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.”

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 out now. 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