Raddatz nodded, looked to the house. A little place at the end of a cul-de-sac. Wood that looked weakened. Paint that was worn. A yard full of junk. That’s what filled the yard. Junk. Unrecognizable beyond anything more than metal that had rusted reddish orange. The place was a dive. A deep dive where a guy who was sinking same as a weighted rock would end up.
“What do we do?” Eddi hated asking that. Made her sound like a newbie. A good cop would just sit tight. But Eddi was hoping Raddatz was getting antsy too. “Haven’t seen a thing. What do you want to do?”
“Guy’s got no job, no life. No reason for him to go in and out of the place. Not if he’s stocked. He could hole up for days. Longer.”
“Or he could be out killing freaks.” Even when she used the word, she was using it with less conviction. Putting on a show.
“Could be doing that.”
“Only one way to know for sure.”
Raddatz checked his watch.
“More than sixteen hours,” Eddi informed.
Raddatz shook his head, told Eddi that wasn’t what he was thinking.
“Ought to call my wife.”
“If you want.”
“More trouble than it’s worth.”
“The inquisitive kind.”
“Never learned to be a good cop’s wife.”
Eddi, lightly sarcastic: “That’s tough; you having to settle for a good regular wife.”
Just for a second Raddatz took his eyes off the house, looked to Eddi. Gave a smile. “You’d like her.”
“You think?” Eddi asked, but didn’t really care. Wouldn’t let herself care. Getting wrapped up in Raddatz’s personal life was counterproductive. What she cared about, what she had to focus on: Carlin and how they were going to handle him.
“She’d like you.” Raddatz looked back for the house. “You’re both no-nonsense, you know? That’s the thing with her, she never—”
“Helena, yeah?”
“Yeah. Helena. She never went in for the bullshit. Like I said, I could do without her playing twenty questions all the time, but you gotta like a woman who just eliminates the bullshit.”
“I’d take that in most people.”
“I had no interest in marrying most people. I found it in her, I said that’s the one. You should get to know her. After this is done, it’d be good of you to get to know her.”
Oh, shit. Eddi knew what was going on. Oh, shit. Get to know her. Get to know Helena. “After this is done,” get to know Helena. What Raddatz was saying without saying: After we do the job, if I don’t make it, go have a conversation with my wife. Give her all the post-death clack: He was a good guy, an honest cop, he loved the hell out of you . . .
Eddi hated that kind of thinking, prepping for things going way south. It invited bad luck. Bad luck had a way of spilling around. She didn’t want to have to have a conversation with Raddatz’s wife. Raddatz’s widow. The only thing she wanted less was for someone to have a similar conversation with . . .
It came to Eddi if the job did go south, if she didn’t make it, who the hell would miss her? Her mo—
No.
Vin she had a relationship with. To some degree. Maybe a couple of other cops’d miss her for a while before she was reduced to a photo on a memorial wall. Something schoolkids on field trips would look at with mild curiosity.
More and more Eddi realized how similar she was to Soledad. How much of that was nature, how much was nurture?
Moving off the thought, moving back to what’s what: “How do you want to play things?”
“Knock, see who’s home.”
“A guy who can kill freaks, and we’re just going to—”
“We’re two regular normal humans coming around to ask questions. He lets us in, we look around, see what we’re dealing with.”
“Because as psychos go he’s one of the nice ones. He’s got manners and all that.”
“You’re the one getting antsy.”
“You’re not?”
Raddatz, a smirk. Appreciative. He asked: “No one answers, are you ready to go in?”
“Whatever’s next, I’m good for it.”
“You’d really like my wife.”
The third knock on the door got the same response as Raddatz’s first two. None. Except for the bark of the dog on the inside of the house. The shades were drawn. Raddatz and Eddi couldn’t see inside, couldn’t see what kind of dog it was. The barking, its low octave, said it was sizable. Ill tempered. Pit or English bull terrier. Rottweiler.
The situation—the two of them standing around in plain sight for a returning Carlin should he be out—was less than good.
Raddatz pointed that out to Eddi.
Eddi agreed. Asked: “So?”
“I’d say bust in. Except for the dog.”
“Not a problem.” Eddi unholstered her gun.
“You are not going to shoot a dog.”
“It’s just a dog.”
“You are not going to shoot a damn—”
“For Christ’s sake, I get you’ve gone soft for freaks. It’s a dog!”
Holding up a finger, slowing Eddi down: “That dog didn’t do anything to anybody. It’s got nothing to do with the job.”
“You want in the house?”
Raddatz took a moment. Pressed his face to the front window, juked to see what little he could see past a slit in the shade. What he could see: straight through the house to a back door. “Break open the back door. The thing comes out around back, we head in the front.”
“Nuts.”
The two stood around awhile. Long enough Eddi got that Raddatz wasn’t altering his position on things.
Eddi: “Freaking nuts.”
“We knocked. A couple of times. If Carlin’s here, he already knows we’re looking for him. What happens next happens on the other side of this door, and I’m not letting a dog keep me from getting to it.”
Shaking her head: “Easier just to shoot it.”
“Never had a dog, have you?”
“Never.”
“Talk to me after you’ve had one.”
“I’ll go around back, make the run.”
“I’m missing my hand, not my legs. I can make the run.”
“You can make the run like an old guy. I’ll do it.”
As she was heading around to the back of the house, as she was trudging around junk, Raddatz said to Eddi’s back, his nature only kinda good: “Screw you, Aoki.”
“Got the feeling I’m doing it to myself.”
I’ll make the run. That’s what she’d told Raddatz. But Eddi hadn’t factored in, hadn’t even considered . . . how fast do dogs really run? They were tight on turns. They had, after all, four-wheel steering, so to speak. And Carlin had a yard full of shit. Crossing through the yard, Eddi saw the junk was pipes and rusted chairs, discarded appliances. A lawn mower that had given up the fight against grass that was wild with weeds and uncontrolled growth and ultimately very little grass. Eddi had to pick her way through all that to get to the rear door. There would be no time to step careful on the way back around.
Just pop the glass, open the door . . .
Yeah. Sure.
Her right hand brushed the butt of Soledad’s holstered piece. Its action echoing her true belief: It’d be so much easier to . . .
Eddi’s hand quit its fantasizing, picked up a ruler-length pipe from Carlin’s junglized yard.
She schooled herself: Pop the glass, clean the frame real quick so you don’t slash yourself to the bone reaching in, flip the lock. Hopefully lock and not locks. Open the door. Run. Well, dodge all the crap in the yard and run.
The simple plan was getting amended by the second.
She couldn’t see into the house from the back door any better than she could from the front. But what she could hear was Raddatz pounding on the front door, distracting the dog. The dog barking.
The fact that their operation thus far came down to them playing head games on a dog . . .
W
ith the pipe Eddi popped the glass . . .
Raddatz, she thought, better have that front door open.
“Raddatz,” she yelled.
Eddi swirled the pipe over the wood frame, cleaned it of glass. Hand in, she reached around and threw the dead bolt.
Already there was the scratch of claws on linoleum. The dog wasn’t barking, it was snarling.
“Raaaddatz!”
Door open. Run.
Down the porch to the weeds.
Behind her the dog crashed the door.
An obstacle course lay ahead of Eddi. The pipes, the equipment, the mower, lawn chairs, a legless table . . . more shit than she could remember. More junk than she could easily navigate.
Not the dog.
The dog wasn’t having any trouble, not from the sound of its growl. The thunder—yeah, the rhythm—of thudding paws on dry earth that was like a coke-high drum solo done up midconcert Keith Moon-style. It was gaining by the millisecond. Eddi’s estimation of distance would have to rely on audible approximation. No way she was turning around. No way—no matter that she thought, honest-to-God thought, she could feel the dog’s breath on her ankles—was she turning for a look. Pillar of salt? Piece of meat. Assume it’s right there, she told herself. She told herself to run her ass off like the animal’s right there. That, and keep from getting snagged on the mower or the lawn chairs or the pipes or the—
A hot hurt to her lower leg. She’d cut too close to something and it’d cut back. She was thinking when she should be running and moving and dodging. She wanted to think about something, forget the pain in her leg: the dog. Think about how bad that would hurt. How bad would a mauling hurt? Think about that, and book.
There was Soledad’s gun . . .
No time to pull, to turn, to take aim.
More fire to her leg.
The dog?
The dog was still chasing, closing.
Phantom pain she was feeling. Or maybe another jagged laceration. Worry about it later. Once in the house or tomorrow or anytime, Eddi told herself, when she wasn’t getting chased.
The porch.
Eddi grabbed right hand to railing, let centripetal force swing her. Went up the stairs, dived for the threshold like a wideout stretching to make the goal line. She crossed it.
“Close the fucking—”
Raddatz was already on it. Eddi heard the door slam shut, the lock get thrown. Raddatz wasn’t taking chances.
Eddi lay, sucked air.
“Should’ve let me shoot it.”
Eddi lay, looked at her leg. Fabric of her pant torn. Flesh of her ankle rent.
“Should’ve—”
“Heard you.”
Hand out, Raddatz helped heft Eddi up.
Eddi went to the door, peeled back the blind, looked to the dog jumping up, at the window. Throwing foamy spit at the window. A beast. It was much more beast than domesticated animal. Guessing as much as she knew for certain: It looked like a mastiff. It looked like how she’d imagined one of the hounds of the Baskervilles when she’d discovered reading could actually be fun, not just a chore, back in her senior year of high school. Snout bleeding from where it tried to get through the pane Raddatz had shattered to do the B and E. That was its freshest wound. Flesh a jigsaw of scars except where its fur was bare to the skin from lashings, from burnings, from beatings. The sadistic fuck. Carlin didn’t have Ramona to slug around anymore. He’d gotten himself a new whipping horse.
Jumping. Snarling, no matter its slashed snout.
“The dog,” Eddi said as it did all it could to get through the door to kill her, “that thing was bred for hating.” She felt sorry she hadn’t killed it. She felt like she oughta put it out of its misery.
“Come on,” Raddatz said to her. “Come on.”
From her holster Eddi took Soledad’s appropriated gun, flicked the safety off. Unlike just about every other gun in the world, the piece audibly confirmed it was hot.
“What kind of load you using?” Raddatz asked.
“Soledad’s red clip. Slugs tipped with Semtex. Explodes on contact, so do yourself a favor and don’t get caught in the cross fire.”
“Do me a favor and don’t get me caught in one.”
The outside of the house—the junk, the weedy yard—was barely a primer for the level of charm the interior had been allowed to degenerate to. Newspapers everywhere. Magazines everywhere. Everywhere there were dirty dishes. Rotting food. Unseen but smelled was excrement. Maybe from the dog. Maybe from Carlin. Whichever. The stench was a sock in the face square to the nose. It was a funk so rank it actually hurt. The only smell Eddi had ever taken in more putrid was the stink of a decaying, rancid, bloated, gaseous floater she once had to stand watch over off the Santa Monica pier. She was a newbie. The vets made her do it, made her mind the body. The vets wanted to have some fun. Make Eddi puke. Eddi was not about to toss in front of “the boys.” Eddi stood there. Took the smell. Told “the boys” if LACFSC wasn’t around soon to pick up the body, they should order her some lunch. She’d eat it right where she was. The boys fucked with her much less after that. And if it weren’t for that, if it weren’t for that smell giving her a primer on how bad something could reek, at that moment Eddi might real well have lost it. Thank God, too, for the shaded windows of Carlin’s house. The California sun roasting the rot in the joint would’ve made the air toxic as alien atmosphere.
“Nice,” Eddi said, looking around. “Early American psycho.”
“Guy’s nuts,” Raddatz assessed. “But that doesn’t make him a freak killer.”
“You’re not thinking he’s clean?”
Raddatz shook his head to the negative. “I just want to know it for a fact. Especially before he comes home and we have to figure how to explain breaking and entering on a guy just for being supersloppy.”
“He beats his wife, beats his dog, lives like he thrives on shit—”
“You almost dropped me for the wrong reason. Let’s just be sure.”
Raddatz, Jesus . . . toeing the line between unilateral action and moral justification, to Eddi he was coming off like a badassed Quaker.
Again: “Let’s just be sure.”
Raddatz pointed Eddi to a room off the entry that was, really, just a main trash area. He indicated he’d have a look into the kitchen.
All the while just outside, the dog—that poor kill-beast—barking. Snarling. Growling. Bleeding.
The room off the entry: papers, magazines and stench. Standard decor. And, in a corner, a tribe of roaches. The whole of it potential evidence to be sifted through.
And here was Eddi without any rubber gloves.
She started looking through some papers on a table. Might as well start high and work her way down. The paper at the very top of the mound was dated almost two years previously. So which was it: Carlin hadn’t touched a paper in two years, or he read—actually sat and read—old papers? Eddi figured whichever was the crazier.
Digging through the mound: A paper sixteen months old. One that was outdated by another nineteen months. Five months. Sixteen, again. Four. Ten. Seven months. Not one fresher than three months. And not one that offered particular insight, that indicated a particular frame of mind. Nothing, that Eddi could see, regarding freak killings or MTac operations or cops getting hobbled by muties or obsessive consideration of any of that. Nothing more significant than yesterday’s news.
Was there something else to be found? Elaborate plans for world domination merely left lying around? That was comic book stuff. That was the kind of thing La Femme would have done to taunt Nightshift back in the day. It was the kind of thing disorganized serial killers did because they were too crazy, too sloppy in mind to do otherwise. But even the kookiest of criminals, shy of their desire for direct notoriety, generally liked being free of incarceration too much to just leave a pointing finger for the cops.
Still . . .
Eddi kept looking. A Chicago Trib from eight months prior. An old Time magazine. An older B
etter Homes and Gardens. Southern Living. Harper’s. A Chinese take-out menu.
A paper fetish. Maybe Carlin just had a paper fetish. And a metal fetish to go with his junk fetish. All around, as there’d been in the yard, were pipes and rods and siding. Welded. Twisted.
Art?
Didn’t look like art. At least, if it had artistic value, it wasn’t apparent to Eddi’s eye.
Eddi, yelling across the space to Raddatz: “Anything?”
Raddatz yelling back: “Nothing.”
The thing about metal sculpting, to Eddi it always seemed like a loopy kind of art—word used loosely—in the first place. You’ve got paint, you’ve got pencils. Clay. Even marble if you’re desperate to chisel something. And marble work looked good when you were done with it. Looked classic. Metalwork? Looked like something the stoner kids did in some high school detention class. And this, what Carlin had . . . ? This crap—this crap on top of all the other crap he had lying around—was just . . . welded. Twisted. Bent and rent.
And Carlin called this . . .
Not art.
It wasn’t art.
Twisted metal. Melted metal. It was practice.
Picking up a pipe, turning to Raddatz, moving for him: “Hey, this might be—”
The floor became ten thousand killer bees. In its instantaneous fragmentation it formed a swarm. Tiny piece of flying oak. Inanimate, but seeming to possess an instinct for delivering pain. The swarm rode a concussive wave for Eddi, stung her with their splinters. Slashed her with their jagged edges. Bare flesh was lacerated flesh. Bleeding flesh. Eddi’s hands went on the defensive, jumped up, sacrificed themselves to protect her face from what hit with the force of a good-sized gas explosion. A small bomb. What it really was: Carlin irrupting up into the room from a crawl space. Up into the room through the floor.
His maximum arrival kicked Eddi back. She went limp, took the force. Didn’t fight it, let it ride her down. Hit the floor. More unforgiving wood waiting for her.
The moment she landed Eddi was already making a move. Trying to get up. She did a simultaneous self-
diagnosis. Nothing broken. Nothing broken so bad as to gimp her. Probably, she was cut pretty nastily on her exposed flesh; the splintered wood having worked like razors over her skin. Felt warm blood flowing from cuts. She didn’t feel any hurt. Adrenaline was blocking her lower pain receptors. It was revving her heart, getting her ready for a fight.
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