Free Noir by Robert Coover

time to be exploring your body, opening up your trousers, crawling into them, and you realized that the hand was operating on its own. Or perhaps still belonged to her in some manner. Her other hand was between her thighs. Which were exquisitely beautiful. You ached to hold her and, by reaching out, though you couldn’t see your hands, that seemed possible, and as you wrapped your mitts around her amazing hams she began to quiver and twist, her jaw dropping open, her green eyes glazing over. And while you were holding her in that strange way, fascinated by her snaky writhings, the hand began crawling up your body toward your face. You tried to reach for it to push it away, but your hands were pasted to her behind. You understood immediately as it gripped your cheek bones and reached inside your mouth that it intended to screw off your head and you awoke in a sweat on your leather sofa, the hand resting on your face. You must have fallen asleep while studying it. Your pants were a mess. More work for poor Blanche.
    Thereafter, she began to dampen your dreams incessantly with her erotic haunting and, with the help of Rats’ pharmaceuticals (the hand had succeeded), you slept as often as you could. A femme fatale, yes, but of an eerie sort. You showed the hand to a counterfeiter you knew, a pal of Rats, explaining that you were on a murder case, the hand your only clue, and asked him to do a sketch based on your description of what you called your scientific reconstruction of the whole from the part, a sketch you hung on the wall over your desk like the portrait of a president. Without pants. Something to stare at during those brief interludes between sleep. You’d lost interest in the Crabbe case, having gone the false data route, stalling for time, and might have forgotten about the snarling old pawnbroker entirely had he not shown up one rainy afternoon in your office, awakening you from a dream in which you were at sea, afloat in the cup of the upturned hand, tethered by your unseen hands to the hips of the green-eyed beauty swaying on the shore while the winged scarab fluttered in your crotch. Crabbe glanced up at the counterfeiter’s drawing, then at the hand perched on your desktop, turned white. How did you get this? he gasped. He grabbed up the hand, drew a gun, pointed it at your head. Which was when you met Snark. He called out from the doorway and when Crabbe spun to fire, you had a mortally wounded pawnbroker on your office floor with just enough life left in him for Snark to extract a full confession. It turned out Snark had been pursuing Crabbe for murder. No, he said, the body had both hands and looked nothing like the drawing, being more of the dippy overfed bleach-blond heiress sort, but Crabbe was probably feeling guilty and saw his victim everywhere. And why don’t you button up there, that’s a truly ugly sight. It wasn’t the hand that startled the pawnbroker, Snark went on to explain, picking up your phone to call in the meat wagon, but the rings, which had belonged to the victim and had been peddled by Crabbe to an undercover cop. Snark’s contortionist wife used an ancient mummified hand in a trick in which she seemed to swallow her arm, the hand appearing from an aperture lower down, though the highest part of her during the act. Fooled me the first time, Snark said and took a deep drink from the neck of your whiskey bottle. I was afraid to put my thing in there again for fear of the hand grabbing it and not letting go, until she showed me how the trick worked. He’d figured that mounting the stolen rings on the mummy’s hand and leaving it somewhere Crabbe was sure to see it might freak the murderer out and elicit an admission of guilt, as it did.
    Yeah, but if you hadn’t turned up when you did, pal, I’d be fucking fly bait.
    So what? We’d have caught him just the same and would’ve had two murders to pin on him instead of one.
    Snark picked up the hand and stuffed it in a pocket. You