Page 71 of Slow Burn

The rest of the chocolate shake disappeared in one hissing slurp. She looked for someplace to put her trash and tossed it in the back floorboard. As she did, something sticking out from under the floormat caught her eye.

It was an ID card. In this one, Agent James was squinting at the camera, looking older than he was, and his name was David Van Housen. It said he was Miami police.

She fumbled open the glove compartment. Two more IDs, one Dallas PD for Brian Groves, one Texas Rangers—the cops, not the baseball players—for Henry Samms. They all had his picture on them.

She clutched the three IDs like a bad poker hand and swallowed hard.

The FBI one was fake, too, had to be. Real feds didn’t carry around an assortment like this.

There was no witness protection. There was no protection at all.

She was sitting right where they wanted her.

Chapter Thirty

Ming

Ming opened her eyes to the awareness of someone with her in the darkness of her bedroom, someone unknown. The fear felt like a wave of heat over her skin, muscles tensing and twitching under the strain.

She lay still and waited. After a few seconds, someone struck a match. The bloom of yellow illuminated an evil mask—no, it was only a man’s face. He touched the match to the end of his cigarette.

“What do you want?” Her throat felt as dry as concrete, her tongue as thick as lead.

He didn’t answer. The glowing tip of the cigarette bobbed in the dark as it moved.

Something struck her across the legs. She caught a scream in her throat and bowed her head to swallow the pain she knew would follow—but there was no pain. She reached down and found that he’d dropped a newspaper on her bed.

“Read it,” he said. She cleared her throat, but it didn’t help.

“May I turn on a light?”

“Sure.”

She flicked on the bedside lamp. He leaned against a bare brick wall, smoking, staring at her—an average-looking man, brown hair, casual clothes. He’d just showered; the ends of his hair were damp and stuck in sharp points to his neck. Beside him was a larger man in blue jeans and a plain black cotton T-shirt. He had a gun in a shoulder holster.

She scanned the first half of the page, lingering over items about police department reorganizations, a salmonella scare, the latest HIV statistics. The man took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, “Bottom of the first page.”

She unfolded the paper with a snap, and Velvet’s face stared at her, caught defiant by a police camera six years ago. She began to read, forcing herself to do it slowly, each and every word.

When she was done, she looked up at her visitors. The one with the cigarette dropped it on the floor and ground it out with a twist of his foot.

“Phone call,” he said, and pulled a cellular phone from his jacket. He pressed a button and held it out to her. She took it and held it to her ear as the number dialed.

It was answered on the second ring, by a man who said, “Ming?”

Surely her throat was full of concrete now; every swallow seemed a monumental effort, every breath a victory. She closed her eyes.

“Yes.”

“I have to explain to you how disappointed I am about all this. I am pretty fucking disappointed.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Somebody took off one of my people yesterday. Burned him alive. You understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Today I get this paper on my desk, Ming, and I am seriously unhappy about the way this girl shot off her mouth.”