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 question 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.