"Freaks going to war again."
"The fear of another San Francisco. That'd be the end of the liberal voice and the push for the return of metanormal rights. It would give more power to the guys in power."
"You, your little cadre: You hid this info."
"And we tried to find the killer. But somewhere, someone started to see a pattern: Intel they weren't getting, information that was being misdirected. They couldn't prove anything.
They seemed to believe they couldn't put any of their people inside to watch us."
"But Soledad was at DMI."
Raddatz nodded. Up and down, but the motion was sideways to Eddi's skewed view of the world.
Raddatz said: "She got the charge to get evidence, to shut us down. Or, better, if things worked out that way, to stop us with force."
"To kill you."
Nothing from Raddatz this time.
From Eddi: "That's bullshit. That's the most fucked-up… I've had perps popped red-handed who could spin better lines."
For a minute, for nearly that, Raddatz stood. Just stood. He took Eddi's words, her crack about all he'd said being bullshit, about as well as a boxer-beaten, beat up, struggling through round fourteen of fifteen-would take a long-delayed but well-laid blow. He was done. He was through. A husk that'd just had a hole riven through it exposing it as the empty vessel that it is. Raddatz could not reach Eddi, and that finished him.
He put Eddi's gun down on the floor. "Do you remember"-Raddatz empty in spirit, empty in voice when he spoke-"how you felt the day after May Day? The hate I had is still so clear to me." With his hook Raddatz pushed Eddi's piece toward her. "When the girl saved my life, everything I used to believe was taken from me. But what I believed in was hate. My hate was replaced with the burden to… not to do what the law said was right, but to do what I knew was right. I fucked that up, and my fucking up cost people their lives. Now I'm alone in my efforts. Maybe I've got a chance to make things correct, but If it's a chance at all, it's a slim one. Before the guys in power can make a grab for more I have to buy the metanormals time." 'Time for what?"
"For the truth to come. For revelation to set them free. But now's the time to do something, or do nothing. To do right or just let evil play. What's it gonna be, Eddi?" With her gun still lying on the floor before her Raddatz stepped around behind Eddi. She felt him work her cuffs. She felt the metal give up its bite.
The gun right there. A trick. Had to be.
"What's it going to be, Eddi?"
"I pick up the gun, I try to shoot you, what: Your superfriend's going to crush my skull?"
Ra shook his head no.
The gun.
"Maybe all this is just to test me, to see if I'd flip over to the freaks' side."
"Or maybe all this is the truth. Maybe, crazy as it is, you and me ended up here for a reason. Even if the reason Is just to kill me. And if that's the way things are," nodding for the gun, "pick it up, do your job. Tell your bosses you got a freak fucker. An insurgent. You've preserved the order of their world for them."
Eddi picked, up the gun. couldn't feel it. Just the throb of blood pumping back into her hands. Pumping hard. Her heart was exhausting itself. She was swimming in gore. Eddi was, In her head, back in the alley on the edge of doing what she'd come to do. Make things right, yeah, but make things right for Soledad.
The blood in her hands felt like it was going to purge from her flesh. Bust right through it.
Raddatz stood where he was. Gave off nothing. If this was it, this was it. Whatever was coming he was ready to take.
Not a trick. He was okay to die.
Kill him. For Soledad, kill him.
Her head, hands ached. Fucking ached. Eddi felt her hurt so clear…
But she did not feel… she could not sense what was outside, what was a mile away. She couldn't smell the fragrance of a freshly perfumed girl sitting in her car on Beverly Boulevard, or hear the whisker-snap of a shaving guy in Torrance. All that was lost to her. She was just in a little dark room somewhere. She was not hyperaware of anything. She did not sense or feel death. For the minute there wouldn't be any killing.
"One more time, Raddatz. Tell me everything."
She sat looking down at the tabletop, staring at it. Through it. It was glass. So, really, it was the floor at which she was staring. The kitchen floor. A stain from some Chef Boyardee ravioli that one of the kids had spilled onto the tile and she'd managed to miss since… Raddatz's wife asked herself when was the last time the kids had eaten Chef Boyardee?
She was calming down. But still she asked:
"Why?"
"Same as always. Nailing a perp is only half the job. It's the paperwork that-" "Why now?"
There was some world-saving to be done. Double-dealing by the establishment had to be put down. But before all that. Raddatz had to do some damage control with the missus. He was only supposed to have walked a few blocks to grab some magazines. A couple hours had passed. A couple of hours Raddatz had spent doing a nasty dance with Eddi Aoki in the basement of a half-built/never-finished apartment building in Studio City. A cop's wife, her man all of a sudden does a fade, no matter how many years she's been living, with possibilities, it's understandable if she goes a little nuts. So Raddatz had to tell a few lies about an incident that'd gone down in plain view. Lies about having to step in, assert himself as the law-as cops are never really off-duty-until some uniforms hit the scene.
Helena bought it. Through her love of her man, her fury at him for maybe having gotten himself hurt or worse, she bought the lie.
Raddatz did a quiet thanks to God. Helena being a cop's wife, he knew her intuition-or her enhanced suspicion from years of proximity to a DMI officer. There was a chance she wouldn't have gone for word one. Then would come questions and recriminations. Accusations. Was he off drinking, was it another woman… Raddatz really only had the time and temperament to douse a small fire, not to deal with a whole forest set ablaze.
So in a way it was a little ironic. She'd bought the big lie of her husband stepping in and helping out. What she couldn't get past: him telling her he had to go out and push paper. Right now.
"Somebody else can't do it?"
"I was a witness."
"So do it tomorrow."
"The time I sit here talking I could be done and back."
Head up, looking right at her husband: "You were dead." "I don't…»
"I said to myself he's dead. Not maybe, but… I wanted to accept it. Be done accepting it. I wanted to be ready for it."
"Those days are over. I'm not MTac anymore."
"It doesn't matter. If you know the feeling once, you never-"
"3 was gone a couple of hours."
"To me, Tucker, you were dead."
Just then he realized she was cupping his mangled wrist. Hook off. Raddatz was letting it breathe. His nerve endings were pretty much useless. The whole of It, the stump, the scars, the remnants of surgery-surgeries- was a hideous sight. Never, never once that Raddatz could remember had Helena ever recoiled from it or from its touch to her body. Never that he could recall did she hold back from making contact with it.
She was such a good woman. No pejorative there. No marginalization regarding her gender in relation to modem society. What was right and fine, what was the core of all vows that a man and woman take when joined before God and the law was what Helena owned and regularly put into practice.
Raddatz asked himself: Would she-if Helena knew the truth of things, if she knew that he was helping the kind who'd tried to turn her into a widow, had done as much as they could to turn the human race into a distant memory-would she finally recoil from him then? Would her anger still be a combination of love and rage, or just the rage?