Damage Time

by Colin Harvey

  There's no point in arguing with her. She's so deeply in denial that nothing you can say will convince her. Only your threat to leave her alone in the empty street was enough to persuade her to come with you and now that the shock of your threat has worn off, she's reverting to her usual stubbornness.

  The central lane begins to move forward faster than those on either side, and for a moment you're tempted to follow the lead set by several other cars and try to maneuver into the lane, but the line stops as soon as it starts. Car horns blare like maddened elephants.

  Several drivers get out of their stationary cars, then run across the other lines of traffic. Many stop when confronted by the sheer height of the side wall, but a few clamber over it and jump down into the adjacent gardens.

  Within minutes dozens of other drivers are following these pioneers' example; leaving their possessions in their cars and abandoning them both, clambering over the barriers and running across the gardens toward the city center, like lemmings hurtling toward a cliff.

  VIII

  Monday

  Still haunted by images of crowds scampering across suburban Pennsylvania gardens, Marietetski removed the sensory-deprivation hood and unpeeled the scanner, rubbing sensation back into his shaven scalp. It would sting like hell when the local anesthetic wore off, but without Shah, he'd have to get used to it. And it would be many years before he could work without the safety-net of the hood, unlike Shah, who could just blank his surroundings by closing his eyes.

  "What you viewing?" His partner's voice made Marietetski jump. Shah leaned across him, cheap aftershave tickling Marietetski's nostrils.

  "118-395-04." Marietetski pointed at the screen with the clip he'd downloaded from the web while putting his eyepiece back on.

  "Huh," Shah said. "You been studying a burn, bud. Entirely legal downloaded copy."

  "Oh, crap. You sure?"

  "Positive. You can tell by the very faint sense of loss that usually accompanies any rip that the criminals make, as if the memory itself is hurting. Did you get that feeling?"

  Marietetski shook his head. "Nah. Just great sadness."

  He described the scene to Shah who scratched an earlobe, fiddling with his new eyepiece. He clearly hadn't yet gotten used to it yet. "There are a lot of these death of suburbia clips out there, all looking for some wealthy connoisseur to give them some tender loving care. For a lot of these people, losing their cars and the scattered lifestyle their motors supported was worse than anything else. They've convinced themselves that someone will be interested. We always think that people are interested in our own little obsessions." Shah paused. "What were you looking for?"

  "Just trawling." Marietetski pushed his chair back and smiled at a passing girl in a sharp suit, who returned the smile with interest.

  "OK," Shah muttered. "Don't tell me."

  Marietetski ignored him. "How ya doing, Kimi?"

  "Oh, OK." Kimi waved her hands to illustrate her OK-ness. "I'm starting to learn where all the files are now."

  Marietetski caught her glance and said, "This is my partner, Pete Shah. Pete, this is Kimi. Works in communications." Answering the phones, they used to call it, he thought.

  "The one who–" Kimi caught herself in time. "Nice to meetcha!"

  "Nice to meet you too, Kimi." Shah gave her what Marietetski recognized as his friendliest smile, although his face barely creased.

  Kimi turned back to Marietetski and eyed his lean, muscular frame. "You work out down in the gym?"

  "When I get the time." Physical training was mandatory – even Shah spent time in the gym – and provided a token offset to the building's power consumption, but finding time when shifts seemed to get longer and longer was proving increasingly difficult for everyone.

  "There's one piece of equipment that I can't get my head around," Kimi said. "I'm a little embarrassed to ask people down there – I feel like a fool – but maybe you could spare a few minutes at lunchtime? Show me how it works?" She flashed him what Marietetski thought of as a sixty-watt smile, shy and slightly hesitant.

  "Sure." Marietetski tried to ignore Shah's muffled snort of laughter. "Twelve-thirty?"

  "Yeah, that'd be great." Kimi's smile increased to a hundred watts, then to a hundred and fifty. "Thanks." She walked away, hips swaying.

  "Oh, John, you are such a bad, bad boy." He mimicked Kimi's hand-waving falsetto, "Maybe you could spare a few minutes to show me how your equipment works?"

  "Hey, old man," Marietetski said. "I can't help it if the girl has taste." He flexed his arm. "This is lean, mean muscle, almost perfectly built." He grinned and to forestall the inevitable comeback headed for the coffee machine, calling, "Time for some sewage. My treat." It usually was; Marietetski knew that Shah wasn't rich, and with both wives and a co-husband pulling what were comparatively good wages Marietetski could afford the coffees, although Shah made a point of buying periodically.

  Marietetski slotted his card into the machine and punched up the codes for their coffees when a deep male voice behind him said, "What's the old guy doing back in here?"

  Marietetski swung around and gazed at Peruzzi with a distaste that he couldn't have explained, if asked to. The uniformed patrolman was thinning on top but his hair curled over his collar at the back, while his shirt was a size too small for his muscular upper body. None of that was really justification for Marietetski's hackles to rise.

  More likely it was the too-knowing way that Peruzzi talked. While Marietetski might have sometimes doubted Shah's competence, he was the only one allowed to do so. "He's back at work. Got a problem with that?"

  "No, no," Peruzzi said. "Just ah, wondering…"

  "Yeah?" Marietetski took first one cup from the dispenser, then the other.

  "Whether it's wise to let a guy who's under investigation into the building."

  Marietetski stared. How'd you like to wear this coffee, asshole? Instead he said, keeping his voice even with great effort, "In case you hadn't noticed, Officer Peruzzi, there's a chronic shortage of resources."

  "Well, sure…" Peruzzi said, as he inserted his own card into the dispenser.

  Marietetski said, "Shah's been reinstated as far as he'll be working under really close supervision, and with restricted access to files. Only what's directly connected to the cases, and each file will be signed out by van Doorn or me." He added in a low voice, "And the simple truth is that he has a talent for identifying and linking apparently unrelated memories that's almost unequalled in the whole freaking NYPD. Shah is the expert on memory rips."

  "I guess," Peruzzi said, walking away with his cup of coffee.

  "Believe it!" Marietetski called to his back. He turned and found Shah leaning against a wall, clearly trying to stifle a slight smile. "What?" Marietetski said, rubbing the toe of his right shoe against his left instep. "What's so funny?"

  "Ah, John," Shah said. "You sweet talker, you." He sighed theatrically and leaned his head back, resting it against the wall. "A talent almost unequalled in the whole NYPD…"

  "Well, I can hardly say you're a boneheaded waster, can I?"

  "That's more like the typical picky Virgo I usually have to put up with! I wondered where you'd stashed him."

  "Picky Virgo? Put up with me? Put up? With me?" Marietetski raised one eyebrow.

  "Weeeell," Shah said. "I do like the slightly pompous tone you get sometimes. His voice deepened: 'Each file will be signed out by van Doorn or me'." Shah tried to raise an eyebrow, but succeeded only in raising both – and Marietetski burst out laughing.

  "I guess I have certain, ah, standards," Marietetski said, when he'd stopped laughing.

  "Standards." Shah nodded. Then he too started to guffaw.

  "Yeah," Marietetski said. "So how are Leslyn and Doug? Did they have a nicer than usual day?" Marietetski suspected that the day before had been the first Sunday Shah hadn't worked in about thirty years.

  "Oh, they're a little shell-shocked. But Leslyn's getting used to having me underfoot. An
d Doug's as big a jackass as he ever was." He grew serious. "I know that you're not allowed to talk about the woman, but…"

  "No, I'm not. There are no other perps in the frame, Pete. That's all I can say. If they get one piece of evidence beyond circumstantial that points to you…"

  "Leaving me in limbo." Shah sipped his coffee and winced. He stared into space for a while. "Listen, John. I appreciate that this is difficult for you. You're ambitious – I get that."

  "Don't make it sound like a crime, Pete."

  "I'm not," Shah said. "Ambition's almost extinct nowadays, but I'm not criticizing it. What I meant was if you want reassigning, or if you want me to ask, I'll do it. I may joke about you making commissioner by the time you're forty, but I won't do anything that'll blight that career in the Justice Department or wherever it is that you've lined up."

  "Thanks," Marietetski said. "But don't worry about it." Both Linda and Dolores had suggested the same thing, and Paul was wavering, but Marietetski knew how his co-workers thought better than his partners did. If anything else turned up then he would seriously consider it, but at the moment Marietetski was getting office points for loyalty to a partner who wasn't a formal suspect and who might yet be cleared. The time to jump ship would be when something else broke that nailed Shah. At the moment you're only a damned fool for sleeping with a hooker, Pete. But lack of professionalism doesn't make you a killer.

  They returned to their desks. Shah said, "What files you going to sign out for me?"

  Marietetski lowered his voice. "The clip I was looking at?"

  "The death of suburbia thing?"

  "That's the one." Marietetski stroked his chin. "There's an old man ricocheting around HHS amongst other places. Someone ripped his memory, left him halfway to a vegetable. But because he's physically fit HHS say he's not their problem – they're as short of case workers as any other agency. Victim Support's as stretched and can't help."

  "In some ways it's worse than if they're dead. But what's that got to do with the clip you were looking at?"

  "The old guy's originally from Philadelphia. I know now that it isn't him, but I was trying to find something to lock me in on relatives, maybe get him shipped back there."

  Shah shook his head. "Probably no more than ten thousand people living in Philly now. They got hit harder than most by the Dieback. They'll no more have the infrastructure to support him than anywhere else." He thought for a minute. "Was there any sense of a residual signature to the rip left in this guy's brain? Sometimes you can pick up clues – like is there any residual fear? If so, chances are the vic knew what was coming. If not, you may still get a lingering sense of shock spreading throughout the nervous system. We can chemically scrape the brain, but not the nervous system, where some of the emotional impact is stored."

  "They only picked him up Friday afternoon," Marietetski said, and it sounded lame even to him. He simply hadn't thought of it. Damn. It was only now, that he had to work alone that he realized how much he relied on Shah. What Marietetski had dismissed as plodding was now starting to look like attention to detail, allowing Marietetski to do the theorizing that he was good at or to process the simpler cases, the invasion of privacy or other spin-offs where someone else in the memory objected to their presence at a scene being publicized.

  "So come on," Shah said. "Let's go see your vic, put that Masters in Forensic Criminology to some use."

  The sheets of rain outside meant that every pedicab and other type of transport was fought for by pedestrians determined to stay dry. Instead they took a subway ride to the compound that was the victim's latest version of limbo. "I think this Harlan Buffett is related to the guy whose clip I was looking at," Marietetski said as they left the station to venture back out into the downpour. "I guess that old guy – Jim Powell – sold his memory to finance life in Philly."

  "He wouldn't have got much for it," Shah said. "They're dime a dozen, memories like that. It's the rarer stuff that makes the money."

  "Which of course includes the illegals."

  "Yep."

  The compound was only a block from the station, but they had to duck from awning to doorway to canopy to stay even half-dry. Marietetski wrinkled his nose at the smell of horses at the stand – sweat and dung. As they scampered from cover to cover he finally plucked up the nerve to ask, "So what actually happened?" If his eyepiece were studied it would reveal that he'd broken orders to not broach the subject, but it seemed unreasonable of van Doorn and IA to demand that he stay off the topic.

  "I took her home. I guess she dosed me with something in her perfume and took my eyepiece. I woke up with a SWAT team standing over my bed and about a million guns pointed at me."

  "I wondered what had happened to it." Marietetski pointed at Shah's new piece. "I guessed it'd been impounded. Tough getting used to a new one?"

  "Not as much as maybe going to prison," Shah said. "But tough enough."

  "You don't remember anything? Nothing at all?" Marietetski said. "That sounds more like a rip than a dose."

  "I get flashbacks." Shah looked decidedly uncomfortable, "nothing coherent, though."

  Marietetski wondered what Shah was holding back. Because he looked so ill at ease that Marietetski wanted to laugh. If doctors make the worst patients, I guess cops would make the worst liars. "Seems ironic you get your piece stolen the day after hers was taken. Makes you wonder if it's the new crime of choice."

  "Just coincidence."

  "Teach you to hang around with funny women."

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  "Nothing, nothing." Marietetski held his hands up in surrender. "Hey, sorry. OK?"

  "Sure. Look, I'm sorry too. I shouldn't have snapped."

  "Anyway, we're here," Marietetski said.

  'Here' was a shelter, a cold, damp warren through which the dispossessed wandered like ghosts or sat and stared into space.

  Harlan Buffett was in his mid-fifties, Marietetski guessed, but he could have been a decade younger or older.

  "Harlan?" Shah said, voice gentle as a moth's landing. "I'm Officer Pete Shah of the NYPD."

  Buffett stared at them and swallowed.

  "He doesn't respond to anything," the accompanying orderly said. "They took so many of his core memories, both episodic and procedural, that he's basically a vegetable."

  "Catatonic, I assume you mean," Shah said, glaring. Marietetski could almost read his mind: show some respect, asswipe.

  "Not in the strictest medical sense, no." The orderly flushed at Shah's tone. "He isn't rigid, nor does he show any purposeless activity. He simply sits, staring into space."

  "I'm going to show you some pictures, Harlan." Marietetski took out a reader that was no bigger than an old style cellphone, before eyepieces supplanted them. "See if you recognize anyone." Marietetski held the reader in front of Buffett's eyes, but elicited no other reaction. Shah held a portable encephalograph close to Buffett's head and peered through the viewfinder, watching to see whether any of the pictures Marietetski flashed up drew a response.

  "Nothing," Shah said when Marietetski had finished.

  "Not to Sunny Kotian?" Marietetski said.

  "Nor Kotian senior, not Junior, nor to any of the other halfdozen less likely candidates to Ripper-dom," Shah said. "You showed him the pictures of the Powells?"

  "Everything that I could find." Marietetski put away the reader with a sigh. "Come on, let's head back. We're getting nowhere here; just another wall to bang our heads against."

  IX

  "How was your equipment?" Shah leered as Marietetski eased himself into his chair with a sigh. "Was Kimi suitably impressed?"

  "Very funny." Marietetski settled himself down, then looked across. "What ya doing?"

  "Trawling the web." Shah looked up, refocusing on the here-and-now. "Public postings, nothing classified. I haven't hacked your password."

  "Never thought you did."

  "Either I murdered Aurora, or I didn't. Since I didn't, someone wants me i
mplicated. Why else take my eyepiece and leave it where the body was tossed in?"

  "It's a working hypothesis. I'll check the intraweb, see if anything's been posted today." They were silent a while. Marietetski said, "Pete?"

  "Uh-hmm?" Shah's eyes never looked away from the screen.

  "Take a deep breath when I ask this…"

  "Deep breathing now," Shah said, still not looking up.

  "But you seem a little on edge when we talk about the night before. I'm sure it isn't 'cause you killed the girl, so what is it? I'm not trying to interrogate you or anything…"