The Driver

by Hart Hanson

  “Turn left here.”

  “Into what?”

  “There! See?”

  He was pointing at a barely visible double track through the scrub.

  “Are you sure this is a road? It doesn’t show on my GPS. This is a Mercedes sedan, not a four-by-four.”

  “It paves up again in a while.”

  I made the turn and we squirreled our way down a canyon through gnarled oak trees and scrub and boulders and deer grass, but then, a hundred yards farther along, as Avila had promised, the gravel turned to macadam. There was even a fluorescent line along the soft shoulder, indicating that people drove this road in the pitch-black night.

  “How far?”

  “A ways yet.”

  “Did you bring a gun?”

  “No, brah, that’s what I pay you for.”

  “Brah, you pay me to drive you places. Not to kill people. And especially not to get killed.”

  “For a Dr. Sergeant, you sure get nervous.”

  I was nervous because I knew what it was like not only to get shot at but to actually be struck by a bullet (it’s a life-changing experience). I understand that Avila had probably seen some ugly things growing up the way he did (crackhead hooker for a mom), but he’d never been shot.

  Ten minutes later we were still driving, seldom reaching speeds above twenty-five miles per hour, the Mercedes bobbling and tossing like a ship on her soft suspension on the twisty road.

  “How much farther?”

  “Brah, I told you. A ways.”

  It’s extremely frustrating for military or former military to take instructions from civilians. Soldiers tend to be precise in time and distance (mikes and klicks), and Avila’s fondness for meaningless measurements like a ways and a while did not help. We skirted the mountain before descending into a dry mishmash of hummocky hills and dry washes. One thing I knew for sure was that our tail, if we had one, would have to stay well out of sight behind us. Even a helicopter would draw too much attention back here on the ass end of beyond. We were being provided with plenty of time and space to get ourselves into shitloads of trouble and desperation.

  The road veered south along an arroyo, directly into the sun, which made everything even harder to see, a kaleidoscope of glare and silhouette that was unnerving.

  I’d spent some time on various exercises and maneuvers in and around Camp Pendleton, which wasn’t far to the southwest, and I tried to recall if the Marines had any kind of eyes that swung over this far. I realized that all the stuff I was currently finding disconcerting was disconcerting because Keet knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Lots of white supremacists in this area,” I told Avila, “in case you didn’t know.”

  “Lots of white supremacists everywhere, brah,” he said.

  “You aren’t apprehensive?”

  “Shit,” he said, meaning, I ain’t scared of shit.

  “I can’t see why we didn’t bring a few of your tough guys with green polo shirts and guns.”

  “When you got barrels of money,” Avila said, “you don’t need guns.”

  “Is that Gandhi you’re quoting?”

  Beneath Avila’s hip-hop mogul veneer, he was exactly what Delilah said he was: a street kid who made his fortune leaping off fifty-foot plywood cliffs with nothing but faith in his own abilities and a plank nailed to acrylic wheels (all of which made him brave and stupid where I prefer to think of myself as courageous and smart).

  “Slow down,” Avila said, and I allowed myself to hope for one glorious moment that he had no idea where we were, that we were hopelessly lost and we’d simply turn around and get a steak and martinis at the Indian casino on the way back to Los Angeles. But Avila knew what he was looking for: a turnoff marked by one of those old-fashioned Western-style ranch gates. This one was topped with sheet-metal work that had mostly rusted but clearly read HARBOR RANCH, bracketed by a brace of what appeared to be civil war–era cannons.

  “This is it.”

  “Harbor Ranch?”

  “Turn in.”

  I stopped dead in the road, hoping that the task force tail would rear-end us or at least catch up a couple of miles.

  “I gotta ask. What’s cannons got to do with a harbor?”

  “You don’t gotta ask because who the fuck cares?”

  “For that matter, why call a ranch a harbor? They’re two completely different things. One is made of water and the other is made of dirt.”

  “Brah. Go!”

  “Is this even really a ranch? Does Keet raise cattle?”

  “Why you always talking about things I don’t give a slick shit about?”

  “He built a sign saying Harbor Ranch, festooned with cannons,” I said. “I’m intrigued by the psychology.”

  Avila looked at me for a moment and must have decided that the only way we’d get moving again was if he explained the situation fully.

  “The cannon is to protect the harbor. A harbor is a protected place, out of the storm, right? Keet’s been to prison, so his psychology wants to feel safe and protected. Like in a harbor. Maybe you disagree with his symbolism. Probably you think he should have called it Castle Ranch or Fortress Ranch or Bunker Ranch, but what I think is that you should ask him for yourself if we ever get there!”

  Avila was now yelling at me, which meant that he was scared, which made me feel better, so I put the Mercedes in drive and said, “There’s a harbor for ships and there’s a harbor that is a verb meaning to take in or protect—like harbor a fugitive.”

  But Avila had managed to calm himself. “You’re lucky I didn’t bring a gun, Mickey. Right at this moment, you are the luckiest son of a bitch in the history of the world I don’t have a gun.”

  We bounced along the dusty road for almost a mile in silence, twice barely clearing boulders at the side of the road before we popped out of the arroyo to see Keet’s place laid out on a shelf on the other side of a dry wash. A bridge rated for four tons carried us over the wash and through a fantastical double row of King palm trees, as straight as the horizon, as though we were driving up to the lobby of some fancy desert hotel in Palm Springs. I counted a dozen palms on each side. But at the end of the driveway, instead of a hotel, there was a comically king-size log cabin, probably made from a kit sent in a hundred one-ton trucks from Wyoming because no way a full-size tractor-trailer could get past those boulders. To the left and right of the log cabin were two surplus Korean War–era Air Force Quonset huts. Outside of the one on the left, close to the driveway, leaned a fully tricked-out Harley Electra Glide, gleaming with care and chrome and aftermarket extras. On the right was a free-weights setup that looked like it had been transported straight from the yard at San Quentin—except the weight bag was hanging from a towable sixty-foot crane rated to lift two tons.

  All completely deserted.

  I pulled up in front of the log cabin, ensuring that the nose of the Mercedes was pointed back toward freedom and safety, both of which were, by my best guesstimates, ten miles and a century and a half away.

  “Nobody home,” I said. “Oh well, maybe another day with some other clueless nitwit driving you.”

  “Keet’s got cameras all the way out to the state road,” Avila said. “He knew we were coming for the last half hour. The man likes to make an entrance.”

  Avila let himself out of the Mercedes. I sighed and got out as well in time to see Avila place his arms on the roof and wince from the burn. It was well over a hundred degrees out here. It felt like Kandahar in July except not as safe.

  A couple of minutes later, a tall, heavyset man exited the cabin’s front door and waved at Avila.

  “Biz! Good to see you here in my front yard. Come on in out of the sun,” he said in a disconcertingly pleasant voice.

  “That’s Keet,” Avila said.

  “We got air-conditioning,” Keet continu
ed. “We got cold beer. We got comfortable chairs. Bring your friend with you.”

  Keet had to be telling the truth about the air-conditioning because he was dressed for autumn in the Brazos Mountains: a light-blue plaid shirt with a turquoise bolo tie hanging loose, turquoise and silver bracelets and rings, a turquoise belt buckle on a belt circled with pounded-out silver coins. Also flip-flops.

  “Stylish,” I said to Avila.

  “C’mon up and sit a minute,” Keet said.

  “What I got to say won’t take long,” Avila said, not moving an inch toward the log cabin.

  “Will you at least come up onto the porch? It’s a hundred degrees and the porch is where we keep the shade.”

  Avila stood, still as a pond, staring at the porch, not moving.

  This was nothing more or less than an elemental tussle of wills between a street rat and an ex-con, even if the street rat was dressed up as a lifestyle mogul and the criminal was dressed like a Latvian schoolteacher’s fantasy of a Navajo mountain surfer cowboy.

  Keet pulled a sweat-stained tractor cap out of his back pocket, slapped it against his thigh to remove imaginary dust, pulled it over his pomaded hair, and ambled out into the sun toward Avila and me. Honest to God it was like aliens had heard a description of how John Wayne walked, took a stab at it, and almost got close enough to fool you from a distance.

  Lookathiseyeslookathiseyeslookathiseyes, Willeniec whispered in my ear when a puff of air-conditioning somehow made it all the way from Paul Bunyan’s log cabin to where I stood in the driveway without being obliterated by sun and dust. I couldn’t take Willeniec’s advice because Keet was too far away, but the smell of cologne and hair product preceded the man like an advertisement—here be a vainglorious and a dangerous man, a man who’d worked out plenty on that heavy bag and probably on more than one poor bastard hung up on that hook.

  Had Willeniec been here? Was this where he got the idea to hang Ripple from the engine hoist?

  When Keet finally did come close enough to reveal his eyes, I wished he hadn’t. They were milky-blue zombie eyes. Occluded. Hippocrates would have had to invent another class of humors (based on gonorrhea ooze) to describe Keet. As he walked toward us, Keet whistled through his teeth like he was calling a pack of dogs. A tricky, ventriloquist’s whistle. If I hadn’t been looking directly at him, I’d have thought that whistle came from somewhere else entirely. But it wasn’t dogs who responded to Keet’s whistle.

  A number of vexing questions were instantly answered, theories confirmed, suspicions verified. Two men emerged from the Quonset hut on the left, the hut that acted as an extended garage housing cars, trucks, ATVs, and motorcycles. The first man was my old friend from the alley, Chelsea Boots, still wearing his fancy footwear but otherwise dressed like a Mormon missionary in khakis and a white dress shirt. Behind Chelsea Boots was the fat biker who’d attacked Nestor at Avila’s gate. From the other Quonset hut, the one decked out like a prison gym, strode the two skater delinquents who’d attacked Avila in the swanky bar. The kids were both in wifebeaters and had obviously been pushing weights around because they walked as though their muscles were about five times bigger than they were, aggressive and hostile and stupid with testosterone. The stocky Slavic-looking kid who eschewed underwear was carrying a sawed-off shotgun, which was dispiriting because that particular weapon took absolutely no skill to operate in a lethal manner. Behind him was the skinny Goth boy with dyed hair and lurid tattoos. In the absence of a shotgun, he was dragging behind him what appeared to be the same aluminum baseball bat his buddy had used to crack Nestor on the head.

  I uttered the following to Avila in the comically fast manner of someone listing side effects at the end of a drug commercial, “These are the two kids who tried to kill you in Santa Monica and the black guy was their getaway driver.”

  “Santa Anas!” Chelsea Boots said, pointing at me in recognition, like he was delighted to see me again. “Wife with a knife!”

  “Hey,” I said, doing my best to sound companionable.

  “These two little shits tried to kill me,” Avila told Keet. “They shot my bodyguard in the gut.”

  “Kill you, Biz?” Keet widened his eyes in fake surprise. “I don’t think so. That’s a reckless charge to level indiscriminately.”

  Avila decided to play it completely humorless with Keet, not be sucked into sarcastic badinage, which I considered to be a good decision. Goth Boy must have missed the life-skills class on self-incrimination because he pointed at me with his bat and said, “That’s the motherfucker who stopped us from finishing the job!”

  “You little pussy,” I said, dredging up my best drill-sergeant contempt, “how about you try another somersault? Maybe get your boyfriend to hold your dick, though, so you don’t lose it halfway through.”

  (You understand that my own personal evolution has brought me to a place where the use of pussy as an implication of cowardice, and implied homosexuality as a base insult, are both meaningless and wrongheaded, but I’ve found that when insulting someone, it’s best to use terms that they find upsetting, which means stooping to their level. Sorry.)

  Proving my theory, Goth Boy took the insult hard, vibrated with fury, and demanded that Slavic Kid immediately swap the shotgun for the bat, spit spraying from his mouth, the gist being that he wanted to jam the shotgun up my ass and blow my head off.

  “Go get your own gun,” Slavic Kid told Goth Boy.

  That made Chelsea Boots laugh, which infuriated Goth Boy. He grabbed Slavic Kid’s shotgun by the barrel and started a tug-of-war. I’m not sure there are many more dangerous pastimes than playing push-me-pull-you with a loaded shotgun, and I fully expected (hoped?) to see one of these dipshits blow the other in half.

  “Stop it, you boys,” the fat biker said in a mellow tone.

  The boys ignored him.

  “The fact is my boys did what they were told,” Keet informed Avila.

  “You told them to kill my bodyguard?”

  “In fact, I ordered them to kill both bodyguards but to use their judgment and don’t risk getting caught. These boys did a bang-up job for me.”

  “Even the one who dropped his gun?” Avila asked.

  The professional hitters who had done such a bang-up job were still tussling over the shotgun. Like an indulgent father, Keet nodded at the biker, who stepped over and cracked the two boys’ heads together like coconuts. Goth Boy went out like a light, his stream of invective ending with the clunk as he crumpled to the ground in a heap, his knees bending together like a Victorian horsewoman riding sidesaddle, his tattooed arms comically limp at his sides, ending up left cheek in the dirt, facing the log cabin. Slavic Kid had a thicker skull. He staggered, made a halfhearted kick at the fat biker, then stumbled drunkenly back toward one of the weight benches, sat down, cradled his head in his hands, and cried softly like he didn’t want us to hear.

  Chelsea Boots could not have been more amused. On the downside, the fat biker picked up the shotgun, and he handled it a lot more authoritatively than the boy had.

  “You sent him and him to my house.” Avila pointed at the biker and Slavic Kid. “They assaulted one of my security guards. You consider that a bang-up job too?”

  “My name is X-Ray,” Slavic Kid said through his tears.

  “What’s the matter with you, X-Ray,” I asked, “sagging your shorts so low with no underpants?”

  “It gets him girls,” Keet said.

  “Why? Because your ass crack draws their eyes away from your ass face?”

  Chelsea Boots chortled and repeated, “Ass face!”

  “What do you want me to do?” the biker asked Keet, hefting the shotgun.

  “Shoot his head off,” X-Ray said.

  “I wasn’t asking you.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked the biker, hoping to delay a horrible death if Keet agreed with X-Ray. “I’m gu
essing Tiny or Beanpole?”

  Chelsea Boots guffawed. “It’s Slim! I wish we did call him Beanpole. Maybe we will from now on!”

  “He didn’t ask you, Tums,” the biker said.

  “Tums?” I said. “What’s with you people and whimsical names?”

  “Maybe I got a nervous stomach,” Tums said, chortling through a cloud of smoke.

  “You know everybody’s name. X-Ray. Slim. Tums,” Keet said. “You might as well know the young man taking a nap is Nick, because now we got no choice but to kill you.”

  “I don’t know anybody’s real name,” I pointed out.

  “If you finished playing, I came to tell you that I got your barrels,” Avila said.

  “I know you have my barrels, Biz,” Keet said, flapping his arms. Then to me: “You know we’re the only ones here with brains, right? Too bad I’m gonna have to get Slim to blast yours all over my yard.”

  “I moved those barrels to a place where, if I die, you will never find them.”

  “People always think they can hide things, but things always get found if you look hard enough.”

  (I couldn’t help but think of Willeniec’s corpse, upside down at the bottom of a dried-up well far to the north of us, and wondered if I’d end up stuffed into one of the abandoned mines on this property. Karma’s a bitch, baby.)

  “Think about all those times cops came to bust us for drugs when I was a kid. Nobody never found my stash. Not once.”

  “That’s true,” Keet allowed, “even when they brought dogs.” He spat into the dust near Goth Boy. Nick.

  Who was not moving. I wondered if he might be dead even though there was no sign of blood.

  “But how’s about we kill your friend?”

  (Pointing at me again.)

  “Now?” Slim asked.

  I was not happy. The death threats flying around were all landing on me like starlings on a wire.

  “You have a very soothing voice,” I told Slim.

  What I fervently desired was the arrival of Delilah’s task force. X-Ray and Slim could be taken into custody for assaulting Nestor (we had that on camera) and Goth Boy Nick (who was now endeavoring to sit up but seemed unable to coordinate his arms enough to provide the leverage) and Mr. Tums could be arrested as accessories for the attempted murder of Bismarck Avila, not to mention the actual murder of his bodyguard. Failing the appearance of the task force, I listened for the approach of a noisy helicopter full of law enforcement officers hovering overhead and filming everything. But the only sounds in that dry, hot air were the clicking of the cooling engine of my Mercedes and the soft groans of Nick as he gave up trying to stand and simply began crawling for the nearest shade, which was under my automobile.