Adrenaline by Jeff Abbott

running. I nodded. “Are you a
traceur
?” I asked. A term for parkour runners, drawn from the French term for a special kind of bullet that leaves a trail.
    “Oh, no. I used to live in Paris. I used to watch the kids trying parkour, running along the edges of buildings, throwing themselves from rooftop to rooftop, amazed that they didn’t break their legs.” She smiled the slash-smile again. “I wished I had their nerve, their fleetness.”
    “I say if you want to run an obstacle course, get on a track.” Ollie poured more whisky in the woman’s glass, although she hadn’t asked.
    “But life’s an obstacle course,” the woman said. “The runners run in the world we live in, not an artificial one.” She turned back to me. “I always thought they looked like animals.”
    I raised an eyebrow.
    “In their grace. Wolves on the street. Hunters. The runners looked to me like a pack, closing on prey.” The woman sipped her whisky. “I have a fondness for wolves.”
    It was exactly the sort of bizarre comment you hear in a bar that would make no sense anywhere else but seems reasonable in dim light with the sting of booze on your lips. Ollie stared at the woman, auditioned an unsure smile, and decided to end the discussion of wolves with introductions. “Hey, Sam, this is Mila.”
    Mila offered a hand. I shook it. “Are you a regular, Mila? I’m still learning who’s who in Ollie’s kingdom.”
    “She’s a wandering regular. Stops in when she’s in town, which is only like three times a year. And then I can’t get rid of her for a week.” Ollie grinned. “She keeps wanting to buy the bar from me but you know I will never sell.”
    “I can work on him for you,” I said with a polite bartender smile. “I’m sure he wants to retire to Florida.”
    “Oh, God, no,” Ollie said. “New York till I die.”
    “He won’t sell, but he listens to my proposals because he sells me a bottle’s worth of Glenfiddich during that week.” Mila kept her hands folded on the bar in front of her, primly.
    “Nice to be able to travel,” I said.
    “The world is a smaller place these days. Much smaller.” Mila shrugged—a small, elegant gesture. “Be careful on your parkour runs, Sam. Ollie will not spare the whip if you’re on crutches.”
    “Sam I don’t need to whip. The others, Jesus, Mila, you can’t believe it. How hard is it to pour neatly and quickly and accurately into a glass? To pour? Gravity does the work. This is not surgery. I tell you, that day-shift guy, he sloshes my profit margin onto the floor and I mop it up…”
    I raised my arm. “I better bandage this.”
    I found the first-aid kit in Ollie’s cramped office. There was a desk, with scatterings of papers, an ancient, grinding PC Ollie had never quite mastered (I’d had to help him do searches on the web and also recover a lost spreadsheet), and a safe. The safe would not be difficult to crack; it had a keypad and, considering Ollie’s general loathing of technology, I suspected the pass code would be a simple one to guess.
    Arm tightly bandaged, and dressed to work, I went back out to the bar. Mila was gone, bills tucked under her glass. She was an excellent tipper.
    “She completes me,” Ollie said. “Damn. I like her but there’s no hope.”
    “Where’s she from?”
    “Everywhere.”
    If Howell wanted to have me followed by someone other than his normal teams, or wanted to insert someone into my life, he might pick a person like Mila. Or if the Money Czar was coming after me,
he
might send someone like her.
    But. But she had a history with Ollie. Unless Ollie was lying about that, and was in Howell’s pay. Hello, madness. You see how your mind starts to twist: you suspect everyone. I went back to wiping down the bar, trying to blank my mind.
    “Hey, I got this for you.” Ollie pushed a thick book at me. I looked at the cover. A bartender’s guide. I opened it to the end to see how many pages it was: 508. Very