Well, Jim, if you ask me, what we’re seeing is exactly what’s wrong with professional sports today. The fans just get way too involved in things. I’m sure this guy was flicking his lighter up in the rafters and—

  Thanks for that insight, Greg. Excuse me for interrupting, but I have definite word now that the victim is dead, I repeat, the victim has just been pronounced dead from severe burns. What a tragedy for the sport, the players, and the fans.

  I’m telling you, Jim, this is the kind of thing that gives hockey a bad name.

  “What’s the fucking score?” one of the drunks yelled.

  The five jarheads at the table near the TV were up and walking. Paolo sipped beer and munched pretzels and thought about Velvet’s story of the client bursting into flames.

  Could happen, he decided. Definitely could happen.

  The fight was okay, but the businessmen didn’t have much of a chance against the jarheads, not even with a couple of bouncers joining in to break it up. Not much of a substitute for the hockey game. Paolo watched until he’d finished his beer, dropped a dollar on the table for tip, and took one last walk around the bar.

  Not there. Ming was going to be very unhappy.

  By the door, a delivery guy was loading papers into a machine marked FREE. The logo on the side said BIG D GAZETTE. Paolo grabbed one off the top and flipped to the back for the personal ads. He sat down at an empty table nearby and started circling the ones that caught his eye.

  Young, shy SWF seeks M for friendship and companion-ship. Favorite colors: black and blue

  Friendly curvaceous SWF seeks WM for cuddles and communication

  Bored? See me. I’m a MF with vast experience in what’s most important to you—marital status no obstacle

  Not bad, he decided, and folded the paper up.

  Velvet’s face stared at him from the inside bottom right. It was an old mug shot, not very flattering. She had that defiant crazy look in her eyes. He laid the paper out carefully and found the article that went with the picture.

  He read it silently, lips moving, one thick finger marking his place. While he was still working on it, two or three cops showed up to haul the businessmen and jarheads out; he hardly noticed.

  When he was done, he sat back and closed his eyes.

  “Jeez, Velvet,” he whispered aloud. “Oh, Jeez.”

  He knew he’d have to kill her.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Velvet

  Agent Garrick James bought Velvet a hamburger and fries and a shake, which was a good thing, because even though she wanted to throw up she needed the stuff in her stomach to do it with. She took tiny dogged bites of the hamburger until she got it all down, licked the ketchup off her fingers, and munched nervously on french fries while he drove down Industrial to Oak Lawn. The shake was chocolate and too watery, and every time she sucked on the straw the taste of plastic made her want to gag.

  “Where’re you from?” she asked, to take her mind off the throb in her head. Agent James looked over, surprised, and almost ran over a man in a red flannel shirt shuffling across the street.

  “Kansas.”

  Farmer country. She wrinkled her nose and took another gulp of shake. Shakes for the shakes, that was what Cousin Floyd had always said, and if anybody should know, it was Floyd. He’d emptied out every liquor store in Verbina County.

  “Where in Kansas?”

  Another look. She wondered if he was lying to her, or only wondering what the hell she was doing.

  “K.C. How about you? Where’re you from?”

  She looked out the passenger window of the car at a bunch of ragged-looking men sitting in an empty lot, passing a bottle back and forth. None of them seemed to be enjoying it much.

  “Hell.”

  “That’s melodramatic,” he said. She shrugged. “Look, I promise, you won’t be in any danger. You just sit in the car while I go into the dry cleaners and ask a few questions, then I’ll take you to my office. We’ll find a safe place for you, until we’re ready to arrest these men.”

  She perked up a little at the thought of that. Witness Protection. Didn’t that mean, like, expensive hotels and nice food? Of course, the bad part was the testifying, but she’d done that before. At least this time she’d get something more in return than the dead shattered look in her mother’s eyes. Hey, Mom, I’m a fucking hero, how about that?

  She could almost see Mom’s absentminded smile and hear her say, That’s nice, Amy. Happy birthday.

  Agent James made the turn on to Oak Lawn. They cruised past the gray buildings in the Design District—squat concrete buildings that were almost aggressively ugly—passed under the freeway, and headed toward Highland Park.

  “Hey, Agent James?”

  “Yes?”

  She twisted around in her seat to face him. He still looked like a college boy, but the eyes were different—cool, calm, distant. A guy with a purpose. She wasn’t sure if she liked him that way.

  “Remember when you tried to shake me down for a blow job?”

  He braked for a red light and kept staring straight ahead as he said, “Yes, I remember.”

  “Did you mean that, or was that just, like, part of the investigation?”

  He blushed pretty well, a Valentine-red flush that worked its way up from his collar and along his cheeks. His ears turned shell pink.

  “I was wearing a wire, Velvet. I was just doing my job.”

  “I’m good at it,” she said. “Blow jobs, I mean. I’m okay at the other stuff, but man, I’m a fucking artist at blow jobs. Want one?”

  The ears turned the color of maraschino cherries.

  “You’re not in my price range.”

  “I’ll do it for free.”

  “Why?”

  She started to answer, stopped, and turned back to face the road.

  Truth was, she didn’t know.

  After the third traffic light, the stores took on a glossy look, like they’d been Tefloned. The houses had a heavy dignified self-satisfied look, like over-weight bankers. The street narrowed to discourage casual visitors.

  “It’s up ahead,” she told him. “On the right.”

  It was just the way she’d remembered it—standoffish, stuck-up, dark. Agent James eased the car into a narrow parking space and shut the engine off. She couldn’t tell if the place was closed or open, but he didn’t seem to have any doubts.

  “You stay here, keep the doors locked, wait for me,” he said. She nodded. His eyes locked with hers, but she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Thanks for the offer.”

  “No charge.” She flinched when he slammed the door, dug her nails in her palms, and sat stiffly. The door opened for him, but, of course, it would, wouldn’t it? Through the dark-tinted window, she saw him go to the counter and talk to a model-perfect blonde that might or might not have been the same one from last time. The model went in the back. Agent James followed her.

  The rest of the chocolate shake disappeared in one hissing slurp. She looked for someplace to put her trash and tossed it in the back floorboard. As she did, something sticking out from under the floormat caught her eye.

  It was an ID card. In this one, Agent James was squinting at the camera, looking older than he was, and his name was David Van Housen. It said he was Miami police.

  She fumbled open the glove compartment. Two more IDs, one Dallas PD for Brian Groves, one Texas Rangers—the cops, not the baseball players—for Henry Samms. They all had his picture on them.

  She clutched the three IDs like a bad poker hand and swallowed hard.

  The FBI one was fake, too, had to be. Real feds didn’t carry around an assortment like this.

  There was no witness protection. There was no protection at all.

  She was sitting right where they wanted her.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ming

  Ming opened her eyes to the awareness of someone with her in the darkness of her bedroom, someone unknown. The fear felt like a wave of heat over her skin, muscles tensing and twitching under the strain.

  She lay still and waited. After a few seconds, someone struck a match. The bloom of yellow illuminated an evil mask—no, it was only a man’s face. He touched the match to the end of his cigarette.

  “What do you want?” Her throat felt as dry as concrete, her tongue as thick as lead.

  He didn’t answer. The glowing tip of the cigarette bobbed in the dark as it moved.

  Something struck her across the legs. She caught a scream in her throat and bowed her head to swallow the pain she knew would follow—but there was no pain. She reached down and found that he’d dropped a newspaper on her bed.

  “Read it,” he said. She cleared her throat, but it didn’t help.

  “May I turn on a light?”

  “Sure.”

  She flicked on the bedside lamp. He leaned against a bare brick wall, smoking, staring at her—an average-looking man, brown hair, casual clothes. He’d just showered; the ends of his hair were damp and stuck in sharp points to his neck. Beside him was a larger man in blue jeans and a plain black cotton T-shirt. He had a gun in a shoulder holster.

  She scanned the first half of the page, lingering over items about police department reorganizations, a salmonella scare, the latest HIV statistics. The man took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, “Bottom of the first page.”

  She unfolded the paper with a snap, and Velvet’s face stared at her, caught defiant by a police camera six years ago. She began to read, forcing herself to do it slowly, each and every word.

  When she was done, she looked up at her visitors. The one with the cigarette dropped it on the floor and ground it out with a twist of his foot.

  “Phone call,” he said, and pulled a cellular phone from his jacket. He pressed a button and held it out to her. She took it and held it to her ear as the number dialed.

  It was answered on the second ring, by a man who said, “Ming?”

  Surely her throat was full of concrete now; every swallow seemed a monumental effort, every breath a victory. She closed her eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “I have to explain to you how disappointed I am about all this. I am pretty fucking disappointed.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Somebody took off one of my people yesterday. Burned him alive. You understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Today I get this paper on my desk, Ming, and I am seriously unhappy about the way this girl shot off her mouth.”

  He waited for her to say something, but she couldn’t. Breathing was enough of an effort.

  “She even mentioned your name,” he said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I’m going to ask you one question, Ming. Have you found her?”

  “No,” she whispered. There was a long silence.

  “You call me back in eight hours, Ming. When you do, the only word I want you to say is yes, understand?”

  “I understand.” The line went dead. She offered the phone back; the brown-haired man put it in an inside jacket pocket.

  His companion went around to the other door and opened it, looked through. He nodded. The smaller man said, “We’ll wait in there. When you have her or you know where she is, you tell us. If you don’t have her in eight hours, we take you in.”

  She understood that as clearly as she’d understood the cold voice on the telephone. It had now become a matter of survival, hers or Velvet’s.

  There would be no question of the winner.

  Two hours later, she listened to Paolo’s wind-ruffled voice on the telephone say, “But she’s not there, Ming, I already looked. I went to all the places, and wherever she is, it ain’t around here. Nobody around here’s seen her for two, three days.”

  “Who was she with two or three days ago?” Ming had to fight to keep her voice calm, for the benefit of the two men next door waiting to kill her.

  “Nobody, I guess. Nobody regular.”

  “You guess? I have no time for guessing, Paolo, find out. Find out now. Go everywhere and ask everyone, hire people if you must, but find her. She’s not gone. I know she’s not gone.”

  The wind fuzzed his reply, but she knew he’d do what she said. Paolo was a dog, loyal and mildly intelligent and willing to love the one who kicked him.

  Yet he could be a rabid dog, when necessary. That was the most valuable thing of all. At the end of the evening, when the blood was cool, she wanted to look down at the broken body of Velvet Daniels and be unable to recognize her from any other pile of meat. Paolo would do that for her.

  At the end. But there would be a long slow red crawl to the end.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Martin

  The airlines wouldn’t let Carling use her cell phone on the flight. Seething like a volcano, she used the credit-card driven model the tight-lipped flight attendant indicated. The strain was starting to show a little; her hair looked a little ruffled, her suit a little wrinkled. Martin was almost sure he saw a glint of weariness in her eyes.

  “Mrs. Womack?” Carling said into the phone, and breathed a long sigh. “I’m not on a secure line, so we’ll have to make this brief, not to mention that it’s going on my VISA. What did you get?”

  Martin had the window seat, which coincidentally was the emergency exit seat. He’d been reluctant to take it, because he’d once seen a special about getting out of airplanes in emergencies. He’d had nightmares after that show of being in this very seat, people screaming, flames all around, and the instructions kept getting smaller and smaller and longer and longer. He decided to read the special card in the seat pocket again, just in case.

  “Not much,” Carling was saying. He looked over at her and raised his eyebrows in a silent what? “Okay, that’s something, anyway. You take the next flight into Dallas—yes, that’s right. Perfect.”

  She cut the connection and gave him a small quiet smile. He hadn’t seen that one before, and he liked the way her lip curled.

  “AARP to the rescue?” he guessed.

  “Mrs. Womack has some very interesting chemical analysis of the preacher’s clothes. I think you’ll be satisfied.” She reclaimed her VISA card from the slot and studied it suspiciously before putting it in her purse.

  “We’ll get there just about midnight. Any thoughts about procedure?”

  “Would I be out of line, if I asked about a hotel?”

  She gave him a long serious look, smile fading.

  “You’re right. We need the sleep. Womack and Mendoza will arrive about three o’clock, we might as well wait for them to arrive before we do any serious thinking.” She looked around for the flight attendant and lowered her voice. “Don’t eat the food here.”

  “Words to live by.”

  The plane hit turbulence, bounced, dropped. He felt his stomach hit the ground hard.

  “I’m not just talking about the normal hazards of mystery meat. I think we may have picked up a couple of traveling companions who aren’t exactly tourists.”

  “What?” He craned his neck in an attempt to see over the blue headrest. “Who?”

  “Quiet!” She squeezed his knee for emphasis and let it stay, a light distracting pressure. “They’re behind us. Two men, traveling light. The flight attendant had a long conversation with them, and I didn’t like the look of it, so don’t eat anything, don’t drink anything, don’t even get up to go to the john, if you can help it.”

  Her hand felt warm as sunlight on his knee. He stared at it and said, “What do we do when the plane lands?”

  “You leave that up to me and Mr. Mendoza, I’m sure we’ll think of something.” The words sounded confident, but she looked tired, almost vulnerable. Her hand moved a couple of inches. Up his thigh.

  “Are—” Martin cleared his throat and glanced around for the flight attendant, small lurking children, nosy grandmothers. “Do you think we could—stay together? Tonight?”

  She cocked her head to one side, eyes luminous and controlled. He felt something bend in his fingers, and realized he was still holding the emergency exit procedures card. He missed the pocket twice trying to put it back.

  “Is that a proposition?” She sounded amused. He didn’t dare look at her directly.

  “Uh—” He cleared his throat again. “Yes. I think so.”

  Hard to believe she was the same woman he remembered from the Washington basement—smooth warm skin, a hot hungry mouth, she’d been so completely real, so amazingly present. He wanted to cross the distance again, hear her say his name in a whisper like raw silk.

  She leaned over, and the smell of her overwhelmed him—perfume, skin, hair, even the slightly stale smell of her clothes. Her lips brushed his, warm and moist. Her hand traveled further up his thigh.

  “I think,” she whispered, and lightly kissed the skin just under his ear, “I think we’d better get some sleep, Marty. We’ll need it.”

  She had just effectively zeroed his chance for sleep, and she knew it. He saw it in the flash of her eyes, the crooked half-smile.

  He kissed her, felt her lips part under his. It only lasted a second, before she put her hand flat on his chest and pushed him a safe distance away. The air felt thick and hot between them.

  As he gulped in deep breaths, he saw the flight attendant watching them like a nun. She hustled off down the aisle when he caught her eye.

  “Let’s not do that,” Carling said, smoothing her skirt. “I need to keep a clear head.”

  He nodded and turned face forward, staring at the headrest in front of him. The plane dipped down, descending, and a constellation of lights wheeled outside the windows.

  “Won’t happen again,” he said to the headrest, and thought he heard her laugh just as the captain turned on the NO SMOKING and FASTEN SEATBELTS signs and announced the weather in Dallas. Cold, windy, expected freezing rain and sleet in the next few days.

  “No smoking,” Carling said, and snapped her seat-belt shut. “Words to live by, Marty. Words to live by. Have you thought about what would happen if somebody flamed out in an airplane?”

  He closed his eyes, opened them, and reached for the emergency exit procedures again.