Just a little smirk from Vin that said he didn't want to play anymore. From the way his shoulders slouched, his body hunched, he didn't want to do much else than sit where he was for another hour. A couple hours. Seven years. It was all the same for Vin.
But it was okay Vin didn't want to play. Soledad was ready to get serious about things as well.
She said: "Were you for real about what you asked before?"
"What I…»
"Do I want to get married? Do I want to marry you?"
"Yeah," Vin said. "Okay," Soledad said.
My motivations are screwed. I know that.
I don't know if I came out of the box screwed up, or if I got that way after San Francisco when getting sick kept me from taking a trip to the city. Kept me alive when 600,000 other people got killed.
That's a shitload o' guilt to be carting around.
So I quit living for me and started living for the give-back. Paying off a debt I didn't really owe to people I'd never met. And from day one, if that wasn't wrong, I knew what I was doing at least wasn't quite right.
Thing is, knowing you've got a dysfunction and doing something about your dysfunctionality sound the same, but are nothing alike. Maybe with years of therapy and religion, tons of medication you can break patterns.
I didn't go in for any of that.
So the pattern repeated.
With MTac.
With the tattoo I wore for Reese. And now, again, with Vin.
I didn't love him. I liked him, cared about him. The little bit I understood of love, I know I didn't feel that way for Vin.
What I felt….
Pathos.
I felt it for this cop, used to be so strong, who'd let himself devolve to the point of being a gimp. Not just physically. There were all kinds of people, fewer body parts than Vin, who amounted to so much more.
That sounds harsh, but sometimes the truth hits
like All
What was damaged on him, it was his spirit that was handicapped. The most obvious indicator was he 'd casualty, quietly become a lush, thinking his slowed movements and slurred speech went unnoticed. Same with the perpetual glisten of sweat that he now wore. Or worse, he knew the signs were obvious and didn't care.
I think, really, Vin's romantic about the idea of being cliche: the busted cop who melts to an alky.
Not romantic. Just pathetic.
s couldn't let Vin be pathetic.
No matter saving Vin is an unactionable task. Like the costumed freaks from years prior who I've come to hate so well, I felt I had to-had to — try some difficult heroics. So I tested Vin. Took his offer of marriage. Any other man, receiving a belated yes to a proposal right after talking about a woman's former love would say two things to her. The second is "you," the first, "fuck." Any man wouldn't let himself, so obviously, be relegated to sloppy seconds.
Any real man.
Any self-respecting man.
Any man who hadn't let himself devolve into a one-legged drunk.
But Vin, Vin had said okay. Vin passed the test. Or flunked it. Vin needed saving. So here's Soledad the anti-hero to the rescue.
God, do I need more religion.
Or medication.
Soledad was crutching through DMI, crutching to her office. Raddatz was on his way somewhere else.
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."