“I owe you, Dwayne,” I said. Dwayne shrugged.
“I’d say pay it forward, brah, but I know better. I’d get out of town if you can, Ballard. MS-13 is pissed about what went down at their crib and you whacking Francisco and Demir. You got every fucking mara in L.A. looking for you. Those guys were a valuable commodity in their business. If they get a whiff of you, they will rain down on you hard.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m hoping I can finish this bit of business up quick and be on my merry way.”
“May not be that easy,” Dwayne said. “She’s missed you and she wants to keep you here as long as she can.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The city,” he said. “She thinks you two belong together. She wants to hook back up with you like in the old days, wants to finish what you two started. Says you owe her something. Watch yourself, man. She’s crushing hard.”
I knew what this bitch of a town wanted from me, and I was half-tempted to give it to her. We had made promises to each other, vows, and I had broken mine—big surprise there. Who knows, before this was over, maybe I’d make good on my word and give L.A. what I owed her. Dwayne said he’d give me a heads-up if he heard of any badness headed my way on the gang, or citygeist, front. I tried to pet Gretchen good-bye; she growled, snorted, and padded away.
It was two hours before Grinner found me downstairs at the bar. I was on my third whiskey and “A Sorta Fairytale” by Tori Amos was playing over the hum of the client hive. Anna kept me company for a time.
“I recall when you first came here,” Anna said, her elbow on the bar, watching me drink. It should be an Olympic sport. “You got so frustrated you couldn’t find that silly drink anywhere.”
“Cheerwine,” I said, sipping my drink, “and it’s still hard as hell to find in some places. Besides, it’s not silly, it is a powerful elixir of all things good and pure.”
“No wonder it’s hard to find,” she said. We were quiet for a moment, letting the music and the conversations around us fill the gap. Most of the men and women in the room were watching Anna, wanting her, or wishing they were her. I knew she felt the attention. She was one of the most hyper-aware people I’d ever met; she could read the energies in a room without any supernatural abilities. She also presented as very comfortable in her own skin, and, for the most part, that was true. Anna had fought more demons than I, all in her head, and had conquered many of them and made strict bargains with the ones that she couldn’t. Just being near her, she radiated wellness, life.
“You used to drink a lot less,” she said. “Up until things got bad, near the end. You ever think about quitting it?”
“Yeah,” I said, gesturing to one of the bartenders to hit me again. “I do pretty good for a while, then I run into something that shakes me up, reminds me of what a fuck-up I am, and I fall down. No big.”
“Do you remember when we used to meditate together? The yoga? That could help.”
“Why do you care?” I asked.
“You know why I do personally,” she said, standing. “I love you, no matter how hard you make it to do that. I also hate to see potential go to waste. It offends me.”
“That should be my epitaph,” I said. She sighed and looked at me with those bright soul-stones she called eyes.
“I have an appointment,” she said. “Some music industry mogul that needs his ass minced into hamburger meat. To be continued.” Anna walked away and the whole world watched her, me included. The music had shifted to “Cold Desert” by Kings of Leon by the time Grinner took Anna’s seat and ordered a club soda. He’d had his blue AA chip for several years now.
“I found her,” he said.
“I thought you said an hour,” I said with a grin.
“Fuck you,” he said. “The attack took forty-eight minutes to crack that ugly bitch. The rest of the time was gift wrap for your sorry, ungrateful ass. I put training wheels on this, so even you can’t screw this up. Cheers, asshole.”
We clinked glasses and drank. Grinner nodded toward the elevator. “Come on.”
Upstairs, in an empty office Anna had instructed Grinner to use, he sat down behind the most heavily modded laptop on the planet. I stood behind him. “Here she is,” he said and clicked the mouse. An image appeared on the screen of a beautiful young woman, a few years older than the photo Dree had given me, with longer platinum-blond hair, blue eyes that seemed to burn out of the screen, and a wistful, sad expression that was eons away from the girl laughing beside her best friend at a concert.
“She’s using the name Karen Anew,” Grinner said. He clicked on a file icon, and an MP5 clip began to play. It was a clip from a porn movie called, in a flash of cinematic brilliance, Myth-Bust-Hers. The star of this tale of four guys trying in a very unconventional way to pay for their pizza was Caern, or “Karen,” if you prefer, in a pair of thigh-high, rainbow-striped socks and nothing else. “Her stage name is Crystal Myth,” he added.
I sighed. That minuscule, gnawed-on section of my insides that hadn’t turned to oily, black water had hoped the trail wouldn’t end up here. The majority of me that swam in that oily water knew better, knew it would. “Well, shit,” I said. Grinner closed the video clip.
“Yeah,” he said, “It’s a goddamned shame. ‘Crystal Myth’
