“Yeah, sure, honey. Just sleep it off or something.” The older cop didn’t even look back at her as he got out. A welcome puff of cold air blew back toward her, but it wasn’t enough, she was drying off, she was getting hot again.

The younger cop turned toward her.

“You okay?” he asked. She burst into tears. “We’ll be on our way in just a few minutes. Just sit tight.”

She lay down on the seat, gasping for breath. So hot. She could feel the fire starting where she’d begun to sweat under the leather.

“Hey!” The younger cop tried to pull her upright. “Hey—”

He got out and opened the back door.

She slammed her feet into the door and threw him out of the way, slithered out onto the pavement and launched into a stumbling weaving run. Her boots slipped and slid on the ice, her lungs ached from the shock of freezing air. Ice crystals stung at her face and neck.

The young cop got up and chased her, shouting. She heard him fall and scream.

“My leg! I broke my leg!”

She made it to the opposite side of the street and into the shadows of an alley, charged past a Dumpster and around another corner, another alley, this one littered with paper sacks of garbage. The air stank of urine and rotting fish.

She stumbled out onto another street, deserted except for a few parked cars. The waving curtain of icy rain swept toward her, and she slumped against a wall and let it soak her.

She had to get out of the clothes. Had to.

In the shadow of a boarded-up doorway, three homeless men warmed themselves over a hibachi fueled with old newspapers and magazines. She weaved toward them and stopped, gasping. They didn’t even look up.

“Help me,” she managed. One of them glanced at her, then back down in to the fire. He added a curling TV Guide to the flames. “Please! Please, you—you—”

“Can’t hep you,” he said in a high thin voice. “Can’t hep nobody. Git.”

“I need—do you have—a knife—or—”

The second homeless man looked up, frowning.

“I got a knife,” he said, and grinned. His front teeth were worn to thin pegs. “Good knife. Sharp.”

“Help me get my clothes off.”

The third man added torn-up strips of USA Today to the hibachi, as if she hadn’t said anything at all.

“Help me take my clothes off!” she screamed. “Don’t you understand? Take my clothes off!”

“Been a long time since anybody asked for that,” the second man said to the first. The first nodded thoughtfully. “Been, oh, two year. Yeah?”

“Yah. Two year. Maybe two an a haf. ’Member, was over on Ellum—”

She let out a wordless scream of frustration and headed on up the street, into the wind and the bite of the ice.