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Chapter 14:
Twenty
minutes later the police quibble van landed on the roof of the Los Angeles
Police Academy building
Stiffly,
Jason Taverner stepped out, looked warily around, smelled smog-saturated
foul air, saw above him once again the yellowness of the largest city in
North America ... he turned to help Ruth Rae out, but the friendly young
Jesus-freak pol had done that already.
Around them
a group of Los Angeles pols gathered, interested. They seemed relaxed,
curious, and cheerful. Jason saw no malice in any of them and he thought,
when they have you they are kind. It is only in netting you that they are
venomous and cruel. Because then there is the possibility that you might
get away. And here, now, there is no such possibility.
"Did he make
any suicide tries?" a L.A. sergeant asked the Jesus-freak pol.
"No, sir."
So that was
why he had ridden there.
It hadn't
even occurred to Jason, and probably not to Ruth Rae either ... except
perhaps as a heavy, shucky gesture, thought of but never really
considered.
"Okay," the
L.A. sergeant said to the Las Vegas pol team. "From here on in we'll
formally take over custody of the two suspects."
The Las
Vegas pols hopped back into their van and it zoomed off into the sky, back
to Nevada.
"This way,"
the sergeant said, with a sharp motion of his hand in the direction of the
descent sphincter tube. The L.A. pols seemed to Jason a little grosser, a
little tougher and older, than the Las Vegas ones. Or perhaps it was his
imagination; perhaps it meant only an increase in his own fear.
What do you
say to a police general? Jason wondered. Especially when all your theories
and explanations about yourself have worn out, when you know nothing,
believe nothing, and the rest is obscure. Aw, the hell with it, he decided
wearily, and allowed himself to drop virtually weightlessly down the tube,
along with the pols and Ruth Rae.
At the
fourteenth floor they exited from the tube.
***
A man stood
facing them, well dressed, with rimless glasses, a topcoat over his arm,
pointed leather Oxfords, and, Jason noted, two gold-capped teeth. A man,
he guessed, in his mid- fifties. A tall, gray-haired, upright man, with an
expression of authentic warmth on his excellently proportioned
aristocratic face. He did not look like a pol.
"You are
Jason Taverner?" the man inquired. He extended his hand; reflexively,
Jason accepted it and shook. To Ruth, the police general said, "You may go
downstairs. I'll interview you later. Right now it's Mr. Taverner I want
to talk to."
The pols led
Ruth off; he could hear her complaining her way out of sight. He now found
himself facing the police general and no one else. No one armed.
"I'm Felix
Buckman," the police general said. He indicated the open door and hallway
behind him. "Come into the office." Turning, he ushered Jason ahead of
him, into a vast pastel blue-and-gray suite; Jason blinked: he had never
seen this aspect of a police agency before. He had never imagined that
quality like this existed.
With
incredulity, Jason a moment later found himself seated in a
leather-covered chair, leaning back into the softness of styroflex.
Buckman, however, did not sit down behind his top-heavy, almost clumsily
bulky oak desk; instead he busied himself at a closet, putting away his
topcoat.
"I intended
to meet you on the roof," he explained. "But the Santana wind blows like
hell up there this time of night. It affects my sinus passages." He
turned, then, to face Jason. "I see something about you that didn't show
up in your 4-D photo. It never does. It's always a complete surprise, at
least to me. You're a six, aren't you?"
Waking to
full alertness, Jason half rose, said, "You're also a six, General?"
Smiling,
showing his gold-capped teeth - an expensive anachronism - Felix Buckman
held up seven fingers.
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