"You shorted the automatic braking system, didn't you?" I asked.

She smiled proudly for a moment, and nodded.

"Yes I did. It was really easy. All the older cars had the system wired in as an after-market product. It wasn't something that the manufacturers put in back then."

"What was the second thing?" I asked.

"You said two things'."

"Oh, yes. The distraction. His 'cla.s.sic' car is--was-air-cooled. I sprayed mace into the vents on the front of his windshield, and on his hood. When it pulls air 144 R. Doris in from the outside, I guessed that it would pull the spray in, too."

"But how could you know he would turn on the air inside the car?" I objected.

"I couldn't. I took a gamble that it would be another hot day, and it paid off. I estimated that as soon as he was out of the driveway, he would turn on the air. It takes about seven minutes to cycle the air system into full operation. I guessed that the spray would hit him about sixty seconds before he crossed the tracks. I a.s.sume it did."

I sat there for a few minutes, saying nothing. It was stunning how she'd worked it out. Essentially, she'd made his eyes water just seconds before he would cross the tracks. The tracks were at the bottom of a steep hill and surrounded by a ditch on either side.

Even if the spray hadn't worked, he probably would have crashed with no brakes at that speed. Had he left at his normal time, the train would have been there and gone before him. I had to admire it.

I looked at her, and could see the desperate hope on her face.

"Can I see those pictures, please?" I asked.

"Sure," she said, and rose to go get them. When she returned, she tossed me a large envelope. Inside were pictures of her bruised body.

In one photo, I could see welt marks on her ribs from a strap or a belt of some kind. In another, there were cigar shaped burns on the inside of her thighs. I shuddered. It was enough.

Smiling at her, I said, "Sorry about your husband, Fran."

"Yes," she said, "thank you." This time her smile was real.

"It's a shame he had to go that way, but at least he felt no pain."

"You're a generous woman, Fran. He deserved far worse than what he got."

"I know," she said, "but accidents happen."

I left the home of Francis Foster, and got back in my air car. As the auto drive engaged, I reported in to the station that I was headed home for lunch, and that I would report in later. I listened to her story on my ear chip as the traffic flew by.

The air car landed on the roof pad of the apartment building where I lived. Walking down the steps, I erased the recording I'd made of Fran's story. I believed her, Foster was an abuser of the highest order, and I'd promised her no recordings. I entered my apartment and tossed my coat on the kitchen table.

I ordered up a sandwich and a beer from the auto chef

While it was synthesizing my lunch, I turned on my computer system.

Grabbing my meal, I sat down at my console and plugged myself in through the neural jack on the back of my skull. Entering virtual reality has always been a pleasant escape for me.

Soaring over numerous sites, I activated my security program, and located the chat "room" where I spent most of my spare time. I chose my persona, this time a distinguished-looking gentleman with gray hair at his temples, dressed in an immaculate three-piece suit. I stepped in, and looked out into the room. It was, in actuality, an auditorium.

Filled with women.

There are good days and bad days when you make your living as a police detective. Today had turned out pretty well.

I stepped out onto the auditorium stage, and said, "Ladies, my name is Maxwell Centouro. I am here to help you, and if you listen to me, your troubles--at least those with your husbands--will soon be over.. .."

GLORY HAND IN THE.

SOFT CITY.

by Jay Bonansinga

Jay Bonansinga is the author of the novels The Black Mariah, Sick, The Killer's Game, Head Case, and Bloodhound. His short fiction and articles have appeared in Grue, Filmfax, Cemetery Dance, and It Came From the Drive-in. He lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife and son.

I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I still had my right hand.

It threw me for a moment.

I lay there in a cold sweat, my heart thumping. I brought my stump up in front of my face, waving invisible fingers back and forth. I could feel the twinges of phantom pain, the sharp aching in the knuckles that weren't there anymore, and the hot, itchy sensations like sunburn tingling in the heart of my nonexistent palm.

"What's'matter, Glory?" The hooker lying next to me was stirring awake, gazing up at me through heavy lidded eyes. She called herself Porsche, and her hair had that bizarre coppery color of laboratory-grown follicles. Earlier in the evening we had humped for twenty minutes, until I had climaxed my routine one and-a-half fluid ounces of sterile s.e.m.e.n and Porsche

had fallen fast asleep. I hadn't had the heart to boot her out.

Now I was telling her I was fine.

"You're sweating," she insisted, sitting up, reaching for her box of synth-cigs.

"Nightmares."

"You're s.h.i.tting me. You're still sleeping natural?"

Porsche lit a syn-stick, sucking a mouthful of pale blue smoke.

"I sleep like a baby since I got the alpha implant put in. Word to the wise, Robert: Get an alpha implant."

"Already tried it--didn't work," I said, flexing my non fingers concentrating on the ghostly feelings. The heat, the tingling: They were my first true neural sensations since I had lost the hand in a nasty kendo fight with a couple of trans genic Sikhs in a juice den last month. I was on a missing person case that had gotten me mixed up with the Indo-Burmese Chimera Triad, and I was trying to fight my way out. It took a pair of emergency techs working nonstop just to save my hand's nerve network and get the thing frozen before the cells shut down. They told me they could probably save the hand and restore the nerves, but I was devastated. My pipeline to true bio-touch had been inexorably threatened.

That's when I started thinking about checking out of the private investigation game.

"When do you get that back?" The prost.i.tute nodded toward my stump, toward the cap of surgical mesh and the network of medical tattoos drawn around my wrist for calibration during the reattachment.

I told her next Thursday, and then I glanced across the shadows of my measly little studio flat. The cracked plastic calendar was hanging by the autoclave, the digital face reading Friday, March 7, 2053, and I realized I had only six days left until my biological hand was done.

And then I realized my right hand was all I had left in the world. The rest of my body had been grafted and treated so many times, there wasn't much left with a decent nerve ending. Like most of the regular army, I had lost ninety percent of the skin on my arms and legs during the war in Pakistan.

All those new viruses mingling, nasty hybrids surfacing everywhere. Of course, the plague years got the rest of me. My left hand, much of my torso, and a good portion of my left shoulder had atrophied during the Hanta plague in '24; and most of it had to be reseeded with test tube tissue. Even my a.s.s had ninety percent lab-flesh on it.

But n.o.body was smart enough to see the shutdown coming.

They called it Miller's Syndrome: the gradual atrophy of the nerve endings due to some faulty connection between laboratory grown skin and the natural subcutaneous fascia. In English: The world went numb. Four out of five survivors of the new plagues experienced the deadening effects within a year of being treated. I got it myself. After my discharge, I started going numb. And even throughout my years as a beat cop, I felt the nerve endings closing down.

Of course, I was lucky. I had fared a lot better than most of the poor schmucks creeping around the Hard City nowadays. Most folks born after the turn of the twenty-first had a hundred percent reworked tissue, and the closest thing to a real neural sensation for them was jacking into a nerve-net box and letting some virtual Hindu mama jerk them off. I, on the other hand, possessed .. . well .. . the other hand. I was one of the small percentage of old timers who still owned a biological hand. A stretch of skin with its original nerve bundle intact.

And right now I wanted it back.

"Ouch!" I jerked back against the fiber steel headboard with a start.

My unseen fingers were shrieking.

The invisible heat was erupting.

"What is it, honey?" Porsche had managed to slip out of bed and climb into her said. Now she was standing a few feet away, nervously puffing her cig.

"I dunno--I can--I can feel--OUCH!" I convulsed against the wall.

My phantom hand was going up in flames.

"Should I buzz somebody?" Porsche was gawking at me, chewing her lip.

"No--I'm just--I can feel the--" I climbed out of bed and turned on the halogens. With my numb left hand I managed to pull on my leather pants and guide my feet into my boots. The heat was like a cymbal crashing in my brain. I took a few deep breaths, then walked over to the window, I looked out through the gray ozone filter.

My invisible hand throbbed.

The Hard City was shimmering in the toxic darkness, the sodium-bright residential blocks glowing sickly silver.

At this hour the streets were still humming, the threads of directional lasers still st.i.tching through the haze, looking like cat's cradles.