When I told her the amount, she let out a whistle and then said, “You can’t keep living off payoffs for failed murder attempts. What would you do if no one ever tried to kill you again? No cojes los mangos bajitos. If you had a regular job, you’d qualify for loans to pay for the assessment.”

“I love that so many Cuban aphorisms involve food. Now I want a mango daiquiri. Anyway, writing takes up all my time.”

“I have a problem believing that you’re slaving away in front of your laptop when you’re so tan in April. You should consider writing something marketable.”

“Like stupid stories about stupid girls and their stupid obsessions with stupid boyfriends and stupid handbags? Bitch, puhleeze. I’m dedicated to my craft, to literature.” I lifted my leg to show Mercedes my rocker-girl heels with silver stud details. “Do you like my new shoes? They make me four inches taller. I’m practically Amazonian.”

The corners of her mouth twitched upward, but she was already focusing on solutions to my problem. “If you got a roommate, you could use her rent to pay for the assessment, or maybe you should expand your gardening business full-time.”

“Your suggestions are shockingly soulless for the daughter of musicians.” I reached into my handbag to pull out a bottle of red-black nail polish.

“Real musicians have day jobs, which is why my parents still teach.”

“What I need is corporate funding. Ian’s neighbor’s father is a sci-fi geek who has multiple graduate degrees in science, and all he does is hang out in a lab,” I said, dabbing polish over the chips on my nails.

“No one just ‘hangs out’ in a lab.”

“He won’t clone his wife’s dead cat, Señor Pickles, or build her a robot maid, which seems like a very churlish attitude. If I was a scientific genius, cloning pets and building robot maids would be on the top of my to-do list.”

Mercedes knew I still missed my old dog, so she was silent for a few seconds and then she said, “If you got a Daisy clone, you could give me Rosemary. He’s a great dog and I’ve been thinking I could use a pet. I could also use a few robot bartenders.”

“If I ever meet the scientific genius, I’ll get him right on that,” I said. “Gabriel and I went shopping and had dinner this week.”

Mercedes and Gabriel had bonded over their enthusiasm for computer hacking. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s going to a Vampire Council confab about someone who wants them all to come out. I think Ian is perfectly happy living in a crypt. Thus cryptic. Cryptology. Cryptography. Those are all excellent words.”