Helena bought it. Through her love of her man, her fury at him for maybe having gotten himself hurt or worse, she bought the lie.
Raddatz did a quiet thanks to God. Helena being a cop’s wife, he knew her intuition—or her enhanced suspicion from years of proximity to a DMI officer. There was a chance she wouldn’t have gone for word one. Then would come questions and recriminations. Accusations. Was he off drinking, was it another woman . . . Raddatz really only had the time and temperament to douse a small fire, not to deal with a whole forest set ablaze.
So in a way it was a little ironic. She’d bought the big lie of her husband stepping in and helping out. What she couldn’t get past: him telling her he had to go out and push paper. Right now.
“Somebody else can’t do it?”
“I was a witness.”
“So do it tomorrow.”
“The time I sit here talking I could be done and back.”
Head up, looking right at her husband: “You were dead.”
“I don’t . . .”
“I said to myself he’s dead. Not maybe, but . . . I wanted to accept it. Be done accepting it. I wanted to be ready for it.”
“Those days are over. I’m not MTac anymore.”
“It doesn’t matter. If you know the feeling once, you never—”
“I was gone a couple of hours.”
“To me, Tucker, you were dead.”
Just then he realized she was cupping his mangled wrist. Hook off. Raddatz was letting it breathe. His nerve endings were pretty much useless. The whole of it, the stump, the scars, the remnants of surgery—surgeries—was a hideous sight. Never, never once that Raddatz could remember had Helena ever recoiled from it or from its touch to her body. Never that he could recall did she hold back from making contact with it.
She was such a good woman. No pejorative there. No marginalization regarding her gender in relation to modern society. What was right and fine, what was the core of all vows that a man and woman take when joined before God and the law was what Helena owned and regularly put into practice.
Raddatz asked himself: Would she—if Helena knew the truth of things, if she knew that he was helping the kind who’d tried to turn her into a widow, had done as much as they could to turn the human race into a distant memory—would she finally recoil from him then? Would her anger still be a combination of love and rage, or just the rage?
Or maybe, know what might shove her away? The fact her husband didn’t trust this “good woman,” this woman of her vows . . . he didn’t trust his partner, his wife, the heart of his life enough to be honest with her. That would most likely set her back same as a fist to the face.
“I’m telling you those days are done.” Raddatz hoped he’d go to his grave not knowing what the revelation of the lie would do to his wife. He could endure, had endured a lot of pain and loss and suffering and come away from it a version of whole despite his scars. What he could not take, what would leave him a wreck: breaking Helena’s heart. “I’m not that kind of cop anymore.”
“So you get in the middle of, of—”
“A punk acting like a man. A kid running around high with a knife. His knife, my gun. You don’t need two hands to win that fight.” An attempt at humor. It got Raddatz nothing. “I sat on the kid for a minute until the—”
“It wasn’t a minute.”
“I had to wait for uniformed cops. I told you.”
“Go two hours without hearing from me when I’m supposed to just be running an errand. How would you feel?”
“Jesus. By the time it was all done—”
“How would you feel?”
Like he’d been hacked open. Like his insides were being lifted from him for no greater purpose than being spilled onto a floor. Like he was dying, which he might as well be because he wouldn’t want to go on living. And all that would pretty much be his initial reaction.
But Raddatz said, calmly, evenly, covering his true concern: “I’d be worried as hell. But my worry wouldn’t let me keep you from doing what you had to do in life.”
“Paperwork?”
Raddatz’s exasperation was turning real. “I’m going to go to the station, I’m going to do some work, I’m going to come home. You need anything from Ralph’s?” He was already moving for the garage.
Helena mumbled a no.
Raddatz gave the most casual good-bye he could. The kind a wife’d get from her husband cop off to do paperwork and a stop at the store on the way home. The kind he’d given her a thousand times previous. Now he couldn’t even be sure he was faking it well.
Raddatz pulled out of the driveway, rounded a corner, stopped his car and picked up Eddi.
Re: the time it’d taken Raddatz to deal with his wife: “Home issues?”
“Cop’s life, cop’s wife. Always issues.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Hayden’s.”
“Who’s Hayden?”
Raddatz kept mum to that.
Eddi, again: “Who’s Hayden?”
“You carry grudges well?”
“Why?”
“Hayden’s the one who laid you out.”
Eddi’d always wondered . . . not always. Not even sometimes. Occasionally, when she was taking the Sepulveda exit off the 405, the La Brea exit from the 10, almost any exit off the 101 between Chauenga and Sunset, Eddi wondered: the little apartments? Dirty, ratty apartments tucked close to the freeway that absorbed the continual roll of rubber on road, the noise pollution associated with it, the toxic fumes that came from it: Who lived in those? Who the hell would live in those?
The answer, obvious: anyone who couldn’t live somewhere else, somewhere decent. The poor. The transient. The unbalanced. The undocumented.
And now Eddi knew to add to the list at least one superhuman who would otherwise, living normal, risk being exposed and hunted down. Killed.
Standing across from that superhuman, Hayden, standing in his shithole of an apartment, Eddi wasn’t sure what she should be feeling. The hate she’d always felt for the kind that’d made her fatherless. Hate with some added resentment for this freak that put a single, unanswered punch on her that still left each pulse of her heart throbbing in her head. Some kind of awe that she was spitting close to a metanormal and they weren’t actively trying to kill each other.
Or maybe she should be feeling pathos. Not so much for the freak, but for his wife and for his kid who was maybe three years old. Old enough he should be starting preschool. He should be outside playing, running, laughing. He was doing none of that. Probably never would. That kind of life was reserved for kids who didn’t grow up hiding out in crappy apartments near off-ramps ’cause at least one of their parents was a freak.
Not a social worker, Eddi told herself. She wasn’t there to hand out pity. Contrivances were in need of being conceived. Conceive them. Make things correct. Move on. Eddi told herself quite firmly: You are not part of this world.
“It’s difficult sometimes.” Hayden was doing the talking. “With my abilities, enhanced strength, it’s difficult—”
“To know how hard is too hard to hit somebody?”
“I’m sorry.”
Eddi recognized him. Beyond being the wispy, reedy guy who’d knocked her loopy, Eddi recognized him as the guy Raddatz had chatted with a couple of times at the newsstand. Chatted. Passed information with. Eddi should’ve been a little more observant.
Queer. Here was a guy, Hayden . . . trim and slight as he might have looked, here was a guy who could punch his way through a concrete slab same as regular people could poke a finger through tissue. Here was a guy that could’ve taken off Eddi’s head using any two digits of one hand. And here was this guy apologizing to Eddi. Standing back away from her. Cowering slightly, unconsciously, now that she stood opposite him. This is how badly the MTacs had freaks scared. This was the legacy of Soledad, of Yar, of Bo, of Reese, of every MTac that’d ever chalked a freak in the name of the law.
Eddi, making sur
e everybody’s on the same page: “So you got freaks getting killed. You wanted to know if freaks’re going after each other, starting back with their old ways.”
Raddatz nodded to the affirmative. “But we’ve got no motive for the attacks.”
“One superhuman wants to kill another. How much more reason do you need?”
“On the job, how many times did you come on really random violence? Guy robs a liquor store, he wants money. Guy jacks a car because he wants wheels. A girl gets killed because she jilted her man. I don’t care what kind of powers metanormals have, you’ve got to look at the crime same as any other. Besides . . .” Raddatz looked to Hayden. “If one of their own went off, they would know.”
They would know. Raddatz was acknowledging what the establishment feared: Metanormals weren’t just hidden among the normals. They had a network, an underground. As far as the establishment cared, that was one step removed from having a resistance. Forming an army.
And Raddatz was actually trusting Eddi with this information.
If he was trusting her. If he wasn’t handing her misinformation. Disinformation. But, really, wasn’t the trust Eddi’s to use or discard? She could keep on with Raddatz, hear him out, back his play. Or she could keep a metaphorical hand on her gun ready for betrayal.
“Okay, so this isn’t random . . .” What was the phrase Eddi was looking for? “Freak-on-freak crime.”
“No,” from Hayden. “Whoever it is, or they are, they’ve . . . they’ve made targets of us.”
“The last guy to get killed, Anson Hall, he’d been stalked. We got out the word among the metas: Mind your back for anybody who’s watching you, clocking you. That’s how,” Raddatz said, “we knew to stake the house where the last murder attempt was.”
“Melinda thought—”
Eddi asked: “That was the intended vic?”
Hayden hesitated. He used her name in front of Eddi by accident. He’d just outed to an unknown quantity a fellow freak.
“It’s all right.” Raddatz vouched for Eddi. Went out further on the limb.
Hayden said: “Melinda Franklin. She has the ability to alter thermal degrees in a microclimate.”
“A weather girl,” Eddi slanged.
“She thought she was being watched. She got a message to some other metanormals, to me. I told Tucker.”
Hayden was so insubstantial. He was in his mien, he was physically. Going from the gut, Eddi’d always figured a guy who was superstrong would have muscles the size of small bull calves. But if you could lift almost anything and everything that was set before you—from engine blocks to locomotives—how could you ever develop musculature? Couldn’t. No more than pumping five-ounce weights would land Eddi on the cover of a fitness mag. Metagenetics had their own, odd rules. And admittedly, for Eddi, even in this short amount of time seeing them from the inside out held a certain fascination.
A semitrailer coming down the off-ramp took Eddi’s attention. She looked to Hayden’s wife. Hayden’s wife had been watching Eddi stare at her husband. She didn’t care for the way Eddi was staring, studying her man as if he were a control animal at a university lab. Hayden’s wife made her feelings plain in expression alone.
Eddi to Raddatz: “Why are you involved? Besides your guilt or near-death experience or whatever. Freaks’ve got—”
“Do you like ‘chink’?” That from Hayden’s wife. “You call us freaks, do you like to be called a chink?”
“Chinks are from China.” Eddi calm enough to be commenting on a recipe for soup. Directions to the mall. “My family tree goes back to Japan. So they’ve got all the power this side of God. Why don’t they just take care of the problem themselves?”
“That’s what the people up top want.”
“They don’t fight back they get killed. They fight back they get blamed for using their abilities and end up hunted.” Eddi, flippant: “Kinda sucks to be a metanormal.”
Hayden, not sarcastic, serious: “Yeah. Kind of.”
The boy, with his mother, just sat and listened. Grown people standing around talking about the thousandth variation on hunting season on the unique, and he just listened. The thing was, even if both his parents were metanormals, it wasn’t a sure bet he’d have an active gene. Wouldn’t know at the earliest until puberty. For most that’s when the gene went active. And how would that be for this kid? Early teen years, getting zits and pubic hair and maybe the ability to rip sequoias from their roots or see through brick walls or have control over the metals of the earth. What do you do then? You try to live “normal,” or do you take your abilities and pay back the normals for what they did to your kind? It occurred to Eddi that maybe this moment was merely a polite introduction to the boy. Their severe meeting was years and circumstance away. And what would the circumstance be? Violent, hopeful? Would it end in death or inspiration? Eddi was getting with the idea the future was beginning right then. And right then Eddi got, or was at least starting to feel, the weight of Raddatz’s words: It is time to end fear.
Okay, so what did Eddi have? Eddi had nothing. Raddatz had little to give her beyond what was known. What was obvious. Freaks were being killed. Tashjian had given her that much coming in. All Raddatz had added was a long-winded assertion freaks were the vics in the situation. Backed it up with nothing more than the word of a freak itself. Eddi didn’t take it. She didn’t disbelieve Raddatz, but she wasn’t going on trust anymore. She was also going to jettison the gut instinct that almost caused her to commit murder. She would start acting like a cop. A cop alone, for sure, but a cop.
And where’d that put her? Nowhere. The freaks were no help. No matter the underground they had going, they didn’t know—at least the way Hayden told things—who might be responsible for the killings. And Raddatz really only knew—again, according to story—what the freaks were feeding him. Raddatz had been hiding intel, been chasing tips, but had been able to do little investigating. And what amounted to his investigating unit, the rest of the cadre, they were zero help where they were.
And yet, ironically, the only help Eddi had was coming from beyond the grave. Soledad. Her journal. Whether Tashjian was lying to her or not, using her or not, she’d come into the situation to collect intel—go back over Raddatz’s work, be it honest or otherwise, vivisect it and hand the pieces to another. Like with everything else in her life, Soledad’d come at the chore with frigid dispassion. Sentimentality is fine when you’re reflecting on things. But in Soledad’s world attaining a point of reflection would have been impossible being sentimental. In the end, for Soledad, sentimentality wasn’t possible anyway.
So here was Eddi hoping what Soledad left behind would give her the perspective Soledad never had.
Accurately, succinctly, on the pages of her journal were summaries of Soledad’s conversations with Anson’s wife, with Officer Hayes—a notation about him trying to hit her up. There was her retracing of Anson’s steps, his running from his attacker. The burns to his clothes, as well as the possibility the attacker had thrown Anson into a wall, actually tried to beat him with a motorcycle.
That was troubling. A freak displaying multiple abilities. The thing that had taken out Raddatz’s old element, the berserker, had increased strength and speed, but it was just the meta version of a druggie on PCP. A mutie that had actual separate, distinct abilities . . . It signaled the next step in evolution. It harbingered the end of normal humankind.
And wouldn’t that be . . . ironic, poetic? As the freaks were a threat to normals, the superfreaks were now ready to wipe out the freaks.
But that was just theory. The very first one Eddi arrived at. Really, all that made it substantive was motive. It at least gave meaning to the murders.
Back in the day, in the age of heroes—Age of Heroes—those kinds of murders were easy to explain and so very public. One-Eyed Jack trying to prove he’s a badass by taking out the Egyptian. Death Nell trying to pay back Red Dawn for what’d happened to the Burningman. Every endowed evildoer on the
planet trying to assassinate Pharos in the belief that if he fell, the Age of Heroes would pancake with him.
In a way, in the wake of San Francisco, that seemed true.
Eddi was getting sentimental. Hadn’t she warned herself against it? Jesus, she wished she were Soledad. Maybe the first time she’d ever admitted that. Even to herself. Conflicted, yeah, but Soledad was rarely confused. Never distracted. She had her burden, but she carried her burden. Incorporated it. Eddi for all her toughness didn’t take loss well. After May Day her development arrested. She’d forever remain daddy’s little girl. And after the loss of Soledad . . . She knew she’d always be trying to prove herself to a woman who couldn’t care less what Eddi did or how she did it as long as the execution was fuckup-free.
Christ, Eddi muttered. This wasn’t an investigation. This was an exorcism. It was evidence that ignorance was the most blissful thing this side a hit of ketamine.
This was not something Eddi could at the moment deal with.
What she could deal with, what she needed or at least felt as though she needed . . .
Wouldn’t it be nice to waste some time with Vin?
The hell of it was, it was so comfortable down there. The shag of Vin’s carpet was fairly thick and took Eddi’s body well. The lack of conversation stressed her none. And the liquor . . . Eddi’d only had a little, but a little was all that was needed to make her numb. She almost could have envied Vin’s existence. But this was a treat for Eddi. A life lived oblivion-style on a daily basis, that’s not really living.
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