Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [10]
Afterwards, while Diana was still slightly stoned by virtue of the anesthetic effect of her internal technology, Damon helped her to pack up her things.
There wasn’t that much to collect up; Diana had never been much of a magpie. She was a doer, not a maker, and it was easy enough for Damon to see, in retrospect, that it was the doer in him that she had valued, not the maker. Unfortunately, he had had enough of doing, at least for the time being; his only hunger now was for making.
When the time came to divide the personal items that might have been reckoned joint property Damon gave way on every point of dispute, until the time arrived when Diana realized that he was purging his life of everything that was associated with her—at which point she began insisting that he keep certain things to remember her by. After that, he began insisting that she kept her fair share of things, precisely because he didn’t want to be surrounded by things that were, in principle, half hers. In all probability, it was not until then that the reality of the situation really came home to her—but it was too late for her to scrub out the fight and start again in the hope of rebuilding the broken bridge.
The possessions Diana was prevailed upon to take with her filled up the trunk she’d brought when she moved in plus the three boxes Damon had used to transport the groceries and a couple of black-plastic waste sacks. Even though there were two of them to do the work, there was far too much of it not to pose a logistical problem when the time came to take them down to her car. They had to jam the elevator door open in order to load the stuff inside, and they had to compound that misdemeanor with another when they had to tell an old man who stopped the elevator on the eleventh that there wasn’t room to fit him in and that he’d have to wait. The elevator gave them hell about that one, but neither of them was in a fit state to care.
When they had packed the stuff away in the trunk and rear-seat space of her car, Damon tried to bid her a polite good-bye, but Diana wasn’t having any of it. She just scowled at him and told him it was his loss.
As he watched her drive off, muted pangs of regret and remorse disturbed Damon’s sense of relief, but not profoundly. When he walked back to the elevator his step was reasonably light. When it came down again the man from the eleventh floor stepped out, scowling at him almost as nastily as Diana, but Damon met the scowl with a serene smile. Although his past sins had not been forgotten, the elevator never said a word as it bore him upward; it was not permitted to harbor grudges. By the time it released him he was perfectly calm, looking forward to an interval of solitude, a pause for reflection.
Unfortunately, he saw as soon as the elevator doors opened that he wasn’t about to get the chance. There were two men waiting patiently outside his apartment door, and even though they weren’t wearing uniforms he had experience enough of their kind to know immediately that they were cops.
Three
D
amon knew that it couldn’t be a trivial matter. Cops didn’t make house calls to conduct routine interviews. In all probability they’d soon be conducting all their interrogations in suitably tricked-out VEs; if the LAPD contract ever came up for tender he’d go for it like a shot. For the time being, though, the hardened pros who had been in the job for fifty years and more were sticking hard to the theory that meeting a man eye-to-eye made it just a little more difficult for their suspects to tell convincing lies.
One of the waiting men was tall and black, the other short and Japanese. Cops always seemed to work in ill-matched pairs, observing some mysterious sense of propriety carried over from the most ancient movies to the most recent VE dramas, but these two didn’t seem to be in dogged pursuit of the cliché. Damon knew even before the short man held out a smartcard for his inspection that they