“Sorry for bringing it up.”

“Just shut up and drive,” she says, pointedly not looking at me.

I pull the car out of the parking lot. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong with what we’re doing, and I’m not sure Gabriela and I have the same idea about the point of this trip.

I don’t want to go after a professional assassin who’s got a god on her side when she’s gone to ground. There could be all sorts of shit in there that I don’t know about, wards, booby traps. Hitting a tripwire and getting a face full of buckshot is not my idea of a good time.

But if I know where she is, then I can follow her when she leaves, and maybe catch her before she sets anyone else on fire.

I try to tell Gabriela this as diplomatically as I can, but I don’t think she’s listening. She just grunts and stares at the mirror.

“She’s bundling sticks,” she says. “Why is she bundling sticks?”

“I haven’t been able to figure that out. She’s been at it a while.”

“Maybe we’ll get a chance to ask her,” she says.

“If we get a chance to ask her then this whole thing’s gone to shit.”

“You’re making that sound bad,” she says.

The mirror tugs in her hand toward the south. “Head east,” she says. “If we can triangulate it we might narrow it down by a couple miles.”

Gabriela used to have a crew of techheads. They did this with a different tracker that went brighter or darker depending on where and how far away the target was. But they had software on their side and GPS and nailed a location in half an hour. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

We take the 10 and cut through Boyle Heights into East L.A. before the tugging on the mirror shifts direction. I take the car south on the 710, over the 5 and past the train tracks. When we hit the outskirts of Vernon, a tiny industrial town that’s all factories, train tracks, and smog, the mirror yanks in Gabriela’s hand, leaning due west.

“Looks like she’s in Vernon,” she says.

“About fucking time.” We’ve been driving for almost two hours, the sun setting on the slow-moving snake of white and red lights. Traffic slowed us to a crawl despite a spell designed to make people want to get out of our way. It only works if there’s somewhere else for them to go.

“Okay, she’s not bundling sticks anymore,” Gabriela says. “She’s dipping the ends in some kind of liquid and putting them on a rack.”