Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,14

his mitts on.

Oh, and I learned that day that Skunk Ape is what they call Bigfoot in Florida.

How he’d earned that particular nickname wasn’t very hard to figure out. Hair down past his shoulders, beard that hid a good portion of his face. Total neck beard. He was big. Not huge, but big enough to be intimidating. I doubt he worried much about walking the streets alone at night. Finally, it was obvious he bathed less than often. Dude stank, plain and simple, a problem compounded by the closeness of his shop below the W&C. He was wearing a paisley waistcoat with a sweat-stained gingham shirt underneath. Weird, how I remember crap like what Skunk Ape was wearing that afternoon, but can’t remember stuff that actually mattered.

As they say, anyway.

Back to the delivery. There was a very cute girl behind the counter, sort I always think of as Betties, because they’re working that Bettie Page look, only with enough tattoos and piercings to find work in any halfway decent sideshow. She told us Skunk Ape would be right with us, and then we waited upstairs for maybe ten minutes. Never did learn the chick’s name, but she gave me the hairy eyeball while I perused the wares. Dinosaur and mastodon bones, a ruby-throated hummingbird mounted inside a bell jar, jackalopes and Jenny Hanivers and two-headed cobras in jars of formalin. Et cetera and et cetera. Pretty cool shit, really. Anyway, finally Skunk Ape appeared, introduced himself, stared at me a moment, then ushered us behind the counter and down an exceedingly narrow flight of stairs. He parked himself behind a desk littered with an assortment of taxidermy tools, several magnifying glasses of various shapes and sizes, slips of paper impaled on receipt spikes, bits of hide and bone, and a dinged-up beige PC.

He stared at me.

The way he’d stared at me, I knew he knew exactly what he was seeing. That he’d seen it before, up close and personal. There was a mix of fascination, revulsion, and lust in his murky eyes. Made me want to snap his neck. Might be, if I had, everything would have gone another way. Might be Selwyn would still be alive and here with me. But, you know, probably not.

“What are you looking at?” I asked him.

He sucked at his teeth. He didn’t look away.

“She’s with me,” said Selwyn, taking my hand, the wooden box cradled in her left arm.

“Always playing with fire, ain’t you, Annie?” he smirked. “You’ve outdone yourself this time.”

I didn’t bother asking why he’d called her Annie.

“Can we get this over with?” I asked her, instead.

Skunk Ape frowned and sighed. He pointed at me. “Is that really the best disguise you could manage, Lady Nosferatu? Annie, is she at least housebroken?”

There was a stuffed black bear to my left, wearing a red fez and frozen forever rearing up on its hind legs. I reached out with my free right hand and knocked it over. When the fez bear hit the floor, its head came off in an impressive puff of sawdust.

What do you say when someone breaks your bear? You’d think the occasion would call for something imaginative and extra-pissy special, right? Well, the best Skunk Ape managed was a couple of vamp specific slurs and flipping me the Massachusetts state bird.

I kicked the fallen bear, raising another cloud of sawdust. “Think I won’t kill you, Sumo Boy?”

“Play nice, you two,” Selwyn said, then coughed and let go of my hand. She swatted the sawdust away from her face while Skunk Ape muttered and rearranged the junk on his desk until there was room for her to set the box down. He finally stopped staring at me and was watching her expectantly, one bushy eyebrow arched like a dying caterpillar.

“At least tell me that’s what I think it is,” he said to Selwyn.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said and coughed again. “There was some last-minute bullshit. That greedy bastard in Cambridge decided to jack the price on me, right at the last minute. You know how it is.”

“Don’t think that means I’m paying extra,” he replied. “Open the box. Let me see it.”

Fairly sure he was salivating.

Selwyn produced a rusty barrel key from a front pocket of her jeans and unlocked the box, lifted the lid, then stepped back from the desk. From Skunk Ape’s expression, you’d think he’d just found the world’s best girl-on-girl, faux lesbo porn. His mouth was a perfect O, framed by the wild tangle of his