Sinner

Jeremy thought about it. He thought about it for so long that the sun moved a little overhead. A family went by us on their way to the beach. One dad was in a wet suit with a surfboard under his arm. The other dad was in the world’s geekiest swim trunks. The children trotted behind them making gleeful supersonic noises and punching each other.

“Jeremy,” I prompted, because I couldn’t take it anymore.

He said, “What we just did wasn’t about the music. The way’s never been about the music. The way is about the show.

The gig. This is just another gig. The studio was about the music.”

“Can I do the music without the way? Like, and still sell anything?”

“I think you like the way too well for that.”

“Hey.”

Jeremy said, “I’m not saying it’s bad. You’re good at it. But sometimes I think you’ve forgotten how to stop doing it. Do you think maybe you should get out of the city for a little bit?”

“Is that a suggestion or a question?”

“Just to get your head back together.”

I rocked my head to look at him. I could feel the knob at the back of my skull grinding and crackling against the tarp and the ridges of the pickup bed. It was sort of satisfying. I shook my head back and forth. Not disagreeing with Jeremy, just feeling the crunching on my head. “What makes you think my head is not entire already? What a glorious time I’m having in this state.”

Jeremy took a drink of unsweetened iced tea. He said, “Chip died.”

“Who the hell is Chip?”

“Chip Mac.”

“Are you even using words, man? Or are you just communicating with a series of clicks and whistles?”

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.