I hit the sidewalk running. Lupe was there outside the front door, panting, wild-eyed, swinging her car keys in one hand. Taking me by the wrist, she ran away from the Boulevard, dragging me with her toward her car. She opened the door and got in. She gunned the motor.

Then I did something I’ve always wanted to do. I jumped over the passenger door, tumbling into the car seat.

“Hit it, girl!” I yelled.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

We shot into traffic. Lupe pulled a fast U in front of an oncoming diesel Mercedes.

“Where to?” she shouted over the honking horn and squealing brakes of the Mercedes.

“Mexico.”

¡Mexico! Hector’s gonna calm down. You don’t understand. He gets like this all the time. Nervous ‘cause he’s got a fight coming up. And he’s not getting laid.”

“A few days before she was killed, Cathy Vega was in Mexicali at a motel called...” I felt in my suit pocket for the matches I had found at Casa Guatemala. They were gone. Had the Guatemalans frisked me while I was out cold? I felt ashamed to think of strangers touching me. “Did they search me while...?”

“I told them you weren’t packing and to keep their hands off you, but...”

“Thanks.” I thought of the strangers who touched Lupe, the men. It made me sick. I didn’t want to look at her. “Did they find anything?”

She nodded. “Yeah, but I couldn’t see what it was.”

So they knew I knew about Mexicali. I stared straight ahead. On the left was Edgemont Hospital, a private mental institution where the county had tried to place a former client, Eloise Himes, after she had hacked up the living room of her apartment with a machete. Next to it was a run down two-story house the color of dog poo with a sagging door and broken windows. Farther up ahead the night was illuminated by the klieg lights of another supermarket opening.

“The video ended five minutes after you got up,” Lupe continued. “Before the lights came back on, I saw the woman you’d been talking with go down the hall after you.”

“Emma Garcia,” I explained. “She’s the leader.”

Lupe swung into the left lane to get around a van and pushed the gas again. “I thought Tony Guerrero was the leader.”

“There’s a power struggle going on between them. I wish I knew what it was about. Who’s aligned with who.”

Lupe nodded in agreement. “Raul went after Emma. I thought I’d be able to snoop around without him stuck to me, but Tommy Hutchings, the red-haired one, came right over to talk to me again. The next thing I knew, they were hustling me to the back of the place and I saw them carrying you into the shed.”

“Did they say anything before I came to?”