Page 72 of Slow Burn

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 outnow.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 silentwhat?“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.”

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