“If you got shoes, lady, you best give em to me. I don’t want to kill you but I got to get to folks that’ll help me with my chap and I can’t do that barefoot.”

No one on this little piece of Second Avenue. People—a few, anyway—sitting on the steps of 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza, and a couple were looking right at Trudy and the black woman (the mostly black woman), but not with any alarm or even interest, what the hell was wrong with them, were they blind?

Well, it’s not them she’s grabbing, for one thing. And it’s not them she’s threatening to kill, for anoth—

The canvas Borders bag with her office shoes inside it (sensible half-heels, cordovan-colored) was snatched from her shoulder. The black woman peered inside it, then looked up at Trudy again. “What size’re these?”

Trudy’s tongue finally came unstuck from the roof of her mouth, but that was no help; it promptly fell dead at the bottom.

“Ne’mine, Susannah says you look like about a seven. These’ll d—”

The apparition’s face suddenly seemed to shimmer. She lifted one hand—it rose in a loose loop with an equally loose fist anchoring the end, as if the woman didn’t have very good control of it—and thumped herself on the forehead, right between the eyes. And suddenly her face was different. Trudy had Comedy Central as part of her basic cable deal, and she’d seen stand-up comics who specialized in mimicry change their faces that same way.

When the black woman spoke again, her voice had changed, too. Now it was that of an educated woman. And (Trudy would have sworn it) a frightened one.

“Help me,” she said. “My name is Susannah Dean and I … I … oh dear … oh Christ—”

This time it was pain that twisted the woman’s face, and she clutched at her belly. She looked down. When she looked back up again, the first one had reappeared, the one who had talked of killing for a pair of shoes. She took a step back on her bare feet, still holding the bag with Trudy’s nice Ferragamo low-heels and her New York Times inside it.

“Oh Christ,” she said. “Oh don’t that hurt! Mama! You got to make it stop. It can’t come yet, not right out here on the street, you got to make it stop awhile.”

Trudy tried to raise her voice and yell for a cop. Nothing came out but a small, whispering sigh.

The apparition pointed at her. “You want to get out of here now,” she said. “And if you rouse any constabulary or raise any posse, I’ll find you and cut your breasts off.” She took one of the plates from the reed pouch. Trudy observed that the plate’s curved edge was metal, and as keen as a butcher’s knife, and suddenly found herself in a struggle to keep from wetting her pants.

Find you and cut your breasts off, and an edge like the one she was looking at would probably do the job. Zip-zoop, instant mastectomy, O dear Lord.