What Fire Cannot Burn so-2

by John Ridley

  Their paths crossing, Raddatz stopped. Said to Soledad: "Got anything pressing?"

  "No."

  Raddatz said: "Want to head over to LACFSC?" "Sure."

  Humanity is self-modifying. It adjusts to constants of its environment. Death.

  See a dead body once, be shocked. Revulsed.

  See another body, a few more. You might be revulsed, but shock's no longer part of the deal.

  A few more bodies, revulsion is a quaint notion that's remembered, if at all, with effort.

  See a dozen bodies or more, no matter they've been shot, no matter they've been burned, regardless of the decay or level of stink, the viewing sensation is nothing more spectacular than seeing a late-model Ford creeping along in the slow lane on the 405.

  But even the jaded could be, if not astounded, affected. There are, after all, a lot of ways to die. But Soledad didn't know, wasn't sure until she hit the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office at the Forensic Science. Center, that there was tiny way to kill an invulnerable metanormal.

  Michael Han, the county ME, found it all fascinating as hell. Fascinating enough he didn't pawn the inquest off on some junior on his staff.

  Raddatz…? Hard for Soledad to tell how he took things. Maybe he was shocked into submission by the confirmation of an invulnerable's mortality. Maybe he didn't care just as long as the freak was dead. But if there was a spike in him emotionally one way or the other, it was indistinct beyond normal curiosity. By choice or by accident he was tough to read as a player at the big table at the World Series of Poker.

  Raddatz asked: "How did it happen; an invulnerable dead?"

  "Dead by a means other than natural causes." Han tossed out the obvious.

  Hard to say if an aptitude for working with the corpses was a product of nature or nurture. The Hans could've been a case study. Michael's father, Chise, had jobbed in the Coroner's Office. As an assistant ME, but never as the coroner. That left a way for the son to surpass the father. Assuming being better at dealing with the dead than your old man was an aspiration. For the

  Hans, for a generation of Hans, apparently, yeah, it was.

  "Other than natural causes," Raddatz acknowledged.

  "If you were," Han continued, "to consider which superability would be the most desirable, I think many would say invulnerability. Skin that's impregnable. Bones that are little different from titanium."

  Han gave an odd gaze to the thing on the examining table below him. It was the longing look of reverence. Han was all about death. With the John Doe, he'd almost met something that could kick Death's ass.

  Almost.

  Han, continuing: "It's about as close to immortality as can be achieved. You would never need fear a traffic accident, a plane crash, let alone slipping on a patch of ice. Only age. Only God's work itself. And even that may not come on a schedule normal humans are accustomed to."

  "And this one, it didn't die of natural causes?" Soledad was circling the examining table, giving herself a guided tour of the freak, the examining light overhead raining down a harsh luminescence. There's your God light: the light people who've had near-death experiences claim they've floated toward. The light of the guy who looks at your body with a cold disinterest before he cuts it open 'cause that's what his paycheck tells him to do.

  A shake of the head from Han. "Not that we can determine, Miss O'Roark."

  Soledad stopped, looked up. Looked to Han. Miss O'Roark. Not Officer O'Roark. Not operator. Not Bullet. Miss O'Roark. When was the last time she'd heard that? Long enough ago that hearing it now sounded pleasant.

  "What about poison?" Raddatz asked. "Poison'd take it out, yeah?"

  Han answered: "We were able to empty the contents of its stomach, run a tox screening. It came back negative."

  "Suicide?" Soledad asked.

  "A possibility." Han leaned back against a wall. He looked up, looked at the ceiling as if he were giving the question a little thought. "If anyone would know how to kill such a thing, it would be… it would be the thing itself. But that adds why to the question how."

  Raddatz: "You're a freak, you've got no prospects, the law says you're not human. You end things."

  Soledad: "We should be so lucky the muties start taking themselves out." Soledad added harshness to a sentiment she already held, put the edge there for Raddatz to see how he'd take it.

  Nothing. No effect she could read on him.

  On the freak, on its side, on its bare flesh: defects. Soledad saw them as she circumvented the body. Little… little divots. Four on one side.

  Soledad: "What are these?"

  Han stepped around, took a look at what Soledad was talking about. "Actually, I was hoping you might know."

  "How am I going to know what you don't?"

  "If it was any other metanormal, I wouldn't expect you to. But as you can imagine, not a great many invulnerables make their way to my part of the world. And not too many officers have had as much experience with metanormals as you have."

  Soledad gave a careful look to the defects. She said to Raddatz, guessing: "Scar tissue?"

  Raddatz shrugged.

  Soledad split her focus between the freak and Raddatz. Here they were checking out a dead invulnerable, and all Raddatz could do was shrug? Was he one of those cops who said little but took in all they saw? Was he a cop that had prior knowledge of what he was looking at and was therefore bored by questions he knew the answers to?

  "It's a possibility. The meta gene," Han said, "becomes active in most metanormals around puberty. He might have been injured as a child."

  Soledad asked: "Has the body been cleaned?"

  "Before the autopsy. Before." Han corrected, "the attempted autopsy."

  "Where the scar tissue is, was there any flaking?"

  Han picked up a notepad, flipped through it.

  "Yes."

  "A lot, a little?" "Minimal amount."

  "But there was, there was flaking there?"

  Han said to Soledad: "Yes."

  "Dead flesh," Soledad said. She said: "This wasn't an old wound."

  "That just," Raddatz said, "narrows it down to a million other things it could be."

  Soledad stepped up, put her hand to the invulnerable. No matter that it was dead, except that it was cold, it was human to the touch. Not hard. Not alien. Nothing exceptional other than the marks on the body. Marks like… they were like… Soledad's fingers slipped neatly into them.

  It had started to rain. Just a little. Anywhere else, any other city, a little rain would be an annoyance. Slightly bothersome. In LA anything more than a misting is a plague from God. A disaster of the highest proportions. The motorists of the city, suspect of skill on good days, were utterly deficient in the short-term-memory department. Between the annual sprinkles that came around in January and February, then took the rest of the year off, LA drivers had a habit of forgetting real quick that water is wet and wet pavement is slick. So idiots would take the Laurel Canyon speedway-a twisty road that ran over "the hill"-at the limit plus fifteen. Same as they did on hot dry days. Launch their vehicles over the center line or into one of the houses that bordered the road. Occasionally, they took flight over a guardrail and down the Santa Monica Mountains where they sometimes went days, months… wasn't weird for a launched vehicle to go well more than a year without getting spotted in the thick growth despite an organized search by the LAPD.

  And Soledad was fine with that. Other than innocents potentially getting hurt, the people who ended up in a porch or over an embankment were the same ilk who, millennia ago, would've been stuck in the tar pits watching the rest of humanity pass them by.

  Instead, here, now, Soledad and Raddatz were stuck in traffic courtesy of a Neanderthal with a CA driver's lie.

  "So what do we do?" Soledad asked.

  "Sit here like everybody else. What do you want me to do, hit the lights and siren?"

  Soledad wasn't sure if Raddatz didn't catch her meaning or was giving her shit. Either way, her true q
uestion wasn't answered.

  "What do we do about the John Doe? What's the procedure with DMI?"

  "Write up his particulars, log it. Try to track his family, any other freaks he had contact with-"

  "But the John Doe; what do we do about him?" "We keep surveillance on living freaks. We don't deal with dead ones."

  "And when they die of questionable causes?"

  "Don't think anybody said it was questionable."

  "Nobody said anything, because nobody knows what happened. You can't give an answer, to me that counts as questionable."

  The radio was playing. Old-school rock and roll. Raddatz reached over. Lowered it. "From your dealing with things one time that's your professional opinion?"

  "Yeah, 'cause I've never done cop work before. Never even went to the academy."

  "What you do-"

  "Got a gun and badge high-bidding on eBay. The rest was a free ticket."

  "What you do, what you did, I've done it. I've worked both sides, O'Roark. MTac and DMI. So don't think you know more than me, know better than me. You don't. Doesn't matter how much legend you built in G Platoon. This isn't G Platoon. This is a whole other thing."

  And Soledad let that sit for a while, not caring one bit for being talked to-talked down to-like that. And if they were in G Platoon, if they were on an MTac element…

  But they weren't.

  They were stuck in a pool car going nowhere.

  So Soledad could, should, just let things go

  instead: "Why am I here?" "You busted your knee, you put in for the hours."

  "Are you obtuse, or do you just want to see what it takes to-"

  Raddatz made an awkward cross-body reach for the radio, reached to turn it up.

  Before he finished the motion. Soledad had slapped the radio completely dead.

  "Because if you're trying to set me off," she said. Soft and low. The quiet adding its own emphasis, "you're doing it. Why am I here? Why are you bringing me along for the ride?"

  "Testing the waters. You say you're done with MTac."

  "The doctors say I'm done with MTac."

  "However it is, it's a new beginning. So now it's a matter of are you up for this, or are you just doing things to do things?"

  Raddatz and Soledad roiled up on the accident that was slowing a good portion of LA to a crawl. Squad cars. Flares. A BMW welded by its own fire to a tree.

  The sight, the smell of the burn. Sense memory came on hard to Soledad.

  She said: "Here's the thing: I've been tested every way you can think of. I've passed all of them, so throwing me any more of them is a waste of time. Mine and yours. I'm gonna be here. If I'm part of your cadre or not-"

  "I don't have a-"

  "If I'm a pariah, I don't give a fuck. Honest; you, all of you and your supercreep attitudes get on my nerves. I'm keeping freaks in check however I've got to do things."

  "That's a good speech, Soledad."

  "Christ…»

  "Is it done? Is that it?" "Yeah, that's it."

  "Procedure; that's what you were talking about, right?"

  Soledad and Raddatz slid past the accident. Traffic picked up. Most of the drivers went right back to speeding.

  "Here's procedure," Raddatz said. "ID the John Doe. Run his prints, try to match him up to a missing person report, take things from there."

  " 'K." A fraction of a word that stood for: whatever.

  Raddatz turned up the radio. Flooded the car with old-school rock.

  Soledad moved up-or down, depending on how you looked at things-from crutches to a cane. Cheapest thing she could find at a medical supply store. An old-man cane. Wasn't very cool. As unaffected as she liked to think she was, she still figured if she was going to have a cane, maybe she oughta get a cool one. For a hot second Soledad thought about getting one of those canes that have a sword hidden in them. But then she thought she might end up using it. Worrisome. Not that she'd somehow get in a situation that was cane-sword necessary. That didn't worry her. What was worrisome: She'd use the sword and people would start comparing her to Eddi and her knife. She could live without the comparison. She could live real well without that. She got the old-man cane.

  No getting past the feeling of clandestineness. The hour was odd, the location obscure. One-forty in the morning, a bar in Hollywood. Mot a glam bar. A small joint off Ivar where drinking was done by a select few night, morning and high noon. Drunks who couldn't remember their names, let alone unfamiliar faces. Perfect for clandestineness. The. meeting Soledad was having with Tashjian was on the extreme DL. IA cops were not cops that cops wanted other cops to peep them talking with even if all they were rapping about was the price of tea in China.

  Soledad didn't like playing in the shadows. Up until recently her cop life had been about being in the open, being direct. A show of force. That- coming on strong about things-was as much of a weapon for MTacs as their HKs and Benellis and Soledad's own home-brewed piece. Working

  DMI was all about rooting around, rooting around. Being a mole for IA on top of that was

  It was what?

  If DMI was about kicking over stones, was IA the slug under the rock?

  Only days Soledad had been perpetrating a lie. Already she was sick of it.

  "It does take getting used to," Tashjian counseled.

  "I'm not going to be doing this long enough to get used to it."

  "My hope was, in time, you would at least see the value in what you're doing."

  "I see the value, but to me it's like seeing value at Kmart. Taking advantage and taking pride are two different things."

  "I miss that, O'Roark." Tashjian tipped his glass to her. "I miss that sense of humor of yours. So slight as to be unique."

  Whatever Tashjian was drinking-a mixed, lime-greenish thing-it was the girliest drink Soledad'd ever seen. A queer alky mick going dry on St. Paddy's Day wouldn't touch the stuff.

  Yet…

  The drink fairly glowed, was nearly hypnotic. Hard drinkers-and the few flies in the bar at that hour were nothing but-stared at Tashjian each time he raised his glass. Watched him as he lowered it. Licked their lips in sympathetic pleasure. Whatever Tashjian was drinking, before the night was done, everybody in the joint would most likely have one.

  "I mean"-Tashjian returned the glass to the bar-"I'm assuming you're joking. I can't imagine you having something against value-priced shopping."

  "We're talking about the job." Soledad kept on point. Soledad didn't want to string things along, spend one more minute where she was and doing what she was doing any more than necessary.

  "We're talking about the job," Tashjian echoed. "Tell me about the job."

  "You heard about the invulnerable John Doe?"

  "Very slightly. I know the ME has the body, but DMI is in control of the situation."

  "It's being… I guess it's being investigated. I'm not sure how the hell things work at DMI. Anyway, I'm on it."

  "How did you manage that?"

  "A senior lead was going to check out the body, I got an invite."

  "And it went all right?"

  "All right how? All I did was look at a body."

  Tashjian stroked the condensation on his glass. "This senior lead; he trusts you?"

  "He doesn't like me. My experience, someone doesn't like me, they're taking me at face value."

  "I'm glad for that. Don't agree, though. I don't take you at face value, and I like you quite a bit."

  "Don't get ideas. I'm engaged."

  "I have none. But I'm flattered you think enough of me you have to put me off."

  "I'm not… I don't have to put you off. I'm just telling you."

  "And all the protest you're putting into the telling: Is that for me or for you?"

  Fucking with her. Tashjian was fucking with her. Some guys golfed. Some built ships in a bottle. Tashjian's hobby, Soledad was pretty sure, was fucking with her.

  "Can we talk about the freak?"

  Tashjian nodded. "Has anything co
me to

  light?"

  "I've been out one time on this, and I was lucky for that much."

  "Do you have a sense of the circumstances? Was it murder?"

  "It's inconclusive. No poison, at least as far as the ME can tell. But how else you'd kill an invulnerable freak I don't know."

  For a minute Soledad and Tashjian said nothing.

  The sound track playing in the bar was ESPN from a TV. Ice kicking around in glasses. Hacking coughs.

  Soledad didn't like being there, in the bar. She wasn't a drinker. Drinking reminded her of Vin. And that didn't feel real right; that she didn't want to be reminded of her instant fiance.

  "Tashjian, how long you been with the PD?"

  "Thirteen years."

  Something funny about that to Soledad. Figures. Tashjian's been around thirteen lucky years. "Seen a lot in thirteen years?"

  "My share."

  "But not a dead invulnerable." "Can't say that I have."

  "So if you did, If you did see one, it'd get your attention."

  "And, finally, your point?"

  "Seeing a dead invulnerable didn't much get Raddatz's attention."

  "Raddatz? Tucker Raddatz is the senior lead you're working with?" Tashjian's thumbnail scratched at his chin: acknowledgment of the curiousness.

  "Something I should know about him?" Soledad asked.

  "Very distinguished officer. A short but memorable stmt with MTac. Memorable mostly because he was the sole survivor of a warrant served on… what's the colloquialism for metanormals with accelerated production of adrenaline?"

  "Berserkers."

  "Tore through the rest of his element as though they were rice paper. He was lucky to get away with just losing a hand. I think that's all he's lost."

  "I can think of one other thing: any and all regard for freaks whatsoever."

  "Is there something hinky to you?"

  "I'm not a detective." Soledad, no permission asked, reached over, took Tashjian's glass, took a drink. Girliest thing she'd ever had. And it was good. "But I'm not sure I blame somebody who's been torn up by a freak for having absolutely nothing but hatred for them."

  "Careful with your sympathies."

  "I know what's at stake. I'll do the job."