The Driver

by Hart Hanson

  “Success and ball removal don’t fit comfortably into the same sentence.”

  “Please, Skellig,” Lucky said. “I know you deal with Upset by Making Light, but I hope you won’t make such Insensitive Remarks when Ripple awakens.”

  Lucky glanced at Dr. Quan in a way that might appear to an outsider that he was begging her pardon for my vulgarities but which I recognized as his initial foray into a potential love connection. I gave Lucky Are you serious? eyeballs, but he came back at me hard with the Afghan Scowl.

  (It’s a historical fact that the Afghan Scowl is what defeated Alexander the Great in 330 BC, Genghis Khan in AD 1219, the Persians, the Arabs, Tamerlane, Queen Victoria twice, and the Soviets. But don’t worry, I’m sure we will fare differently—USA! USA! USA!)

  “I don’t recall telling you my first name,” she said.

  “I heard it from an EMT who asked you out.”

  “Skellig,” Lucky said, “I think you have to be much more specific than that. I can’t imagine there is any EMT who hasn’t asked Dr. Grace Quan out.”

  “Is he for real?” Dr. Quan asked me, jerking a thumb at Lucky.

  “Totally sincere,” I said. “I know it sounds like a cheesy line, but he’s in dead earnest. Can we see Ripple?”

  “He’s still unconscious,” Dr. Quan said.

  “It would do us good just to see him breathing,” Lucky said, laying on the sensitive-soul crap pretty thick, not that Dr. Quan minded. In fact, she must have found Lucky reassuring, because she led us through to the recovery area, where we looked at Ripple through glass.

  At least I assumed it was Ripple. There was a smudge of orange in a sea of complicated white and blue medical linens and tubing, bandages, and machines. We stared at Ripple for a long moment; then Lucky nodded and I realized that this display of love and compassion was only fifty percent to seduce Dr. Quan. The other fifty percent was one hundred percent sincere concern.

  Dr. Quan walked us out saying that we should come back the next morning. She’d make sure that Ripple knew we’d both been here and concerned for his well-being.

  “He won’t care,” I said.

  “He will pretend not to care,” Lucky clarified. “Our Ripple pretends not to give a shit but in fact he gives a Large Shit,” said Lucky, illustrating that even trained communicators who speak many languages can have trouble conveying exactly what they mean.

  Dr. Quan smiled and (lo!) Lucky had achieved his goal. Mentally, I jumped ahead in time to where Dr. Quan introduced Mom and Dad Quan (both doctors, I presumed) to her diminutive, illegal-alien, limo-driving, Afghan boyfriend and hoped, for Lucky’s sake, they weren’t Dragon Parents.

  At the main doors to the hospital, Lucky took Dr. Quan’s hand and thanked her for her concern.

  “Please don’t thank me,” she said. “I’ve just about called Detective Groopman a hundred times to tell her I’m suspicious.”

  “Suspicious? Of what?” I asked.

  “If I could answer that,” she said, “I’d know what to say to Detective Groopman. Maybe I just want to ask her if she thinks you’re a good man or not.”

  I wondered how to answer her implied question, given the fact that I’d recently slid the corpse of a man I’d murdered headfirst down a bottomless dry hole.

  “Lucky thinks I’m okay,” I said. “I’ve always trusted his judgment.”

  “You two,” she said. “I can’t tell if you’re legit or, like, epic wingmen for each other.”

  “A doctor is much like a detective,” Lucky said. “You must listen to your instincts.”

  “Darren said a few things after he was sedated,” Dr. Quan said.

  Thank God Delilah wasn’t there to see panic flicker across my face.

  “About his time in Afghanistan,” she continued.

  My gut unclenched an iota.

  “What about it?”

  “He never got a chance to prove himself,” she said. “He said he never even got a chance to fire his gun at the enemy, much less be a hero.”

  “Being a hero is overrated,” I said.

  “You’d know,” she said, “according to Darren.”

  “It’s true,” Lucky said. “Our Skellig is Brave and True and Much Decorated.”

  “A man brings in a woman and she’s hurt. Broken nose, say. Eyes swollen shut. Some doctors can tell instantly if the man is helping her or if he’s the one who did it to her. Not just men and women either. Adults and children. I’m not good at that. I recognize that my instincts don’t always serve me well. Who’s good? Who’s bad? I honestly can’t tell.”

  “That’s an overrated skill,” I said. “My advice is to worry about whether you are good or bad. If you’re mostly good, you’ll be drawn to mostly good people. If you’re mostly bad . . .”

  “I am a Very Mostly Good Person,” Lucky said. “And I love Skellig like a brother.”

  Dr. Quan shook her head and grimaced at Lucky’s unbearable sincerity.

  “I know,” I said, half apology, half boast.

  “It would be good for Darren if you could find a way to convince him that he has nothing to prove.”

  I’ve led enough human beings into harm’s way to know that even though Gracie Quan was right about Ripple, her insights probably came about because of her own issues having to do with proving her own self-worth.

  “You are concerned that a young man like Darren, who feels that he has not proven himself courageous In His Own Eyes, may search out Inappropriate and Dangerous Opportunities to prove himself.”

  “Like the situation that put him here,” she said, shaking our hands. She chose to shake my hand first and Lucky’s second. Every man in the world knows that the last hand shaken is the preferred hand, and nobody knows that better than Lucky.

  “So pleased to meet you, Grace,” he said, firing me the Afghan Gloat.

  Lucky and I watched Dr. Quan head back in through the automatic doors. Lucky asked what I wanted to do for dinner. I told him that I wanted to grab some take-out Mexican to eat in the car while we checked out a few properties.

  “What kind of properties?”

  “That’s what I need to check out.”

  I showed Lucky the warrant Willeniec had produced to search for barrels at Avila’s home. My finger skipped by the storage unit and indicated the other addresses that matched the addresses written down in Willeniec’s notebook.

  But first we had to decide between Gilbert’s and Benny’s for the tacos (we chose Gilbert’s), after which we started our real estate tour downtown.

  Three crap hotels, all within spitting distance of Skid Row. Two of them four stories high, the third six.

  “None of these would survive an earthquake,” Lucky said.

  “Looks like they already have. Barely.”

  None of the buildings showed lights in the windows above the second floor.

  That’s a lot of empty hotel rooms—unless you count squatters, hypes, crackheads, meth heads, and hustlers.

  Since Lucky had driven us downtown, I got behind the wheel and drove us out to the next series of addresses out in the Valley.

  The Armenian section of Van Nuys.

  North Hollywood.

  Panorama City.

  Arleta.

  The addresses were not diverse. The properties were much of a muchness: shitboxes, mostly abandoned, overrun by rats and fleas, squatters, and the homeless. All multiunit: apartments, hotels, or motels. All at least partly deserted. Some were boarded up completely.

  “Mr. Avila appears to be a slumlord,” Lucky said.

  “Maybe he’s involved in one of those things where he knows where the state’s gonna put through a bullet train or redevelop so he’s just holding on to the land until it triples in value.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Sure—as long as Avila doesn’t
have any kind of inside knowledge. And even if he did, what do deserted buildings have to do with barrels?”

  “These would all be Grand Places to Hide Contraband,” Lucky said. “Would you like to search one of them?”

  “No. Willeniec did that already. Let’s call it a night.”

  Lucky drove us back over the Sepulveda Pass to Oasis in Santa Monica, both of us glad that we were heading south on the 405 instead of north with the last vestiges of rush-hour traffic heading from the LA Basin into the Valley.

  A burgundy Ford Taurus was parked diagonally in front of the mechanic’s bay doors. It sported a dent in the side of the sort that might result from, say, sideswiping a Bentley during a car chase on the Fox Lot.

  “What Crapola is this Encroaching Upon Us now?” Lucky asked.

  “Where’s Tinkertoy?” I asked.

  “She was sealed up tight inside her room when I left,” Lucky said. “Why?”

  The driver’s door of the Taurus opened and Detective Delilah Groopman of the LAPD, Pacific Division, Major Crimes, stepped out, leaned one hip against the car, and crossed her arms.

  DELILAH AND I ENJOY A COLD ONE

  Delilah and I decide to conduct our conversation on the porch of my penthouse on the roof. Having never been up here before, Delilah is surprised to find that my porch is a delightful terrace, three sides of which are enclosed by handmade Thai teak screens commissioned (then rejected) by Quentin Tarantino for his movie about girls with swords. The fourth side opens to the west, where we can see the top half of the Santa Monica Pier Ferris wheel rolling above the beach in a multicolored nimbus of flashing lights.

  I present herewith a heavily paraphrased transcript of our conversation, made suitable for Disneyland and 1950s prime-time network television programming.

  Delilah proceeded. “Skellig, whatever could you have been thinking when you decided to elude the officers of the law who were endeavoring to fulfill nothing less than their sworn duty when they followed you earlier today?”

  “Why, Delilah, I find I am amazed! Were you in that vehicle?”

  Delilah conceded that she was not personally in the burgundy Taurus but that as a member of the siblinghood of law enforcement, she found herself piqued on behalf of all peace officers because I had eluded them.

  I inquired if Delilah had contrived to arrive tonight in the burgundy Ford Taurus in a transparent effort to startle me and she allowed that she had hoped such a dramatic and illustrative move might drive home to me the fucking importance of fucking candor in our current fucking conversation.

  When I responded that I’d had no fucking idea who the fuck was in the fucking burgundy Ford Taurus when I’d made asses of them, the quality of our colloquy flung itself into a temporary briar patch of nonproductive vitriol, invective, and personal insults from both sides (she felt I was lying; I was insulted by the charge), until we counted to ten and agreed to return to the pertinent essence of the conversation.

  When I queried as to why the police were following me, Delilah responded with “Oh, you fool, you were not the object of this surveillance; Bismarck Avila was the object, but pray tell why you would think otherwise? Are you plagued by some manner of guilty conscience?”

  (I told you Delilah is an excellent cop with a top-notch bullshit detector and motive sniffer, because I was, of course, stewing in anxiety as, let’s call it what it is, a cop killer.)

  Fresh from my success deflecting Dr. Quan with semantics, I suggested that when I said follow me, I was extending the umbrella of a collective entity over both my client and myself, at which point Delilah told me, again, to fuck myself.

  I guess I’m no longer paraphrasing.

  Delilah and I both stared at the whirling wheel of lights on the pier, struggling to remember that we were friends who would be much more than friends if it weren’t for the fact that the woman whom I unrequitedly loved with all my heart was her actual best friend.

  “I didn’t know it was cops.”

  “Liar.”

  “I couldn’t take a chance with Avila’s safety. Somebody wants him dead. And you have to know if I’d seen you in the car, I’d never even have told him we were being tailed.”

  Delilah recognizes the truth when she hears it. She nodded, slightly mollified. I pressed my tiny advantage.

  “Do I get to know why the police were following Avila?”

  What I really meant was: It’s definitely Bismarck Avila who was being followed, right? Not me? For murdering a cop?

  Delilah thought about answering honestly, but the cop part of her was still majorly irked with me, so she changed the subject. But she switched from asking questions to making observations, so I figured I was halfway out of the woods.

  “I never took you for a reader,” she said, indicating the piles of books shoved under my glass coffee table.

  “My dad’s effort to make me a better man. I have to read them in case he springs a pop quiz. Could you at least tell me if what has you all hot and bothered is the killing of Avila’s bodyguard or the disappearance of Willeniec, A.?”

  Delilah pressed her lips together like an annoyed child and wrinkled her nose. (Very fetching.)

  “There’s been no official response from the sheriff on Willeniec yet.”

  “Is that what they ordered you to say?”

  “No, Skellig, what they ordered us to say is absolutely nothing. I’m stretching the rules for you.”

  “That instruction is coming down on you from a great height?”

  “Like piss from Mount Olympus.”

  “LAPD or sheriff?”

  Delilah didn’t answer but made a big show of looking at me quizzically and smacking her lips like her tongue was parched. I got the point.

  “Want a beer?”

  “A little sensitivity if you please, fuckwit. I’m currently not drinking.”

  “Fizzy water with lemon?”

  “Thank you.”

  Which definitely meant that Detective Groopman was about to punch out for the evening, leaving me to chat with my pal and unhealthy crush, Delilah. When I returned with a tall glass of iced mineral water with lemon for her and a bottle of beer for me, Delilah was standing at the lip of the roof, gazing down Santa Monica Boulevard toward the ocean, letting the sea breeze ruffle her hair. We tapped beverages and drank.

  “Tell me about Ripple.”

  I had to remind myself that it wasn’t a question so this was Delilah being solicitous, not Detective Groopman probing for connections to Willeniec’s disappearance.

  I told her. She winced but obviously bought the rough-sex-with-an-Internet-stranger cover story. Then she peered at me through lowered lids and said, “Detective Antony Willeniec is attached to the sheriff’s Commercial Crimes Unit.”

  “That’s shocking.”

  “Why?”

  “The A stands for Antony? I did not see that coming. I thought for sure it was Asshole.”

  “You want to hear this or you want to be a fuckwit?”

  “Both?”

  “There’s no record of Willeniec applying for a warrant to search Avila’s place.”

  “I saw the warrant, Delilah.”

  “You’re the kind of person who might remember the name of the judge who signed.”

  “Last name, Kellog.”

  “Judge Kellog died last year.”

  “Kudos to Willeniec, persuading a dead judge to sign a warrant.”

  Delilah laughed because, unlike many, she thinks I’m funny. She drank her lemon water again, the ice cubes bumping up against her lips. (Lucky ice cubes.) I like to watch Delilah drink deeply because there’s no bobbing Adam’s apple, just a sensual throb in the throat, like a sob but sexy instead of sad.

  “Pervert,” she said, catching me at it, pleased.

  “Willeniec falsified the warrant?”

  “
What warrant?”

  “The one he showed Avila and me.”

  “We have only your say-so on the existence of said alleged warrant.”

  I reached into my breast pocket and presented her with said alleged warrant.

  “Fuck,” Delilah said.

  She looked at it for a moment, then held it up to the light.

  “He took an old warrant, used Wite-Out on the names and objectives, photocopied it, then typed his own shit in.”

  “Very old-school crooked cop.”

  “Fuck,” she said again, unhappy that she had in her hand actual tangible proof that one of her own was walking the wrong side of the tracks.

  “The other night, when I brought you coffee at work, this is why you got all excited when I told you about Willeniec?”

  “I’d like to keep this,” she said, flapping the warrant.

  “Technically, it’s Avila’s, so maybe give me a receipt?”

  “No wonder Avila wanted you to be his driver; he gets a paralegal with the package.”

  “You pick a few things up when you sleep with a lawyer.”

  I immediately wished I hadn’t said it because a shadow crossed Delilah’s face.

  (Change the subject.)

  “What’s Willeniec up to?”

  “Maybe searching for something he knew he wouldn’t be able to use as evidence in court.”

  “You like that scenario?”

  “Beats the alternative.”

  “Which is . . . Willeniec trying to steal evidence for himself?”

  “Depends what’s in the barrels.”

  “Liquid cocaine? Human organs? Blood diamonds. Like that?”

  Delilah plucked the lemon from her glass and scraped the pulp out with her lovely teeth. (Lucky pulp.)

  “We learned from Sir Thomas More that silence indicates consent,” I said.

  “Your face is stupid and it fools me into forgetting that you read books and went to college,” she said.

  I figured this was as far as I was getting and I was about to suggest dinner, when Delilah said, “Willeniec was being watched,” which startled me enough that it must have shown on my face for at least a microsecond, which is all Delilah needed. (Good cop.) And she switched back to asking questions.