“My cousin owns a rental place. You go there and he’ll hook you up. Just tell him Benito Cruz sent you.”

Benito called his cousin and told him to expect a big ugly white dude, then gave me walking directions to the lot. I thanked the semi-vampires and walked off. It was the first time in my life I’d turned my back on a vampire, but true to their word, they didn’t attack. Nice neighborhood.

Benito’s cousin’s lot was a little dump of a place off Ventura Boulevard, but he had a nice selection of cars. I laid down a decent chunk of the cash Simon had loaned me and got set up with a jet-black ’63 Pontiac Catalina. The car roared like a fucking lion. I probably should have went with a cheap Honda Civic or something, but the Catalina just cried out to me. Besides, I’d look like a jackass in the Civic. I put down as much cash as I could, but because I was “friends” with Benito, the cousin would let me pay off the balance later.

I rumbled from Ventura to the freeway and headed toward downtown Los Angeles. It was way past the time I said I’d meet Jerry, but I figured he’d wait.

I arrived at the warehouse loft a little before eight. The street was deserted. Strictly urban. I saw a couple crackheads milling around an alley, but that was it. I guessed downtown L.A. wasn’t the happening spot for hipsters or the undead.

The pill I popped had hit a little harder than I’d expected, so I was pretty jumpy. I parked my new ride outside the drab building. It was flat gray with clouded, dirty windows and a door that looked like a loading dock. I hit the intercom beside the double steel doors.

No sooner had the bell rung than a voice started yelling from somewhere inside. It was a female voice, high pitched and panicked. She screamed that she’d be there in a second. My guess was that it was Myra.

Bingo. She answered the door wrapped in a towel, and her hair was dripping wet. She had a tattoo of flaming dice on her right shoulder and a tribal design around her wrist. Her hair was black and cut with shorter-than-Betty Page short bangs. I guess I was wrong about the hipsters.

“Oh, I thought it was Joey. Sorry, you must be Jerry’s friend. Uh, you want to come in?”

“Yeah, that was the idea.”

She pulled the door open a little more, told me to make myself at home, then scrambled up a cold flight of cement stairs. As I entered the warehouse, I noticed the stairs didn’t go down any further. If there was a way into the basement that Jerry mentioned, I couldn’t see it.

I followed Myra up the stairs. She was small and thin and looked like a spider monkey as she took the steps two at a time. Her towel had come open in the back. I looked away.