Water to Burn (9 page)
Authors: Katharine Kerr
“No real reason. Just curious.”
More warnings sounded in my brain. Thanks to his guns and his muscles, I tended to forget that Ari could be just as sly and sneaky as I could. He was probing for something, and Jack and his father had more than a few old secrets that I didn’t want found. Something must have shown on my face, because Ari smiled in a vague sort of way.
“Well,” he said, “what’s on the agenda for today? Apartment hunting?”
“For sure. The sooner we’re out of this place, the better.”
Besides the usual problems with finding an apartment in San Francisco, I had one particularly difficult requirement. Having Chaos masters out to kill me was one thing; putting innocent bystanders in their way, quite another. I wanted a unit over a business that would be closed and uninhabited at night, the most likely time for any attack.
That afternoon we had a real stroke of luck. Under a heavy gray sky that threatened rain, we were driving back and forth on various streets down in the Sunset district when I suddenly knew we should turn down 48th Avenue. Whether it was the forces of the Balance or the Collective Data Stream, I don’t know, but the tip paid off.
Just a couple of blocks from Ocean Beach, we found a building that held two flats, both empty. Most of the houses on that block stood cheek by jowl in the standard Sunset district style, but this particular house stood between two wide driveways, both leading back to a graveled yard and a row of ramshackle garages. A “To Rent or Lease” sign displayed a handy realtor’s phone number. When I called, the realtor was more than glad to meet us at the property.
While I looked over the inside of the building with the realtor, Ari prowled around the outside and sized up the neighboring apartment houses as well as the building itself. As I walked through the two flats, the realtor, a skinny dour sort in a gray suit and a pale green turban, kept peering out of various windows to keep track of him.
“May I ask what your partner is looking for?” Mr. Singh said eventually.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s a cop. They’re suspicious by nature, cops.”
“I suppose this is so.” Mr. Singh hesitated, then shrugged. The upstairs flat turned out to be a very typical San Francisco railroad flat, though a nice one with hardwood floors. It had a modern kitchen opening off the back door steps, which seemed solid when we climbed them. From the kitchen, a narrow hall led to a sizable bedroom and bathroom and eventually to a big living room with a squared-off bay window that let in afternoon sunlight. When I sampled the vibrations, I felt nothing but the usual lingering traces of domestic bickering and laughter, probably from a large family.
Downstairs, however, struck me as peculiar. From the upstairs flat, we went down the front stairs and out of the front door to a glassed-in porch and the door into the downstairs flat. It opened into an oddly shaped room with a closet that implied it had once been a bedroom, except that on the far side it opened directly into a tiny living room with the obligatory bay window. Beyond that, a hallway led down to a minuscule bathroom, a randomly assembled kitchen, and a huge proper bedroom with windows looking out to the graveled yard and the garages.
“This place is put together kind of weirdly,” I said.
“Yes, I am afraid that is true.” Mr. Singh paused to look out of a bedroom window at Ari, who had opened one of the garage doors and was peering inside. “What is he doing now?”
“I can only guess.” I finally thought up a plausible reason for all the prowling. “But he’s getting a new car this week.”
“Ah.” Mr. Singh smiled in relief. “Of course. He wishes to ensure it will be safe. With the lower flat, you would also gain access to the garage directly under the building, but the rain does run under that door. The outside garages are quite sound. The property management firm had our maintenance man look all the garages over.”
“His name isn’t George, is it?”
“No.” His puzzled frown reappeared. “Why—”
“Just a thought. Sorry.”
Mr. Singh led the way into the narrow beige kitchen—beige walls, stove, refrigerator, the works, all the same ugly yellowish tan. The paint and the counters looked brand-new, as did the stove. While Mr. Singh scowled out the window at Ari, who was taking pictures of the back of the house with his cell phone, I opened myself up to the vibrations. Immediately, I smelled gas and felt despair. I shut down fast.
“Someone killed themselves here, didn’t they?” I said.
Singh winced, then forced out a weak smile. “You are very astute,” he said. “I am afraid that this is true. A very sad case, a woman who had taken many drugs, or so the police told us.”
“I see. That’s why it’s been standing empty so long.”
“Yes, many people who rent here in the Sunset are arrived from China. They will not take a house where someone has recently died.”
“I see. Well, that won’t bother me, particularly. I’d only use this flat for business, if the zoning’s okay with that, anyway. I’m moving into Internet marketing, and I’d like a separate office and storage space.”
His dour mood lifted. “The zoning will be no problem. May I ask what you will be selling?”
“Souvenir objects from the Holy Land—Israel, that is.” Although I was lying at the moment, it occurred to me that I’d found a good cover story. “Thanks to Ari, I have connections.”
“Ah, of course. And then you would live in the upper flat?”
“Yes, and I assume nothing horrible happened there.”
“Nothing, no, that I know of, and I have handled this property for many years. Perhaps if you rent the entire building, the owners can be persuaded to give good terms on the lease.”
Although we made a formal commitment that afternoon, the owners, of course, wanted a credit check. On a handshake, Mr. Singh promised to call us as soon as he talked with them. We left him to lock up the building and returned to our car.
“Let’s go straight to the old apartment,” I said to Ari. “I want to do an LDRS on Evers. Something keeps nagging at my back brain.”
But at the apartment we found Mr. Hansen the glazier there, busily glazing, while Mrs. Zukovski, swathed in her pink tracksuit, sat on my computer chair and watched him. He’d taken both side panes of glass out of the bay window as well as the remnants of the shattered main pane. A chilly wind blew through the living room.
“You might have told me that he was coming today,” I said.
“I didn’t know until he got here,” Mrs. Z said. “He had a cancellation.”
Hansen turned from the window and smiled. “Sorry. I got all the way down to the other job before they bothered to tell me I couldn’t come in.”
“Very rude of them,” Mrs. Z said. “So I thought I’d just keep an eye on things.”
Meaning, no doubt, that she’d been going through our stuff while Hansen worked. It was a good thing I’d put all the papers pertaining to the case into a locked drawer in my desk.
“Uh, I hope you’re going to get that done before the rain hits,” I said.
Hansen stuck his head out of the glass-free window and considered the cloudy sky. “Sure looks like it, don’t it?” he said. “Sure been a wet year.”
“It has, yeah,” I said. “Everyone was worrying about drought, and it turns out that we’ve got water to burn.”
Hansen laughed and nodded. “Yeah, we sure do. I’m glad of it, yeah, but it’s sure caused a lot of trouble down the coast.”
“Like Pacifica, you mean?”
“Yeah, that’s it, all right. All them fancy buildings, red-tagged now.” He paused to scratch his scalp with one dirty fingernail. “Well, I’ll be getting the windows done in a couple of hours here.”
Rather than sit around and freeze while Hansen finished, we left. Once we got outside, I paused on the sidewalk and considered my back brain. The nagging sensation had disappeared. “We could go sit in the car,” Ari said. “You could do your LDRS there.”
“Not necessary. I’ve missed my chance at whatever it was.”
“That’s too bad.” Ari glanced at his watch. “It’s four-thirty. Let’s go have an early dinner.”
We walked across the street to the Persian restaurant. Since they featured a salad bar, I’d gone in there a couple of times. Nice people ran it, the son and daughter of refugees from the fall of the Shah. That afternoon, in the slack time between lunch and dinner, a young skinny guy with a long blue apron covering his gray slacks and white shirt drifted over to take our order. I remembered him as a cousin of the owners.
His English, when he asked if we’d like something to drink, was not the best. Not a problem—Ari spoke to him in a language that sounded a little bit like Italian to my ignorant ears. The waiter grinned in relief and answered in the same. Needless to say, I let Ari order for both of us.
“Is that Farsi?” I said once the waiter had gone off to the kitchen.
“Yes,” Ari said. “A dialect of it, anyway.”
“How many languages do you know?”
“It depends on how you define a language.” He looked away and frowned while he thought about it. “Five European ones, then Hebrew, of course, and Farsi. I can get by on the street with Dari, but I can’t claim I know it. Then there’s Arabic. It has a lot of dialects. Most speakers of one can’t understand the others, but everyone who’s been to school can understand the standard version. I know the standard and the Palestinian dialect well, and then I can get by with the Egyptian version.”
I was impressed. I only know three languages, if you don’t count Latin, which I don’t, since there aren’t a lot of people around who want to speak Latin back.
The waiter returned with rose-flavored sodas and a tray of appetizers, a more generous selection than I’d ever seen before. With the place so empty, he hovered at the table for a while, talking with Ari. Both of them laughed now and then—at jokes, I supposed. After he brought the main dishes, he lingered some more, and this time Ari began asking him questions in between bites, which the waiter answered at some length.
It dawned on me that the boy had no idea that he was talking with an Israeli, because as far as I could tell, Ari’s accent was identical to his. I smiled and looked vacant in what I hoped was the proper public manner for the girlfriend of an Iranian guy. At the end of the meal, Ari paid in cash, not a credit card with his giveaway name on it. He left a good tip, too.
We walked outside just as the rain started. As we scurried across the street, dodging cars, I saw Hansen loading scrap glass into the back of his truck. Brand-new glass gleamed in the bay window of my apartment.
“All done,” Hansen called out.
“Thanks!” I said and waved.
We managed to avoid Mrs. Z as we went upstairs. I’m sure that she needed to lie down and rest after writing the check for the windows. As soon as we got inside the apartment, Ari strode over to the new windows to examine the workmanship. I turned on the heat.
“What was all the conversation about?” I said. “In the restaurant, that is.”
“I was asking him how Johnson got up to the roof,” Ari said. “The night you were attacked, no one in the restaurant would tell the police anything. It made me wonder if they’d assisted him.”
I experienced a retroactive frisson. “Uh, had they?”
“No, or at least, I doubt it. The waiter was too forthcoming. The Shah’s Iran was a police state, and this new regime is no better. One gets used to acting ignorant around authorities. They saw Sanchez as a threat and told him nothing.”
I was planning on running various Agency procedures that evening in the hopes of picking up traces of the coven members and through them, of the hooded man. I changed into work clothes, a pair of jeans, and a green top with a watercolor print and a deep V-neck. When I booted up my computer for a routine run on TranceWeb, I found nothing new in my inbox.
“I still haven’t gotten that file on Reb Ezekiel,” I said.
Ari muttered something in Hebrew, then took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. “I’ll see what I can do to speed things up,” he said. “The sodding thing should have come through by now. I wonder if someone’s intercepted it.”
“Could be, but I’ll bet the bureaucrats just haven’t cleared it yet. It has to come to the Agency via the State Department and the two guys there who know we exist. I—”
His cell phone went off with a loud burst of sour Bach. We both yelped. He clicked it on and wandered into the kitchen to answer the call in private, but he reappeared almost immediately.
“It’s Sanchez,” he said to me. “Evers apparently committed suicide this afternoon.”
I murmured something unladylike. Ari alternated between listening to Sanchez and relaying the details.
“He drowned in the bay right by the Ferry Building . . . around four o’clock . . . jumped from one of the piers . . . witnesses . . . they said what?”
A long pause while I squirmed in curiosity. Four o’clock—just about the time when I should have been doing an LDRS on Evers. Thanks to Hansen, I’d missed the chance, not that I could have reached Evers to warn him. By the time we’d headed for the Persian restaurant, Evers must have been dead.
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