Asimov's Science Fiction (7 page)

Jones didn't know the woman's name, but he had touched her interface as he walked past, and he had her face, a rough idea of her age, her building, and the fact that she had at least two kids. It should be enough.

Fifteen minutes later, he had her.

Andrelline Smith. Thirty-one. Married. Degree in Social Justice and Women's Studies. Two kids. Housewife. He smiled at the irony of her education. This was marvelous. He read her feed directly off the line. It was full of recipes and sales. Here and there he found the taste of wine or the tone of regret inherent in her search for the latest book by a writer named Kate Aarons. Romance, of course. So cliché. She was apparently planning a trip to Mexico, where her mother was born.

He latched into the structure of Andrelline Smith's feed.

His first change was small, just the flash of an image—a woman with one hand tied to a chair. Ten minutes later the same woman, her back arched, a man's hand at screen right. The model was a Latina, like Andrelline, smooth skinned, but not perfect. He watched her feed as the evening progressed, saw the way it spiked with each subliminal note he layered in.

His eyes narrowed. His mind focused.

He felt like a conductor standing before a secret symphony.

The kids were in bed, finally.

Andrelline sat on the couch, her feet curled beneath her. She was reading a book. Harol had been moody all night. His boss had not gotten the job, so he was stuck in his place for one more cycle. Harol was a good man, but hard to reach at times. She had learned to give him his space.

As she read, she felt urgency come over her. She felt warm. Then she felt more than warm. She imagined Harol when he was not so distant, she felt him, tasted him. Her mind wandered, and somewhere in the mix she found herself thinking of the boarded window and thinking of the man across the street. She imagined secrets. She stretched, arching her back, feeling a sense of longing, a sense of need that was suddenly so strong it hurt.

Her forehead shimmered with a film of sweat. She bit her lower lip, enjoying the sharp edge of her teeth.

Jersey Jones watched from his apartment as he fed her images of the dark merlot she had stored in the cabinet. A moment later she passed by the window and poured two glasses.

Yes.

It was dark when Detective Stone woke. His digital clock read 9:45. The television flickered with a baseball game, so it was not yet morning. His feed smelled of coffee and buttered toast. Shit. Everything about his life was out of sorts.

It came to him like a bolt of lightning—a gift from the inner workings of his mind.

It wasn't Doering's feed that was the problem.
He picked up his phone and pressed his tech analyst's number.

"Did you find anything about the feeds?" he asked.

"Nothing you haven't seen."

"What about Jones's feed?"

"Nope. Nothing out of whack."

"What about the ad feeds?"

"What do you mean?"

"The products themselves, the rates of the packet reception, anything?"

She hesitated. "Nothing unusual."

"No spikes. No odd perturbations. Nothing with a kink on."

"No. I don't think so."

"That's it," he said. "Jersey Jones is a geek-head, a code monkey. Awkward as shit. Maybe even a little creepy. Yet he's got a revved-up cougar in his room for the evening,
and
his body chemistry is all spun up, but his ad-line is flowing along just as steady as rain."

"I see what you're saying," the analyst said, her voice rising. "You would think his feed would be... uh... more interesting."

"Exactly. Something's not right. Can you read him now?"

"I'm at home. I'll have to go back in to access his stream."

"Okay, I'll call you later. Thanks." He broke the call.

George called in sick to work.

The cops wouldn't move on this guy without enough evidence to lock him down, but he had seen the look on the woman's face. Something was going to happen tonight, and he was going to be there. George Manning was the Gut Man.

He ate three Chicago-style hotdogs at a restaurant down the street, then parked his car in a real lot, bitching about the thirteen-dollar-an-hour rate, and feeling his stomach complain about greased-up french fries that had come with the dogs.

Thirteen fucking bucks. Jesus.

This had better be worth it.

He slipped his Beretta into his pant waist and walked to the corner where the apartment buildings joined. The weapon was a Px4, semi-automatic 9mm, with a full magazine of ten rounds loaded. He liked it for its ambi-safety—something that, being left-handed, was important to him. A man needs to be professional and safe.

He sat on a raised block of marble outside a bank. Cars and buses passed. The sound of a bar band came in the distance. It was just past ten.

Harol hadn't wanted another glass of wine, but after he went to bed Andrelline finished her second and went back for a third. She tried to read another chapter, but her mind wandered, and her feed drifted in directions she wasn't used to. The apartment was silent now, the rest of them sleeping.

She felt desire inside her that carried a hint of what she thought of as freedom. It was a ball of wanton energy woven tight to the core. She drank wine, and pictured herself walking down the street with the same, feral essence she sensed from the man earlier today. Her skin tingled. The stream brought images of two people writhing in such a close frame she could not tell their genders, an ambiguity that made the moment somehow more real. For a moment Andrelline forgot she was married or that she had children or that her parents had divorced, forgot even that her life was in a rut.

George watched the woman leave her apartment building. She stopped at the corner, breathed a languid breath, then walked across the street with such an unhurried gait he thought she might get hit by an onrushing taxi. She wore a trench coat, buttoned once. Her feet and legs were bare. Her walk alone was enough to draw attention. It was fluid, hypnotic. She made it across the street and inside the opposite apartment building before George broke from his fugue and stood to follow her.

He got to the door just as the elevator rose.

It was going to the seventh floor—he was sure of it. He remembered the edge to Jersey Jones's voice. Something bad was going to happen if he didn't get up there. He lumbered through the hallway and took to the stairs. As he ran, his feed filled his mind with a driving beat of heavy metal, the perfect hero soundtrack.

Detective Stone got out of his car and waited for backup. He leaned against a fender and crossed his arms. The warrant had been granted. He was going to interrogate Jersey Jones further, and possibly even arrest him. It was getting late. The air was crisp and cool. He liked this time of year. It felt like a fresh start.

A man stepped into the apartment foyer, hand against his side in the fashion that told Stone he was packing. He was a big man, nearly as round as he was tall, dressed in dark clothes and what could be a military vest.

Shit.

He released the strap on his own weapon, and moved to investigate.

Andrelline did not ring when she came to Jersey Jones's door. Instead, she knocked, just as he had instructed her to knock. He liked the sound of flesh on the door. Three blows from the knuckles, a physical call, a manifesto in pain that beckoned him to her service. He opened the door and found her standing naked, her coat pooled on the floor behind her.

His eyes narrowed in appreciation. This woman was not broken. This woman could handle her pain. He would control her in a way no one else could, and she would like it.

"Come in," he said. "I've been waiting for you."

The sound of the locking bolt sent electricity up her spine. Somewhere inside her, Andrelline understood what was happening. She felt trapped, she wanted to wrest control from this new part of her, this drunken alter ego who seemed so calm, so collected. She wanted to change her life. She wanted to live. But this was not her, or was it? She felt the flavor of a desire so much larger than her body could contain. She did not want to touch this man's face, yet touch it she did, and when she ran her fingertips down his face the smoothness of his cheekbone brought comfort, she felt safe. She did not want to sit in the chair while he roped her wrist down, and yet when she did, and when
he
did, she felt a surge of something so brilliant she forgot the fear she knew she should feel.

What was she doing?

She tried to scream, but her body did not respond. Instead she felt her back arch and her legs and feet curl around the chair legs.

Stone crossed the street, working to remain calm, his eyes wide, his ears straining. Auto exhaust flavored the air, the horns of cars carried from the distance. By protocol he should stay put until his partner arrived, but a man with a gun changed everything, and a man with a gun who also happened to be on a crime scene made it a priority.

He made a decision.

Stone stepped into the apartment building but found no sign of the man. He went to the elevator. It arrived at the seventh floor without incident. The hallway was empty. Was the man already in Jersey Jones's apartment? Stone rested his hand on his weapon and rang the bell at Jones's door.

"Who is it?" the man's voice came several beats later. He was clearly wary.

"Detective Stone," he replied. "I have a few more questions for you."

"Just a moment. Let me get decent."

The detective waited.

George's chest was on fire and his legs felt like Jello. His breathing echoed in the vertical shaft of the stairwell, sounding like an asthmatic locomotive. He had made it up only five flights and he thought he was going to die. He thought his goddamned head was going to explode. He gripped his gun and looked down the shaft, using his free hand to grab the rail and drag himself along. He imagined his buddies laughing at him. Sweat blurred his vision, and his hands were wet, making the gun feel slippery. This was it. He had to work out. He had to move now, though. Every moment he waited was a moment the woman might be killed.

Two more flights.

He climbed a stair, ignoring the flaming pain along his back. Another step, then another until finally he came to a door with a big "7" painted in black lettering. He pushed it open and stepped into the hallway.

There was a man there, a big black man standing in the hallway with a gun at his side. The man whirled and reached for the weapon. George's heartbeat jumped to overdrive and adrenaline washed his brain. He dropped to one knee, and on pure instinct drew a bead, screaming as he pulled the trigger. The blast echoed in the hallway.

He pulled again and again.

Three shots. Surprisingly, all of them hit the target somewhere.

The man fell, crashing into the apartment where the door had just opened. The door tried to slam shut, but the man's body was in the way. George lumbered forward, his voice raw with an incoherent battle cry. His feed brought him an image of a big man of bronze.

There were shots... the woman screamed.

What the fuck?

Jones tried to slam the door shut, but the cop was there, gasping for air and bleeding on the floor through a hole in his neck he was trying desperately to hold closed. All of holy fucking hell was breaking loose and Jersey Jones had no idea what to do. The cop tried to grab his foot with one waving hand, but Jones avoided him. Footsteps pounded in the hallway. The shooter was coming near.

His mind froze. He retreated. It was dark in his apartment, and the man appeared at the doorway, half in shadow, half illuminated by the hallway lights. Jones grabbed the bust of John Von Neumann his team had given him as a gag, and he threw it at the man. It scored a hit, but his attacker was a wild bull, screaming obscenities and surging toward him with a gun pointing forward.

"Get your ass down!" George yelled, pointing the Beretta at the shadows as he stepped into the apartment. "You're under arrest, goddamn it! Get your motherfucking ass down!"

But instead, Jones ran, and George went into pursuit mode, crashing into the apartment's living space and squeezing off more shots. It was like he had stepped out of his body. He was amped. He felt the crystal clear sense of "now" his buddies said they felt when things got hairy. It was in-fucking-credible.
You fall back on your training, they all said as they drank beer and popped peanuts. Things just happen.
And now these things were happening to George.

He blew a hole in the wall, and he destroyed a disc player, and he hit other things that were not Jersey Jones.

But at least he had the bastard on the run.

A bullet smashed through the wall and ripped into a small electronic device. The bullet did not know what the device did—nor, of course, did George. The box shattered, though, breaking into pieces of laminate, wire, fiberglass, and chips. And as the device shattered, the feed it was pushing into Andrelline Smith's brain came to its end.

Self-control hit her so hard it snapped her head around.

Her legs were free, but her arms were locked down. Andrelline heard the shooting and the grunts and screams of male voices that came from the other room. She was intensely aware of her nakedness. The chair was hard-backed and made of sturdy wood. She jerked against it, but the ropes were firm at her wrists and elbows. She struggled to her feet, and found herself standing there, hunched over like Quasimodo.

Jones hit the floor when the shots started coming. He crawled into the kitchenette where maybe he could grab a knife or something. A bullet blew a hole in the cabinet above him. He used the counter to pull himself up, then threw his blender. It looped through the air, power cord whipping around.

The hulking man dodged, but his ankle buckled. He lurched, sending a bullet into the ceiling as he crashed to the floor, the crown of his head thudding against the edge of the coffee table. The gun fell away.

There was an instant of total silence.

Then Jones heard screaming from all around. A roar of confusion raged inside his brain. The detective was moaning. Crap. He had to get out of here. Now. He picked up the gun. It was heavy.