I pull the battery out of the phone as soon as I hang up and toss the phone into the wastebasket. I take my pocket watch out. The watch speeds up time drastically. It’s effective, if difficult to control. It doesn’t always work the way I want. I don’t know if it can do anything else, and I only figured this out with trial and error and more than a few dead cats. I’m just fine not experimenting any more with it.

I point the watch face at the phone at the bottom of the wastebasket. I wind the crown a couple notches and push it down with my thumb. The phone goes brittle, the glass cracks. Stress fractures appear across the surface and the plastic flakes away until there’s nothing but a pile of plastic shavings and bits of metal at the bottom of the wastebasket. There’s a rusty hole in the bottom of the wastebasket, too. The watch doesn’t have great aim.

The first time I tried disposing of a burner phone like this, I didn’t take the battery out first. Turns out rapidly aging batteries explode. The more you know.

I shower, washing off Gabriela’s blood, counting the cuts and bruises, finally stopping when I can’t tell where one bruise ends and the other begins. Everything hurts: muscle, skin, bone. It’s usually a little difficult to see the bruises under all the tattoos, but these are fresh and clear as crystal, deep purple marks going green at the edges.

I change my clothes, tossing the blood-covered ones into a trash bag I’ll burn later. At this rate I could probably just leave it lying around and let Quetzalcoatl burn it for me along with the rest of the city.

Once I feel a little more human, I call Letitia. It takes a few tries to get through to her, and when she finally answers I hear telephones ringing and raised voices in the background.

“Letitia,” I say. “Busy day?”

“Jesus, Carter, haven’t you heard? A couple miles of industrial buildings in Vernon went up last night.”

“Yeah, about that.”

Silence. Then, “You know something?”

“Oh, and then some. And you’re gonna want to hear it. And I don’t know if you’re gonna want to tell your boss about it.”

“David’s not my boss.”

“Yet you knew exactly who I was talking about when I said it. Can you get away for a bit? We’ve got some things to discuss.”

“For this, yes. Where at?”

“You’re operating out of Downtown, right? Meet me at the King Eddy in an hour. And remember, don’t tell your boss.”

“He’s not my—” But I hang up before I can hear the rest.