Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [51]
She squinted at the screen and frowned. They needed a Realtor on-call, to help them figure this mess out. “Okay, does that make any sense to you?”
Sergei leaned over her to look at the display, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder. “No…maybe.” Out came the ubiquitous cell, and he punched in a preset phone number.
“Good morning. It’s Sergei.”
“Good morning?” Wren mouthed at him, one eyebrow raised. She did the math quickly in her head. Too early for London, unless this person was a real early riser: Asia? Her suspicion was confirmed when Sergei switched into what sounded like Chinese. She hadn’t even known he knew any Asian languages, although once she thought about it, it didn’t seem too strange at all.
Makes me feel about as smart as a rusty nail, though. That’s four languages he knows, English, Russian, French and Chinese. That I know about. Wren could barely manage a smattering of French, and knew a handful of words in Spanish, most of them rude.
To make herself feel better, she drew down on the current humming in the walls and made a fortune cookie rise from the debris of dinner, stripped the cellophane from it, and sailed it through the air into her hand.
Sergei shot her a glare. “Sorry,” she mouthed. Active current—even controlled doses—did terrible things to cell phone reception, which was why she never bothered to carry one.
She unrolled the slip of paper in her hand, and read her fortune. It is not the dying which is so bad, but the staying dead. Confucius say “huh?”
Jimmy had a seer writing his fortunes. Made for occasionally unnerving experiences. She considered the slip of paper and then tossed it into the garbage. Sometimes you had to let the really obscure ones go. It would make sense when it made sense, and probably not an instant before, if she knew anything at all about seers. She had enough trouble dealing with today, much less what might happen tomorrow.
“Okay, thanks.” He replaced the phone in his pocket and leaned forward, as serious as a man six foot three inches tall could look, sitting on the floor.
“So?” She prepared herself for the worst, not knowing what she thought that might be. The room smelled stale, her mediocre ventilation not handling the layers of Chinese food spices and sweat.
Unexpectedly, he laughed, his smooth chuckle washing out over the room and easing muscles she didn’t know had tensed. “You look like I’m about to bring an ax down on your neck, Genevieve.”
“Bastard. Who was that? What do you have?” Something clicked in her memory then. “That was Stephen?”
“It was indeed.” Stephen Langwon was a former Treasury agent—and occasional art collector, preference for watercolors and a damn good eye, according to Sergei—who had retired and gone into, of all things, real estate. They did have a Realtor on-call after all. “He’s in Seoul for a family reunion.”
“Bastard,” she said again, with more heat, realizing that he’d spoken whatever that language was just to piss her off. “You messed with me on purpose!” Wren kicked out at him, surprised when her bare foot actually managed to connect with his thigh. He grabbed her heel and held on to it with one hand as he continued.
“Stephen thinks that our target probably bought this house through a corporate blind, something to keep taxes off his back. And maybe deflect attention from any suspicion he might be under.”
“Right.” She tried to pull her foot away but he held on to it. “So who does own it?”
“Nobody?” He shrugged. “Maybe a holding company, I’m not sure how it works, and I didn’t want to keep him on the line that long to explain it to me. Besides, static was terrible.”
She ignored the slam. She had already apologized, what more did he want?
“So if it’s owned by some corporation, can he weasel out if, say, stolen goods are found there?” Wren whistled. “Sweeeeet. But where does that leave us?