John Ridley - What Fire Cannot Burn

"These are… they're unique times. 'Unique' is hardly a strong enough word. All of us have to work from the gut now and figure out right and wrong later." It was veiled, but Eddi was speaking a truth beyond the subject. "But that's the point: later. Maybe we'll look back and see we made a mess of some things. A lot of things. But I'd rather be around five, ten years down the road to apologize then, knowing we bought ourselves the time now to be sorry about anything at all."

Veiled, yeah, but truth. And Bo was the sort, truth he always had to yield to.

"Okay, Eddi," Bo said. "Okay."

G Platoon had its own evidence lockup. Superfluous. For most crimes, if they went to trial, there might be questions. Reasonable doubt. Did that guy really rape that chick? Did that woman really pour gasoline on her husband while he slept, then toss a match on after? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, evidence. With freaks?

With freaks, if you were a freak, if you got caught being a freak-flying or shooting energy from your fingers or morphing metal-that and a little DMA sample positive with a meta gene was all the more evidence anyone really needed. «Anyone» being agents of the law.

So the evidence lockers for MTac were really more like souvenir storage. Leftover junk from calls gone bad. Slagged helmets. Uniforms shredded by animated steel. Punctured by hand-slung projectiles.

And there was Soledad's gun. And from her workroom in Parker Center all the prototypes, sketches and theory work she'd done in adapting her O'Dwyer. Eddi wasn't ready for that. It was nearly obsessive-compulsive the details Soledad put into the designing and the modifying and reworking and adapting the weapon. Yes. Eddi was aware Soledad had the background for it. Studied tech at Northwestern. But it was impressive taking into consideration that. Soledad was still «just» a cop. Not a hardcore techie. Not a scientist. Merely a chick with a gun who wanted to make a difference. Made Eddi angry when she considered neither the department of the armorer nor the money drain that was HIT had come close to putting together what Soledad had. It just made Eddi feel all the shittier for what she was perpetrating.

Put that aside, she told herself. Eddi told herself she'd deal with her ill feelings, her guilt..

Later.

Right now she wanted to do something for Soledad: find the thing that killed her. Make sure it never killed again.

Action.

People like action. To hell with sitting and thinking and planning and considering. People want guns coughing, muzzles flashing, random objects taking bullet hits and fragmenting spectacularly. Balls-to-the-walls action. Which is why, you go to a movie, you hardly ever see police doing police work-filling out duty logs, filing reports, working phones. You just see cops kicking in doors and letting their guns do the verbalizing. And miraculously, no matter movie cops never seem to do surveillance or shadow a suspect or engage in an ongoing stakeout, they always seem to know exactly which door to kick in. They never seem to let their guns get verbal with the wrong person.

It was getting cool at night. Cool for LA. Eddi's blood had thinned since she'd moved West from Philly. She kept the car windows roiled against the chill. Except sitting in a car for hours with another person's got a way of making the air rank. Stale. So every once in a while Eddi had to crack the window, let fresh air inside. But that just made the car cold. She'd have to close the window. The air'd get stale. She had to do her little ballet all over again.

Sixteen hours of that. Sixteen hours and twenty-three minutes of rolling the window up and down while she eyed Carlin's little house on Folsom Street.

Not really sixteen-plus hours continually. Her and Raddatz had been swapping little naps in shifts when they hadn't been eating shitty drive-thru food, when they hadn't been just staring at Carlin's house looking for signs of life that hadn't presented themselves in the previous three-quarters of a day.

Heading for the seventeenth hour, things were going to get hard. Eddi was going to get… she was antsy. If you're a cop, there's only so much sitting and staring and bad-food eating you can do before you want to kick in doors and have conversations spoken in hot ounces. Before you become like any other paying customer who wants to see some action.

Eddi poked Raddatz in the shoulder. He was fully awake instantly. Eddi gave a quick update on how little the situation had changed.

She said: "Nothing."

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 seer: 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 hen 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?