by John Ridley
Lesker leaned to the window and spat. The wind grabbed up the saliva, splatted it yellow-green against the back window of the squad.
Soledad was starting to think maybe this was the reason the brass had yessed Rysher's request to get her back in uniform. Maybe Lesker was enough to annoy her off the force and save the department the expense of a disciplinary hearing. Maybe that was his sole remaining purpose for being a cop. Officer Lesker: Police Irritant.
"You're on the job," Soledad said,"you've got a good chance of getting dead, so what's it matter how?"
"It matters. You're staring at death, it matters if you're going the easy way or the hard one."
She wondered: How would he know? If Lesker'd ever even glanced in death's direction, it was by pure, complete accident. Soledad was fairly sure Lesker'd never code-3-responded in his life. If he'd ever drawn his gun, it was to use it as a paperweight.
Outside her window, normalcy. The appearance of it. The traffic, drivers cocooned in cars, in their own worlds. Pedestrians slogged through hot, static air made visible by the smog. A copy shop filled with people running off resumes, poorly written screenplays. The low-end menial business of show business. Soledad speculated:
Which of them—of all those people in the cars, on the street, going about their jobs—which of them was secretly a mutie? A freak?
Lesker asked: "Know what I shoulda done?"
Soledad grunted vague interest.
"Moved to Seattle. Got on the Seattle PD. Rains in Seattle."
"Heard that."
"It rains a lot."
"Heard."
"Nobody goes out in the rain. Not regular folk, not perps."
"It's safe."
"Yeah. Safe."
A beat.
"Alaska." Soledad looked at the dash, out the window. Anywhere but at Lesker. In their time together Soledad had gotten no closer to mastering the trick of looking at him while conversing. They talked, but it was more like she was talking to herself.
"What about it?"
"Snow. Snows a lot in Alaska. It's safe."
"Yeah. Bet it's safe."
"Know where else is safe, Lesker?"
"Where?"
"Dark side of the moon. Why don't you see if you can't get yourself to the dark side of the moon?"
Lesker had no problem giving Soledad a look that told his partner, in graphic and exacting detail, just what she could do to herself.
Soledad wasn't going to be back in uniform much longer. Officer Lesker: Police Irritant was on the job.
Outside the car, across the street: voices loud and threatening. Soledad looked, couldn't make out the situation except that there was a gun involved.
To Lesker: "Roll on that."
"Aw, shit." Crime had managed to mess up Lesker's quiet day. He tapped the siren, yanked a hard U in the middle of the street. Pulling to the curb, both cops got a better look at the things. Just outside a corner market a Korean woman was having it out with a black guy. The black guy was holding a thing of orange juice. The Korean woman was gripping a gun.
Up out of the squad Lesker and Soledad eased for the scene. Lesker easing a bit more than Soledad, letting her take point. She kind of shook her head in disgust at him, but mostly kept her eyes on the Korean woman, on the gun she held. Soledad put her hand on her piece, her teeny-tiny-feeling service revolver that would be more than enough to kill the Korean woman if things worked out that way. But Soledad didn't draw it. That was one of the tons of reasons women made better cops than men: Female officers tended to navigate potentially dangerous situations with intelligence instead of force. Male cops liked to kick in doors and spit lead.
Lesker was something different altogether. Lesker just floated around in the background.
Calm, firm, like she was talking down an angry dog, Soledad said to the Korean woman: "Ma'am, put the gun down."
The only response was a wild babble of Korean.
"Put down the gun!"
"What da fuck is dis bullshit?" The black guy got all angry-brother indignant with Soledad's measured response.
Eyes on the woman, Soledad turned her command toward the brother."Stay where you are; do not move!" Back at the woman, stronger: "Ma'am, I'm asking you for the last time to put down the gun!"
"Sheeeit. Brotha had a gun, you'da blowt his head off by now. Why you havin' dialogue wit ching-chong?"
Too much going on."Shut up," Soledad yelled at the brother."You want to just stand there and shut up? Lesker!"
Lesker moved in the direction of the brother, but just slightly.
"Ma'am…" Grip tightening on her piece. Maybe it was coming to that.
A new voice: "No, no! She doesn't speak English." From out of the market: a boy, seventeen, also Korean.
Soledad confirming: "You speak English?"
"Yeah, I do." Not even the hint of accent.
"She your mother?"
The boy nodded.
"Tell her to put the weapon down and step away from it."
Quick, the woman got the instructions in Korean. There was a little back-and-forth between her and her son, but even with the language barrier Soledad could tell the boy made it desperately clear to her what she needed to do. The woman laid the gun on the sidewalk. The woman took three steps away from it.
"Ain't dat a bitch? Brotha woulda been long laid out by now."
"Hey, brother man" — danger past, Lesker got into things—"didn't you hear the girl?"
… The girl…?
Let it go.
Soledad picked up the gun, popped the clip, cleaned it working the slide twice. Nothing. No shell chambered. In another situation, if things had gotten real hectic, all the Korean woman would have been able to do with the weapon is get herself good and dead.
Soledad, to the boy: "She have a permit for this?"
"We have it in the store. I can go—"
"Later. Tell me what's going on."
Brother Man answered: "Wha's goin' on? Whatcha think goin' on? Da bitch tryinta kill me."
"I wasn't talking to you."
"Why you axin' ching-chong an' them shit?"
Soledad stepped to Brother Man, stepping past Lesker in the process. She hadn't bothered to look at Brother Man before. Now that she had, she saw fashion was a sense he didn't own. Polyester shirt. Matching shorts. Knee-high silk socks. Gator skin loafers. Along with that he trimmed himself with cheap gold, plenty of it, like he did all his shopping at Huggy Bear's garage sale.
Locking eyes with Brother Man: "I'm going to get what I need from you in a second. Right now, I'm dealing with the lady. Okay?"
"Damn, girl, whyya gotta git attitude? Black gotta do right by black, ya know?"
Soledad was already back to the boy."What happened?"
"My mother says he stole that carton of orange juice, walked out of the store with it and didn't pay. She tried to stop him, and he pushed her."
"Aw, sheeee—"
"That's when Mom got her gun."
"Dat's bullshit."
"Is that bullshit? Is it? How much bullshit would it be if I hauled your ass in? How many warrants going to get kicked back on you?" Getting the feeling Brother Man was mostly talk, Lesker was getting bold with himself. He was about to give a real live OJ-stealing street thug a hard time. He was about to get himself some stories to tell the other cops in Seattle, or Alaska, or wherever he finally ended up.
Dark side of the moon.
"I didn't steal no juice. I paid for it."
"Yeah, you did," Lesker editorialized.
"A brother cain't have ends? I got more in my pocket than you do, blue."
"You sure don't waste any of it on wardrobe, slick."
"Lesker!" Soledad's head was starting to hurt."Let's keep it civil."
"How about let's do this: How about we remember who's senior here? How about that, O'Roark?"
The Korean woman added something to all that, but she added it in her native tongue and got nothing but ignored for her trouble.
&nb
sp; Soledad brought things back around to the boy, who seemed to be the only one present she had anything like a rapport going with.
She asked: "Did you see him take the orange juice?"
"My mother said he did."
"But did you see him take it?"
"My mother's not lying. He obviously stole it."
An eyebrow from Soledad."Obviously?"
"All those people do is steal."
More eyebrow."Excuse me?"
Lesker: "You got that."
"Muthafuckin' choon."
Something from the Korean woman.
Soledad to the boy: "I'm one of those people, all right?"
"Yeah, but you're, you know…" The boy, formerly articulate, suddenly found the spoken language a struggle."You're different." He took a moment to figure how."You're… a cop."
"All I need from you is the story straight and simple. I don't need any help with anthropology."
"Sheeeit, goddamn sellout what she is."
Soledad felt like a mill was being rolled, slow, over her. Forget the heat and Lesker and having to deal with the high crime of fruit juice theft. The alleged high crime of fruit juice theft. Here was a smart young kid taking good advantage of everything America had to offer. Except part of the package deal was all the racism he could carry. Black vs. Asian, Soledad caught square in the middle, and the representative from her side doing very little representing.
She prayed, quietly, to herself, for something to transport her from the situation.
The thing about prayers: Occasionally they get answered.
Quick, violent, the ground shook. Shook so much the assembled group had to spread their arms, sway to maintain balance. Could have been an earthquake, but it was too severe and over too fast. It was more like an explosion. The screams that followed the thunderclap of noise would make you think so.
Typical LA: People ran toward the panic, not away from it. There'd be death and mangled bodies to see, but only if you were in the front row.
Soledad ran too, but with a different purpose: to save lives if she could. To help. To do… something. Lesker was behind her, but all he got was farther behind.
Olive Street.
Pushing through the crowd, the gawkers, Soledad saw: not an explosion. In the middle of the boulevard the ground had split open, collapsed. A sinkhole that swirled thick, dark and dirty. A collision of earth and water. On each side of the hole—it was a chasm stretching sidewalk-to-sidewalk, probably as deep below the churning water—LA traffic stopped dead, a parting like the Red Sea between cars. That meant down there in the pit…
Chaos. Confusion. People trying to get away. People trying to get close. Screams and the ever-present heat. A wall of faces, each registering its own response to the disaster.
To the crowd: "Get back! Everybody move back! Lesker!"
Lesker, just hitting the scene. The short run had turned his uniform a sweaty dark blue. If he said anything back to Soledad, it was lost under the hard huffs of his overworked lungs.
"Get these people away from here! Get on a radio, we need EMS and Rescue to go down for survivors!"
Survivors?
Soledad looked into the hole. A main had broken. That was obvious. It'd turned the ground above it to near liquid that raged in a soil river through the Red Line tunnels below the boulevard.
Survivors?
There were only the dead, and they were probably washed halfway to Santa Monica by now.
"Officer!"
"Come on, move back. You've got to clear—"
"Hey, Officer!"
Pushing through the crowd, a guy in a worker's uniform. The patch sewn to his shirt: MTA.
Soledad grabbed him, pulled him close."You work this site? Were you down there?"
"Yeah, I—"
"How many men down there?"
"Nobody. We were on break and—"
"Is there an access tunnel? Any way to get to the cars?"
"There are no cars. That's what I'm saying: There's nobody down there."
The constant throb of adrenaline that made reacting easy made thinking hard. Soledad forced herself to understand."The traffic…"
The MTA man carefully, clearly painted the picture."I'm standing there on the corner, we're on break like I said. Just come up out of the tunnel, me and my crew. We're standing there, and all of a sudden the traffic it… it splits up, you know? Those cars back there stopped." He pointed to the vehicles that rimmed the sinkhole."Every one of them stopped where they were."
"Stopped why?"
"Just did. They stopped, and the ones in front kept moving. I'm standing there looking at it thinking, ain't that queer: the cars stopping. I'm thinking just that, then the ground opens up."
Soledad looked at the hole. No workmen down there. She looked at the cars lined up to one side or the other of the sinkhole, but none—not one—where the ground had split.
She repeated the engineer's words to herself: Ain't that queer?
"It's like…" The engineer thought of something new to add to the obvious."It's like a—"
"A miracle," Soledad finished for him. A miracle. Like that gas explosion on the news that had injured no one. Like that little girl who survived getting hit by the car.
Miracles.
Miracles don't just happen.
Her eyes to the faces, the limitless faces in the crowd. Her hand to her gun. Looking. Looking. Endless expressions: horror, fear, shock, alarm, excitement. Expressions, expressions, expressions… then nothing. No expression. One face that was blank. One face that was placid. One face that was perfectly calm because it knew no one was hurt. It knew of miracles.
Soledad pushed through the crowd toward the face: a woman wrapped in a heavy overcoat. Too heavy for the ninety-plus-degree LA day.
The woman saw Soledad coming, surging for her. The woman smiled some, turned away and walked.
"Hold it!" Soledad swam, fought through the crowd.
The woman didn't have to fight or shove. She seemed to just float away.
"Stop, police!" Hand on her gun, too many people to pull it out.
The woman, in the open, gaining distance. She walked, but somehow moved faster than a leisured pace. Quicker than her casual steps would seem to carry her.
One arm before her, Soledad swatted aside the gawkers, their attention having shifted from the victimless sinkhole onto her."Move!" The people moved, not nearly enough."Move!"
Tripping, stumbling out into the open, Soledad saw the woman getting farther away. Soledad fought herself upright, raced forward.
Gun out, she hit an intersection.
A car horn, the skid of tires.
Soledad one-handed herself over the hood of the Ford that almost took her out, hit the pavement, rolled, kept moving. Eyes on the woman, eyes dead on the woman.
Up the boulevard the woman slowed, turned. Still smiling; warm, gentle. Fearless. She had nothing to fear. Hands to her coat, she peeled it open and let it fall away.
Soledad stopped cold. She had thought that in her studies, in her research, in the files and documents she'd poured over year by year, she had seen every metanormal, every freak and mutie known.
She had never seen this.
The woman—white of skin. Somehow golden of tone—free of her coat, spread wide a pair of feathered wings.
The gasp, from Soledad, from the crowd well behind her, was audible.
And then the woman was in the air. She didn't leap up or beat her wings, she quite simply raised for the sky.
Recovered, Soledad gave a final warning: "Police, stop!"
The woman sailed on upward.
With her gun, Soledad took aim. One shot she would get. One poor shot at the flying woman gliding farther and farther away. Two-handed grip, finger on the trigger… Squeeze.
Bang.
In the air the near speck that was the flying woman shook, faltered. Rose again. Then sank.
Soledad marked the trajectory and ran for it as the figure twisted, tumbled, spir
aled to the ground. To the hard dirty pavement.
Soledad was there, gun extended, ready to shoot. The scars on her neck were a reminder that muties don't go down easy. She eased up to the woman stretched out on the boulevard. Not dead. Not yet. But in no shape to do damage.
With her foot Soledad rolled the woman to her back, as much as she could with those wings—mangled, snapped now. She was bleeding hard, but with her complexion so naturally white the loss was hard to calculate.
The woman looked to Soledad, still smiling. Different than before. Still warm, but something else now. Forgiving.
Behind her, sucking air hard and dripping sweat, Lesker came running. He looked at the woman, her wings. To Soledad: "Jesus Christ! You shot an angel!"
"She's not an angel. Angels don't bleed. She's just another freak."
Lesker had too much disbelief to hear any of that. He knew what he saw and reported it to Soledad one more time."You shot a fucking angel!"
It's hard at first. Sort of. Balancing the law with what's right. The law tends to be dear. What's right is gray, if it's even in that much contrast.
A guy climbs a fence onto land marked no trespassing, it's wrong. Guy climbs a fence onto land marked no trespassing to pull someone who's drowning out of a lake, he did wrong to do right.
That's the simple version of things.
A guy's walking down the street, crowded street—civvies, old women, kids. And this guy's walking along with a loaded gun; out in the open, finger on the trigger. What do you do? You treat him like the pope? Offer him a foot massage? What you do is you act like he's a potential criminal. A probable killer. You protect those people on the street any way you have to, up to and including putting a bullet in the guy. It's the right thing. Now, let's say this guy isn't just carrying a loaded weapon. Let's say he is a loaded weapon. Let's say he might not just take out a couple of people on the street, let's say he could take out every single person on the entire block, half the city… You going to be any more gentle with that guy than the guy sporting the gun? Hell if I think so. And every freak there is, is nothing but a loaded weapon looking to release. And maybe, sometimes, because you're human, you question: Is this, is what we do, right? Then you think of the guy on the street with the gun. The law says take him out. Common sense says take him out. So what do we do? We take them out.