“Do you need help? I could come along.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
He shakes his head.
“Not much these days. At night, I mostly lie in bed trying to remember the way things used to be.”
“I know the feeling. Look, I’m not going to a nice place. This might be dangerous.”
He cocks his head.
“You mean I might die?”
“Okay, not that. But it’s still dangerous.”
“I’ll get my coat.”
His coat is a sweatshirt Kasabian loaned him. It doesn’t matter. This is L.A., where, if the temperature dips below sixty, we call in the National Guard.
I head out to the car and Vincent follows. When he gets in, he takes out the bottle and pops a pill.
“You should take it easy on those.”
He swallows hard, getting the dry pill down his gullet.
“It doesn’t matter. That was my last one.”
“You went through that whole bottle?”
“Yes. Do you think you can get more?”
“We’ll let the doctor decide that. I’m sure she’d love to meet you.”
“It would be nice to meet some new people.”
I steer the Crown Vic into the light middle-of-the-night traffic and head east. Vincent looks out the window, watching the city roll by.
“I didn’t often get to look at places in my work,” he says. “I like it.”
“Enjoy it while you can. We’ll have you back with a scythe in your hand in no time.”
“I hate that image. It makes me look like a monster.”
“If they painted you in pink taffeta with fairy wings, you’d still be a monster to ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the human race.”
“I know.”
“The pills make that easy to deal with, don’t they?”
“I feel the pull of life. The rejection of limbo and nothingness, and that’s what death, unexamined, feels like. Even though I know otherwise, it feels as if my body itself rejected the idea of its end.”
“Survival instinct. I suppose you immortal types don’t worry about that much. We deal with it every day.”
“You’re part angel, but you still worry about death?”
“Not the death part so much as the stuff I’ll leave behind. I lost a lot of years Downtown. I’ve barely started making up the time.”
“And your friends?”