“It has to be able to stay in the car for hours,” he explained very seriously, “but not go bad. And it can’t make you have to . . . you know, go to the bathroom right away. So salt is good, because it helps you retain water.” He handed me a small package of pretzels.
“I thought for sure there would be doughnuts,” I complained. I could not get a friggin’ doughnut on this case.
“Doughnuts are bad for you,” Jesse said around a mouthful of pretzel shards. “These are naturally fat free.” He swallowed and dug through the plastic grocery bag between us. “But I’ve also got apples, granola bars, let’s see . . . peanuts, Naked Juice, and Diet Coke.” He looked up at me expectantly.
“Naked Juice? Do the other cops know you’re a closet health nut?” I grumbled.
“Plenty of cops eat like this,” Jesse said, with great dignity. “You’re just prejudiced. Against the fuzz.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that.
Time passed slowly. We got on the topic of car games—as it turned out, both of our families had taken us on road trips as kids—and for a while we played Twenty Questions and My Mother Owns a Grocery Store, which turned out to be basically the same game. After a couple of hours, though, I started to fidget, flipping the compartment between our seats open and closed. I peeked inside—nothing there but CDs. “Do you have any gum?” I asked, and without waiting for an answer I opened the glove compartment. When the little interior light turned on, I saw a glossy black pistol resting in a specially contoured piece of foam. “Whoa. How many guns do you need?”
“That should have been locked,” Jesse grumbled. He reached over my lap to close the glove compartment, locking it with the ignition key. “And no, no gum. But I’ll put it on your stakeout wish list for next time.” He put the keys back in the ignition, eyeing my face. “You look cold,” Jesse commented.
I nodded. It was chilly in the car, and though rotating the ice packs on and off my knee felt great, the ice wasn’t doing me any favors when it came to body heat. I put the ice packs on the floor of the car, and Jesse twisted around to dig in the backseat. He handed me a fleece pullover that smelled like oranges and Armani cologne. I thanked him and spread it over my lap.
“So did you have any plans for New Year’s Eve?” he asked.
“Nah,” I admitted. “I was just going to stay up and watch TV or something.”
“With Molly?”
“No, she usually . . . goes out.” Party holidays like New Year’s and St. Patrick’s Day are big feeding opportunities for the vampires, especially the ones like Molly who can pass for young people.
It’s not that I don’t know anyone else in Los Angeles. I know a few people from my hometown who’ve ended up here too, and one of Jack’s ex-girlfriends—not to mention Jack himself, who lives in the city and works at a blood lab owned by Dashiell. But, even aside from the fact that knowing me can be hazardous for one’s health, for the most part I don’t trust myself around humans anymore. It’s too easy to start talking about my day and accidentally let something slip about the . . . people . . . I spend my time with. Then I’d have to go begging Dashiell or Molly to press someone’s mind for me, which would put that person on the Old World’s radar. So I just keep to myself, mostly. It’s not that hard, in a city this big.
“What about you?” I asked Jesse. “Are you missing any big New Year’s plans right now?”
“My parents usually throw a big party,” he said. “My brother Noah’s usually in town for it, and we team up and assault the food table.”
“Noah’s the stunt double, right?”
Jesse smiled. “Yes.”
“Is it weird for you, that they all work in Hollywood and you don’t?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Mostly because they don’t understand why I wanted to be a cop. My mom, especially, was sort of hurt by it. She doesn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to work in the movies.”
“So why did you become a cop?” I’d brought up the topic idly, but I realized it was a pretty good question.
Jesse looked away for a moment, thinking. “There was this detective,” he said slowly. “When I was a kid.”
“Did he, like, solve the murder of your best friend or something?” I asked lightly.
“It was my cousin,” Jesse said gravely.
I must have looked horrified, because he laughed out loud, his face brightening. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” I smacked his arm, and he picked up the story. “No, I used to go to movie sets with my folks once in a while, you know, and once on a teacher in-service day, my dad had to take me to this preproduction meeting with him.
“I was waiting in the reception area, with my Spider-Man comics, you know, and this guy walked in. You could just tell right away that he was somebody important. He had this . . . mmm . . .”
“Presence?” I offered.
Jesse snapped his fingers. “Yes, exactly. I just figured he was a movie star at first, but there was something different about him. A vibe, I guess. Anyway, he came and sat down with me, asked me about my comic books, and chatted with me a little bit. He was a homicide detective.”
“What was he doing at the movie studio?”
“Oh, he was there as a consultant. The movie Dad was working on was this cop drama, and this guy had come to advise them on the real-life procedures and things. They do it all the time.”
There was a loose strand of black hair on his forehead, and for a second I could picture exactly what he’d looked like as a little boy, waiting for his dad with a big stack of comic books. “What did this guy say to you?”
“He . . . ,” Jesse trailed off, caught in the memory, and started again. “It was something he said, exactly. The thing was, I had already seen so many cool things on movie sets: fake car accidents and space aliens and exploding buildings. And I figured out pretty early that there wasn’t anything you could do or imagine that couldn’t be faked by good filmmakers. And if anything could be faked, how did you know if something was real?” He looked at me for a moment.