“Who are they?” Martin turned to look over his shoulder at the headlights of the cab behind them. Carling nudged him none too gently.

  “Quit staring. Want to know about Fathi el Had-diz?”

  “Well, I assumed he was political. You know, an extremist.”

  Their cab driver, obviously not a native Dallasite, was taking advantage of a long red light to consult a Mapsco. He muttered something under his breath, tossed the street map on the floor, and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “He probably started out that way, but he went commercial. He’s a businessman. If what we suspect is true, he’s going to take this technology—or this process—whatever it is, and sell it to the true believers for whatever he can get. He’s just as likely to sell to the IRA or the Neo-Nazis as he is to any Arab group.” Carling smiled grimly. “He’s very good. Also, he’s very well staffed, which is something of a problem right now. He knows we’re on his trail, and he’s going to be assigning people to cover us, if he hasn’t already.”

  Martin resisted the urge to glance over his shoulder again. It didn’t save him from another nudge in his ribs, a harder one. He looked down and saw the handle of a gun.

  “Are you going to shoot me?”

  She gave him a disgusted look. “Just take it. If I wanted to shoot you, I’d point the barrel at you. Keep it with you. I assume you know how to shoot?”

  She said it like it was something everyone learned in grade school, like multiplication tables. Her face went blank as he shook his head.

  “I thought everybody in Texas knew how to shoot. Never mind, here’s the safety, I’ve already loaded a round in the chamber. Just take it off of safety, point and shoot. And try not to shoot me, if you can help it.”

  It was a minor miracle that the cab driver had missed the whole exchange; he was busy squinting at street signs and muttering again. Martin gently pushed the gun away with two fingers and shook his head.

  “I’d just blow my foot off.” She was going to protest, he could see it; to stop her he leaned forward and tapped on the glass separating them from the driver. “Hey! Buddy! Take a left up here.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Giving him directions to my office. We can pick up my car there. It’ll save us a few hours of driving around while this guy figures out street signs.”

  She didn’t seem to approve, but didn’t protest, either; she sat silently, eyes narrowed, while the cab darted down one street after another. From time to time she took a hand mirror out of her purse and checked the cab behind them, which seemed a little too much cloak-and-dagger for his taste. Six blocks before he told the driver the last turn, the other cab turned off and disappeared.

  “Free and clear,” he sighed, and slumped back against the worn leatherette upholstery. The cab driver lit up a cigarette and rolled down the window to let in a blast of chilling air. “Up ahead on the right. Turn in to the parking garage, I’ll use my card to let you in.”

  Carling did not seem to have relaxed much. As they descended into the dark tunnel, she looked back over her shoulder, the first overt sign of nervousness he’d seen from her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. She shook her head.

  The fluorescent-striped swing-arm of the gate swung up like an ax, and let the cab clatter through. Martin leaned forward and told the driver to go down three levels.

  Nobody else was moving. What cars were left in the structure sat mute and dark, like modern sculpture. The patches of lights looked weak and watery, the dark as thick as oil.

  The cab eased to a stop at the third level, crept forward toward the plain white Lincoln Martin indicated. He passed over too much money in cab fare, since Carling didn’t jump to volunteer. The cabbie grinned and demonstrated perfect dentures, then left them standing in a cloud of stinking exhaust.

  As his tires squealed into the turn, Carling did a slow circle to survey the garage. Fluorescent tube lights buzzed like colonies of flies, and somewhere metal squeaked in the wind.

  “Let’s go,” Martin suggested, and fumbled his keys out of his coat pocket. She grabbed his wrist and held up one finger; she bent and looked in his car window, shifted right, then left. After a long shivering silence, she shrugged.

  “Go ahead.” She waited until he’d put the key in the lock and opened the door before going around to the passenger side. He reached over and flipped up the lock.

  As she slid in, he said, “Did you think they’d put a bomb in it?”

  She shut her door and clicked her seatbelt shut, and smiled.

  Tires squealed somewhere up above, moving fast. They both froze, staring at each other, and Martin swallowed hard and started the car. It took two coughing tries and shuddered when he threw it into reverse, a plowhorse forced to race.

  Carling’s hand came out of her coat pocket with the gun she’d tried to hand him. She laid it in her lap, casually; he was relieved that the barrel was pointing away.

  As he shifted into drive, lights exploded out of the darkness behind them. He floored the Lincoln, felt it hesitate and then lunge forward. Slow. Too slow.

  At first he thought the tire had blown out, but the wheel stayed steady in his hands, and the booms continued, and he realized somebody was shooting. Not Carling; she had turned to face backward, but was only starting to raise her gun.

  Jesus, she’d been right, she’d been right all the time. He wondered if he’d ever have a chance to apologize.

  He took the uphill turn too fast, skidded, felt the back end of the car slide and bounce off a concrete stanchion. Carling steadied her right hand with her left, sighted, and fired straight through his back window. It exploded in a network of stars. The noise was like a slap, a physical sting on his skin and a punch to his ears; he gagged on gunpowder. She fired again, two shots he thought, or three. His ears rang too much to be certain.

  They picked up speed in the straightaway and he touched the brake for the curve, not too much, just enough; the tires screamed and shimmied, but held. He couldn’t see the car behind them through the cracks in the rear window, but he heard them hit something with a thick metal crunch.

  “Did they stop?” he yelled. The wind cut through the shattered window and blew Carling’s hair back like a wind sock, revealing the stark pallor of her face, the fixed wide eyes.

  “Drive!” she shouted back. He hit the gas hard and saw the EXIT light ahead, a beacon in the dark. The fluorescent gate was down.

  He fumbled for his card, dropped it, fished frantically. What are you doing? he thought. In the middle of a car chase, he was trying to pay his toll.

  He put his foot all the way to the floor. The Lincoln growled and hissed forward over the concrete.

  The barrier had a core of metal; he heard the squeal as it bent and slashed a screaming cut down the side of his car. More booms. He pulled his head in toward his shoulders like a turtle, and the Lincoln slammed down the short ramp. The front end hit the street in a shower of sparks, but then the tires grabbed and the building fell away behind them, the dark mouth of the parking garage closing in the distance.

  Martin became aware that his chest hurt. He let his breath out and gasped in a fresh sweet lungful of air, and looked over at Carling.

  She was still facing backward, one hand clutching the headrest, the one with the gun hanging at her side. She still looked chalk-white, hair wild around her face.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. She didn’t seem to hear him. “Carling, are you—”

  She fell back slowly, like a rag doll, hitting the back of her head on the dashboard. Martin screamed her name and slammed on the brakes. The car fishtailed to a stop, the rear window fell out of the frame and spread square pieces on the backseat like parade confetti.

  The whole front of her shirt was soaked red. The bullet hole looked very small, the size of a button, only in the wrong place, just below her right breast. He gathered her up in his arms and got her in the seat, tilted the back down so she was lying nearly flat.

  Her eyes fluttered open and found his.

  “Marty?” she said, her voice was shockingly soft, a little girl’s voice. “Don’t put me on the machines. Please don’t do that.”

  He remembered the other car and looked back. Nothing. Nothing he could see.

  As he ran red lights and broke speed limits, he dialed her cell phone one-handed and told Parkland Hospital that he was bringing her in.

  They were waiting by the ER doors, two tired residents, three nurses. Martin held Carling’s hand as they wheeled her in. She opened her eyes again, but didn’t seem to see him at all, like the day he’d found Sally and she’d opened her eyes, but they’d just rolled like marbles, hadn’t seen him, had never seen him again.

  They left him at the double doors with Carling’s blood on his hands. He wasn’t even aware that he was crying until a passing nurse handed him a tissue.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Robby

  Mark had a broken nose and two broken fingers, courtesy of the rush for the exits. Robby waited with him while the paramedics fixed him up. Jim was no-where to be seen. She had no way of asking Mark with all the inquiring ears around, but she thought Jim had probably collected the take and taken advantage of the confusion to get home safely.

  Mark tilted his head back and snuffled loudly. The cotton plugs in his nostrils were thick with blood. He gave her a puppy-dog look as the paramedic taped his fingers.

  “My dose,” he said. “How’s it look?”

  “Swollen,” she told him, and patted him lightly on the knee. “It’ll give you that sinister look.”

  “Wodderful. I gad’t breathe.” He stared morosely down at his fingers, as the medic finished with them. “This sugs.”

  “At least you’re alive, pal,” the paramedic said. He had the war-weary look of a career man. “Got at least one guy ain’t so lucky.”

  “The man who burned?” Robby asked. The paramedic met her eyes, but his face was as blank and impersonal as looking in a mirror. “Was it murder?”

  “Tell you what, I worked a lot of burn cases, and I never seen nobody just burst into flames, I don’t care what they tell you at the wacko conventions. Always something chemical involved, if you ask me. Murder, accident …” He made a seesaw motion with his hand. “Who the hell knows? Whatever it was, he was one messed-up guy, I can say that.”

  “Did he smell of anything? Gasoline? Anything like that?”

  This time he really looked at her, but it wasn’t much of an improvement; now it was suspicion, not weariness.

  “Playing detective?” he asked, and gave her a cool smile. “No, nothing like that. Smelled like any other burned body. Okay, pal, you’re fixed up. Make sure you get those breaks X-rayed.”

  “Danks,” Mark mumbled, and stood up. He had a large waffled shoeprint on the front of his shirt, and a smear of blood along his collar. “Gan I go home dow?” The paramedic had already closed up shop, snapping his red box together like a fisherman who’d caught his limit. He nodded toward a harassed-looking black patrolman a few feet away.

  “See that guy.”

  Mark actually started walking toward the policeman. Robby caught his elbow and pulled him gently aside to stand next to an overweight woman wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt. The woman was arguing loudly with her son, a pale young man with brittle eyes.

  “I wadt to go home,” Mark said again. “Robby—”

  “You don’t go through him. I’ve had about enough trouble for one day. Go to the bathroom and go out the other exit. It’s around the corner, he won’t be able to see you leave. I’ll talk to him and meet you outside.”

  He walked toward the bathroom like a condemned man going to the chair. She waited until she was sure he’d got it right before approaching the patrolman.

  As she’d suspected, the cops were too busy, too confused, and too harried to do much more than take a name and an address. She provided both—completely fictitious—and stood with a crowd of gawkers as a white-sheeted lump was carted out of one of the tunnels. She couldn’t tell if the crowd’s silence was respectful or avid, and decided it didn’t really matter, not to the man on the cart.

  What did he have in common with Arnold, burned to death in his kitchen? Velvet’s Burt, dead in a hotel room?

  The thought occurred to her that it might be random. She shivered, pulled her coat closer, and walked, head down, to the exit.

  A blue-white glare hit her in the face like lightning; she put up one hand to shield her eyes and heard shouting. The glare zipped away, leaving green after-images like hostile ghosts.

  The news crews were chasing the cops, paramedics, and the white-sheeted gurney, a stampede of expensive on-camera suits and ragged-jeans cameramen, of boom men swinging mikes like medieval lances. The circus rushed by her, elbowing and shoving, and she stood looking after them.

  After a few seconds, she smiled and fingered a calfskin wallet that she’d tugged out of the pocket of one of the newsmen. A prominent one, she thought; she remembered his face from billboards.

  She’d never liked reporters.

  Mark was waiting by the car, shivering and miserable. She tuned out his mumbled complaints and drove to the exit, which was jammed with incoming news vans and rubberneckers and cars waiting to leave. She watched the sullen glow of taillights and thought about how strange it had been, how very strange, watching a man die like that. No one seemed to have felt much about it, really. No one seemed to care who he was, or how he’d caught on fire.

  She wasn’t sure she cared, either. Velvet had cared about the one in the hotel room—cared enough to try to help him, at least.

  She’d looked down at Freddy Arnold and felt nothing except horror and revulsion, really. No sorrow for a man she’d known at least casually. No fear.

  The stealing had been a shock reaction. She’d blanked out for a few minutes, and then his wallet was in her hand, and she was looking down at him from a great height, as if she’d floated to the ceiling. The smell—

  It had been like Dublin. Like reaching for her father’s blood-smeared wallet, that last piece of him still whole.

  “Robby?” Mark touched her on the shoulder; she jerked as if he’d slapped her. “Uh, are we goidg?”

  The line had moved forward two car lengths. Behind her, a Mercedes blared its horn. She took her foot off the brake and let the car creep on.

  “Weird dight, huh?” said Mark. She nodded. “Did you see id?”

  “I saw him running.” It had all been so strange.

  “What was id like?”

  She looked over at him. His nose had swollen to twice its size, and bruises were forming around both eyes. He looked half-dead.

  “Like a movie,” she said. “Just like a movie.”

  By the time she had dropped Mark off and got back to the warehouse, it was nearly midnight, and all she could think about was a cup of Jim’s hot cocoa, his arms around her, and the weightless oblivion of sleep. Through some trick of memory she kept smelling burnt flesh in the air, on her skin, on her clothes, or maybe it was just the smells of woodsmoke, barbecue pits, exhaust.

  She was grateful for the dark stillness of the warehouse, though it made the hair on the back of her neck prickle to cross that empty, empty room toward Jim’s door.

  It wasn’t dark enough. She slowed as she realized that the door was not completely closed, and a thin slice of yellow light glowed around the jamb. Jim was careful about things like that—kept his door locked, all the time. She stopped where she was, debating, heart racing, and heard a whisper.

  No, a moan.

  Jim.

  She crossed the rest of the distance in a sprint, slammed the door back, and stared in stunned disbelief at the wreck of his room. The couch was slashed and thrown against one wall, the chair shoved on its side. The shelves had spilled out their books on the floor. Jim’s prized big-screen television had a gaping hole in the center.

  Jim lay against the couch. She threw herself to her knees next to him, unable to get her breath, saying his name over and over, but knowing he couldn’t hear her. His face was swollen and bloodied, his legs clearly broken, the left badly enough that a knife of bone had sliced through his pants and blood soaked the carpet around him.

  Worst of all were his fingers, his long clever magician’s fingers. She bent her head and cried helplessly, desperately, at the sight of them broken like matchsticks.

  As she dialed 911, still trying to force air into her aching lungs, he whispered, “They were looking for Velvet.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Velvet

  Velvet had gotten across the street by the time Agent Dimples came out to get her from the car. She ducked in an entryway, but knew he’d seen her, knew he was coming after her. She darted from one storefront to the other, but they were locked, closed up tight.

  The response time of the Highland Park Police was legendary. She picked up a brick from a flower-bed and pitched it through a plate-glass window; as she’d hoped, alarms went off, whooping to the skies.

  Not enough. He was coming at a loping run, as if he ran a lot. She took off down the sidewalk, regretting all those hours at the bar, those candy bars between tricks. Her legs felt like mud. She heard the slap of his shoes behind her.

  She gained the next corner, a cluster of imposing houses with high rock walls and ornate gates. The second one down had a plain-looking gate of six-foot-tall wooden boards—operated with a motor, of course. She got her fingers under the gate and shoved it open enough to wiggle in, leaving two fingernails in the wood as it slammed back against her. She surveyed the back yard—Christ, what a yard!—and circled the pool to a tall stand of something that looked like corn but probably was more expensive.

  She dropped gratefully down on the cold ground and hugged herself, shivering, waiting. The wind carried an echo of laughter. She pulled the corn plants aside and saw a family inside eating dinner in a kitchen from Better Homes; they were having something that looked like lasagna. Her stomach pitched.