soledad’s. That it happened with an experimental weapon—”

  “How many freaks has that thing brought down?”

  “That it happened with an experimental weapon suggests the gun shouldn’t be standard issue.”

  Bo, head ticking side to side: “How long have you been with DMI?”

  “What does that have to—”

  “A couple of weeks? A month? You talk like one of them.”

  “Wherever I’m assigned, I do my job. If you have prejudice for one division over another, then that’s your issue.” She was plain, simple. Direct and unflinching.

  Her facade was. Behind that: Real clear to Eddi was her first call. Going after a speed freak, too anxious with her trigger, too anxious about going BAMF. Ending up sailing a couple of slugs into Vin. When her world was falling apart, when she thought on the good end of things she was facing Admin discipline, on the bad end she was looking at discharge from the force, who was there to back her up? Bo. Soledad and Bo. Now Eddi was selling Soledad out and shining Bo on, and as far as Eddi could tell, the deceptions were only starting.

  But then . . .

  Someone had killed freaks, had killed some of the best freak-hunting cops on the PD. Had done it with harsh science. Harsh science was needed to fight back. Soledad’s gun was needed, and Eddi could not be honest about her reasons. She’d already bitten a guy’s ear to the cartilage and come this close to putting bullets into the back of another guy’s head. So a couple of lies, what were a couple of lies even to and about people she really cared for?

  Coming forward in his chair, leaning on his desk, locking eyes with Eddi: “Then how about this: How long have you been with DMI that you get to come around giving orders?”

  “How long have you been 10-David you can’t follow procedure? I’m not giving orders. I’m conducting an investigation.”

  “On Soledad’s piece? That’d be for A Platoon.”

  “If Soledad’s weapon had been issued by the department of the armorer. It wasn’t, and it wasn’t being tested under the auspices of HIT either. If it’s an investigation pertaining to metanormal activity, then it belongs to DMI. The question is, did the freak”—Eddi made sure she threw in the word; she’d noticed she was using “metanormal” a lot. A lot more than most cops. She figured it’d be smart to make sure she talked the talk—“Soledad was surveying have some kind of an effect on her sidearm? The incident happened while she was detached to DMI, so it’s a question for DMI to answer.” Eddi was coming off like a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer. So slick she slipped and slid.

  Problem was that cops hated lawyers, and Bo was cop to the bone.

  “Then let me ask things this way . . .” That drawl of his made his subtext read: Maybe you think you can shine me, but I don’t shine. “How long have you been at DMI you should be handling the situation?”

  “I’m going to be fair.”

  A snide laugh from Bo.

  “If the gun works, I want to know. If it doesn’t, I want to know that too.”

  “Soledad always figured you were envious of her.”

  Beyond her playacting, Eddi bristled. She was hearing that too much; hearing people thought she was in competition with Soledad. Enough that it annoyed her. Enough that it might be true.

  “Let’s face things. You, well, you idolized her. Wanted to be her.”

  “If you’re trying to make me feel something in particular . . .”

  What Eddi felt: her breast. The sting of her tattoo. As fresh as the day she had it etched on the flesh of her chest.

  “If you can’t be as good as Soledad, might as well discredit her.”

  “You’re better than that, Bo. I know you are. No reason to attack me. I miss her too.”

  Bo chewed the air in his mouth, chewed at it . . .

  Bo asked: “Is there something I should know? As in why you’re forcing the issue?”

  To keep Bo at arm’s length. To keep him from getting involved. Eddi was being the way she was because when things went south, and most likely they would, Eddi didn’t want Bo heading down with her.

  “These are . . . they’re unique times. ‘Unique’ is hardly a strong enough word. All of us have to work from the gut now and figure out right and wrong later.” It was veiled, but Eddi was speaking a truth beyond the subject. “But that’s the point: later. Maybe we’ll look back and see we made a mess of some things. A lot of things. But I’d rather be around five, ten years down the road to apologize then, knowing we bought ourselves the time now to be sorry about anything at all.”

  Veiled, yeah, but truth. And Bo was the sort, truth he always had to yield to.

  “Okay, Eddi,” Bo said. “Okay.”

  G Platoon had its own evidence lockup. Superfluous. For most crimes, if they went to trial, there might be questions. Reasonable doubt. Did that guy really rape that chick? Did that woman really pour gasoline on her husband while he slept, then toss a match on after? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, evidence.

  With freaks?

  With freaks, if you were a freak, if you got caught being a freak—flying or shooting energy from your fingers or morphing metal—that and a little DNA sample positive with a meta gene was all the more evidence anyone really needed. “Anyone” being agents of the law.

  So the evidence lockers for MTac were really more like souvenir storage. Leftover junk from calls gone bad. Slagged helmets. Uniforms shredded by animated steel. Punctured by hand-slung projectiles.

  And there was Soledad’s gun. And from her workroom in Parker Center all the prototypes, sketches and theory work she’d done in adapting her O’Dwyer. Eddi wasn’t ready for that. It was nearly obsessive-compulsive the details Soledad put into the designing and the modifying and reworking and adapting the weapon. Yes, Eddi was aware Soledad had the background for it. Studied tech at Northwestern. But it was impressive taking into consideration that Soledad was still “just” a cop. Not a hard-core techie. Not a scientist. Merely a chick with a gun who wanted to make a difference. Made Eddi angry when she considered neither the department of the armorer nor the money drain that was HIT had come close to putting together what Soledad had. It just made Eddi feel all the shittier for what she was perpetrating.

  Put that aside, she told herself. Eddi told herself she’d deal with her ill feelings, her guilt . . .

  Later.

  Right now she wanted to do something for Soledad: find the thing that killed her. Make sure it never killed again.

  Action.

  People like action. To hell with sitting and thinking and planning and considering. People want guns coughing, muzzles flashing, random objects taking bullet hits and fragmenting spectacularly. Balls-to-the-walls action. Which is why, you go to a movie, you hardly ever see police doing police work—filling out duty logs, filing reports, working phones. You just s
ee cops kicking in doors and letting their guns do the verbalizing. And miraculously, no matter movie cops never seem to do surveillance or shadow a suspect or engage in an ongoing stakeout, they always seem to know exactly which door to kick in. They never seem to let their guns get verbal with the wrong person.

  It was getting cool at night. Cool for LA. Eddi’s blood had thinned since she’d moved West from Philly. She kept the car windows rolled against the chill. Except sitting in a car for hours with another person’s got a way of making the air rank. Stale. So every once in a while Eddi had to crack the window, let fresh air inside. But that just made the car cold. She’d have to close the window. The air’d get stale. She had to do her little ballet all over again.

  Sixteen hours of that. Sixteen hours and twenty-three minutes of rolling the window up and down while she eyed Carlin’s little house on Folsom Street.

  Not really sixteen-plus hours continually. Her and Raddatz had been swapping little naps in shifts when they hadn’t been eating shitty drive-thru food, when they hadn’t been just staring at Carlin’s house looking for signs of life that hadn’t presented themselves in the previous three-quarters of a day.

  Heading for the seventeenth hour, things were going to get hard. Eddi was going to get . . . she was antsy. If you’re a cop, there’s only so much sitting and staring and bad-food eating you can do before you want to kick in doors and have conversations spoken in hot ounces. Before you become like any other paying customer who wants to see some action.

  Eddi poked Raddatz in the shoulder. He was fully awake instantly. Eddi gave a quick update on how little the situation had changed.

  She said: “Nothing.”