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 so strange.

“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.