The Driver

by Hart Hanson

Lucky and I ran through it in less than fifteen minutes, much faster than deciphering Avila’s map to find the first two barrels.

  Three barrels of cash minus two in police hands equals one missing barrel of cash.

  A constant (Avila) is a function of the variable (the missing barrel). Avila is currently an associative property unaffected by the variable because he doesn’t know it exists.

  Avila’s muscle-bound young cousin, Rocky, had stolen the barrels.

  Constant: Rocky had stolen three barrels.

  Constant: Rocky gave Avila two of those barrels.

  Constant: Rocky was murdered.

  Constant: Not by Keet.

  Variable: What if Rocky hadn’t stolen the barrels for Avila?

  Variable: What if Rocky’s murder hadn’t been connected to the barrels?

  “Oh,” Lucky said.

  We took the Mercedes because it has a spacious, lockable trunk. We placed two large, empty canvas duffel bags in that trunk as well as two shovels. We decided not to take weapons, partly because I was on probation and forbidden. I drove because I was extremely familiar with the route.

  “What if Avila calls the police?”

  “It’s not stealing.”

  “How is this not stealing?”

  “The money’s not his.”

  “That is a Matter of Perception. Theft exists when you take something that does not belong to you. Thus it remains theft even if the person you stole it from is not the rightful owner.”

  “There is no rightful owner! It’s like international law. Like salvage. Why do you have to be so negative?”

  “We are discussing stealing well over a million dollars.”

  “We have no idea how much of that money is left. And it’s not stealing!”

  Then I told Lucky that I was thinking of selling Oasis Limo to Avila and that this money would provide for both him and Tinkertoy if it didn’t work out. Plus, my share would give me the time I needed to find my place in the world.

  “And be the type of man Connie will wed?”

  It was an easy matter to get access to Avila’s Calabasas mansion, especially now that Cody Fiso and his guards were no longer on the job because Avila no longer needed protection because Keet was dead and Avila’s woes were all legal and so unlikely to get him killed, just financially bled to death.

  “Since this place was searched both by the villain Willeniec and by a legitimate warrant-execution team, we must search where they didn’t search,” Lucky said as we pulled up in front of the mansion.

  “Remembering,” I said, “that they were looking for barrels.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which they didn’t find.”

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning the cash was removed from the barrels and hidden somewhere else,” I said.

  “This place is huge.”

  “Avila’s place is huge,” I said. “Nina’s place is not huge at all.”

  I pointed at her desert island.

  We were in the miniature pirate ship heading across to Treasure Island when Avila exited his mansion and shouted at us. We waved in a friendly manner, pretending we couldn’t hear him, which was ridiculous since he was only twenty-five yards away. Getting the point, Avila stopped yelling and watched us from the water’s edge. After a moment, he was joined by my old pal Chris, aka Gargantua, aka Tweedledum, the giant who conked me on the head and tried to make it look like the correct response when X-Ray and Nick appeared in that bar waving guns so many months ago.

  “Set the brake; it’ll buy us some time,” I told Lucky.

  Lucky applied the brake. We watched for a couple of moments while Avila and Chris tried to recall the boat and then gave up.

  The money wasn’t on the island. My first thought was that we’d find it buried beneath the refrigerator / treasure chest, but I was wrong. By the time we’d dug her fridge up, Nina was on the shore with Avila, first yelling at us to stop whatever it was we were doing and then insisting that Avila and Chris swim across and kick our asses.

  “But not, you’ll notice,” I said, “threatening to call the police.”

  Chris announced that he couldn’t swim. Avila stripped to his underwear, dove in, and swam toward us.

  “Hey, Nina?” I shouted.

  “What?”

  “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “The money.”

  “What money?” Avila asked, emerging from the pond and walking toward us along the beach.

  “Ask Nina.”

  I leaned on my shovel while Avila blew water out of his nose.

  “You are a beautiful swimmer,” Lucky told him.

  “I didn’t ask Nina,” Avila said. “I asked you.”

  “Turns out Rocky stole three barrels from Keet.”

  “He told me two.”

  I put on my weapons-sergeant poker face. I wanted to know how much Avila knew, or how much he’d guessed, without me providing him any hints. Avila wiped water off his body, using the web between his thumb and forefingers like a squeegee.

  “What’s he saying?” Nina shouted. “It’s a lie.”

  “You’re not the first guy who picked the wrong woman,” I said.

  Avila’s mahogany skin rose in goose bumps as he realized the same inevitable sequence of events that Lucky and I had worked out. A puff of wind blew east to west, a miniature squall raising ripples on Avila’s miniature lake.

  “You fucked up in a major manner,” I said.

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you think?”

  Avila nodded at me and jumped back into the lake. This time he didn’t swim on the water’s surface; he swam along the bottom, invisible, and he stayed there so long Nina started shouting at the surface of the water when it started bubbling.

  “What is it I Do Not Comprehend?” Lucky asked. “Why is he drowning himself?”

  “He’s not drowning. He’s screaming.”

  Avila was upset because the rumors Delilah had heard around the Gangs Unit were true. Avila had his young muscle-head cousin Rakim or some shit killed because the kid slept with Nina and (I’d be willing to bet) because when Avila found out, Nina told Avila that the kid had forced himself on her, knowing that would be a mind-fogging trigger for Avila after what happened to his mother.

  Avila rose from the water and said something to Nina and headed toward the house, calling poor, confused, lumbering Chris to come with him.

  Whatever it was Avila said to Nina was bad enough that she crumpled to the ground. Avila shut the door on Nina in that way you know is final.

  “You know,” I told Lucky, “Nina once told me that it was Rocky who built most of this boat for her. Kid was good with his hands.”

  Nina’s boat.

  It was Nina who more or less told us where she’d hidden the money, the same way that so many Afghan and Iraqi civilians told us where to find stashes of weapons or explosives.

  The closer we got to the money, the more Nina tried to distract us, like a child’s game of getting-warmer.

  Lucky, who’d helped my team search hundreds of huts and houses and apartments, clued in immediately. It was Lucky who found the money shoved into the barrel of the fake cannon. And it was me who found the rest in the fake gunpowder barrel.

  Bundles of cash stuffed in garbage bags.

  “What do we do now?” Lucky asked.

  “We take it,” I said.

  “What about her?”

  “Leave her cab fare,” I said.

  “You don’t want to offer her a ride?”

  “No,” I said. “She’s had her ride.”

  A PIECE OF PARADISE

  To answer your first question: yes, this story is over.

  To answer your second question: just over a million dollars.
<
br />   To answer your third question: I split Keet’s blood money equally with Tinkertoy and Lucky and then spent a chunk of my portion to buy a particular piece of parched and barren property just outside the town of Maricopa.

  I explained this inexplicable action by telling the heartwarming story of a dying old farmer named Danny Marler I’d once driven to an Oilers game, his requested detour from the retirement home to his family orchard, Danny Marler’s love of his land and his vision of its future. I said that I had decided to have faith in Mr. Marler’s conviction that one day this drought would break and his land would sprout tangerines and almonds again no matter how far down his uncaring corporate neighbors dug their aqua-sucking wells.

  Lucky is the only person who suspects the truth. And that’s only because he helped me tilt twenty cubic yards of clean mixed fill into an abandoned dry well on the property.

  Better safe than sorry, I told Lucky. Wouldn’t want anyone falling down that hole now that I owned it. Who knows? Maybe old Danny Marler was right and it will bloom again someday.

  At first Tinkertoy was determined to donate her entire share of the barrel money to the Parrot Sanctuary, but Lucky and I were able to persuade her that a sudden bequest of over a quarter of a million dollars from a former Army transport sergeant turned limo mechanic (with psych issues) to a bunch of colorful birds tucked away in the shadow of a minor league baseball stadium could raise eyebrows we didn’t want raised. Tinkertoy agreed to parcel out smaller gifts anonymously over time.

  She paid less than a thousand bucks for an old beater Toyota Corolla and rebuilt it (modifying a bunch of old Tahoe parts she got somewhere). She and Lucky painted it to resemble a parrot, and every single day she drove her loony-tunes car to visit the Parrot Sanctuary. The psych wizards at the Veterans Administration perceived her sudden engagement with the wider world around her as a giant stride forward in her personal progress.

  Avila agreed to buy Oasis Limo Services, and Mom got me an interview with a big veterans charity that was trying to recover from a scandal where they paid more to themselves than they gave to the veterans who needed it.

  Tinkertoy started hawking at me (in her gentle, insistent way) to go with her to the Parrot Sanctuary. I told her that I had to study up for my second interview, the one in which I presented a plan to remake the veterans charity and then take it to the national stage, but Tinkertoy kept staring at me with her dark, disappointed eyes before either turning back to her work or driving off in the parrot-mobile to keep her date with her loud and talkative birds.

  “Go with her,” Lucky suggested.

  “I don’t have time.”

  “Seat. Belt,” Tinkertoy said when I plopped myself into the passenger seat of her car. She drove like a confident hundred-year-old nun along Santa Monica Boulevard to Twenty-Sixth, up Twenty-Sixth to Wilshire, east on Wilshire toward the Veterans Administration. She parked in the shade of a keen-smelling green eucalyptus grove and led me to a folding chair at the same small round café table she’d been sitting at before Connie got her released from her 5150 psychiatric commitment.

  She disappeared around some packing cases, then returned with a battered thermos and a tin cup and poured me a cup of astringent, burned coffee.

  She was wearing Ripple’s I LOVE JESUS BUT I STILL CUSS fanny pack.

  “Exactly how much of Ripple’s stuff did we steal?” I asked.

  “He would’ve. Wanted. Me. To—”

  “I think he would too,” I said, “and Jesus will appreciate you filling his fanny pack with sunflower seeds and parrot pellets instead of marijuana.”

  But Tinkertoy was already moving away from me again, and if she answered, her response was masked by the parrots shrieking and clacking their bills on their stands and the wire screens.

  Gradually, through the bird commotion, I heard another sound.

  Someone in distress. I circled around the parrot cages toward the source.

  “Take me back! Fuckin’ take me back!”

  These words were spoken by a young man, maybe twenty years old, long dirty brown hair. He wore shiny gray basketball shorts clownishly high on his waist, a black T-shirt sporting the slogan OBEY GRAVITY! On his feet were those ugly, soft rubber orange cartoon shoes that look like they were made for little children or mental patients—which is what I took him for because of the next thing he announced: “I want to go back.”

  There was no one there but me.

  “I want to go back,” he said again to nobody, close to tears.

  (Who doesn’t want to go back?)

  He held a hand out in front of him, feeling the air.

  He was blind, I realized. Which meant that I could simply sneak away without engaging. Which is what I was doing until I caught a glimpse of a tattoo on his calf above the rubber sandals.

  A nautical star (Navy) and each point of the star was marked north (Lost).

  I looked around for a volunteer or Tinkertoy, but there was only me. I heard the crack of a bat from over toward the baseball stadium and his head snapped over that way and a look crossed his face of complete desolation, the despair of a lost child. The parrots started shrieking again and the kid slumped down to the ground, cross-legged, and rocked forward, holding his head in his hands.

  Feeling I was intruding, I turned to leave, only to find Tinkertoy standing behind me, hands on her hips, a huge blue-and-gold parrot on her shoulder, woman and parrot both staring me down.

  “He. Needs. A job,” Tinkertoy said. “And we. Need. A dispatcher.”

  To my surprise, my chest bloomed with tight anger. I felt my face change. “Is that why you brought me? To replace Ripple? Because Ripple is not replaceable.”

  Of course I didn’t mean as a dispatcher. I meant that Ripple had thrown himself off a roof to save my life, to prove himself a hero, probably expecting me to save his life in return. Only I didn’t, did I? Ripple’s confidence in me had been misplaced. And now this kid—blind and obviously drowning in either sadness or depression or self-pity.

  “I’m selling the place to Avila. You can bring Avila here, ask him to hire the kid.”

  “He’s. Learning braille,” Tinkertoy said. “His name is Rollo.”

  “Well, Rollo is Navy.”

  We’re Army. Me and Tinkertoy and Lucky. Navy’s a whole other culture. It would never work.

  “And look at his stupid shoes.”

  The parrot on her shoulder stared at me, then tucked its head beneath Tinkertoy’s ear. Stupid bird.

  “Lemme think about it,” I told Tinkertoy.

  Make a decision, my Dad taught me.

  Don’t shrug, my mother taught me.

  I remembered the way Ripple had drawn me.

  Avila would have to go find himself some other limo company.

  I crossed thirty feet of the surface of the earth and helped Rollo to his feet.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, F. W. Watt, poet and professor, University College, University of Toronto, for being the first person to read my writing and still let me into your writing seminar. It changed my life.

  Thank you to George McWhirter, writer, poet, translator, mastermind, and mad oracle, for your support, advice, and sheer Irishness.

  Thank you to big shot novelists Scott Turow, Harlan Coben, Chris Ewan, Leif G. W. Persson, Richard Greener, and Kathy Reichs. Adapting your work for TV taught me buckets. Buckets of buckets.

  Thank you to TV agent Matt Solo of WME (Los Angeles) for changing my life by bringing me to Los Angeles and then encouraging me to write a book even though you get paid only when I write TV scripts.

  Thank you, New York hotshot literary agents Claudia Ballard and Eve Attermann at WME for being my hotshot New York book agents because actually having hotshot New York book agents has been a dream of mine since I found out about New York and literary agents.

  Thank yo
u to my editors at Dutton, Ben Sevier and Jessica Renheim, not only for publishing my book but for patiently shepherding me through this bizarre and magical process.

  Thank you to Jeanne Newman, slayer of dragons and anxiety, bringer of calm, confidante, lawyer, and friend.

  Thank you to my pal and cohort, Stephen Nathan, who was the first person to read The Driver and assure me that—with a few improvements—it was good enough to show other human beings.

  Thank you to fancy novelist Steven Galloway for a much-needed and valuable early read and response.

  Thank you to my sons, Hartwick and Joe, for being constantly amused by most of my endeavors and telling me many things I need to know.

  Thanks to my dad, Paul, for making books a forbidden fruit by yelling at me to put down the damn book and go outside and do something on sunny days.

  Thanks to my late mom, Brenda, for challenging me to typing competitions and for improving my spelling by cheating at Scrabble.

  Thanks to my late stepdad, Art Macgregor, who, knowing that he would not live long enough to see this book published, asked to see it in manuscript—a much-appreciated compliment from a man whose time was too finite and so precious.

  Huge thanks to novelist Jack Hodgins, friend of decades, a literary artist of the first rank who spent decades mentoring me.

  And finally, thank you to the limo drivers of Los Angeles. Especially those who are military veterans. And most especially those who talked clearly and loudly on their cell phones while I feigned listening to music.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hart Hanson wrote for Canadian television before moving to Los Angeles, where he worked on various TV programs before creating the series Bones, the longest-running, scripted, hour-long series on the FOX network.

  Married with two sons, Hart lives with his wife, Brigitte, in Venice, California.

  The Driver is his first novel unless you count the one he wrote in his midtwenties, which is rightfully buried away in his father’s storage locker.

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