Talking to her is a risk, but she’s my conduit to Chu, and Chu’s got that file. I give it a couple of hours after I tell her what’s going on before she calls him. If she skips the bit about Quetzalcoatl, I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I don’t expect it. I can only hope he’s as much a politician as I think he is.

I can see why Vivian wants a new car. This one’s a dinky little Fiat that looks like it wasn’t built so much as shit out of an incontinent elephant. I may set it on fire once I’m done with it. Maybe I’ll toss my bag of bloody clothes in first.

I head Downtown, passing by the Biltmore. I watch as two black body bags are loaded into the coroner’s vans. I wonder who they were. This might be the thing that bothers me the most. If someone’s going to try to kill you, you should damn well know their name. This random stranger bullshit is getting on my nerves.

The King Eddy is a Skid Row bar that was there long before Skid Row was. It was a no-name bar for the King Edward Hotel in the early 1900s and when Prohibition hit it turned into a basement speakeasy using Downtown L.A.’s maintenance tunnels to smuggle in illegal hooch.

Not that anybody really cared. Prohibition didn’t really take out here like it did in some places. Mostly because everybody in the city government was on the take. And then when Prohibition ended, the bar came out from behind the piano store it was using as a front and went legit.

After the War things went to hell. The Red Car stopped going down 5th, the hotels all turned into flop houses, cheap rents pulled in the kind of crowd that cheap rents pull in. Next thing you know, you’ve got Skid Row, junkies, drug deals, beat poets. The King Eddy was a survivor.

But the one thing it couldn’t survive was gentrification. Eventually it closed down, then got bought and opened back up. Now it’s a hipster version of a Bukowski dive bar with eight-dollar Budweisers.

I liked it better when people were doing coke and shooting heroin in the bathroom stalls, getting into drunken fights out on the sidewalk. Yeah, it was a mess, but it was real life, messy, and visceral and full of drama. Even the ghosts were more interesting back then.

I park Vivian’s Fiat in a lot on Main, slapping a Sharpied sticker that says STEAL ME on the windshield, and walk the two blocks over to 5th and Los Angeles where the King Eddy sits as a cornerstone of the King Edward hotel.