I walked back down the stairs with heavy steps.

I searched on through the night, tired, pointing my torch into faces until ghosts swam before my eyes and I could no longer trust what I was seeing. Occasionally I caught glimpses of running shadows in the distance and at first I thought they were cops, but my mind was so tired and twisted they could just as well have been the shadows of clouds scooting across the moon.

I was heading back to the main block, ready to call it a night, when my radio squawked into life.

"Denny, you still around? I thought you'd--" "Get your f.u.c.kin' a.s.s down to the dark block," Denny snapped.

"Now!"

"Wha-What's happening?" My mind wheeled.

"I've got the f.u.c.ker."

A cold wave pa.s.sed through me.

"Hendry? You found him--?"

"Just get the f.u.c.k over here fast, or you ain't gonna get the pleasure of the pop."

My legs were already rolling.

"You shot him?"

Anger welled in me.

"Denny--" "Relax. I just--I just settled him down a little, that's all. I ain't gonna deprive you."

I clipped the radio back on my belt and started running toward the dark block.

Denny was standing in the open doorway. A bare lightbulb burned directly above him, turning his hair into a halo. His hands hung loose at his sides, thick veins cording his forearms. I was panting by the time I reached him and took a moment to calm my breathing.

nodded at Denny.

He pointed into the building.

"Through that door, second on the right."

I followed his directions. My legs felt weak, and my face was glazed with sweat. The floor was swimming with urine and I reached my arms out to the walls to steady myself and felt something sticky. I looked up.

Angry finger paintings in blood covered the wall on my right. I followed the trail, ending in the room where Denny had directed me.

The pale early morning sun burned through the grime on the windows and picked out a hunched figure against the far wall. He was sitting with his knees drawn up, his head resting on his knees. A trail of blood led from the door. The man's clothes were ragged and dirty; the soles of his shoes napped loose like grotesque tongues. The small of feces a.s.saulted my nostrils and I found myself gagging. I crossed to open the window. It was rusted shut, so I popped it with the b.u.t.t of my gun. Shards of gla.s.s rattled on the floor at my feet.

The man stirred and raised his head, and I saw the full extent of Denny's handiwork; a quick death would be a relief to this man. A deep cut ran from above the left eye down to the jawline; it had sliced through a nerve and the upper lid twitched as if shot through with electricity. Beads of blood as dark as leeches clung to the cut. The eyes were as dead as gla.s.s marbles.

His jaw was broken, the right side of his mouth hanging loose.

The man's head fell back on to his arms.

I flashed on video images from deep memory.

I moved closer, careful not to slip in the blood. I knelt in front of the man and put my gun against his forehead and pushed his head back, cracking it against the wall.

The face of a stranger leaped out at me, and my senses froze, unable to deal with the information. A stranger. A complete stranger. All I could think of was why had Denny led me to a stranger? For a brief moment I had been blinded by the mask of injuries, but the more I looked at the man before me, the more I couldn't understand what Denny had done.

But in the end it didn't matter; all that mattered was that Hendry was still out there.

I pulled my radio from my belt and called for a paramedic.

The freeway was quiet heading south, and I was able to run on cruise control. It had turned eight, the sun was burning a track in the sky, and the tarmac shimmered before my eyes. Denny was asleep in the back, and I could hear him snoring gently. The fact that he had almost just beaten a man to death didn't seem to have jagged his rhythm.

We must have been an hour out of the camp when I noticed the red light on Denny's Medibag. I remembered Denny telling the juice heads to leave the bag alone and I could only a.s.sume that despite his warning one of them had managed to hide their juice in the bag on the trip out and had left it switched on.

I shouted at Denny to take a look, but he just rolled over in his sleep, dreams of torture playing across his eyelids.

The light was still on, and Denny was still asleep twenty minutes later when I pulled into the service station. I drove over to the far side of the car park and stopped next to a green Bullet van.

I climbed down from my seat and opened the rear door. I pulled myself into the back and walked over to the Medibag. Normally, Denny keeps it locked, but when I flipped the lid it opened. A cold mist crept over the edges and began to spread across the floor of the shuttle. I waved it away with my hand and knelt down to take a better look. There was something in there. It looked like a sheet of paper all crumpled up.

I reached in to lift the paper out, and there it was.

A human heart.

Deep blue and covered with a fur of frost but still a human heart.

I fell forward on to my knees, a burning pulse beating in my head. I could do nothing but stare into the box, at the cold air swirling around the heart, as if pumped by the organ itself.

I still had the sheet of paper in my hand. I lifted it and read. It was a printout from a DNA scan, the information identical to the one the technician had shown me back at the Datacenter, identifying the blood as belonging to Hendry.

I didn't understand. Was the heart Hendry's? It didn't make sense.

How .. . ?

I looked at the sheet of paper again for some sign;

spidery handwriting near the bottom; blood was smeared across most of it but I could make out the tail end: ".. . now that his heart is still, we may be at rest." It was signed Jolie.

Jolie.

She must have hacked into the DNA database and put a trip on it so that when anyone accessed the records of Hendry, she would know immediately.

I flashed on running shadows--telecommunications security turned bounty hunters? And Jolie--had she cut out the heart of the man who had killed her son? I screwed my eyes tight, but images of Jolie scooping a knife in a man's chest still burned on my retina.

I stared at the heart for a long time, the distant rhythmic sounds of traffic on the freeway calming me.

The whole mad spiral of events that had led to my being here, from the shooting of Cal to the b.l.o.o.d.y heart in my hands, played out in a continuous violent loop in my head, over and over.. ..

Eventually I picked up the heart and wrapped it in the sheet of paper.

I jumped down from the shuttle and walked across to the far side of the car park where a chain link fence separated me from the yard. I listened carefully but for a long time I could only hear the sound of my own breathing.

When I heard the sound of the dogs fighting over sc.r.a.ps behind the building I drew back my arm and threw the heart as hard as I could toward the noise.

The frozen heart shattered on hitting the ground, splinters of viscera already melting on the hot tarmac.

THE DEATH OF.

WINSTON FOSTER.

by R. Davis

R. Davis currently resides in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with his very patient wife Monica and his beautiful daughter Morgan Storm. He holds a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin, and writes both fiction and poetry. His current projects include a book-length ma.n.u.script of poems ent.i.tled In the Absence of Language and several novel projects that may never see the light of day.

".. . so if you've found yourself dreaming of killing your abusive husband, take it as a sign that a significant part of you has already done the deed. It is unfortunate that the dream itself is not nearly as gratifying or effective as actually doing him in ..."

--Maxwell Centouro, 2075 ad

THERE are good days and bad days when you make your living as a police detective. Most of them, including this one, were bad. I made an effort to think about the good days as I steered my air car to the home of a recently--very recently--widowed lady by the name of Francis Foster. She knew I was coming, and from the tone of her voice when I'd called, she had already heard the news.

Her husband was dead.

I'd spent the first part of my morning at the scene of the accident, which didn't get my day off to a flying start. Her husband, Winston Foster, had been killed on his way to the office by a hypertrain traveling at 380 miles per hour. When it hit Foster's car, it had spread his body like raspberry jam down the tracks and into the ditch.

He'd been initially identified by a fingerprint scan from his left hand, which was attached to his left arm, which wasn't attached to anything at all. The arm had been found among the weeds in the ditch by a rookie cop who'd promptly thrown up at the sight.

The problem, and the reason I was involved at all, was that there are numerous safety systems built into a car to prevent just such an occurrence. I had been a.s.signed the rather grim task of breaking the news to Mrs. Foster, as well as investigating what--if any-reasons might exist for the accident. All in all, it was building up to be a banner bad day.