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.

Her hand was trying to drop the knife. She wrapped her left hand around it, too. Lenny’s eyes stopped looking quite so calm.