G riff had made her put on armor for the ride, a black-magic cotton candy jacket. Burton wore one too, and in a way that was what nearly killed him, how the lining flash-hardened with the energy of the bullet. Fired into the concrete between Burton’s feet, by a man who was probably already dead when his finger pulled the trigger, the bullet had ricocheted up, hit the jacket’s sleeve around Burton’s left wrist. The bullet had disintegrated then, something about the physics of the cotton candy tending to cause that, and one fragment headed back down, into Burton’s right thigh, nicking the femoral artery.