Free Water to Burn by Katharine Kerr

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