by James Sallis
But he couldn’t. And what Beil had proposed—once they’d snaked past I work alone and They’ll keep coming—seemed, if not the best alternative, then certainly a feasible one.
“The people who engaged me—”
“As a problem solver.”
“Exactly. Like all of us, primarily they wish to restore order, to have things the way they were. But now there are imbalances. Problems with those moving the pieces around.”
“None of which has anything to do with me.”
“Your presence has introduced wholly unexpected variables. You’ve become a crux, of a sort.”
Driver’s attention went to what looked to be a collision down on Baseline. First, headlights moving toward one another too fast, then a hitch in time, then the lights gone suddenly askew. Did he hear the crash, a horn, seconds later? He remembered a night years ago back in L.A. when he sat in Manny’s banged-to-hell Mercedes on the northern flank of Baldwin Hills, in oil fields that appeared deserted but might for all he knew still be functioning. The gate was open, and they’d entered along a dirt road. The entire city lay before them. Santa Monica, the Wilshire District, downtown. Hollywood Hills in the distance.
“The diminutive fires of the planet,” Manny had said. “What Neruda called them. All those lights. The ones inside you, too. Your house is burning, that’s all you see. But get up here, get some distance, it’s just another tiny fire.
“We go through our lives agonizing over income or what others think, getting wound up about Betty LaButt’s new CD, who shot or fucked Insert-name-here on some TV show, or the latest skinny on the latest idiot with cheekbones who’s making a run for office, and all the while, governments go on killing their citizens, children die from food additives and advertising, women get beaten or worse, meth labs now take over the rural south the way kudzu once did, and we’re getting lies spoon fed to us at every turn.
“The most interesting thing about us as a species may be all the ways we figure out so we don’t have to think about those things.”
This from a the man who spent most of his life writing crap movies. Well, mostly crap anyway.
Emergency vehicles pulled in below, so yes, a collision.
Driver stood. The boulder he’d been sitting on was all but covered with paint-sprayed tags, scribblings, and knife etchings—Manny would have insisted upon calling them modern petroglyphs. In the dark Driver could only make out that they were there, not distinguish them. Tags, he figured, tags and hearts and dates and jumbled-up names. And if he could read them, they’d make about as much sense as everything else.
— • —
He drove back in along Southern and Buckeye, then spilled over to Van Buren and, surprised to see lights on at the garage, turned in. The door was unlocked. As he stepped through, a head leaned out from behind the hood of a bottle-green BMW.
“Everything all right?” he said.
“Would I be under here if it was?”
“I mean…” He looked around. The only lights were two floods over her space. Strange to have the place so silent. “It’s late.”
“And quiet.”
His face must have carried the question.
“You tilted your head, the way people do when they’re listening—just for a second there. Nice, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“Love it. Being alone in the night, nothing much else in the world except what I’m working on.” She came out from behind the BMW. “I have a key. Lupa’s daughter and I, we went to school together. Anyway, this monster’s almost done.”
“Yours?”
“No way I could afford it. Or want it. But I can get it running smooth again, and the guy who owns it can’t do that. You notice the sidewalks just up the way?”
“Not really.”
“WPA, from 1928. More cracks than cement, so the city finally decides to repair them. One look and you can tell the old good stuff from the new crappy stuff.”
“I’ve got some poorly repaired cracks myself.”
“Not the right vintage.”
“A little earlier, true. Interesting thing to notice about the neighborhood.”
“Everything’s interesting. You just have to look closely.”
“And most people don’t.”
She shrugged. “Their loss.”
He was careful not to move closer. And while she seemed wholly at ease, body language told him she was every bit as watchful and aware. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”
“You never had it.”
Caught without a response, he shook his head.
“You have legal motives in mind, say—oh, I don’t know, applying for a marriage license, checking my credit—put down Stephanie. Real life, I’m Billie. Long story, not very interesting.”
“I thought everything was.”
She turned to put down the feeler gauge she was holding and turned back. “You have possibilities, Eight.”
When he held his hands out and apart in mock supplication, she pointed to the stall where he usually worked. Right. Number eight.
They turned to the door in unison.
“You folks okay?” Floating in the gray behind concentric circles of blinding light, the cop stepped in. He pivoted the flashlight around the garage, up and down, then back to them before shutting it off. As their eyes readjusted, his partner came into sight at the door.
“Saw the lights on, commercial establishment. Kinda late, isn’t it?”
“And quiet,” Driver said.
The lead cop let that go. His eyes did a once-over, checking Driver’s hands, clothing, shoes, stance.
“We’re good, Officer,” Billie said. “I often work late.”
“Yes, ma’am, we’ve seen your lights on before. What about your friend here?”
“He works here too.”
“Sure he does.” The cop flipped his light back on, ran it along the BMW, shut it off. “You have papers on that car?”
“It’s a repair job, Officer, almost done. That’s what we do here. I can give you the name and number of the owner if you’d like.”
“Might need that. Right now, I’m gonna need to see some ID.”
Driver’s hesitation before reaching for his wallet was instinctive and fleeting. He didn’t think it showed. But afterwards he wondered if somehow Billie hadn’t caught it. She stepped toward the cop, pulling a drivers license out of the rear pocket of her jeans. The license was as well-worn as the jeans.
The cop took it, looked up at her, then back to the license.
“You Bill Cooper’s kid? The one in, what, law school?”
“At ASU, yes sir.” She held out her hand. He gave her the license. It went back in the rear pocket.
He stood a moment, glanced at Driver one more time, and said, “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am.” The two of them walked out. Driver heard both doors, heard the car start up. The cops had parked some distance from the garage.
“Wasn’t that interesting,” Billie said. “Broke the monotony of just another night running up someone’s bill, sopping up more grease, hanging out with a dude that came in off the street.”
She stepped almost up to him. The awareness was still there, but the watchfulness, for whatever reason, was gone.
“Could you do with a cup of coffee, piece of pie, something on that order? There’s a place up the street. If it’s a slow night we stand a fair chance of not getting shot, robbed, or poisoned by the food.”
— • —
In past lives, Butch’s had been a Steak Pit, a Hamburger Palace, a Mexican restaurant, and quite possibly a drive-through bank. Artifacts of those lives—general layout, smell, signs and tiles, an extensive driveway system—lingered. A “piece” at Butch’s turned out to be a quarter of a pie, and came on a dinner plate. Coffee arrived in cups the size of soup bowls. Probably did killer business once the bars skirting the edge of town shut down for the night. Which wasn’t too far off, come to think of it.
He stirred milk into his
coffee, looked at his piece of pie, and felt vaguely challenged by both. “Your father’s a cop.”
“One of them, yeah. And my mother was an illegal. He married her, made an honest woman of her. What does that make me?”
“Interesting?”
“Not really.”
“Like your name then. Not interesting, you said before.”
“When I was little, I climbed on everything. Chairs, trees, people’s legs, toilets, cardboard boxes. Like a goat, my mother said. And Dad was Bill—”
“I get it.”
“With an -ie to make it feminine.”
Outside, two cars tried to pull into the parking lot at the same time. Both stopped. One driver got out, leaving the door open, and started toward the other car. That driver threw it in reverse, backed into the street, and floored it.
And just like that, for no good reason at all, he found himself telling Billie about his mother. How he’d sat chewing his Spam sandwich watching her go after his old man with a butcher knife and a bread knife, one ear on his plate and blood shooting out of the gash in his neck. How that was about it for the rest of her life, she’d used it all up.
“They were good knives, I hope,” Billie said.
“Probably not, it was a cheap house. But they did their work.”
“Her too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Last thing she did, from what you say. A mother, protecting you.”
Somehow that had never occurred to him. He always figured she’d just had enough.
“What’s the story there?” Billie nodded to a booth where a fiftyish woman and a man in his twenties sat, she with eggs and bacon, he with salad. Was Billie picking up on his uneasiness, changing the subject in accord?
“Not mother and son,” he said.
“And not lovers, the body language is all wrong.”
“Yet they’re both leaning in slightly.”
“Dispensing and ignoring advice?”
“Confessing to one another, maybe.” He braved the pie and for moments they were silent. The couple rose from the booth to leave by separate doors. “Law school, huh?”
“Second year.”
“That’s a longish walk from fixing people’s cars.”
“I don’t know. How much of what we do in our lives, what we think, is chosen, and how much is just what comes at us? My dad was always fooling with cars, parking his on the street because some junker was getting fixed up in the garage. Same with my mother’s cousins that came to live with us. Didn’t have any money, and sent most of what they had back home, so they’d build these cars from spare parts and pieces. I’d watch them, and they’d hand me a wrench to pretend I was helping, and before long I was. Discovered I had a weird talent for it, like I could see how things were supposed to work, how they’d fit together, how much strength was needed here, how much relief there. At one point we had twelve people living in the house. Kids, cousins, hard to tell which were which. Mechanic’s pay put me through undergrad, and I’ll be out of ASU free and clear, no loans, nothing.”
“And then?”
“Hard to say. See what turns up, I guess.”
“What comes at you.”
“Right.”
“And if nothing does?”
“You never know. But it’s not like I’ll just be sitting around waiting, is it?”
He drank the rest of his coffee. There were grounds in the bottom of the cup. “You want another piece of pie? You could try the strawberry this time.”
“I think this’ll do me until about next March.” She pushed the remains, crust, a smear of yellow, three tiny strands of coconut, toward him. “Have at it, big boy.”
“Your father still a cop?”
“Some days more than others. But he hasn’t worn the badge for almost ten years. He’s in an assisted care facility full of nice retired shoe salesmen, dentists, and insurance brokers who keep trying to get him to play cards or checkers or some damn thing.” She looked to the window outside which three Harleys (no mistaking the sound of them) cruised by in a rough V. “I kick in what his pension doesn’t cover.”
“And your mother?”
“Died three weeks after he hung the job up. And they had all these plans….” She leaned back against the half wall, legs stretched out on the booth’s seat, cradling her coffee cup in both hands. “Don’t we all.”
A cook leaned forward to peer through the service slot from the kitchen, then came out and stood looking around, like a bus driver counting heads. He wore a green surgical scrub cap and was stick-thin except for a huge swell of belly.
“What about you?” Billie said.
“Plans? Not really.” None he could talk about.
“That ride you’re working on, that’s just a lark? You can’t be racing, or the guys would know you.”
“I did race, down around Tucson, but that was long ago.”
“You’re not old enough to have a long ago, Eight.”
“It’s not always just years.”
She met his eyes (beat-and-a-half, the director would say) and nodded.
— • —
They picked him up the next morning out by Globe. Two cars this time, and they’d waited for an isolated stretch of road. Chevy Caprice and a high-end Toyota. The message he sent back at the food court in the mall had been received.
He was working the Ford hard, letting it out, bringing it back in, slow, fast, slow again, learning its bounce and feed, but this was a little more testing than he anticipated.
The guy in front was good. Driver slowed enough to let him pass and he did, but then he let it ride, kept his distance. Knowing this wouldn’t be an easy take down, and in no hurry.
The one in the rear car was there for good reason. A tightness to his steering. And he didn’t hug his speed, he’d inch it up, fall back, whenever Driver picked up or dropped a few mphs.
Take him out first.
Driver slowed, started to speed, then slowed again and slammed the brakes. Watched the car behind try to stop and realize it couldn’t. Watched it cut to the left and, knowing that’s what he’d do, swung toward it. The car cut hard again to avoid collision and, losing its center, careened off the road, came within a hair’s breadth of turning over, came back down on four wheels rocking. Out of the count for the while if not for good.
So Driver whipped a quick U and floored it, heading back toward lights, traffic, civilization.
Aggressors are like cats: they’ll instinctively follow if you run. And that can give you the edge.
In the rearview he watched the lights of the lead car come around, watched them move in fast. Man had himself a good ride under that bland Chevy hood. Driver could hear the throatiness of the engine going full-out as it approached.
Been a long time since he’d done this, and he had to wonder if it would be there when he needed it. The instincts were good, but. And buts are what do you in.
The wall just ahead, he recalled from before. Earth color, like most everything else out here, with a sketchy lizard or cactus panel every few yards, the whole thing maybe 200 feet in length. Basically a sound baffle, houses, a small community, packed in beyond.
A median strip separated the lanes. There was fencing, but there were also gaps left for police, service vehicles and such. At the next gap, Driver turned hard, crossed the median and, with gravel spitting behind him, plunged into oncoming traffic. Not a lot of cars, but still dodgy. And horns aplenty. In the rearview mirror he saw his pursuer take down a stretch of fencing as he followed.
The wall, a couple of feet of packed ground, a low curb. If he could get the speed up, hit the curb just right…
Like that first gig back at the studio.
Driver cut left, coming in as straight as he could to the curb, then at the last moment hauled the wheels hard to the right. His head banged against the car’s roof as he struck the curb—and he was up. The left wheels came back down, and came down rough, but on the wall, with the Ford running along at a fif
ty-degree tilt.
Then, as the Chevy closed in, Driver swung right again, bouncing back onto the highway and running full-tilt toward him. You haven’t quite registered what’s going on, you see a car rocketing toward you, you react. The Caprice slewed to the median, careened off the fencing and back onto the road, clipping a battered passenger car with its front end, a bright, new-looking van with its tail, as it spun.