The Driver

by Hart Hanson

  “I’m pretty sure you could come up with a reasonable scenario in which saving you saved his own ass.”

  Were Delilah and Connie both, in their own ways, extremely smart, or were they both, in their own ways, extremely cynical?

  “There wasn’t time for Avila to weigh pros and cons before he did what he did. He just did it.”

  Connie considered the situation. I was smart enough to let her do that. At the next red light, Connie said, “What can I do that his lawyers can’t do?”

  A question! Connie’s door was ajar . . .

  At the next red light, I said, “What if a judge were to find out that the police had a hard-on for Avila? What if my lawyer were to say it was obvious that there was a witch hunt and this task force was overstepping its legal bounds in order to railroad Bismarck Avila for Willeniec’s probable murder?”

  “That accusation being based on . . . ?”

  “Delilah straight-up told us that they don’t intend to pursue the suborning-to-murder charges all the way to trial. They only want leverage.”

  “You mean out in the corridor?”

  “Yes.”

  “That entire conversation was off the record. Between friends.”

  A statement. I was losing her!

  “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the truth.”

  “Delilah would hate me if I took advantage that way. Not to mention it would impact her career.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not okay, pendejo. Delilah’s my best friend.”

  “Delilah wants to get promoted to Robbery-Homicide.”

  “Are you saying she’s blinded by ambition?”

  “Not blinded. Dazzled.”

  “You think I don’t want Delilah to succeed? You don’t think I’m ambitious too?”

  “That task force is using Avila as a shortcut. He’s an expendable innocent bystander as long as they get what they want.”

  “Innocent?”

  “In this group, Avila’s the most innocent.”

  “Wouldn’t that be you?” Connie asked. “Aren’t you the most innocent?”

  I decided to let her percolate some more. Which she did. You could smell the coffee.

  “Here’s what bothers me,” Connie said, finally.

  “Bothers you more than a guy getting a sharpened toothbrush shoved between the vertebrae in the small of his back?”

  “The portion of the surveillance audio in which Bismarck Avila asked you to kill Keet was recorded in your limo.”

  “The task force had a warrant.”

  “The limo is your private property. You were not the target of the surveillance. We know that because they weren’t allowed to record anything said in your limo unless they had visual confirmation that Bismarck Avila was in the limo.”

  “Which he was.”

  “Avila had no expectation of privacy in a hired limo. But you did. There’s a possible argument that they can’t use the recording to charge Avila with suborning murder because it violates your civil rights.”

  “I certainly feel violated.”

  “Are you willing to state, under oath, in the presence of a judge, that you never gave anyone on that task force even the tiniest indication that it would be all right with you for them to bug your limo?”

  (Like offering to work as an informant for Delilah? Or begging her to follow me? That kind of indication?)

  “Yes.”

  “Skellig, I need you to tell me something and I need it to be the absolute truth, ¡que Dios me ayude!”

  “I love you. I want to marry you and have six children.”

  “I don’t mean some random truth. Do you believe, in your corazón, in your heart of hearts, that Bismarck Avila wanted you to kill Asher Keet?”

  “Avila was drunk and joking. He didn’t mean it. He doesn’t deserve to get blinded or crippled in jail so a bullshit task force can get medals and promotions for solving the disappearance of a crooked cop.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  What it turned out that Connie could do was perform miracles.

  First, Connie had Bismarck Avila segregated in protective custody. Then she had the surveillance recording made in Two disallowed and the charges of suborning murder dropped. Then she got Avila released. As a last-ditch effort, an angry assistant DA hauled me in front of a judge, hoping I’d support Delilah’s contention that I’d agreed to have my limousine bugged when I offered to work as a confidential informant for her.

  Delilah looked at me and shook her head in disappointment when I perjured myself and stated that although she had approached me, I had not in any way agreed to help her.

  Footage of Bismarck Avila being released and escorted home by Cody Fiso and his green-polo-shirt brigade in a presidential-size motorcade was not only all over TV but went viral.

  Commentators and pundits went berserk over the images of Avila’s fans and followers gathering outside the (wrong) courthouse and rejoicing that he’d regained some of the thug-life street cred he’d lost over the years.

  Internet sales of B!$m@R©k! gear spiked within hours.

  At the Van Nuys county courthouse, Connie and Delilah engaged in a very quiet, very intense argument down the corridor from where I stood, and the two times I approached in order to play peacemaker I got blasted first by Delilah, then by Connie. Due to the fact that I had encouraged Connie to damage her friendship with Delilah by repeating Delilah’s off-the-record admission that the task force was harassing Bismarck Avila for leverage, Connie refused to drive me home. Lucky had to come and fetch me in the haunted Caddie.

  I zipped my lips at Lucky, then had him take us both to the Tacos Reyes food truck on Sherman Way (highly recommended even if you aren’t paranoid about being bugged). For all I knew, Delilah had gotten a new warrant to cover all our limos. When I conveyed those concerns, while standing in line for tacos, Lucky swore in Arabic and promised that he and Tinkertoy would sweep not only the limos but Oasis Limo Services in total the next day.

  Lucky also told me that he’d looked into the ownership of the seedy apartment buildings and dive hotels we’d checked out on our Depressing Real Estate Tour, but the trail, in every case, had quickly gone cold. There were holding companies and numbered companies, nested LLCs, offshore syndicates, partnerships, but no names. Hacking further into bank accounts, etcetera, was beyond Lucky’s Internet capabilities.

  He did discover two interesting facts: One was that all the properties had been purchased within the last three years. The second was that one of the addresses, the Skid Row hooker hotel we’d staked out with tacos, was described as “luxury lofts” in a printout of company assets.

  “That description is inaccurate,” Lucky said.

  Lucky wondered if we should present Delilah with these facts.

  “Perhaps law enforcement can find the truth.”

  “Since I totally betrayed her confidence and perjured myself,” I said, “I’m pretty sure the next communication I can expect from Delilah is her reading me my Miranda rights.”

  I told Lucky about Keet and Avila and the confrontation at Harbor Ranch. I told him about Slim, Mr. Tums and his nasty little assassin’s pistol, and the two damaged boys who did Keet’s every bidding no matter what, including cracking one of their own over the head with a baseball bat.

  Lucky figured it would be prudent for me to leave town for a few days.

  “Keet is angry at you,” Lucky said, “for what you Rendered Unto His Pride. Also the fact that you are Willing and Able to identify Mr. Tums, and the terrible boys, and the fat man, Slim, as Murderers, Thugs, and Assassins Wanted by the Law.”

  “What about you and Tinkertoy and Ripple?”

  “Ripple is in the hospital. I am like the Wind and can disappear, a Phantom.”

  “You wanna please back down on the desert mysticism at lea
st while you’re scarfing down a taco in Encino? What about Tinkertoy?”

  “You must take her with you.”

  I tried to imagine Tinkertoy on a ranch in Big Sur. Hell, there was plenty of stuff that needed tinkering.

  I told Lucky I’d think about it, but I never really had the chance because at seven o’clock the next morning I awoke to the sound of Tinkertoy screaming. I leaped out of bed and threw myself down the ladder and into the garage wearing only my underwear and an antique seven-iron I keep under my bed just for such eventualities.

  Oasis Limo Services was chockablock full of cops all shouting at me to drop my golf club and me shouting at them to let go of Tinkertoy and it was a good old-fashioned Mexican standoff until Delilah stepped forward and told them to put down their weapons and told me to put down my sports equipment, which is when Tinkertoy took the opportunity to make a bolt for her safe place beneath the worktables and through to her hidey-hole.

  Delilah and I yelled at each other some more as she took the seven-iron away from me, slapped me with a warrant, and told her people to get back to work searching Oasis.

  I glanced at the warrant: barrels.

  “What is it with you people and barrels?”

  “Thanks to you, we have to start from the beginning. Barrels are what Willeniec was looking for just before he disappeared.”

  It took all my willpower not to glance over at the stain on the floor where I’d killed Willeniec.

  As Delilah’s team spread out to look for barrels, I persuaded Delilah to let me crawl in after Tinkertoy, accompanied only by Delilah, to check for barrels and to tempt Tinkertoy back out into the world—which I did by convincing Tinkertoy to come out and work on Three (her haunted nemesis).

  “What’s. Wrong. This time?” Tinkertoy asked.

  “The headlights flick from high beam to low and back again for no reason.”

  Tinkertoy nodded and threw herself into uncovering the mysterious source of the headlight beam problem. (Which I had not made up. It existed. That machete murder car is haunted.)

  Hard at work on Three, Tinkertoy was oblivious to the warrant execution team swirling around her.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t fucking deserve this,” Delilah said.

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t see another way to keep Avila from getting crippled in jail.”

  “Fear of getting crippled would’ve scared Avila into turning on Keet. That’s a pretty good choice.”

  “Avila doesn’t scare. Like you said, at heart he’s a tough street rat.”

  “Just so you know, I never fucking fucked fucking Cody,” Delilah said. “He’s tried more than once and the bug was his way of trying again. But I’m pretty fussy about the guys I fuck. At least since I stopped drinking.”

  Two members of the warrant team headed into the dispatch office. I hoped that Ripple had been smart enough to restrict his dope supply to legal, medical marijuana.

  “Are you positive Willeniec isn’t drinking rum and cokes on some black-sand beach?” I asked Delilah.

  “We found his fake passport. We found his stash of cash. We found his cache of weapons. We followed all his wire transfers. We found a chunk of land he bought in Uruguay under his ex’s name. The FBI sent someone from the embassy in Montevideo to check it out. If Willeniec escaped to a better life, then he did it without money or a passport or laying any groundwork.”

  “You ever think Uruguay and the transfers and passport and cash were diversions?”

  “Oh, please! He’s not fucking Jason Bourne. Willeniec’s dead. Someone killed him before he could make a run for it. And you are helping that person. Judas.”

  Unfair as that accusation was, it was also totally true.

  “Avila is our link between Keet and Willeniec. It’s obvious that Willeniec and Keet were competitors when it came to getting those barrels from Avila. We just need to prove it.”

  “By searching my place?”

  “Guess what. The task force believes me and not you,” she said.

  “You mean that I offered to work for you, then reneged?”

  “That’s right. It looks pretty guilty, Skellig.”

  I thought about what Connie had said about task forces and dark forces and ruined lives. Delilah poked me in the chest with her forefinger. “You’re hiding something from me. Maybe you think it’s for my own fucking good, but you know what? You don’t get to decide that. It’s my job to find the truth. I hate my job right now, but I’m still going to do it to the best of my fucking ability.”

  Which is when a member of the warrant execution team wearing yellow glasses and waving around an ultraviolet flashlight called over to Delilah that she’d found evidence of cleaned-up blood.

  Exactly where I’d killed Willeniec.

  “Are you allowed to find blood?” I asked. “The warrant says barrels.”

  “Call your lawyer,” Delilah advised.

  “That’s my blood,” I said. “After I got home from the hospital, I opened my stitches conking my head on the wheel well.”

  I showed her the stitches in my head. “You’ll find more of my blood on the right front fender of the Caddie.”

  “These stitches are made with thread.”

  “So?”

  “Cotton thread. Not surgical nylon. These stitches were not done in a hospital.”

  “Lucky did it.”

  “Lucky stitched your head wound, here, using normal, red cotton thread? What’d you do for anesthetic? Take a shot of whiskey and bite on a bullet?”

  “Lucky has medic training.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  (It had—and she was back to asking her dangerous questions.)

  “You know I’m extremely manly and tough.”

  “This head injury occurred the same night Willeniec disappeared. Wasn’t that the same night Ripple got hurt during an anonymous S and M sex encounter?”

  Which is when a member of the forensics team tried to move Tinkertoy away from the Caddie to examine the wheel well.

  I’d warned Delilah not to let anyone touch Tinkertoy, especially males, but it was too late because a cop took her arm when she didn’t respond to verbal commands, so she started screaming. I stepped in and the cop pushed me back and I reacted instinctively and dislocated his shoulder. Which meant another cop stepped in so I broke his nose. It went on from there in an increasingly unproductive manner, ending with me taking on all comers and a bunch of angry cops aiming weapons at me, and Delilah shouting at me to surrender.

  It was Lucky, coming in to work, lunch bucket in one hand and Starbucks in the other, who convinced me to lie down and let them cuff me, even though, as he said, the police were likely to be Retributive considering I’d done some damage to their Extremities and Pride.

  Which they were. Retributive, I mean. Cops kneeling on your head is tough on the dignity, the skull, and the ears.

  I ended up in police custody (impeding police officers in the pursuance of their duties) and Tinkertoy ended up being taken away on a 5150 for psychiatric evaluation.

  A fair amount of time passed in a mostly tedious manner.

  Affronted law enforcement professionals at every level did a clever job of losing paperwork, squirreling me away in the system so that Connie didn’t find me for twenty-four hours, most of which time I spent paranoid that Keet would discover where I was before Connie did, so I was a little low on sleep by the time Lucky bailed me out.

  Also chilly, because I was still dressed only in my underwear.

  Lucky drove me straight to Connie’s place on the canals, where, in very strict lawyer mode, she informed me that in executing the warrant on Oasis Limo Services, the police had found a number of questionable items in my domicile.

  “Everything in the penthouse came with the penthouse,” I said. “It’s all itemized on the bill of sale.”


  “Quit calling it a penthouse,” Connie advised. “It makes you sound como un loco. It’s a mobile home craned up onto the roof of a garage.”

  “It is nicer than people think,” Lucky offered.

  “You’re being charged with obstructing justice, assault on two peace officers, specifically Penal Code 243(b) and (c).”

  “I bought the penthouse as is. I shouldn’t be held accountable—”

  “Pay attention. You have bigger problems. Under California law, battery on a peace officer is typically a misdemeanor in which, if found guilty, you can get up to a year in county jail and a fine of two thousand dollars. Unfortunately, if the assault results in injury requiring medical treatment”—here she read from a list—“dislocated shoulders, broken noses, cracked ribs, broken fingers, a crushed instep, and a ruptured eardrum, then the district attorney may decide to lay a felony charge, which can result in three years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine.”

  “Is this in total?” Lucky asked. “Or cumulative with each charge?”

  “Like you said,” I said. “That task force is coming after me.”

  “Well, you made it muy fácil for them, ¿no lo hizo?”

  “Skellig Acted Out of Concern for our Tinkertoy,” Lucky said.

  “Your Tinkertoy is being held on a 5150 for a minimum of seventy-two hours,” Connie said, “for a thorough psychiatric evaluation.”

  “After which they’ll let her out?” Lucky asked.

  “Only if the attending psychiatrist finds that she’s not a danger to herself or others. Then there’s the matter of the blood they found in the garage.”

  “It’s my blood. I bumped my head on the wheel well.”

  “Yeah, they found it’s your blood,” Connie said. “But there are minute traces of someone else’s blood mixed with it. Explain that.”

  “Can’t they test it?”

  “DNA,” Lucky suggested.

  “There’s not a big enough sample to run a DNA test.”

  (Thank God.)

  “That sucks!” I said.

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation,” Lucky said.

  “Maybe Tinkertoy cut herself?” I said.

  “I’ve seen her punch the Cadillac,” Lucky said.