by John Ridley
"You misunderstand me. Whoever is responsible for the killings feels personally threatened by metanormals and is acting upon his or her feelings. And if they have no fear of freaks, do you think they would be afraid to deal with you? For your own sake, I would be gentle with this Raddatz."
The threat of things getting physical. The threat of violence and possible death that would have to be met in kind. Suddenly, Soledad was starting to like her new job.
Might as well have been talking with God. Maybe not God. How about the Holy Ghost? If nothing else, Officer Tom Hayes felt like he was talking with that one model on the cover of all those fitness magazines he was desperate to meet. Not that he felt sexual toward Soledad. But in a cop's life that was less than he'd dreamed of, sitting across from one of the most talked-about operators on the LAPD was a dream come true.
He wanted to ask Soledad about some of her exploits. Not fan boy-style. He honestly wanted a firsthand breakdown of truth from fiction. He wanted, he wanted to get her take on the job, on being MTac. He wanted very badly to know-her opinion-the best way to work up to G Platoon. Tom Hayes had a thousand questions for Soledad.
Sitting with him in the coffee room at Hollenbeck station, Soledad had only questions about the John Doe Officer Hayes had found.
The first had been: How'd you find him?
"Didn't really. Some kids had gone down in the river, were doing some boarding on the concrete. Saw the body, made the call."
"Your report said his clothes were burned away."
"Yes, ma'am. Looked like it."
"But not his flesh. Wasn't that weird to you?"
Officer Hayes flipped his hands up but wasn't flippant. He tried to be respectful with the gesture. Added a look that said: "Didn't think about it." He would have said as much himself but was afraid Soledad'd pick up the crack in his voice. He was nervous. Soledad was the kind of cop who could, down the road, have sway over his getting into G Platoon. And the way she was asking questions: How come he didn't do this, didn't do that… He shouldn't be nervous, Hayes told himself. Maybe he should have been more observant, but wasn't like he'd fucked up. Right? He hadn't. Had he?
Hayes said: "He looked like a vag to me. He looked like he had on, you know, bum wear. Half the time stuff that's burned or torn is the best they've got. I thought he died of exposure or drink. He was stiff as hell. Thought it was rigor at the time."
Soledad felt stares. She'd always been sensitive to other people's eyes. The locked looks she was getting now didn't, they didn't feel like the ones she was usually most attuned to. The "it's a black woman!?" ogles she got when she had the audacity to slick herself right where somebody thought a black woman didn't belong. Still, she felt eyes rolling over her. Probably 'cause in the open and out of uniform she was having a chat with a uniformed cop. Some of the cops staring maybe thought Soledad was just a friend. A chick friend who'd come around for some palaver with Hayes which he'd get some good-natured shit about later. But some probably considered Soledad was official in some sense. Admin or IA.
That made every other cop in the joint instantly, reflexively reassess their relationship with the blue who was having a sit-down.
Hayes didn't hardly seem to care. To Soledad he came off a little nervous, but other than that, his head was level all around. Soledad figured if he ever had his shot, he'd make a good MTac. A real solid one. His odds of surviving serving a warrant on a freak were probably 60/40 in favor. Better than the 70/30 most MTacs rated.
"Anything," Soledad asked, "at the scene that'd make you think it was foul play?"
"Nothing. But LA River, if there was anything, it might have gotten washed away. I imagine DMI gave a look once they found out it was a mutie."
"They didn't find anything."
"What about at one of the other incident sites?"
Soledad looked right at Hayes. She didn't answer the question. The question didn't make sense.
She asked: "What incident sites?"
"One of the other… well, you know, where he was hit by the train. It was in my report. You read it, right?"
Soledad went back to just giving a stare to Hayes. The question didn't make…
"Just walk me through everything," she said. "Take me through it."
Officer Hayes didn't bother with any orientating. Soledad had questions, he gave her what he knew to be fact. "Got the call on the John Doe. Went over, spotted the body, called it in. Right?"
Right, meaning: We on the same page so far? "Right."
"Previous to that, the station had taken a report from the MTA, Something got struck on the Gold Line. Engineer thought maybe he'd hit somebody, but couldn't find a vie. No blood or flesh on the car. Way the train was tore up, engineer thought some joker might've put a store mannequin on the track or something. It's LA. Wouldn't be the craziest thing somebody ever did. I found out later the John Doe was a mutie. Did the math. The mutie must've been the one that got clipped by the train. I know DMI handles investigating freaks. But it's my beat. I know the neighborhood. Thought it couldn't hurt to do some talking to people, see if anybody saw anything, heard anything. If they did, maybe they were more likely to talk to a cop they knew than one they didn't."
And it was a good way for a beat cop to score some points too, Soledad thought. And she thought: Hayes was all about the ambition. Forget MTac. He was going to be brass.
Prompting him to go on: "So you talked around, talked to some people."
"One witness said he saw someone running through the area on foot. Another guy thought he saw someone fall off a building. Fall or jump. Thought he did, but the guy got up and ran off." "Our John Doe."
Hayes nodded. "Way I see it, our freak was going crazy. Tearing up buildings, walls… looks like he slagged part of a mailbox on one street. I don't know. He was drunk, I guess. Maybe high. Lucky the only thing that happened was he ended up dead. Anyway, that was all in the report I gave to DMI. Should have been."
Yeah. Soledad thought. Should have been. But not a word of it was.
Jealousy. That was the thought for Soledad's drive home. Jealousy was the logical reason she'd come up with for Hayes's report getting redacted. DMI officers were resentful that a beat cop'd done a better job investigating things than they had. So left out what he'd said- removed what he'd written-from their report.
But the jealousy theory required some serious denial. There wasn't a cop in the PD who wasn't territorial about his or her department. But you'd have to believe that DMI cops-grown men- would get bitch jealous of a flatfoot doing some flatfooting in the first place. And say they were, whatever, jealous or resentful of the work Hayes'd done. No reason they couldn't just stick his work in their report, claim it as their own, and that would be that about that.
Irrelevance. That was another possibility. What Hayes had come up with, those additional incident sites didn't merit inclusion. But to not at least reference them was sloppy police work. In her short time at DMI sloppy wasn't something she found the cops there to be.
Reality: What Officer Hayes had offered up had been purged from the DMI report.
Why?
Did Soledad have to ask herself why? Yeah.
Because she didn't care for the obvious answer. The freak had died a questionable death. Probably, it was murder. So the obvious, the unsettling answer to the question why was that the people who purged the report were conspirators after the fact. Or worse. They're the killers.
East LA was a fairly shitty place. Drugs tree-flowed up and down the streets. A bromide against the better life that wasn't so much better for the people who'd risked everything- everything being their wives, their lives, their well-being-to get to America so they could clean toilets or clean pools, stroller around rich people's babies or hang out on street comers hoping some shifty contractor would roll by offering work at cut-rate pay before the INS came around offering an all-expense-paid trip back to their country of origin. A few weeks, a few months, a few years of that and, yeah, you'd be a hophead too. So,
in East LA, there were drugs. There was everything that came with drugs: guns and gangs and stealing to get drug money and whoring to get drug money and the shooting of people because they got in the way of drug money being exchanged. It was shit cops should've handled. But in East LA the cops worked out of Rampart. Comparing the two, Rampart cops made East LA gangs look like castrati.
Soledad was a cop. But no matter her badge and gun, or maybe because they were of principal significance, her current proximity to East LA — looking at it on a map in her office — was as close as she cared to get to that part of town. But in her head, at least, she had to get close to it. She had some concepts to calculate.
Soledad was a cop, but she wasn't a detective. She didn't have years of know-how when it came to asking questions. She had instinct. She had a nurtured ability to look at things a couple of times in a couple of different ways asking each go-round: What's wrong with this deal? Under the circumstances that'd have to pass for being a detective.
Soledad backtracked the final hours and last minutes of the mutie John Doe. His place of dying, or at least where the body was found, got an X on Soledad's map. The action made physical her thoughts, gave her focus. Made it feel like she was doing something besides waiting for answers to come. The Gold Line.
JD got clipped by a train crossing the track. Maybe that was enough to put down an invulnerable. Maybe this freak, maybe JD was only kind of invulnerable. Titanium skin wrapped around garden-variety innards. Gets hit by the train. Internal damage. Dies.
The Gold Line got highlighted.
But Officer Hayes had said a witness saw him drop from a window. Jump from a window? If that didn't kill him, would a train?
And what was JD doing on the tracks? This guy wasn't a bum scrounging for food, looking for shelter. So what was he doing on the tracks?
He was crossing the tracks.
To?
"To the river" wasn't answer enough. To the river for what? Crossing the track to the LA River. Why go to the river?
Why go from point to point to point?
Along the way something happens. He ends up slamming into a wall. Soledad had dug up a photo of the wall. Cement. Graffiti-tagged. Now with a body-sized divot where the Doe's invulnerable self took out a chunk of it.
And the mailbox Officer Hayes'd told her about. She had a photo of that too. The mailbox used to be a big blue stump same as you'd find on the comer of any street in Anytown, USA. It used to be a symbol of a citizen's right to communicate in the slowest way known to man that didn't directly involve animals. The unit was wrecked, bent, misshapen.
So… what? The Doe goes nuts, has an emotional meltdown, slams a wall, wrecks a mailbox, takes a run across the tracks…
Maybe he wasn't just going nuts. Maybe he was scoring. In need of a score bad.
Sounds very dull for an event involving a freak.
But the first freak Soledad ever took a warrant call on was a flamethrower jacked up on crack. Maybe they were the next step in evolution, but a percentage of them, no different from a percentage of normal people-be they lowlifes living in the hardest urban centers, be they lofty talk radio hosts-just wanted to get high.
The burned clothes?
Maybe if the freak was freebasing, he lit himself up. But Officer Hayes didn't report any paraphernalia around the body, and Officer
Hayes had proven himself to be ass-kissing thorough. And who the hell freebases anymore?
Jumping from a window, running the streets, crossing the tracks, running… He was running.
Why do people run? "Cause they're getting chased.
The Doe was getting chased.
Somebody wants to kill a freak, so they give it a gas bath, flick a match at it.
Reasonable if it was some don't-know-any-better hate group. But if it was murder, if it was the cadre, if they had targeted the Doe, wouldn't they know he was invulnerable? Wouldn't they know gas and fire wouldn't do much more than scrub him clean?
With her pen Soledad drew circles on the map. Circles overlapping circles. Lines of confusion. There were bits of nonlogic, but that the JD was targeted was clear. A police report had been sanitized. The only people in position to do both were cops from DMI.
The really ugly part of all that: If it was true, Tashjian had been right.
Tucker Raddatz had a decent life. He had a decent little place in Studio City. Nice lawn. Some trees. A pool. Little but decent. He had a very decent wife: Helena. She was from Spain. Born there. Grew up in America. She was pretty. Or rather, decent-looking. Two kids, boys, seven and five. They weren't at the age yet where everything their father did embarrassed them. They actually liked being around their dad. and on the surface, at least, didn't seem to be moving toward a time when they wouldn't. There was none of the gloom around the edges of Raddatz's homelife that he seemed to slog with him in his cop life, In the life Soledad was familiar with. A palpable lack of affliction was the first thing Soledad noticed when she rolled up to Raddatz's house. She noticed that, and she noticed Raddatz didn't come off as being real happy to see her.
Helena didn't pick up on the agitation. Or If she did pick up on it, could act the hell out of seeming to welcome the unwelcomed to her home. She greeted Soledad, walked Soledad out to the pool to wait while her husband finished up whatever Soledad'd interrupted with her arrival. Helena brought out some lemonade. Homemade and fresh. Offered it to cool Soledad's wait.
And Soledad sat, sat some…
She'd left her sunglasses in the car. Mistake. The sunlight kicking off the water of the pool was nearly painful.
The patio door opened. Raddatz's kids. Not him.
They jumped in the pool, the younger boy wearing orange floaties. Splashed wildly. So much happiness. So much, despite the fact they would never know a world in which a full and whole city of San Francisco existed. What was such joy, unfiltered and undamaged? The bliss of ignorance? The resurrection of hope? Kids who just didn't know better than to be happy, splash and play? That was the thing, wasn't it: that life was malleable, able to conform itself around its circumstances? Simply: No matter how fucked-up shit was, people thrived. In example was modern history, as within modern history is when man's come the closest to- remained within reach of-making himself extinct. But even when Europe was mustard-gassing itself into oblivion, when Hitler was Final Solutioning everybody in sight, when it was about the Greater Southeast Asia Coprosperity Sphere, when it was all about the cold war or ethnic cleansing or the war on terror, up to the war between normals and metanormals you could still pick up the paper and read about how the local team had blown a ten-point "lead and gotten eliminated from the play-offs. You could still turn on the eleven o'clock news and catch a piece about the dog or flower or auto show coming to town. There was a girl somewhere with her girlfriends all giddy with themselves as she tried on wedding dresses. There was a guy at a newsstand, eager, because the latest FHM had just rolled off the presses with a neatly airbrushed ass shot of that month's It Girl. Even at the edge of forever there were attempts at normalcy. Forays into happiness. The human spirit conforming to chaos.
What had Tashjian called them? Acts of life.
Acts of the human spirit. Human spirit. Not the metahuman spirit. Human spirit survived. Humanity survived.
It would if Soledad had. anything to say about it.
The patio door again. Raddatz. Hook off, stump showing. He crossed right to Soledad, sat next to Soledad on an adjoining lounge.
No preamble: "What?"
For a second Soledad thought about cracking wise on Raddatz not even giving her a hello. But she didn't feel like jokes, and jokes weren't about to buy her anything.
So getting right to it: "Know a beat cop named Hayes?"
"No."
Lie. Didn't even think about it. An absolute assertion needs consideration. A lie you know is untrue. What's there to think about?
Soledad: "He's working out of the Hollenbeck station. Same area the John Doe was found. Know him now?"
"What's the problem, O'Roark?"
He'd gone from lying to evading.
"Here's what I need: I need people to be straight with me. I show up at DMI, nobody wants to touch me. Then you give me the hand.
You and your cadre. I know about them; the guys you keep tight. You take me out to look at a dead freak, only that's all you do. You don't let me in on any investigation, if there is one. Then I find out a cop's report has been purged. Why?"
Raddatz looked off somewhere. Nowhere in particular. Just not at Soledad.
Soledad didn't care for that. "When I said be straight with me, I meant now, not when you felt like it."
"Or…?"
"Do not fuck with me."
The sound of the words shrieked against the air. Chop. Chop. Chop. A swinging blade that metronomed in a manner not to be ignored.
Raddatz: "I feel like, why do I feel like this is a Setup?"
"You think this is more than me just asking for answers, then send me walking. Whatever the reason: I don't fit in, I'm a pain in the ass, I've got no skills for this, I'm a crazy black chick… whatever. Don't admit to anything, don't say anything. But give me a way out before I get buried with the rest of you. I've been down IA road. Didn't care for it. All I'm looking for is a little self-preservation."
Raddatz looked away from whatever it was he wasn't really looking at. Not back to Soledad, but to his two boys going nuts in the pool.
"What do you want, Soledad?" Only time she could recall Raddatz using her first name. "I don't mean why are you here right this minute. What's your big objective? Why'd you go MTac?"
"Could ask you the same-"
"But that wouldn't get us any closer to anything, so I'm asking you. Why?"
"To…" How to say it? How to put into words what she felt, but so rarely articulated? "Save lives. To save life. Human life."
"And that's what's most important, right? That the… the. I don't know. The cloud of death that's been hanging over us since San Francisco, since before that, that it gets blown away."
Soledad looked to where Raddatz was looking, to his boys.