“I think he’s just fine with the idea so long as he’s not one of the corpses. Anyway, he wants to use me as bait. If he controls this information, he probably thinks he can control me, too.”

“You’d think Letitia would have warned him about that.”

“Letitia has her own reasons,” I say. “I don’t think she wants to rock the boat too much. And honestly I can’t blame her. I think it might also make her the best person to talk to. We at least have history.”

“Yeah. If you consider her stabbing you in high school history, sure.”

“I have low standards. Besides, she’s with Chu because she’s afraid of what will happen to her family if she gets targeted.”

I stand up from the couch, my legs wobbly, my body filled with overlapping pains. I swear I can feel every bruise, puncture and abrasion. I’m a little afraid to see what I look like in a mirror. The tattoos help me with the worst of the damage, but they don’t make it feel any better.

Between being poisoned yesterday morning, jumping off cars out of the void, getting the shit kicked out of me by a cartel sicaria, and feeling the deaths of 800 people like a gut punch for every single one of them, I’m not exactly at my freshest.

“There a car in the lot I can borrow?”

“What, you’re not stealing one?”

“Ugh. Too much effort. I’m tired.”

“Here,” she says. She pulls a set of keys out of her purse on a nearby table and tosses them to me.

“You’re trusting me with your car? You do know I’m pretty hard on cars, right?”

“It’s insured, I don’t much like it, and I’m going to report it stolen as soon as you walk out the door.” She gives me a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Good to know.”

“And before you see anybody,” she says, “take a shower. Maybe change your clothes.”

She’s got a point. My clothes are more red than anything else, and the fabric has gotten stiff from dried blood.

“Fine. But pretty soon everybody’s gonna be wearing blood-crusted clothes and you’ll see the genius of my fashion forward sense.”

“That’s actually what worries me,” she says, and turns her attention back to the fires on the horizon.

Chapter 16

You’d think after being back in L.A. a few years and actually owning property I might spend some time in it. I don’t. My sister’s house in Venice is vacant, the other properties my family left mothballed and covered in dust. A few were nothing but empty lots, and stay that way.