Mick Farren - THE FEELIES

Ralph made an impatient gesture. "Everyone wants to spend their life in a feelie, or hadn't you heard?"

"But she was so young and nice-looking."

"And rich, so what?"

"She must have had so much going for her. What's she want to end up here for?"

"Listen, dummy, she's probably in there being Attila the Hun. No matter what people got, they always think they can get better. That's why feelies got made."

Sam still wasn't happy. "I sure hope Artie doesn't get at her."

DETECTIVE IZZY STEIGER WALKED INTO the squad room of the Ninth Precinct and looked around wearily. Murty and Rojas were sitting behind their desks doing nothing in particular. He dropped into his own empty chair. "You heard the latest?"

Rojas shook his head. "What's the latest?"

"The Seventh busted a bootleg feelie parlor over on Jay Street."

"What the hell is a bootleg feelie parlor?"

Murphy looked up from doing the Post crossword. "I heard of one of those a couple of years back. They started up again?"

Rojas was still looking baffled. "How the hell can some sleazo on Jay Street bootleg a feelie? They definitely don't have the technology."

Steiger picked up a sheaf of arrest reports and then put them back down. The station's climate control was once again out, and it was too hot to work. Out on the street, the temperature must have been over a hundred degrees, with seventy percent humidity. And the president goes on TV to tell everyone that the greenhouse effect is nothing to worry about, he thought. Yeah, right.

"They don't have the technology, but they have some awful stupid customers."

Murphy folded up the Post and placed it on the desk. "It's what you could call voodoo technology."

Rojas got up from his chair and walked over to the water cooler. "So how do they work this?"

Steiger put his feet up on the desk. "Basically it's a con. The guys running the scam get hold of a space-a garage, a storefront, whatever, God knows spaces aren't hard to find down around Jay. They build some fake feelie coffins out of lengths of thirty-inch plastic pipe or something of the sort and hook them up to dummy control pacs. Like I said, their customers are pretty stupid, so just about anything will do, the inside of an old TV and a couple of flashing lights, just so long as it looks marginally "Star Trek." Once that's all in place, they start hustling for business."

Rojas crushed the paper cup he had been drinking from and tossed it backhand into the wastebasket.

"So how do they actually do the feelie? What's the illusion?"

Steiger laughed. "In a word, crude. The come on is usually sexual, and most of the marks are men. Once they've got the mark in the coffin, they shoot him full of some crap IV cocktail. Usually it's one thing to put them half out and something else that'll make them hallucinate like crazy. Dust and barbiturate, acid and MPTP, Ser-enax and PCP, synthetic heroin and DMA-I guess pretty much what they can get their hands on."

Murty grunted. "You can get your hands on practically anything down there."

Rojas sat down again. "Sounds like a class act."

Steiger went on. "So once they've got the mark doped out of his mind, they stick a google TV on the front of his face. You know, a Sony Maskman or one of those. They run a porno loop, and at the same time some old whore, one who's probably too fucked up to work the street anymore, gives the guy a blow job."

Rojas was shaking his head in disbelief. "Oh, choice. How the hell does anyone fall for this shit?"

Steiger spread his hands in a don't-ask-me gesture. "What can I tell you? Seems there're fools out there who want to be in a feelie so bad, they'll convince themselves of anything. The experience, if you can call it that, maybe only lasts a few minutes, and they spend the next two or three hours sleeping off the drugs. When it's all over, they wake up with a motherfucker of a headache and no memory but determined to believe that they had a hell of a time."

"What do they pay for all this?"

"Upward of five hundred."

Rojas eyebrows shot up. "Jesus Christ, five hundred bucks for a blow job and a chance to OD."

Steiger grimaced. "And the chance to get any one of a half-dozen retroviruses. The way I heard it, the IVs weren't any too sanitary. Like I say, there's fools out there who'll believe anything. Also you'll be able to hear all about it on the late news. Pictures at eleven."

"Kowalski again?"

"Seems like it. Kowalski of the Seventh, the reporters' friend. I hear he has a smartcard with all the numbers of his press contacts on it. When he wants to tip them off, he doesn't even have to dial."

Murty's lip curled. "Good old Kowalski. I don't know why they don't just make him the official PR of the Seventh Precinct."

Steiger shrugged. "He's better off as he is. If he went official, he wouldn't make as much money."

Rojas was furious. "Kowalski burns my ass. What's with him? He got to spend more time on the phone tipping off the media than doing his fucking job, whatever that might be. Don't he got no dignity?"

Murty spat on the floor. "He's got to supplement his income somehow."

Steiger leaned back in his chair. "You ain't heard it all yet. Kowalski really outdid himself on this one. He didn't only tip the media that this feelie bust was going to go down. He even called out the publicity office of CM. They had cameras down there. They're apparently going to make a commercial out of it, warning the public that the only good feelie is a CM feelie. Kowalski's going to be hired on as a technical advisor."

Murty laughed. "So Kowalski's in with CM. He ain't going to be long for the department now. He's going to be moving on to better things."

Rojas lit a cigarette. "You guys ever think that what those bootleggers are doing isn't all that different to what CM is doing? I mean, CM is a lot more hygienic, but it's really all the same ball game."

Murty looked at him sadly. "You really don't have a clue."

"What do you mean, I don't have a clue?"

"The world runs on diplomacy, Rojas. It's something you don't appreciate. That's why you're still D2 after seven years, and Kowalski drives a Jaguar."

Rojas turned away. "Fuck Kowalski."

Steiger had walked over and picked up Murty's copy of the Post. He idly leafed through it, finally stopping at the ratings for the day. "Today's top feelie is a cop fantasy. You become a police homicide detective."

Murty's eyes rolled heavenward. "It's a wonderful world."

THUNDER CRASHED AROUND THE apartment building, and through the window, Wanda-Jean could see the lightning repeatedly striking the CM Tower over on the west side. The heat and humidity had temporarily exploded into a violent storm, but nobody who knew the city's weather patterns believed that it would be anything but the most brief relief. As soon as the storm was gone, the streets would be steaming again. Wanda-Jean sat and stared out the window at the bursts of electricity and the gray sheets of rain. She thought about turning on the TV. It was almost time for "Torture Garden." Somehow, though, she couldn't. She had a strange feeling of unease. It had started with the "Wildest Dreams" audition and had been with her ever since. She had been asking herself the same question for the past two days, ever since she had heard that she had made it onto the show. What was she really getting into?

The phone rang. Wanda-Jean looked at it suspiciously. She wasn't expecting anyone to call, particularly not in the middle of a raging storm. She picked it up with a feeling of misgiving.

"Hello?"

"This is building security." The building's security system had one of those annoyingly smooth female cabin-attendant voices.

"What is it?"

"You have a visitor."

Wanda-Jean reached for the remote for the living-room wall TV. "Put him on the screen please."