He stepped out of the Jacuzzi and had Sharon Rose wipe him thoroughly dry. He had to brace himself with one hand on the back of a wrought-iron chair against a new wave of dizziness. He’d been drinking most of the night, of course, but the wine had gone to his head in a very strange way, almost disorienting. The scrape of the towel along his erection distracted him back to his pleasure, and he closed his eyes and remembered the Asian’s mouth, so muscular, the teeth so fragile.

  He opened his eyes and looked at Sharon Rose, whose face had blotched unbecomingly from crying, and decided that one night really would be quite enough of her. Draining the last of his champagne, he put the crystal aside.

  “I’ll want my robe again,” he told her. She recovered his Neiman Marcus robe—rich fluffed cotton, embroidered with his initials—from the chair where he’d discarded it earlier. The familiar lushness of it along his skin made him instantly harder. He left the front open and motioned Sharon Rose inside, to where the bed waited. She ran ahead, holding her towel over her nude body with appealing modesty-little winks of firm buttocks, the barest glimpse of golden pubic hair—and he decided that it might turn out to be a properly amusing evening, after all.

  Annoyingly hot, though. He paused at the thermostat and checked it—set at seventy-five, a perfectly acceptable temperature. He flicked a fingertip against it two or three times, and frowned. Perhaps the Jacuzzi had been hotter than usual, or perhaps it was the wine, but he was really quite overheated—

  He looked down at himself—curling chest hair, lightly dusted with gray—a firm flat stomach—the bobbing club of his engorged penis, revealed by the open slit of the robe.

  How odd that the memory of the Asian girl made him remember the smell of mu-shu pork. But it was more than a memory—it smelled like—

  Like flesh cooking.

  A feathery curl of smoke threaded through his chest hair, and the first pinpricks of pain flared red along his sides, his flanks, his arms, his back. He plucked at the robe fretfully, but it seemed stuck somehow-glued—Sharon Rose’s little joke? If she’d dared, he’d—

  The pain sliced into his chest, nerves shrieking. He fought for breath, still thinking clearly about heart attacks and survival rates. He tumbled and caught himself against the wall. More smoke, greasy dark, puffed from his sleeve as his arm exploded in agony.

  He saw the fire without believing it, white glowing tongues licking along his skin, searing it black, eating deep into raw muscle. He slapped in panic at his chest, his groin, the smoke burned greasy in his lungs and he coughed and got enough air to scream, a thin sound, hardly anything at all, really. Like a girl’s.

  He bashed face-first into the wall and hardly felt the impact, left smears of blood and skin and black crust. Pieces of his robe flared and melted on his skin like patches of fur, and he clawed at them with his fingers but the skin was soft and rotten and slick, and his fingers sank deep into it and it sloughed away, still burning. Muscles worked gray beneath, burning black. When he pulled his hands away in horror, his fingernails came off and stuck like guitar picks in the ruin of his chest, and he glimpsed ivory bone where his fingers should have been.

  Sharon Rose. It was his one coherent thought. The girl could call for help, do something, do anything. He screamed for her, but couldn’t hear himself, couldn’t really see anything except shadows—thick pressure in his chest, and he couldn’t get air. He lurched toward a shadow he thought might have been the girl but his legs faded and suddenly he was lying down and that was all right, the pain was not as bad, distant, going away.

  Everything would be all right. Surely, everything would be all right now. He couldn’t possibly die like this, so horribly.

  The last sound he heard was the cheerful sizzle of bacon.

  Chapter Four

  Martin Grady

  Office of Environmental Hazards (OEH)

  The air-conditioning was either broken or off-more benefits of government cutbacks, Martin Grady thought, and pulled at his damp collar in frustration. He stalked to the door, yanked it open, and yelled down the hall for a portable fan. There was a scurry of movement in the Secure File area. Beth stuck her head around the corner and nodded, too quickly. Her broad pleasant face had a stunned frightened look. He wondered what she’d been doing. Too much to believe she’d actually been filing.

  Martin closed the door just as one of the geeks sitting at the conference table behind him finished up with, “And the frogs are dying all along the river.”

  “Who the hell gives a shit about frogs?” Martin asked. He couldn’t even summon up the energy for a good snarl. The frog deaths were number seventeen on today’s agenda, and one through sixteen hadn’t been particularly riveting, either. In a Pavlovian response, the geek cringed anyway. “Okay, point taken. We have frogs dying. What’s killing them?”

  “But—the problems may be—”

  “What my colleague is trying to say is that two events may be related.” That was Jill Westfield, certainly no geek. She sat like a knockoff of Marlene Dietrich, legs crossed, skirt tightly wrapped around her tanned legs, showing enough thigh to invite dreams but no touches. Blond waved hair, perfect skin, round red lips. The only thing she was missing was a cigarette holder. Martin sat down in his chair and stared at her gloomily.

  “Which two?”

  “Numbers seventeen and eighteen. What we’re talking about here is not just pollution, but chemical reactions among various pollutants. The frogs especially are vulnerable to high chemical concentrations. There are also indications that fish are becoming scarce, too, especially bottom-feeders like catfish. I think we’re talking about a widespread infiltration.”

  Martin opened his file and flipped past red-stamped pages. He pulled his coffee toward him and sipped; it tasted gritty, rather oily. Government coffee.

  “A water problem.”

  “Potentially. You’ll notice that the men who’ve been affected—”

  “Christ, what a term,” one of the geeks muttered. The geek nest at that end of the table leaned away from him; one of them even shrugged in Martin’s direction, meaning, geeks. What can you do?

  “The men who’ve been affected—” Jill leaned on the word, a hard set to those ruby lips. Her blouse gaped to show a blush of lace-topped bra. “—have all been middle-aged, overweight, borderline alcoholic. Liver biopsies have all turned up traces of dioxin and dichlorhyradine. Dichlorhyradine has also turned up in the analysis of tap water in these cities, in microscopic amounts.”

  “You’re saying you think it’s the tap water,” Martin said. His gaze strayed toward his coffee cup, and he shoved it an inch of two farther away with an outstretched fingertip. She shrugged. “Jesus Christ, Jill, do you understand what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying—” Dr. Westfield shrugged and lit a thin cigarette; she blew smoke toward the stained yellowed ceiling. “I’m saying the frogs are dying, Marty. You figure it out.”

  The geeks all nodded.

  Of all of them, Martin thought, he was the only one who was scared. It was his name on the big door, after all. And his ticket to Washington.

  The Dallas Morning News, December 14, 1994, page 26A. (shorts)

  ONE DEAD IN HOTEL FIRE

  An unidentified man is dead after what firefighters describe as an intense fire in the Adolphus Hotel. The fire was contained in one room of the hotel and apparently involved only the area of the bed, leading to speculation that the victim fell asleep while smoking.

  “We see things like this all the time,” commented Ralph DeLawrence, spokesman for the Dallas County Volunteer Firefighters Association. “People are careless, and people get killed. They’re just lucky that the fire was small, and the hotel’s sprinkler system put it out.”

  The Adolphus issued a statement saying that today’s incident is the first fire-related fatality in its sixty-eight-year history, and that the hotel’s evacuation and safety procedures worked “like a charm.”

  The identity of the victim is being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

  Big D Gazette, December 14, 1994

  MAN SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTS IN FRONT OF HUNDREDS OF WITNESSES! EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS OF THE EERIE SCENE!

  “I never seen nothing like it,” wailed Irene Perez, maid at Dallas’s historic Adolphus Hotel. “It’s just him that’s burned, not the room. It’s like they say, he just burned up!”

  Irene Perez and hundreds of eye witnesses say that Burt Marshall, 47, owner of Marshall Dry Cleaners of Oak Lawn, “just burst into flames” after checking into his hotel room at 3:00 P.M. with a mysterious blond beauty. Hotel security found Mr. Marshall lying mortally wounded in his room, burned over ninety percent of his body, after responding to a fire alarm. He died on the way to Parkland Hospital.

  “They’re trying to cover this up,” say informed sources at the Dallas County Fire Department. “Things like this happen all the time, and they pass it off as bad wiring or cigarettes or arson. That guy spontaneously combusted, and everybody knows it.”

  Dr. Nils Hansen, noted expert at the Swedish Institute for Combustion Research, agrees.

  “Yah, it happens,” he responded in an interview with this reporter. “We do not want to cause a panic, but there is no denying it, it happens all the time.”

  There is no official ongoing investigation, although an unofficial search continues for the mysterious blond woman with Marshall at the time of the combustion. Anyone with information is urged to report it immediately to the Big D Spontaneous Combustion Hotline, at 1-900-555-FIRE.

  Chapter Five

  Velvet

  Wherever the hell she was, it was dark, and she had to throw up. Velvet stumbled, fell over something on the floor, and laid there with her face in the still-slightly-damp ruin of her mink until the world stopped bobbing around her.

  “Oh, Christ,” she moaned. She wasn’t sure if she meant it as prayer, but there was a first for anything. One thing she was sure about—she wasn’t going to ralph on the mink. Not if she could help it. She got her tingling arms and legs under her, and crab-crawled off of the silky fur and onto ratty coarse carpet. Her hand found a cool smooth wall.

  She had to stand to reach the light switch. The sudden glare drove a nail through her head, but at least she could identify the room—hers—the trail of clothes—not hers, but the ones she’d been wearing—and, gloriously, the bathroom.

  She was on her way there when a hand fell on her shoulder, a big hand, male. She spun around and flattened herself against the wall, all urge to vomit forgotten in the need to scream. The hand slapped over her mouth hard enough to raise bruises and spark pain in the cut on her chin.

  Paolo. Oh Jesus, Jesus, she’d forgotten about Ming again. She should have called or something. Paolo was Ming’s leg-breaker, the size of a refrigerator; he had a face like a two-year-old slice of meatloaf, and the dull glitter of his eyes didn’t tell her a thing about how much trouble she was really in.

  “Ming.wants to see you,” he said, and took his hand off her mouth to fasten it around her wrist. “Let’s go.”

  “But—I need to—”

  “Later.”

  Ming Lee Fong had never gotten over being the star of the Kiss The Whip Club. She still had a fondness for studs and leather, the outfit today was sleek black, edged in silver spikes that looked as if they might be able to slice skin. Her hair was a long waterfall of black silk, her eyes dead, quiet. Ming accessorized well.

  Velvet swallowed hard and waited for Ming to say something. She radiated cold, like the big room, the icy wood floor; it made Velvet feel even sicker. The world was a turntable on 33 1/3, geared down from the fast 45 it had been in the limousine with Paolo. She’d managed not to puke all over the expensive upholstery, at least. He’d allowed her to throw up on the side of the freeway.

  “But I got the money,” Velvet said forlornly, and shifted on her chair. All of Ming’s chairs were uncomfortable.

  “Yes, I know,” Ming said; she had a soothing voice, low and smooth. Her eyes reminded Velvet of a meat-eating Bambi. “Tell me how it happened.”

  “I just—I was just starting, you know, hadn’t even got his clothes off, and he just—” She stopped and swallowed. Scotch. Jesus, she’d never get the taste of Scotch out of her mouth again, no matter how much vodka she drank. Or the taste of Burt. The thought almost made her heave. “He just burned up. I don’t know how it happened, Ming, swear I don’t. It just-happened. Whoosh.”

  “You know what they’ll say.” Ming got up and walked over to the window; it looked out on a blank wall. Velvet looked around, saw Paolo leaning in the corner’s shadows, next to some leather contraption that looked uncomfortably like a harness. Black and red leather hoods hung on the wall like severed heads, with black tails of whips between. He pulled on something, and the leather swayed uneasily. “They’ll blame you. Bad for business.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Was he smoking?”

  “Well, sure, I mean, you know, he was on fire—”

  Ming flicked her black-lacquered, needle-sharp fingernails in Velvet’s direction. Velvet shut her mouth with a snap.

  “Cigarettes,” Ming said. Velvet shook her head.

  Ming lapsed into silence, stared out at the blank brick wall. She tapped a cigarette out of a silver case and lit it, dragging the smoke deep, blowing a hot fog out against the windowpane. Velvet watched the glowing tip of the cigarette with complete fascination.

  “I’m concerned, Velvet. Take some vacation,” Ming said. She turned and smiled. “Two weeks.”

  Velvet’s lips said yes ma’am, but she was watching the cigarette. The hair on the back of her neck crawled. The smell was all wrong, not burning tobacco, burning—melting—she swallowed a gag. The cigarette flared bright red as Ming sucked, went ash-gray with masochistic disappointment when she stopped.

  It wasn’t at all like Ming to be concerned. Not at all. And “vacation” was a word most girls heard right before a “special” job. One that put them in the hospital on a respirator. If they were lucky.

  “Don’t make trouble.”

  “No ma’am.”

  “And don’t talk to anybody.”

  Ming drifted over, and Velvet looked hard at the floor. There was a tuft of red hair near her chair.

  Ming’s hand felt as cold as ice on her cheek, long nails a sharp pressure near her ear. Velvet didn’t want to see her eyes.

  “You know,” Ming said, very slowly, “I’m thinking of moving you up. No more hotel tricks. Very specialized stuff. What do you think of that?”

  Velvet kept staring at the floor.

  “That’d be great,” she said, and ignored the fluttery feeling in her stomach. “Really great.”

  The smell of smoke was greasy in the back of her throat, like mucous.

  “Now go with Paolo,” Ming said, and the icy hand left her face. “He needs a little company.”

  Me too, Velvet thought, and tried not to think about Paolo too much. She’d never done Paolo; she wasn’t really in shape to be creative, either. But she’d fake it.

  Like Ming always said: business was always a pleasure for somebody.

  Paolo propped himself up with pillows on the king-sized bed of the guest room, and stared straight over her head while she went down on him. Her headache continued to throb, a steady backbeat rhythm. After three or four minutes of industrious licking and sucking, Velvet heard a click and looked up to see Paolo holding the TV remote. Behind her, canned laughter swelled out of the set.

  Gilligan’s Island, she thought as she went back to work. That’s the difference between paying customers and freebies.

  Paolo poured himself a glass of Johnny Walker Black Label from a bottle next to him on the night-stand. He drained it in slow controlled gulps, never looking at her. Except for the fact that he still had a rock-hard boner, she might not have even been there. She tried moaning louder, until his heavy face collapsed into a frown and she realized she was interfering with the TV. She felt like an X-rated mime.

  The oily taste of the condom (plain peach-colored, nothing fancy for Paolo) reminded her unpleasantly of the time she’d sucked a balloon into her windpipe at the age of six. She shut her eyes and tried not to think about suffocating, but then she started thinking about burning, and the smell of smoke, and had a bad few seconds of panic while her mouth kept on mindlessly doing its lonely job.

  Right about the time she was considering biting Paolo’s dick just to remind him she was there, he came. She only knew that because the reservoir tip of the condom filled up. She performed an obligatory moaning orgasm, mostly to keep in practice. He craned to look over her shoulder and turned the volume up.

  She had performed solo before, but usually the guy was across the room, not in her mouth. It all seemed pretty damn disheartening. Still, she reminded herself as she sat up—it could have been worse. Burt—

  The thought occurred to her (oh, bad timing for her still-rolling stomach) that Burt could have done his flaming marshmallow impersonation while she’d had his dick in her mouth. Suddenly, Paolo looked like a bargain. She peeled the condom off and wrapped it deftly in a tissue before tossing it—a three-pointer—into the corner wastebasket.

  Paolo was completely engrossed in the program. She sat for a few minutes watching with him. Gilligan picked coconuts. The Professor talked about building a generator. The Skipper complained.

  “Maryanne or Ginger?” she asked. It took a second for Paolo to distract himself from the intense drama on the screen enough to notice she’d spoken.

  “What?”

  “If you were on the island, would you go for Mary-anne or Ginger?”

  Paolo considered for a full minute, staring at the flickering set with narrowed serious eyes.

  “Mrs. Howell,” he said.

  She realized she’d been staring too long. Time to go. She gathered up her clothes—the mink had managed to fluff out again, there was quality for you—and was turning her panty hose back inside-out, when suddenly the TV went off. She looked up to find Paolo staring at her.