Page 3 of Slow Burn

It reminded Robby rather strongly of Ireland.

She ordered a whisky and rocks and pulled a stool up to the counter, careful of the drips and stains on the old wood. The zombie-eyed bartender handed her napkins to clean it, and she sat down with a weary fulfilled sigh. She took her first nose-tingling mouthful of Bushmill’s, paused to crunch a stale pretzel between her teeth. An older man with defeated alcoholic eyes fed quarters into the jukebox, and a Chieftains ballad began to wail. Two stools away, a gentleman in a correctly tailored blue suit sipped canned beer and smiled when he caught her eye; Robby gave him a good long look and smiled back. There was an empty stool next to her. She patted it and raised her eyebrows.

The man—obviously in the wrong place, since one did not come to O’Donnell’s to drink canned domestic beer—had the tingle. No doubt he’d put it down to sex appeal. Her smile warmed as he stood up and started over.

Some days, she just couldn’t stop.

Someone darted in ahead of her mark—a young woman, blond, wearing a pale blue dress and a mink that looked as if it had been drowned, not skinned. She smelled like a wet dog, and her blue eyes had a dribble of mascara at the edges, like kite tails. She sat down heavily on the stool next to Robby and slumped over the bar, staring blankly ahead at her dim reflection in the mirror. A pretty face, too sharp at the chin, a shade too wide at the cheeks to be a model. Something fox-clever about her face. Her eyes were wide and as blue as a Texas summer sky.

“Scotch,” the hooker snapped at the bartender; he reached for a bottle in slow motion. “Double. Snap it up.”

Robby, about to give her a frosty send-off, closed her mouth and watched with morbid attention. She had no patience with hookers, none at all—counted them, in fact, one step below the homeless who smeared greasy rags on windshields—but this one was nevertheless interesting. Swimming with a mink? She supposed some—clients—might be perverse enough to request that, but she couldn’t imagine a hooker being accommodating enough to agree.

More than that, hookers never, ever bought their own drinks on duty. And hookers wereneveroff duty.

Her mark, the gentleman in the business suit, leaned over Robby’s shoulder; she turned her head to smile at him, but he wasn’t looking at her anymore. The hooker. Of course. Where else?

“What’s a nice girl—” he began. Robby ran her fingertips over the bulge of his wallet.

“Buzz off,” the hooker said without even looking at him. “We’re closed.”

Robby was only dimly aware of the man withdrawing, nursing his wounds; the hooker had an eelskin purse on a thin gold chain, and the catch was not quite closed. Robby cocked her head and stared at it, interested. The woman’s Scotch arrived, doubled, and she tipped it back into her mouth and swallowed until it was dry. She coughed like a cat with a hairball. “Oh, Jesus, it tastes like smoke. Uh—vodka. Double.”

Robby sipped her drink and watched. The hooker opened the eelskin purse and peeled a twenty off a wad of bills that looked as wet as the mink dripping on her shoulders. “Hit me until I don’t care, okay?”

“Whatever,” the bartender shrugged. The hooker fumbled her glass and sent vodka spilling over the bar toward Robby, who scooted her stool away from the danger. The woman’s face was flushed.

“Sorry,” the hooker mumbled. “’M having a crisis.”

Robby nodded noncommittally and returned to sipping at her Bushmill’s, and watched the hooker down vodkas, one after another, a masochist getting slaps in the face. After a while, the woman took another twenty out and waved it at the bartender, in case her tab was running down; the drinks kept coming.

Robby sat, relaxed, and chewed a straw while she waited for her chance.

All in all, it was shaping up to be a great day.

“Same again,” Velvet ordered, and wrestled with the mink. It clung like sweat. Before the bartender could turn away, she grabbed his white sleeve. “Hey. No cheap stuff, goddamn it. I’m paying for the real thing. Russian shit.”

She had to admit, she couldn’t tell the difference between Russian vodka and Mexican vodka, but it sounded good. He shrugged and tilted a bottle over her glass for the sixth time, or the twentieth, she’d given up counting. She almost spilled the drink in her haste to get it to her lips, and took in à long spicy sip of cold mist, a swallow of fire and ice.

Fire.She choked and coughed and burst into tears. Goddamnfreaks.She dabbed frantically at her eyes with a cocktail napkin, tried to tilt her head back, but all that did was make cold snail-trails down the side of her face. The tight-assed woman in the business suit on her left leaned forward for a handful of pretzels and pretended not to notice. After another minute the suit finished her drink and disappeared toward the neon-lit hallway that said things like PHONE and RESTROOMS and POOL. Thinking about the bathroom made Velvet remember that she really ought to throw up.

“Pretty lady like you shouldn’t cry,” said the cowboy sitting on her right. The sticker on his carry-on bag read HOU. He thought he was the Marlboro Man, in his big belt buckle and plastic-heeled boots. She snuffled and took a drink of vodka that tasted like salt and mascara.

“Yeah, what do you know about it?” she muttered around the glass.

“I know you got to kiss the girls to make them cry. That it, sweetie? Somebody kiss you and make you cry?” He had yellow-brown skin he’d bought in a blue-tubed tanning salon, and eyes green enough to have come out of a contact lens case. His hat was new and made of straw and had a feather hatband dyed bright purple.

“You asshole,” she whispered, and giggled and choked and swallowed all at the same time. He leaned closer and cupped his ear, a polite cheerful expression on his face.

“Sorry?” he said, and gave her what was probably his most charming smile, dimples and all. Velvet swallowed the rest of her drink in one gulp.

“You’re an asshole!” she shouted into his ear, and giggled helplessly as he slid right off the stool and onto his ass on the floor, face gone childishly slack with shock. “The world’sh—word’s—full of goddamn assholes!”

She gagged down one more slug of vodka and groped blindly for her purse. She narrowly missed putting her stiletto heel in the cowboy’s crotch as she ed over him to weave toward the door.

Ming was supposed to be here, goddamnit. Where the hell was she? Velvet leaned against a wall that seemed to be moving and looked out at the late afternoon street; too many people, too many colors, too many voices talking about too many things—some of them were talking about her. She swallowed hard and shut her eyes, but that was worse. Her head was starting to pound.

Mom would be so disappointed in her if she threw up in public. She imagined her mother standing in the doorway, shaking her finger. Dad stood behind her in his John Deere cap with a face like a tractor tireprint. She wondered if Burt Everard Marshall had family, a nice little fireplug of a wife, tubby smiling children. He’d looked like a family man. She couldn’t remember whether or not he’d been wearing a wedding ring.

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