Letitia grabs the microphone in a flash. “Control, this is One-Henry-Five. I got this. Code 3, Third and Spring Street. Over.” She’s already peeling the car away from the curb.

“Henry?”

“It’s a call sign. Means detective. A two man patrol car is Adam, like Adam-12?”

“I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about,” I say. “Who the hell is Adam?”

“TV show? About police? In the 60s?”

“Jesus, Tish, I thought we were the same age. I had no idea you were an old lady watching fifty-year-old television shows. Did they drive dinosaurs?”

“Fuck you.”

“Can I call you Henry now?”

She gives me the finger and hits the lights and sirens. I wonder, not for the first time, what the point of an unmarked police car is when it’s so obviously an unmarked police car.

“Seems kinda coincidental that there’d be a blue Porsche just around the corner,” I say. “Henry.”

“Maybe she’s coming back to finish the job,” she says. “Asshole.”

“Ah, shit.”

“What?” she says. “Oh.” The nearby fire we’d seen earlier turns out to be the Bradbury. Vintage building with steel art deco stairs and cage elevators in the middle and offices on the outer edges. It’s an L.A. icon. And flames are pouring out of every opening.

“That’s gonna piss a lot of people off,” I say.

“Where are the firetrucks?” Letitia says.

“Dealing with other fires, I imagine. There are kind of a lot of them right now.”

Something’s bothering me. It makes sense that Sastre would want to finish what she started. Downtown is a series of one-way streets. Though traffic’s light, and in some cases non-existent—I mean, would you be out during an apocalypse? Letitia’s still obeying street signs.

“Turn around,” I say. “I don’t think Sastre was planning on getting out of this alive. If she’s headed back to the office building, she’s not gonna bother paying attention to one-way streets.”

“Shit.” Letitia pulls the car into a tight U, tires skipping along the pavement, and heads past the burning Bradbury down the street and—yep, there she is.

She pulls to the curb moments before she sees us, and peels out again, gunning the engine. She heads right at us. Letitia gets ready to turn into the Porsche to knock her off the road with a PIT maneuver, but Sastre feints, and pulls a U just as Letitia begins to swerve.

Letitia corrects, but now it’s officially a chase. Letitia calls in for backup, but something tells me we’re on our own.

Chapter 35

We head east going the wrong way down Third toward Little Tokyo and the river, and I begin to see how bad things are. Looking down from the office building, I could see how far out the tlepilli had been placed, but I couldn’t appreciate the magnitude.