The Driver

by Hart Hanson

  (Which blather reassured me that Lucky had made his peace with the night’s events.)

  “In this case the tree made no sound because it never fell,” I said, showing my three fingers with my right hand, then knocking them down with a flick of the thumb and forefinger on my left. “And anyone will tell you it’s stupid to worry about something that never happened.”

  Lucky nodded. So did Ripple.

  “Tinkertoy?”

  Without taking her face out of her coffee mug, Tinkertoy said, “None of this. Bothers me. None. I got some seats. From the Tahoe. Need exchanging. With the Suburban. That’s all. I got on my mind.”

  At least that told me what her plan was with the Tahoe’s upholstery.

  “Nobody’s gonna talk,” Ripple said.

  “As for evidence of the crime scene, the only blood at the garage is yours,” Lucky said.

  “And I took care of finger number three.”

  I gulped my coffee and rubbed my eyes.

  “When you think you’ve Thought of Everything,” Lucky said, “that is exactly when the Heavens Collapse Upon You.”

  “There is one thing outside our control,” I admitted, “which I gotta deal with.”

  “What?” Ripple asked.

  “I told Delilah Groopman about Willeniec showing up with a warrant at Avila’s place yesterday.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Delilah’s a really good cop,” I said. “That’s what’s bad. But what happened didn’t happen, and this, right now, is the last we speak of it.”

  They nodded. They trusted me. They had faith in me.

  Goddammit.

  EVERYTHING IS FINE

  Can you believe I have to leave the comfort of that diner and my friends, haul myself behind the wheel of One, gas her up, and drive my fatigued self all the way up to Bismarck Avila’s lunatic mansion in Calabasas? It’s a good thing that sleep is something I’ve always been able to go without (although the fact that I hear the voices of people I’ve killed might indicate otherwise). I consider borrowing some of Ripple’s Ritalin (adult attention deficit due to post-traumatic stress), but I’m reasonably confident that this pounding headache will keep me awake through at least one more watch.

  You want me to write here that it’s guilt that keeps me awake, not a headache.

  You realize that would make guilt a force about as powerful as a can of Rip It?

  You do remember what an awful person Willeniec, A., was, right? (Kicking Tinkertoy? Torturing a teenage war-veteran amputee?)

  What? You still want me to feel guilty for killing him?

  Are you sure it isn’t shame you require?

  Or remorse?

  Disgrace?

  Do you want me to bemoan a lapse of rectitude or a lack of probity?

  I ask because these are all different sentiments that people lump together into one ball of wax and call it conscience. Perhaps it’s your opinion that a good man in my position should be hearing rattling chains in the night, beating hearts beneath the floorboards, out-out-damn-spotting, hair shirts and fig leaves. What you are demanding is that I bear a penitential burden. Ideally a cross. You want me to suffer for killing Willeniec. Which means you resent my decision to kill him more than my subsequent action of actually taking his life.

  No? You say you don’t resent me for what I did? Then you must resent me for not feeling the way you think I should feel after doing something of which you tacitly approve?

  (I’ll leave you to cogitate upon the nature of guilt while I continue to live my day-to-day life.)

  At the fake concrete / wood / Greco-Roman columns of Avila’s gate, I rang the buzzer and waved at the camera angled down at me from Olympus. Nobody spoke, but the gate swung open, and just like that, I was back on King Kong’s Skull Island, crunching along the driveway toward the crazy mansion with the gigantic vertical ramp built behind.

  Nina waited for me at the door wearing nothing but an American flag bikini (which made me feel violently patriotic) and a skimpy, gauzy throw-over that all but disappeared when viewed from almost every angle.

  “Biz is still asleep,” she informed me.

  “Late night?”

  “He was up skating ’til all hours. Biz does that when he’s worried.”

  “What’s he worried about?”

  “Oh, I dunno, maybe people taking shots at him and cops sniffing around looking for mysterious barrels. What you think he’s worried about?”

  “I had a pretty late night myself,” I said, hoping she’d suggest I go home and wait for Avila’s call. No such luck.

  “Doing what?” she asked, as though I had no life aside from driving her famous boyfriend around.

  If Nina knew what I’d been doing she probably wouldn’t be traipsing through her house wearing nothing but Betsy Ross’s bathing suit and spiderwebs, me following behind like a poodle, gaping in surprise because the outwardly schizophrenic, theme-confused mansion was decorated in a low-key, beautiful, and tasteful manner.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “What did you expect? Video games and leather and big screens and shark tanks?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was accusing me of being racist or angling for my support if she tried to get Avila to spice up the place. Sure as hell, there was no way to ask without coming off as racist, so I shut up and followed her through a foyer, then a library, then a dining room suitable for seating forty of Avila’s closest friends and family, into an industrial-size kitchen featuring granite and chrome and copper.

  Nina indicated a box full of liquor in what was either an aircraft hangar or a pantry.

  “I need that to go out to the island,” she said.

  “I’m Avila’s driver.”

  “Mr. Avila’s driver.”

  “I’m not a day laborer.”

  “Fine. Put it in your scabby limo and drive that shit out to my island.”

  “Not gonna happen,” I said. “I’ll go wait out in the car for Avila to wake up; then I’ll drive him wherever he wants to go.”

  “Because you’re a driver.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Too proud to carry stuff.”

  “Not my rationale but identical outcome.”

  “I’m gonna have Biz rip you a new asshole when he wakes up.”

  “Do me one better,” I suggested. “Get him to fire me.”

  I retraced my steps to the front of the house (without the need for bread crumbs), returned to One, reclined in the front seat, clicked the satellite over to piano trio sleep music, and shut my eyes . . .

  . . . and awoke to the sound of cursing as Nina appeared, box of booze in her arms, leaning back, trying not to topple off her spiky heels as she tottered across the driveway. Extremely entertaining. Nina wobbled across the paving stones, then stopped to rest, propping the box on a decorative rock wall, refusing to glance my way, before hoisting the box to resume her stagger toward the dwarf pirate ship at its stubby dock, where she put the box down and headed back inside for more.

  I followed her back to the kitchen, where I picked up two dozen beers and a string bag full of limes. Then I went back for two seven-fifties of tequila and a hundred pounds of ice. It wasn’t until all that was loaded onto Nina’s pirate ship that I noticed the first box she’d carried out was completely empty.

  “Ha!” she crowed, noticing me notice.

  “I underestimated you.”

  “Everyone does,” Nina said, “especially men. I suppose now you’re not gonna help me unload.”

  “You got me,” I said.

  (There you go. Menial labor: my penance for killing the bad man. Feel better?)

  Nina pushed a tiny lever at the base of the mainmast, which was the width of a pie plate and eight feet tall, Jolly Roger fluttering on wires at the top, and Nina’s miniature Queen Ann
e’s Revenge lurched across the man-made pond to her desert-island getaway maybe thirty yards from the mainland. At the stern of the ship, a fake cannon pointed at any Royal Navy pursuers who might appear. I sat on the barrel of gunpowder, nudged immovable cannonballs with my feet. When we bumped against the dock, Nina grabbed my arm (totally unnecessary) to support herself before leaping to the sand and tottering on six-inch heels toward the hammock between the two palm trees while I hefted boxes of party goods onto the dock.

  “This is where I come when I get stressed,” Nina said, lighting a huge, slightly moist (and, I assume, salty) doobie she extracted from between her breasts.

  “You suffer a lot of stress?”

  Nina was focused on holding the smoke in her lungs and she sure as hell wasn’t allowing a conversation with me to interfere with her process.

  “Fuck you!” she said finally, expelling lungfuls of smoke. (Nina smoking weed was a beauteous thing to behold.) “Living in a pretty place don’t convey lack of stress.” She offered me the doobie, but I shook my head.

  “You don’t smoke?”

  “I’m on duty.”

  “What if you wasn’t?”

  “Never developed the taste.”

  “I thought you was some nature of soldier.”

  “Some nature, yeah.”

  “Soldiers love weed.”

  “I’m independent in thought and deed.”

  “Biz don’t smoke neither. Biz don’t do nothing, recreationally speaking, on account his mother was a crackhead. But he don’t care what I do. Biz is not a judgmental type of man. He understands people got different coping mechanisms for life. What you got for a coping mechanism?”

  “Good works, prayer, and Bible study.”

  “Don’t be ironic on religion. It’s one thing you should not be ironic on.”

  “You said don’t be judgmental.”

  “I said Biz ain’t judgmental. Never said I weren’t. What Biz copes with is coffee or energy drinks mixed with half booze.”

  “Poor man’s speedball.”

  “Biz ain’t not a poor man’s nothing,” Nina said, losing focus.

  If the booze was any indication, her weed was top grade: only the best stuff out here on stress-free Treasure Island.

  “Biz’s last driver used to smoke with me,” Nina said.

  “Where’s he now?”

  “Dead.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Not for you. If it weren’t for Rocky getting killed, you wouldn’t have a job. Rocky got killed in a carjacking. Rocky was short for Rakim or some such shit. Sweet kid. Rocky and Biz were close, like this.” (You know what she did with her thumb and index finger.) “Cousins. Biz’s mother had a real dark half sister and that sister had Rocky. Who, even though he was a driver, did not mind bringing all my shit out here to the island because he liked me. Six foot six and arms like this.” (You know what she did with her hands.)

  If weed made Nina talk this fast, what the hell would cocaine do to her?

  “Eighteen years old,” she said. “You know what else Rocky did? He built most of the stuff on the boat there for me. Used his carpentry skills to turn it from a boring barge into a full-on pirate ship. Fanciful. Put in a hundred hours just to delight me. Sometimes I think maybe Rocky liked me more than Biz.”

  I wondered if Nina and Rocky had done more than smoke weed together.

  “I don’t see you being satisfied with a mere driver,” I said.

  “Damn right you don’t see me being happy with the driver! Who I belong with is someone like Biz. Owns a whole company by himself. Someone at the top of the heap. See all this we got now? That’s nothing. Biz is gonna take this shit public. You know what happens then?” Nina made an explosion noise, accompanied by a cloud of smoke. “Billionaire time, baby. Chairman-of-the-board money. That happens, we’re gonna look back on this place like some kind of shack.”

  Obviously, Nina was not concerned about being seen as a gold digger. She wore her ambitions like a crown. Nina flapped her hand at the treasure chest to illustrate for my benefit that it featured both refrigerator and freezer sections that needed filling. I loaded beer into the refrigerator and vodka and ice into the freezer.

  “I hope it doesn’t become a pattern,” I said.

  “You hope what doesn’t become a pattern?”

  “Avila’s drivers getting shot.”

  “You should call him Mr. Avila.”

  “Especially if he’s gonna get me killed,” I said. “Let’s hope Avila decides to lay low here at home, give the cops a chance to figure out who wants him dead.”

  “You should call him Mr. Avila. Cops ain’t worth shit to Biz. They don’t care if he gets killed. They like to kill Biz themself. I tell him don’t never wear a hoodie.”

  “The name Keet mean anything to you?” I asked.

  “Poet?” she answered, shocking the hell out of me. Which must have showed on my face.

  “Fuck you, racist,” she said.

  Acting insulted was Nina’s way of hiding the fact that the name scared her; otherwise, she’d never have flicked that fat unfinished roach into the pond like it was an ordinary cigarette butt.

  “That’s gotta be bad for the ducks.”

  “Thank you for helping me carry shit,” Nina said, laying herself down in the hammock, shutting her eyes like daring me to stare. “Biz’ll tip you something. You can take the boat back yourself. Don’t forget to release the brake or the little electric motor burns out.”

  “Aye, aye,” I said. But she was done with me, not in the least amused.

  Nina was still buried in that hammock, immersed in her phone, two hours later when I drove off with Avila to keep an appointment at his lawyer’s office in Beverly Hills.

  101, 405, Santa Monica Boulevard.

  When I asked Avila if he was concerned about any more attempts on his life, he informed me that as long as we kept moving, nobody would take a shot at him.

  “You tell the last guy that?” I asked.

  “You heard about my cousin?”

  “Rakim or some shit.”

  “When he got shot, Rocky was driving a tricked-out hundred-thousand-dollar Escalade, in the middle of the night in Leimert Park,” Avila said. “Stupid.”

  “Interesting fact: more daylight jackings are successful than nighttime jackings.”

  “You got an odd idea what makes a fact interesting.”

  “It’s a counterintuitive statistic.”

  “Why would you ask Nina about Rocky and Keet?”

  “I only asked about Keet. She offered up Rocky all on her own.”

  “Why’d you ask her about Keet?”

  “I’m interested in poetry.”

  “You about half as funny as you think.”

  “I get forced against my will to work for a guy who two skater kids try to kill in a bar, but who do they kill instead? His bodyguard. Before that, his driver gets gunned down. Your employees die at an alarming, Game of Thrones rate. That gives me the right to ask a few questions.”

  “Who told you about Keet?”

  I didn’t feel like I should answer that question by saying it was a woman cop upon whom I was crushing. I decided to lie like a lying-dog liar.

  “That cop from the other day? He came to where I work and asked me if I knew a guy named Asher Keet.”

  Avila made a sucking noise through his teeth that didn’t provide any information except that I was annoying him.

  I honked my horn at a texting Beemer drifting into my lane.

  “I got a question,” Avila said. “Why’d you shoot the ceiling in that bar? Why didn’t you aim at those boys who killed Chris?”

  “I try not to shoot kids.”

  “I bet you shot kids over there when you was Army. Women too.”

  I saw no upside
in explaining why that fact made me less likely to do it again.

  “And dogs. We’re here,” I said.

  “Drop me in front. I’ll text when I need you.”

  “I’ll drop you at the elevator in the underground garage,” I said. “Not in front on the street.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” Avila said, “but even though you got ninja bodyguard skills, I didn’t hire you for protection.”

  “Why did you hire me?”

  “On account that same white cop asking about Keet and looking for barrels has been harassing me. Every time I turn around, there he is. I figure he’s less likely to shoot me in cold blood I got a white guy with me.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, the world currently being the way it is. Too bad I couldn’t tell Avila that he could stop worrying about that particular white cop.

  I removed my sunglasses and pulled in beneath the building on Roxbury just south of Wilshire Boulevard in the heart of Beverly Hills. The garage was full of Jags and Lambos and Ferraris and Bentleys. It smelled like rubber and polish and money. Avila fit right in, even wearing his crazy oversize skater costume and unlaced Jordans. I looped around and opened the door for him like an honest-to-God chauffeur. He took to it like a birthright.

  “Thank you, Mickey.”

  “I prefer you call me Skellig.”

  “And I prefer you call me Mr. Avila. Which you think is gonna occur first?”

  Avila was at the elevator doors punching the up button. It was quiet and cool in that dim Beverly Hills basement, surrounded by millions of dollars’ worth of automobiles (I didn’t even have to raise my voice).

  “You ever consider the possibility that the cop and Keet are working together?”

  Avila stared at me for a moment, then said, “Shit,” in a tone meant to convey that he was miles ahead of me, but that wasn’t true. The thought had never crossed his mind.

  Avila stepped into the elevator and kept jabbing at the button until the doors closed.

  I spent the next forty-five minutes on my phone, checking breaking news to see if any sheriff’s department detectives had been reported missing, until the elevator disgorged Avila, escorted by a uniformed security heavy.