“I’m sorry,” I say, not knowing what else to say. I wish I could forget what Alex looked like. Best friend growing up and my last image of him is his possessed body strangling me right before I had a zombie put a bullet in his head. I keep telling myself he was already dead, but it doesn’t matter. Either way I killed him.

“I know,” she says. “Maybe I’ll just leave town for a little while. Go up the coast.”

“I think that’d be a good idea.”

“Do me a favor, would you?” she says.

“Sure.”

“Don’t get hurt. As long as I’m on Gabriela’s dime I’d probably be the one to stitch you up. And I don’t want to see you again.”

“I’ll do my best.”

—

There comes a time in every person’s life when they have to take a long, honest look back on their life choices and admit that they really fucked it all up.

I didn’t expect to run into Vivian again, like ever. I’d made peace with that, with the guilt, with the fact that I’d destroyed somebody’s life and there was no going back. And then I wake up on a table with her patching me up.

Seeing her threw me. I can’t imagine how she reacted. Not well, probably. I wouldn’t blame her if she’d just slit my throat while I was passed out, but I know she wouldn’t have. That’s more my style than hers.

I’ve fallen into complacency. With nobody trying to kill me and no oblivion hanging over my head, I stopped paying attention. I might have been looking for signs that Quetzalcoatl was coming for me, but I never really believed it. Or at least I didn’t want to believe it.

I pull the Cadillac onto the 101 Freeway and head toward Alvarado. One of Santa Muerte’s churches is there, in a strip mall between a nail salon and a Chinese fast food joint. I haven’t been there in a long time, not since I first came back to Los Angeles.

The church is part of that special L.A., the schizophrenic one that can’t decide what it wants to be. While the tourists are busy looking for movie star houses and waxed porn stars, life is happening all around them. Messy, filthy, violent. And they never see it.

I hit the Four Level, a series of Downtown freeway interchanges that cross over and under each other like an Escher painting connecting the 101 to the 110. It’s a complicated knotwork of concrete and steel and almost everyone driving it doesn’t know that it’s literally a knot.