Supernatural Noir by Ellen Datlow Page A

but she’d have done it if she could. Hopefully things wouldn’t go far enough for Lourdes to find it.
    Marina Abramovic, mutilating herself for art on YouTube, was one out-there chick, but fresh wounds would be suspicious. Same problem with actual surgery. She had to settle, uneasily, for blue contacts, lashes thickened and curled, a yellowy tan from hours under a lamp, a vaguely spider-shaped birthmark colored on the inside of her thigh, shaving all body hair and shaving it again for maximum smoothness, and wrestling her boobs into submission with an Ace bandage wrapped tight as a girdle. That last one was a big risk; Raul and his team better get right in there if kid nipples were what floated Lourdes’s boat.
    When she showed up at the DA’s office in a lavender baby-doll dress and, just to stay in character, no underwear, Raul had no idea who she was. Even though that’s what she was after, it kind of hurt her feelings, which was weird.
    To the giraffelike assistant DA at the desk, she introduced herself as Madison Smith, the preppy name she and Raul had finally compromised on. Behind her she heard Raul come up out of his chair. She probably could have just stirred up his thoughts so he’d believe her, but it was more fun to watch him do it himself. “Shit,” he said.
    “Yup,” she said in the voice.
    “Fuck.”
    “Nope.”
    “How’d you do it?”
    “Trade secrets.”
    “You’re taller.”
    “That’s just shoes, dummy.” She showed him, careful not to lift her foot too high and expose herself.
    His hand went briefly to her shoulder. Like every other time they’d touched—accidentally in passing, comradely fist bumps, brush of the hands maybe or maybe not flirtatious—she stiffened. Then he nodded. “It is you.”
    “Whatever that means.”
    “I take it,” Giraffe said dryly, “we’ve established that the disguise is convincing. Can we move on?” First, though, Giraffe had to brag about other child sex-abuse cases she’d prosecuted. “Sixty-nine years to life is what I got,” she told them about one particularly nasty one. The passionate, joyous pride in her voice and in her heart was really pretty creepy.
    “Very good,” said Raul. Little Shit was getting a contact high from all this moral certainty.
    “I’m telling you, section 85.67 of the penal code is a wonderful tool. No judicial discretion to get in the way of justice. When I know in my gut, as a person, that somebody should get life, I pick the charges and I make it happen.”
    “Enhancements,” Raul said to Little-Shit-as-Madison. “Gotta get those enhancements.”
    “Enhance like what?”
    “GBI’s always good.”
    “Great bodily injury,” Giraffe supplied, and she and Raul laughed.
    “Double my rate.”
    “Mayhem works, too,” Raul allowed. “That’s just disfigurement. You already got some of that goin’ on. What’s a little more disfigurement for the cause?” She flipped him off.
    “And/or torture,” added Giraffe.
    On a roll now, they listed burglary during the crime, which wasn’t likely in this case, and multiple victims, which was. Felony priors would have been even better. Administering controlled substances during the crime had a certain appeal; Little Shit kept what she knew about Lourdes’s sources to herself. And there was kidnapping, which could just mean driving to more than one location or even moving from one room to another. Kidnapping was good.
    “Whatever works,” she told them.
    “You’re awesome.” Giraffe was doing something on her computer—researching, entering data—and she said it with no meaning, like you’d say, “Have a nice day.”
    “I’m sayin’,” said Raul, meaning it.
    “Innocent till proven guilty, though, right?”
    Giraffe waved one long hand. “Right. Sure. Of course.”
    “You going all social worky on me?”
    She rolled her enhanced eyes at him, then moved to where she could see the computer screen. Giraffe was playing Scrabble and had just typed in a