Page 65 of Slow Burn

“What you told me. The man she saw.” He took his eyes off her thighs long enough to give the apartment a quick glance. “So, is she here? Can I talk to her?”

“Gosh, Lenny, I’m real sorry but she’s out. Working. So, how’s the newspaper business?” She crossed her legs, slowly. He swallowed hard.

“Good. Since I’m here, do you, um, have anything you want to tell me? Anything new?”

“Cash,” she said. He dug in a pocket and laid a hundred on the coffee table. “Keep coming.”

He stopped at two hundred, and not even uncrossing her legs could make him go to three. She sat up, grabbed the money, and stuffed it in her panties.

“Sorry you had to skip the table dance, but I’ll make it worth your time.” She gave him a wicked toothy grin and made sure she could make it to the kitchen and Robby’s knife rack before she said, “You want more information, read about it in the papers.”

Lenny’s college-boy face smoothed out. The dimple looked like a special effect.

Funny how fast those eyes could cool off.

“Pardon?” he said softly. She put both feet flat on the floor and leaned forward, ready to run. “I’m, sorry, I don’t understand.”

“No? How about this one—I lost your number, Lenny or whatever-your-name-is. So I called theBig D Gazette.You don’t look anything like Lenny Bradshaw.”

She expected some babble of lies and apology, but he just sat there, watching her, quiet. She didn’t like the calculating look on his face. There wasn’t any more of the college boy; this guy looked old now, older than she did, fine lines of wrinkles around his eyes that she guessed didn’t come from smiling.

“But, hey, whatever, no skin off my nose—” she continued.

“What did you tell him?”

“Who?”

“Bradshaw. At theBig D Gazette.”

Funny, how her hangover vanished under stress; she could feel it jittering madly down in her guts, vibrating up around the top of her head, but right now her brain was working hard.

“Nothing,” she shrugged. It seemed the safest thing to say. Lenny—or whoever—leaned back in the magenta chair and smiled.

“Oh, come on, Velvet. I know you better than that. You couldn’t keep your mouth shut if somebody put a gun to your head, could you? And you’re always looking for a buck. So you went looking for bucks at the paper. How much did he pay you? Three hundred? Five?” He laughed softly, a street laugh, not college-boy at all. “Did you have to blow him on top of that?”

“Fuck you,” she said; it was half-automatic, and it was half-fright. God, who was this guy? Had he already been to the paper, talked to Bradshaw?

“How much?”

She blinked and said, “Pardon?” His smile was as thin and red as a paper cut.

“How much? Fifty? Twenty-five? Ten? Are you a ten-buck-a-fuck whore yet, Velvet, or is that coming in the next couple of years? Is that your career path?”

She stood up, opened her mouth, and sprinted for the kitchen while he was still waiting for her retort. She grabbed Robby’s big black-handled Ginsu knife and gasped in deep scared breaths, as she waited for him to come around the corner.

From the other room he said, “Come on, Velvet, I’m not going to hurt you. Come on out.”

She firmed up her grip on the knife and jammed herself in the corner between the coffee machine and the sink.

“You get the fuck out, right now!” she yelled.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” He sounded relaxed as hell. Something made a metallic click in the other room. She froze and thought,It’s the heating,the central heating, that’s all. Goddamn old buildings, they creak all the time, maybe he knocked something off the table, maybe his knee popped, maybe my knee popped, oh god, maybe it was a—

He came around the corner in one long, graceful step. Over the top of the gun, his eyes were cool and calm.

“Drop the knife, Velvet,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

She had never in her life had a gun pointed at her, never. Funny how it made things happen deep in her guts, funny how her eyes kept coming back to the sleek silver gun and the big black hole pointing at her.I need to remember what kind of gun it is, in case they ask me later, she thought.It’s big. It’s a big fucking gun.

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