Page 92 of Slow Burn

“Hey—” he said, and his fingers tightened around her arm. He looked at her face again. “That little bitch wore the wrong clothes. I can’t believe it. You’re the other one, the thief.”

Robby tried to break free, but her muscles felt hot and painful, and her head was spinning. Bile tasted rough on the back of her throat.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” she mumbled. Her lips felt numbed, her tongue slow and clumsy. She tried to get his wallet, but it slipped out of her fingers and fell. “Let me go.”

“Not a chance.” He fumbled in his pocket. His face took on a blank expression of panic. He switched his hold on her to his other hand. “Shit. Shit! I lost it.”

“What?”

“The gun. I lost the gun! Oh, never mind, shut up and walk. Just walk. Come on.”

He dragged her to a stumble, as fast as his slick-soled shoes could go on the icy sidewalk. Behind them, people and music spilled out of the Gearbox. She tried to break away again but he held tight.

“Faster. Walk faster. Hurry. Are you warm, are you getting warm?” He looked over at her face. “Damn. It’s too cold out here.”

He let go of her arm and stripped off his coat. Before she could get more than three weaving steps away, he threw it around her shoulders and grabbed her wrist.

“Put it on.” He looked almost gray with panic, eyes darting all around on the sidewalk. She tried, but her arm wouldn’t cooperate. “Put it on, hurry up! This is the worst day, absolutely the worst day of my life. I know you don’t care about that, but it is. Everything was supposed to happen today, and nothing worked, nothing. It’s all going up in smoke.”

He stopped and a thin panicked giggle worked its way out of his mouth in a gust of steamy breath. His eyes had a strange shine to them.

“Butyou’llwork,” he said. He took her arm and threaded it in the sleeve, dressed her like a rag doll. She huddled in the warmth of the coat. “Come on,walk.Walkfaster.”

It seemed to take forever to reach the next corner, a nightmare of uncertain steps and the tight stretch of Spandex over her skin, of dizziness and heat prickling. He was talking to her again, but she hardly understood what he was saying until he shook her hard enough to rattle her teeth.

“Can you feel it?” he asked. “Is it starting yet?”

What boiled up out of her this time wasn’t nausea, it was knowledge.

He was talking about burning. He’d put something on the clothes to make Velvet burn.Oh, Jesus, like Arnold, like the man at the hockey game.

She was going to die.

A police car turned a corner and started toward her. She felt the headlights wash over her like sunlight.

The man tightened his grip on her arm.

“Don’t,” he warned her. “If you run, it’ll only happen faster.”

She shoved him as hard as she could. He stumbled backward, hit a patch of ice and slid. He grabbed a parking meter to keep from falling. She shrugged his coat off and ran for the police car. Her legs vibrated like rubber bands, her skin flared hot, hotter.

Oh, god, no. No, not like this.

She collided with the hood of the police car with bruising force, stared into the startled faces of two uniformed cops, and hobbled on. There was water flooding out over the sidewalk near Dallas Alley, a wet shimmer in the gleam of neon. A pipe had broken in the cold.

She fell full length in the water and rolled. The shock made her scream, but she kept rolling, back and forth, until she was soaking wet and the cops were pulling her to her knees.

“Drunk,” she heard one of them say.

One of the wallets she’d stolen fell out of her skirt. Then the second.

“Stupid,” the other one said. “Up, lady. Let’s take a little ride.”

She was shivering convulsively as they slammed the back door of the squad car, but she was alive. Alive.

The man was gone from across the street. His coat lay discarded on the sidewalk, flapping like a ghost in the wind.

“How much did you have to drink?” one of the cops asked her. She tried to talk past the chattering of her teeth.

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