Page 76 of Slow Burn

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 sostrange.

“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

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