John Ridley - What Fire Cannot Burn

"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 docs 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 vies. 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 DM! 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 vies 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: Carl in 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.