Cold Fire

punches, lightning-quick jabs, chops, blocks, choke-holds, and devastatingly powerful, leaping kicks. The teacher was pulling his blows, but there were still a lot of grunts, wheezes, guttural exclamations, and jarring thuds as students slammed to the mat.
    In the far right corner of the room, a brunette sat on a stool behind a counter, doing paperwork. Every aspect and detail of her dress and grooming were advertisements for her sexuality. Her tight red T-shirt emphasized her ample chest and outlined nipples as large as cherries. With a touseled mane of chestnut hair given luster by artfully applied blond highlights, eyes subtly but exotically shadowed, mouth too lushly painted with deep-coral lipstick, a just-right tan, disablingly long fingernails painted to match the lipstick, and enough silvery costume jewelry to stock a display case, she would have been the perfect advertisement if women had been a product for sale in every local market.
    “Does this thudding and grunting go on all day?” Holly asked.
    “Most of the day, yeah.”
    “Doesn't it get to you?”
    “Oh, yeah,” the brunette said with a lascivious wink, “I know what you mean. They're like a bunch of bulls ramming at each other. I'm not here an hour every day till I'm so horny I can't stand it.”
    That was not what Holly had meant. She was suggesting that the noise was headache-inducing, not arousing. But she winked back, girl-to-girl, and said, “The boss in?”
    “Eddie? He's doing a couple hundred flights of stairs,” the woman said cryptically. “What'd you want?”
    Holly explained that she was a reporter, working on a story that had a connection with Dojo.
    The receptionist, if that's what she was, brightened at this news instead of glowering, as was often the case. Eddie, she said, was always looking to get publicity for the business. She rose from her stool and stepped to a door behind the counter, revealing that she was wearing high-heeled sandals and tight white shorts that clung to her butt as snugly as a coat of paint.
    Holly was beginning to feel like a boy.
    As the brunette had indicated, Eddie was delighted to hear that Dojo would be mentioned in a newspaper piece, even if tangentially, but he wanted her to interview him while he continued to do stairs. He was not an Asian, which perhaps explained the unimaginative generic name of his business. Tall, blond, shaggy-haired, blue-eyed, he was dressed only in muscles and a pair of black spandex cyclist's shorts. He was on a StairMaster exercise machine, climbing briskly to nowhere.
    “It's great,” he said, pumping his exquisitely developed legs. “Six more flights, and I'll be at the top of the Washington monument.”
    He was breathing hard but not as hard as Holly would have been breathing after running up six flights to her third-floor apartment in Portland.
    She sat in a chair he had indicated, which put the Stair-Master directly in front of her, giving her a full side view of him. His sun-bronzed skin glistened with sweat, which also darkened the hair at the nape of his thick neck. The spandex embraced him as intimately as the white shorts had clung to the receptionist. It almost seemed as if he had known Holly was coming and had carefully arranged the StairMaster and her chair to display himself to his best advantage.
    Although she was plunging into deception again, Holly did not feel as bad about lying to Eddie as she had felt when lying to Viola Moreno. For one thing, her cover story this time was somewhat less fanciful: that she was doing a multipart, in-depth piece about James Ironheart (the truth), focusing on the effect that winning a lottery had upon his life (a lie), all with his approval (a lie). A veracity percentage as high as thirty-three percent was enough to salve her guilt, which she supposed didn't say much for the quality of her conscience.
    “Just so you spell Dojo right,” Eddie said. Looking back and down at his right leg, he added happily, “Look at that calf, hard as rock.”
    As if she hadn't been looking at it all along.
    “The fat layer between my skin and the muscle underneath, it's hardly there, burned it all away.”
    Another reason she didn't mind lying to Eddie was because he was a vain, self-involved jerk.
    “Three more flights to the top of the monument,” he said. The rhythm of his speech was tied to the pattern of his breathing, the words rising and falling with each inhalation and exhalation.
    “Just three? Then I'll