When they hit the freeway behind us the flames are incredible. Bright blue and a hundred feet high, each feeding into the others. One took out a section of the 10. Four might take out the whole interchange.

“Jesus. You think she’s run out of those yet?” Letitia says.

“Maybe. Or she hates the 405 enough to use what she had left.”

“Everybody hates the 405,” Letitia says. “We’re coming up to where Harvey’s going to set down.”

“Set down?”

“Yeah,” she says. “He’s gonna bounce his bird off her roof.”

“That’s gonna take some tight timing.”

“He’s an aeromancer. Believe me, he’ll land where, when, and how he wants to.”

Harvey makes his move as we come up on Venice Boulevard. It’s not the controlled landing I was expecting. The police helicopter drops out of the sky like a stone. But instead of crashing, it slows just enough at the last second.

The left landing strut bounces off the side of the Porsche, sending it spinning. It flips a couple of times, then stops right side up. One of the tires is shredded. Black smoke is coming out of the engine.

The helicopter rocks back and forth and then lifts jerkily into the sky.

“Did he just fake a crash?”

“Yeah. He wants to keep his job. Needs to make it look like a lucky accident. He’ll set down at the airport.” Letitia stops the car about twenty feet away from the smoking Porsche.

“How you want to do this?” she says. I think about it.

“Stay here with the engine running. I’ll go check if she’s alive. If she tries anything, run her car over the edge of the freeway.”

“Solid plan,” she says. If sarcasm was currency, she’d be richer than Werther.

“You got a better idea?”

“You got a rocket launcher?”

“No.”

“Then, no,” she says. “I don’t have a better plan.”

I pull the Browning out of the messenger bag and mentally tell the gun to behave. It starts to protest, but I think really hard about melting it down into thumbtacks and it shuts up.

I get out of the car. Stand there a moment. Just based on the death toll from tonight, Jacqueline Sastre has got to be the deadliest person on the planet.

I start walking. One way or another, this ends now. As I get closer, I can see into the car. But I don’t see her. Maybe she’s slumped over to the side. Or maybe she got out somehow. There is a lot of smoke. I slow as I get closer.

“La Niña Quemada,” I say loudly enough to be heard over the distant flames, the helicopters above us stabbing the area with searchlights. “You dead yet?”