Olvera Street at night glinted with candy-colored Día de los Muertos flags, even weeks after the holiday. Mariachi strummed guitars at the mouths of different restaurants, while a host of people chattered over meals of varying levels of authenticity. Cielito Lindo was located at the front of the street, a small cultural wedge of the oldest part of the city, between Little Tokyo and Chinatown.

By the time I got there, the taquito stand was closed for the night, all boarded up.

I found Lou in the third bar I tried, a little wrought iron joint with a reddish glow and eight-dollar pitchers of margaritas. She had her back to me, slumped over a tumbler, the scarlet tint of the lighting catching the slinky satin sheen of her cocktail dress. She stiffened when she caught sight of me from the corner of her eye.

“Hey.” I slid into the empty seat next to her. A nearly full glass of amber on the bar in front of her. She didn’t look at me.

“I’ve never been stood up before.”

“I’m here now, aren’t I?” I was too tired, the ghost of Ellen still too near, to soften my tone. Lou had taken maybe two sips of her bourbon. I wasn’t sure what was worse: that she wasn’t drinking it, or that she’d ordered bourbon at a margarita joint. “So I didn’t stand you up if I showed.”

“Not once, never even with a mark. Never even before.”

As a rule, Lou did not talk about her life before the Lady Upstairs. I knew what I knew, which was more than Jackal did, but it still wasn’t much. She didn’t share the details with anyone, not even the Lady, I was sure. It thawed me a little, that Lou was sharing something with me she wouldn’t tell the Lady. I touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I should’ve called. I got stuck in traffic.”

Lou was wearing a little scrub of makeup—darkened lashes, lipstick glossy and reddish. If she knew I was lying, she didn’t show it. She stared sullenly at her glass. Finally, she said: “So what is it, you don’t want to spend time with me or you don’t want to work Carrigan?”

“Neither. I’m sorry, I lost track of time—” That old saw. I heard Jackal’s excuses in the office as soon as I said it and bit down on my tongue. Lou stared straight ahead, unwavering. She might’ve been straining to read the tequila labels on the amber-tinted bottles behind the bar for all the attention she paid me. I decided on something that was a close cousin to the truth. “Okay. Fine. The truth is, I am worried about Carrigan. He’s too rich, Lou. He’s too connected. There’s too many ways for it to go bad.”

“You don’t think you can do it.”