The Shake
young woman who had staked out one of the armchairs. The night wasn’t particularly cold, but she was dressed for a winter assent of Denali. Her long coat, scarf, gloves, and hat were piled on the floor next to her chair, leaving what looked like no more than three or four layers of clothing to protect her from the elements inside the store. And I thought I was cold-blooded.She had gathered a couple dozen books in a pile at her feet and was busying herself sorting through them. She would take the top book, flip nervously through the pages, then stuff it between the chair arm and either her left or right thigh. This process continued until she had sorted the entire pile, at which point she stood up and the two stacks of sorted books collapsed together into the space her butt had vacated. She put her coat on top of the books, tucked her cell phone into one of the coat pockets, and went to the restroom. I walked past the chair and deftly lifted the cell phone. There wasn’t any necessity behind this. It wasn’t as if the feds were tapping my home phone, or trying to triangulate on my location. It was more of a game whose practical implications, if there were any, were mostly just hypothetical. In the last few years, I’d been giving more thought to my technological footprint, the various ways of leaving digital crumbs along the trail of my misdeeds. Later that night I used the woman’s phone to call Richardson.
“Goddamnit, Lisa,” he barked into the phone, “I’m not paying for it!”
I’d obviously caught him in the middle of some delicate negotiations. “Hello, Ron. Having Lisa problems?”
The line was silent for several seconds. “It’s you,” he said, sounding relieved that I wasn’t Lisa. “What do you want?”
“Thoughtful of you to ask, Ron. Especially after all your bullshit about not knowing Arnaud.”
“Jesus! You’re worse than the fucking cops.”
“I haven’t quite made up my mind whether to punish you for lying to me, Ron, or give you an incentive to be more forthcoming.”
There was another long silence. “You killed Danny Weiss, didn’t you?”
“I read about that. A tragedy.”
“Look, I admit I knew Arnaud. But I don’t know why he was killed and I don’t know who did it.”
“Danny said something about a couple of Russians.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Give me something useful and I’ll let you keep your ten thousand dollars for November.”
I could almost hear his mental cash register ringing. “I don’t know, maybe I can find something. Let me get this straight. If I do this, I don’t have to pay you anymore?”
“Not quite, Ron. You don’t have to pay me for November.”
“How about November and December?”
The guy was too much. “I’ll tell you what. You give me something I can use, we’ll cancel the November payment. Depending on how things progress from there, I’ll consider canceling December, too.”
“All right,” he said, after a long pause. “I’ll see what I can dig up. How can I get in touch with you?”
“Don’t try to be clever. I’ll call you again on Wednesday evening. That gives you five days. If you can’t come up with anything, you’ll still have time to make your November deposit. And Ron, don’t waste my time.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re an asshole?”
“I’m a lot worse than that. I’ll talk to you on Wednesday, and good luck with Lisa.”
I removed the SIM card from the phone and tossed everything into the trash, then booted the computer to check my email. Along with the usual spam, there was a note from Mio saying she was going to be in Sacramento on business for a few days in early December, and she was looking forward to seeing me. There was a P.S. informing me that I would be required to take her out dancing at least one evening. This was partly a way of teasing me. She knew I didn’t like the club scene, or dancing, for that matter, but I nevertheless had an obligation to meet her “at least one evening” minimum. Dancing was one of her passions, along with making money and martial arts, and she was extraordinarily talented at all three.
I had little more than a vague impression of the overall scope of Mio’s finances. I never asked her for specifics, mainly because I wasn’t particularly interested. Money was a topic that quickly bored me. I knew she was wealthy. She had investments all over the world: in digital technologies, in oil and natural gas, in biotech and pharmaceuticals. These were things she’d mentioned in the past, before she realized the true extent of my indifference and stopped talking about it. I also knew that, in addition to the Sacramento house she put at my disposal, she owned other properties in California, as well as in Florida, Quebec, Paris, in several East European and Central Asian countries, and in Japan.
On the other hand, I was rather fascinated by Mio’s interest in martial arts. I knew it had little, if anything, to do with acquiring the skill to defend herself. She was a vampire. With her vampire’s strength and speed, there was no need for her to train. It was the “art” of martial arts that she was drawn to, expressed primarily in dance. The various martial arts styles are sometimes divided into two general groups: the hard, fighting styles, and what are sometimes disparagingly referred to as the soft, dancing styles. With Mio, the distinction evaporated. She developed her own techniques, mixing hard and soft elements, incorporating all of it into dance. And if there was ever a dance of death, Mio was its ultimate practitioner.
At the same time, she was thoroughly pragmatic. Aesthetics aside, if martial arts didn’t offer her practical advantages, I don’t think she would have bothered. One important advantage her skills gave her was a way to disguise, at least partially, her vampire powers. Whenever possible, human beings will interpret strange, anomalous, or outlandish events in a way