Jeremy repeated slowly, “Chip. Mac. The guitarist Baby hired for you.”

“I didn’t know his name. How’d he die?”

“OD’d.”

It didn’t mean anything at first. Then I made the connection, but the wrong one. “That was totally not my fault.”

“No,” Jeremy agreed. “It wasn’t. He’d just gotten out of rehab, and he’d been in the hospital, too. Did you know the bass player?”

“He was just some kid.”

“Picked up for dealing last year,” he said. “I asked around.”

It was rather heartwarming to imagine Jeremy asking around on my behalf. “So, what? You think Baby was trying to get me wingmen.”

He made a noise of affirmation. It wasn’t really surprising.

It did make me feel a little strange, thinking how the guitarist was now dead and he’d just been alive and angry at me. And also thinking about how things might have been different if I hadn’t fired them that night. No wonder Baby had been so aggravated that I’d fired Chip, perfectly poised for a disaster on television. “What if I hadn’t fired them? Lucky.”

“Luck,” Jeremy scoffed softly. “There’s no luck.”

“Then what?”

“Your feet take you where you need to be.”

I thought about this. “My feet have taken me to some pretty rough places.”

“That was your dick, dragging your feet along with.”

I laughed. A flock of pelicans flew by, ungainly but beautiful, reminding me I needed to call Leon and make him ride a Ferris wheel. A word appeared in my head, unbidden: home.

Was that what this could be? Was that what I wanted?

“I don’t want to give you back to Chad,” I said.

There was a very long pause. Even by Jeremy standards.

Then he said, “I can’t tour with you, Cole.”

Just as before, when he hadn’t trusted me, it wounded. I didn’t care if the rest of the world didn’t trust me, Baby and America and all that. But Jeremy — Isabel — “I’ve changed.”

“I know,” he said, and he got out the truck keys. “But some things you can’t change.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

· isabel ·

In our clinicals today, we’d been going over codes. Codes are basically shorthand for terrible things that happen in hospitals.

They’re mostly standardized in California.

Code Red: Fire

Code Orange: Hazardous Material Spill/Release Code Yellow: Bomb Threat

Code Blue: Someone’s Heart Has Stopped

A few of the more twittering idiots in my class had been transported by fear at the idea of a code possibly going down during our clinicals. Part of me was sort of hoping for one, though. I was going out of my mind with boredom. A hazardous material spill seemed like a good time. The big thing about the codes was to not panic, anyway, and I was excellent at not feeling emotions. The point was to gather all of the information you could, and then act on it.

Baby was basically a code. I couldn’t decide if she was a Code Gray: Combative Person or Code Silver: Person With Weapon/Hostage Situation. In either case, there was no harm at all in finding out more about her. Which was why I agreed to go out to dinner with her, as long as I chose the place. I wanted it to be on my territory, not hers.

I picked Cole up and we headed to Koreatown, a place that many of Sierra’s monsters were afraid of because they were silly little weaklings who believed what their mothers told them. My mother had also told me to not go to Koreatown on my own, but she’d never been, so how would she know? The news was full of lies and, anyway, the food was great.

Everybody wanted something in Koreatown, and nobody was pretending they didn’t. It wasn’t really attractive, but it felt satisfyingly urban to me. The streets were wide and treeless; everything that wasn’t an apartment building was a strip mall, and everything that wasn’t a strip mall was made out of concrete.

There were more walls tagged with graffiti than not. Not the feel-good graffiti of Venice, either. It was all gang tags and well-done murals about ugly things. One of my favorites was a mural of wolves at a kill. There was no blood, though — just butterflies. That felt like Koreatown to me. It came at L.A.’s prettiness all real and brutal, but in attacking Los Angeles, it just became part of the prettiness. That was the hungry magic of Los Angeles. It defied all comers and turned them all into yet more Los Angeles.

I parked the SUV, swiped a credit card at the meter, and in we went on foot. On our way to the restaurant, a bunch of cute Latino guys on the opposite street corner hooted. I thought it was directed at me until one of them flipped Cole the bird and shouted “NARKOTIKA!” to make sure Cole knew it was personal.

Cole, wired and hectic from whatever had happened during his shoot today, looked over his shoulder at them. For a moment I was afraid he was going to do something that got him stabbed, but he just flashed a peace sign at them. Then he turned away, despite their shouted replies. Done with them. Just, done.

The restaurant, Yuzu, was a Japanese place located in an apocalyptic shopping mall on the edge of Koreatown. It was four half-abandoned, dimly lit levels connected by ancient escalators.

Every store that was still open had signs in Korean out front.

I liked coming here because the food was good, but also because it felt like a place that you couldn’t just use the Internet to find. You had to use something real. And you had to actually and truly not give a damn about what other people told you.

We rode an escalator up. I was wearing a lace top, and Cole’s hand had snuck under the edge of it to rest on my bare lower back. I returned the favor. His back felt smooth and cool beneath his proud to be canadian T-shirt. He was distracted, though. His eyes were narrowed as his gaze flicked from the stores to me. A little muscle moved in his jaw.

“What?” I asked. “Just say it.”

He said, “I think I’ve been here before.”

“Think? Seems pretty memorable to me.”

“I might not have been in a remembering mood.”

I didn’t like to think about Cole coming here to score while on tour, so I didn’t say anything else. We rode up the escalator in silence, then took two steps to the next escalator, and rode that one up in silence. I walked him to the front of Yuzu. Cole pointed to the sign out front, which read: we reserve the right to refuse service or admittance to anyone.