Dead Harvest

eternal damnation, quite possibly triggering a war of literally Biblical proportions – you're also the target of a citywide manhunt on the part of New York's Finest. You can't exactly flash that face of yours all over town.'

  'No?' she asked, strolling through the office door and giving me a catwalk twirl. 'How 'bout this one?'

  I had to admit, the transformation was impressive. Kate's long auburn locks were now shorn into a jagged bob that traced the line of her jaw. She'd bleached it all a platinum blonde, with a streak of blue framing her face to each side. Thick hoops graced her ears, and another wrapped around one nostril. A studded leather choker wound its way around her neck above a vintage T-shirt and tattered jeans patched with bits of plaid. A pair of work boots worn shiny from years of use finished off the outfit. She grinned at me with blue-painted lips, eyes sparkling from beneath streaks of metallic blue eyeshadow.

  'Well? What do you think? The clothes are mostly from the bag we snagged – Anders ran out for the rest this morning. The nose ring is a fake, but it looks legit enough, I think.'

  'I gave him that money for food, not so you could play dress-up.'

  'All the food in the world isn't going to do us much good if I can't ever leave this basement.'

  A fair point, I had to admit. But still, going after Merihem was a far cry from simply walking the streets unnoticed. 'Kate, I'm sorry, but there's just no way. You're staying here with Anders, and that's final.'

Hot breath clouded the windshield of the van as I sat watching the stoop of Merihem's Staten Island lair, smoking cigarette after cigarette as much for warmth as out of boredom. The engine skipped a bit, and the van shuddered as if from a sudden chill. I knew how it felt. I'd snatched this rusty piece of shit from a parking garage over on Prospect Avenue, and swapped its plates with another just as ugly at a liquor store a couple blocks away. The way I figured it, even if anybody reported this baby missing, the cops would spend their night chasing down the wrong van. By the time they sorted out what happened, I'd be long gone. Still, if I'd known the heat was busted on this one, I might've opted for Door Number Two.

  'You want to give me one of those?' Kate asked, eyeing the cigarette as she shivered inside her leather jacket.

  'Not a chance.'

  'Come on – it's freezing in here.'

  'Hey, you're the one who wanted to come. Besides, these things'll kill you.'

  'I thought you were supposed to kill me.'

  'Yeah, well,' I said, 'the night is young.'

  'I still don't see why we couldn't stop off for coffee and doughnuts – I mean, this is a stakeout, after all.'

  'Maybe if you hadn't blown all our cash on that get-up of yours, we might have.'

  'Hey – this get-up is what got me here. Not to mention, you just stole a car. You can't find a way to score a couple bucks?'

  'Sorry – I'll try to snatch a body with a debit card next time.'

  For the first time in the three hours we'd been sitting here, Kate fell silent. We watched the flophouse for a while in the sudden quiet, nothing much happening but the occasional junkie heading in, or a john coming out. Wind whipped down the street, tipping trash cans and rattling the low-slung shrubberies that clung, gray and dead, to either side of the stoop. Though the doors and windows of the van remained closed, the wind cut through them like nothing at all. My knuckles ached from it, and Kate, in the passenger seat, pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged herself for warmth.

  'I don't know how you do it,' she said finally.

  'Do what?'

  'Swap bodies like that. I mean, I changed my hair and my clothes and I feel like a different person. It's got to be hard not to lose track of who you are.'

  I shrugged. 'It's not so hard, really.'

  'No?'

  'I once read that nothing fixes something so intensely in your memory as the desire to forget it.'

  'What's that supposed to mean?'

  'Nothing,' I said. 'Looks like we're on.'

  A figure had approached the stoop. Not an inch over four feet, and a slight four feet at that, he looked tiny and afraid in the orange glare of the sodium-vapor street lights. A filthy down jacket hung loose around his frame.

  'You've got to be fucking kidding me,' I said.

  Kate shot me a puzzled glance. 'Who the hell is that?'

  'A liability,' I replied.

  Pinch paused at the bottom of the stoop, casting furtive glances left and right, and then he ascended the steps, knocking on the flophouse door. I stubbed out my cigarette and cracked the window. Whatever went down, I was damn sure I wanted to hear it.

  After a moment, the door opened. Behind it was a chocolate-skinned woman in a leather halter and a denim miniskirt; a luxuriant head of cinnamon locks that was almost certainly a wig cascaded down over her naked shoulders. She was rail-thin, with sunken eyes and a face that could have been a young-looking fifty or a weathered thirty. My money was on the latter.

  'Ain't you a little young to come 'round here, sport?' she asked. Her words dripped with condescension. A smile played across her face.

  'I'm here to see Merihem,' Pinch replied.