John Ridley_Those Who Walk in Darkness 02

by What Fire Cannot Burn

  Then again . . .

  If you’re oblivious, how do you know?

  The alcohol was slackening her brain, allowing for elevated thought. Eddi felt herself caught in an ever-

  expanding yet closed loop of logic.

  Wasn’t good. She needed to pull out of it.

  “How do you go on like this, Vin?” Assign negativity to the whole scene. That should crush it.

  “Sweet, huh?”

  Was like Vin was reading her mind. Or just feeling her true emotion.

  Eddi, deflecting: “Not really.”

  “Haven’t moved in forty minutes.”

  “How would you know? You’ve been passed out.”

  “Yeah, right. I’m a little bit too much of a pro for that.”

  “I’m serious, Vin. How do you take this? It’d be different if you were—”

  “If I were what? I were really messed up?”

  “Yeah.” Not backing down. If anything, sobering some. “A hundred years ago . . . I’ll even give you thirty years ago, missing a leg meant something. What you’ve got lying around here somewhere is almost better than human, and you mope like you were paralyzed from the teeth down.”

  “I love it when people like you show up telling me about me.”

  “People who are trying to get you back on your . . .” Feet? She was drunk.

  But Vin laughed at the near pun. Made the flesh of his face tight. And for a second, under the bit of flab, behind a growth of beard, Eddi could reconstruct Vin’s good looks. Could see in her head again the senior officer who’d given her the nod for MTac. And the guy she’d accidentally shot in the chest.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s just a turn of phrase.”

  “I mean for shooting you.”

  From his expression it seemed he actually had to recall the event. It was more that he was confused as to why Eddi would even bring it up.

  “I know I probably blurted it a thousand times in the moment,” Eddi said. “But I don’t know if I ever really looked you in the eye and told you that.”

  “I’m pretty sure you did.”

  And then the two of them were quiet for a moment.

  And then the two of them were quiet for too long.

  “You want to ask me something,” Vin said. Then prompted: “Ask.” And when Eddi said nothing, he prompted again. “It’s all right. Ask. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than that foot crack you were—”

  “Do you like me?”

  The feeling when Eddi’s bullets hit him. The unexpected kick from a hundred mules. The rush of air from his lungs. Vin had that feeling again.

  “Do I like you as a person? Do I—”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I . . .”

  “Simple question.”

  “The hell it is.”

  “Simple answer, then. One word. Two choices. Yes or no.”

  “Let me ask you a question.”

  “This is going to go on forever, isn’t it?”

  “Just one question, then I’ll answer yours.”

  “Remind me what my question was, because I don’t even—”

  “You’re putting on a dodge, Eddi. You asked the question, are you afraid of the answer?”

  It was weird to Eddi how perspicacious Vin could be. Always had been. But now that he was still, as in a variation of nearly motionless in life, he seemed even more astute. The one-legged man in the chair was really a sage on the mountain. Maybe he wasn’t wasting himself. Maybe the disregard he displayed for every other aspect of his outward being allowed him to focus—and, yeah, this sounded a little ethereal to Eddi’s own ears—on his inner self. Ot maybe drinking just took away whatever filter he had left.

  It was really repugnant to Eddi that she found herself continually cruising by the conclusion that booze elevated rather than deflated.

  “Ask your question,” she said to Vin.

  “If I said I liked you, would it make you feel good personally, or would it make you feel as though you’d outdone Soledad?”

  Eddi’s answer was quick and honest. “I don’t know.”

  And Vin didn’t need to rejoin the statement, as it was obvious Eddi knew the significance of her answer. He did, however, compliment her candor.

  To which Eddi said: “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. I like you,” Vin said.

  Eddi didn’t know how to take that since, as Vin had pointed out, she didn’t know what she wanted from his answer. She really wished she owned Odin’s eye the way Vin seemed to. She didn’t. Probably never would. Settled instead on having a drink. Another couple of drinks.

  And it got late. Vin slid to sleep right where he sat. Eddi began to drift as well. As she departed, right before her she saw the answer to her original vexation. She’d said as much to Vin, who was beyond response.

  Eddi knew what she was hunting.

  Know what a No-Contact jacket is?”

  Raddatz felt like it was a trick question. He was starting to learn that Eddi seemed tricky by nature. When they were done with “all this,” she could do worse than stay with DMI.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a jacket, actually pretty stylish. Its major accessory is that it can surge an 80,000-kV pulse to anyone who tries to attack the wearer. The attacker gets fried, the person wearing doesn’t feel a thing. Know what a Power-Assist suit is?”

  “What you wear when your No-Contact jacket’s at the cleaners?”

  Not that the crack wasn’t mildly amusing, but Eddi was on her way to something. “It’s a digitally controlled exoskeleton that uses air pressure to enhance the wearer’s strength by a factor of six. It’s got a level detect to counterbalance the additi—”

  “Where’s this going?”

  “The theory coming in was freaks were being targeted for murder from inside DMI. Made sense. DMI maintains surveillance on freaks, DMI would have the intel to take them out. Except the freaks seemed to have been killed by something with superhuman abilities. So your theory: A freak was going after other freaks. That it happens is a historical fact. But that left motive. That left your freak buddies not knowing what was going on. So, maybe, both theories are wrong. And both are kind of right.”

  Raddatz and Eddi were in a booth in Raddatz’s sports bar. Good a place as any to do some talking away from any curious ears. Between sips of nothing stronger than coffee Raddatz was piecing together what Eddi was handing him. Trying to. Was too anxious to do the work himself. “Explain.”

  “Metas are like gods on earth. What do normal people do every day, except try to imitate God? Fly in a plane. Cure the common cold. Prenatal transplant surgery . . .”

  “We’re not after a metanormal? A normal’s doing this?”

  “A normal who’s geared himself up to be more than normal.”

  “I never heard of this stuff before. Where the hell does a guy get hold of a no-touch—”

  “No-Contact jacket. A Power-Assist—”

  “Where does he get ’em?”

  A cocktail waitress making her rounds. The drinks she was hauling looked reeeeeal tasty to Eddi.

  Eddi said: “Might have gotten some prototypes, modified them. Probably, he just cooked up his own version of them.”

  “By himself, basement workshop, he comes up with stuff the rest of the world’s never heard of.”

  “They’ve heard of it if they’ve crawled on the Internet. So, yeah, by himself, basement workshop or garage he does it up. Same as the guys who invented the airplane, the better home computer, the intermittent wiper . . . Same as Soledad did with her O’Dwyer. Look, Raddatz, you know how it works with HIT: Everything goes through committee, gets bid out, the development cost gets jacked up so everybody can get their kickbacks, long ass approval process . . . By the time anything gets done there are new administrators who don’t want anything in development from the old regime. So cops like you and me get shoved out onto the street with hardly better than our bare hands. Meanwhile,
Soledad’s gun is up, running, and evening the score.”

  “If you’re right—”

  “I am. That surveillance picture you had of the perp. That sweat suit? Just enough to hide the Power Assist under it. Add some Kevlar to that . . . Think about how your cadre got it. Beaten, ripped apart, burned. Soledad’s head snapped nearly clean off. Multiple abilities aren’t a trademark of freaks. It’s the work of man. I’m right.”

  Raddatz appreciated the confidence, didn’t fight it. “How’d you come up with all this?”

  I was getting drunk with the ex-lover of the dead woman I’m in postmortem conflict with when I had a boozy thought about the superhuman/man-made leg he has but won’t use? Was easier for Eddi to say: “Just did.”

  “That doesn’t give us who.”

  “It points us in the right direction. The killer’s still got to know his vics. If he killed Fernandez, that was an obvious target. But how did he know about other freaks living in hiding? Where would he get that kind of intel? Who’s got the hardest ax to grind, then swing at freaks?”

  “Somebody who’s DMI.”

  “Is,” Eddi said. “Or was.”

  You wouldn’t believe that someone who could reduce himself to the size of a microbe would be all that dangerous. Wagner didn’t. Course, Wagner never thought anything was dangerous. He was such a roughneck. Was that way straight out of the academy. And let me tell you, when I was in the academy—”

  “You were talking about—”

  “One of those freaks with molecular-reduction abilities. Wouldn’t think one of those was particularly dangerous. Wouldn’t think that.”

  Eddi could hardly think at all anymore. More than an hour, almost an hour and a half of stories. Stories from Blake about Blake’s days with MTac and Blake with his element going after this kind of freak and that kind of freak, and following that Eddi and Raddatz got a recounting of Blake’s exploits on DMI—though Raddatz could hardly recall Blake at DMI when their service overlapped. Blake was an older guy. No legs. Like Vin with an exponent. Good for little but sitting and talking.

  And talking.

  That’s how they differed, Blake and Vin. Vin hardly said a word. Blake wouldn’t shut up.

  “‘You go in,’ Wagner says,” Blake said, “‘and you step on the thing.’ And that’s what Wagner tried to do.”

  “Detective Blake . . .” Eddi tried to put a stop to things.

  Didn’t work. “So we’re inside the building, Wagner steps on the freak . . . only, the freak shrinks even smaller, gets inside Warner’s leg—”

  “Detective . . .”

  “Then expands again. Expands inside Wagner’s leg. Can you imagine having a man pop out of your leg?”

  Nardi—Frank Nardi, the ex-DMI cop they’d talked to before Blake—had been an easier interview. No nonsense. To the point. Helpful. Jack MacKay had been the easiest. MacKay was dead. Suicide. And there was Ed Blake and there were interviews yet to come with Houris Tynes and Marty Carlin. Raddatz and Eddi had profiled their suspect: ex-DMI cop. Ex allowed him a free hand to do his dirty chores and ex because the vics could all be cross-referenced with a DMI watch list that was four years stale. The suspect had no access to new intel—with a background in or knowledge of special weapons. That meant cops who’d worked A or D platoons or HIT.

  Five guys fit the profile. Nardi, MacKay, Blake, Tynes and Carlin.

  Wasn’t MacKay.

  Nardi had been easy, but maybe he was too easy. Too prepped. A guy with all the answers and ready to give ’em. To Eddi that made him hinky.

  Blake wasn’t hinky. Blake wasn’t their guy. Unless he was out boring freaks to death.

  Tynes was a strong possible, but if she had to take bets, Eddi was ready to bet on Carlin. Carlin’s package . . . it was . . . well, it was interesting.

  “I’ll tell you what it was like having a guy pop out of his leg.”

  “Hold on one second.” Raddatz did a hand-to-pocket, pulled out his cell. “Hello?” He listened, listened . . . “Jesus . . .” To Eddi: “It’s Donatell.”

  Donatell? Donatell was dead.

  Raddatz was up and moving as he repocketed his phone. “Gotta go.” A couple of pats to Blake’s shoulder.

  Blake: “Bad one?”

  “Metal morpher in Carson.”

  “Plastic,” Blake said. “Come at it loaded up with plastic and the thing’ll run from you like a politician runs from responsibility.”

  Raddatz, Eddi headed out. Thanked Blake for the tip. Left Blake with a smile. The knowledge there were still cops out there kicking superass.

  Outside the house, walking to their car, Eddi to Raddatz: “Donatell?”

  “First name I thought of.”

  “Could’ve just told Blake we had to go.”

  “Guy’s got nobody. He wants to tell stories.”

  “So you take a fake phone call. You’re a softy.”

  “Not about being soft. When I get to be like Blake, stuck on a shelf and forgotten, I hope somebody leaves me with the illusion that what I did mattered.”

  Now you fucking come? Now you’re here? Where were you when I needed you? Where were you when he was pounding on me?”

  Ramona Carlin sneered, bit at the thumb of the hand that held her cigarette that drifted smoke into her eyes. Red. Bleary. The redness, the bleariness were the cume effect of all the cigarettes she’d used methodically since turning fifteen. Twenty-seven hard years ago. She waited for Raddatz and Eddi to say something, defend themselves. She waited for them to open their mouths so she could take their words and shove them right back down their throats.

  And they were hip to that. Same as any other wronged citizen who couldn’t understand why they got such crappy police work for their tax dollars, Raddatz and Eddi got that Ramona was just warming up her rant. They didn’t bother saying anything. And their passive-aggressiveness just got Ramona all the hotter.

  “How many times did I call the cops, how many times did I try to get you involved? What’d you do?”

  Nothing from Raddatz and Eddi.

  Eddi figured Ramona to be in her early forties. Her looks offered up the proposition that she was years older. The smoking didn’t help the texture of her skin. But the wrinkles her face displayed were more like stress fractures. Hard to tell in the two and a half minutes Eddi had been acquainted with Ramona if she had been born a touch high-strung. What was clear was that her years with her husband had done nothing to help her become any less anxious.

  His package: Carlin had been with a Harbor MTac element that served a warrant on a firestarter. Had attempted to serve a warrant on a firestarter. Two of the element ended up a slick of ash. One of the operator’s legs was charred up like an overroasted chicken leg. And Carlin, most of the right side of his body between neck and torso looked like some kind of sick joke of nature. A patch of something that wasn’t flesh, wasn’t human. It was a scarred, twisted, nasty, barren wasteland. His arm was the limb of a tree burned and burned and burned but was, in the end, too stubborn to fall away.

  After that, Marty Carlin was useless for MTac.

  He was good for DMI. For a while. Then there was an incident. Eddi and Raddatz didn’t know what the incident was. The facts were left out of Carlin’s package. As a rule when shit goes down, suspendable shit, and the cops who are doing the suspending think it’s best even sealed records shouldn’t reflect the shit, the shit was serious. Seriously bad. Potentially damaging to the department image-wise. Legal-wise.

  However it was, whatever he’d done, the PD didn’t think Carlin was fit for duty.

  To Eddi’s way of thinking, unfit equaled unbalanced. An assumption affirmed by poor Ramona. Hard enough being married to a cop. Hard enough being married to a cop who decides to go MTac. But being married to one who barely survives serving a warrant on a freak. Then he apparently goes nuts. Then he, again apparently, decides he wants to use you to work off some misplaced aggression . . . can’t beat the freaks, might as well beat the missus.


  Eddi could forgive Ramona for her nature. Forgive, yeah, but that still didn’t make the woman any easier to deal with.

  Ramona: “You didn’t do anything, that’s what you did. You didn’t do anything because he was a cop. I can’t even . . .” Hands shaking as she tried to take a drag on her smoke. She’d worked herself into a state. “He detached the retina in my left eye. Can’t even see out of it. Can barely see out of it,” she modified. “That’s how hard he used to hit me. One goddamn arm, and he could still . . . And I call the police, and they’re all ‘You two just work it out. You don’t want any trouble.’ You’re the ones who didn’t want trouble. You were supposed to arrest him! That’s what you’re supposed to do, a man beats his wife. But he was a cop, so you all didn’t do shit!”

  Nothing from Raddatz and Eddi.

  Ramona stared, stared at them. Kept her anger to do some aikido; redirect Raddatz’s and Eddi’s compassion against them. But they gave her nothing.

  Ramona gave to them: “Hell with you.”

  She moved from them, across the room, sat down. Her non-cigarette-smoking hand ran over her face.

  “We’re sorry for what happened to you.” Raddatz, his tone was calm. Assuring. “We’re sorry other people didn’t take action.”

  “Other people.” Hand still manipulating her face, buffing her agitation, Ramona’s words were slurred. “Always has to be other people. Nobody wants to take responsibility.”

  Addressing Ramona, but talking of things more sizable than her: “That’s not always the case,” Raddatz said.

  “Yeah? Are you here to do something about what Marty did to me? Is that why you came around?”

  It wasn’t. Ramona knew it wasn’t. Raddatz knew there was no point in lying that things were otherwise.

  “I, you know, I stood by him.” Ramona was cooling. Winding down. Her emotional fission had left her spent. “It was always about, our whole marriage was about what he wanted. Being a cop; that’s what he wanted. Never mind what I . . . It wasn’t about money. He could’ve been a FedEx guy for all I cared. What I cared about: that he came home every night. I cared he didn’t have gang thugs taking shots at him because they were high, and that’s what they do when they’re high. But Marty wanted to be a cop. He wanted to be a cop, so I was there for him. Had an accident after a high-speed chase, fractured his pelvis—”