Cold Fire

Viola impulsively hugged her, planted a kiss on her cheek, and said, I want to have both you and Jim to dinner as soon as possible.

Homems green-corn tamales, black beans, and jalapeno rice so hot it'll melt ya dental fillings!" Holly was simultaneously pleased and dismayed: pleased to have met this woman, who so quickly seemed to be a favorite aunt of long acquaintance dismayed because she had met her and been accepted by her under false pretenses.

All the way back to her rental car, Holly fiercely berated herself under her breath. She was at no loss for ugly words and clever damning phrases.

Twelve years in newsrooms, in the company of reporters, had acquainted her with enough obscene language to insure her the trophy in a cursing contest with even the most foul-mouthed victim of Tourette's syndrome.

The Yellow Pages listed only one Tae Kwon Do school in Newport beach. It was in a shopping center off Newport Boulevard, between a custom window-covering store and a bakery.

The place was called Dojo, the Japanese word for a martial-arts practice ball, which was like naming a restaurant "Restaurant" or a dress shop "Dress Shop." Holly was surprised by the generic name, because Asian businessmen often brought a poetic sensibility to the titling of their enterprises. Three people were standing on the sidewalk in front of Dojo's big window, eating eclairs and awash in the delicious aromas wafting from the adjacent bakery, watching a class of six students go through their routines with a squat but exceptionally limber Korean instructor in black pajamas.

When the teacher threw a pupil to the mat inside, the plate-glass window vibrated.

Entering, Holly passed out of the chocolate-, cinnamon-, sugar-, yeast scented air into an acidic environment of stale incense laced with a vague perspiration odor. Because of a story she'd written about a Portland teenager who won a medal in a national competition, she knew Tae Kwon Do was an aggressive Korean form of karate, using fierce 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 ya mean. They're like a bunch of bulls ramming at each other. I'm not had 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 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 wanted her to interview him while he continued to do stairs. He was not Asian, which perhaps explained the unimaginative generic name of the 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.