Drive

by James Sallis

  “Medicine was the great love of my life, the only woman I ever needed or went after….Been a while, though—like you say. Sure hope I remember the how of it.”

  Yellowing teeth broke into a grin.

  “Relax,” he said. He swiveled a cheap desk lamp closer. “Just having my fun with you.”

  The bulb in the desk lamp flickered, failed, came back when Doc thumped it.

  Taking a healthy swig himself, he handed Driver the jug of bourbon.

  “Think that record’s got a skip in it?” Doc said. “Sounds to me like it’s been going round and round for some time.”

  Driver listened. How could you tell? Same phrase over and over. Kind of.

  Doc nodded to the jug.

  “Take a few more hits off that, boy. Chances are you’ll need them. Probably both of us will, before this is over. You ready?”

  No.

  “Yes.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  As always, the set-up took most of the time. Spend five hours on the prep, then you drive it in a minute and a half flat. Driver got paid the same for that five hours as he did for the minute and a half. If it was a high-end shoot, he’d been in the day before to check out the car and test-drive it. Budget variety, he’d do that first thing the day of the shoot, while the rest of the staff scrambled about like ants, getting in line. Then he’d spend his time hanging out with writers, script people and bit players, taking advantage of the buffet table. Even on a “wee small” film (as Shannon described them) there’d be enough food to feed a midsize town. Cold cuts, various cheeses, fruit, pizza, canapés, bite-size hot dogs in barbecue sauce, doughnuts and sweet rolls and Danish, sandwiches, boiled eggs, chips, salsa, onion dip, granola, juices and bottled water, coffee, tea, milk, energy drinks, cookies, cakes.

  Today he was driving an Impala and the sequence was: double-vehicle ram, bootlegger’s turn, moonshiner’s turn, sideswipe. Ordinarily they’d break it down to segments, but the director wanted to try for a straight shoot in real time.

  Driver was on the run. Coming over a hill he’d see a blockade, two State Police cars pulled in nose to nose.

  What you do is start off from almost a full stop, car in low gear. You come in from the right, a quarter of a car-width or so—just like finding the pocket by the headpin for a strike. Gas to the floor, you’re going between fifteen and thirty mph when you hit.

  And it worked like a charm. The two State Police cars sprang apart, the Impala shot through with a satisfying fishtail and squeal of tires as Driver regained traction and floored it.

  But it wasn’t over. A third cop car lugged down the hill. Seeing what happened, he’d jumped the road up there and now came sliding and crashing down through trees, throwing up divots of soil and vegetation, bottoming out more than once, hitting the road fifty yards behind.

  Driver let off the gas, dropping to twenty-five, maybe thirty mph, then hauled the steering wheel just over a quarter-turn. At the very same moment he hit the emergency brake and engaged the clutch.

  The Impala spun.

  Ninety degrees into the spin, he released the brake, straightened the wheel and hit the gas, let the clutch out.

  Now he faced back towards the oncoming car.

  Accelerating to thirty, as he came abreast—cop’s head swiveling to follow, incredulous—he hauled the wheel to the left hard and fast. Dropped into low, hit the gas, righted the wheel.

  Now he was behind his pursuer.

  Driver resumed speed and, clocking exactly twenty mph over, struck the cop car scant inches to the right of the left tail light. The car went skidding out of control, nose gone from north to northeast when wheels came back online and took the car the way it was headed—off the road.

  To everyone’s surprise, the stunt went down without a hitch, first take. The director shouted Yes! when the two of them climbed out of their cars. Scattered applause from cameramen, onlookers, gofers, set-up men, hangers-on.

  “Righteous work out there,” Driver said.

  He’d driven with this guy once or twice before. Patrick something. Round Irish moonface, harelip poorly repaired, shock of unruly straw-colored hair. Belying the ethnic stereotype, a man of few words.

  “Yourself,” he said.

  999

  Dinner that night at a restaurant out in Culver City, place packed to bursting with ponderous Mission furniture, plaster shields and tin swords on the wall, red carpeting, a front door like something you’d see on movie castles. Everything new and made up to look old. Wooden tables and chairs distressed, ceiling beams etched with acid, concrete floor ground down by polishers, cracks laid in. Thing is, the food was great. You’d swear two or three generations of women were back in the kitchen slapping out tortillas by hand, squatting by fires to roast peppers and chicken.

  For all he knew, maybe they were. Sometimes he worried about that.

  Driver had a few drinks in the bar first. Everything there shamelessly new, stainless steel, polished wood, as though to refute what lay outside the bat-wing doors. Halfway into his first beer he found himself in a political discussion with the man sitting next to him.

  Knowing nothing of current affairs, Driver made it up as he went along. Apparently the country was about to go to war. Words such as freedom, liberation and democracy surfaced repeatedly in his companion’s patter, causing Driver to remember ads for Thanksgiving turkeys, how simple it’s become: just stick them in the oven and these little flags pop up to let you know they were done.

  Causing Driver also to remember a man from his youth.

  Every day Sammy drove his mule cart through the neighborhood crying out Goods for sale! Goods for sale! His cart was piled high with things no one had need of, things no one wanted. Chairs with three legs, threadbare clothing, lava lamps, fondue sets and fishbowls, National Geographics. Day after day, year after year, Sammy went on. Why and how, no one knew.

  “Can I cut in?”

  Driver looked to his left.

  “Double vodka, straight up,” Standard told the barkeep. He took his drink to a table near the back, beckoning Driver to follow.

  “Haven’t seen you around much lately.”

  Driver shrugged. “Working.”

  “Any chance you’d be available tomorrow?”

  “Could be.”

  “I’ve got something lined up. One of those check-cashing places. Way off the beaten path—off any path. Nothing around at all. Gets its bankroll for the week—and for the weekend—tomorrow before opening.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Let’s just say, someone I met. Someone lonely. Way it looks, we’re in and out in five, six minutes tops. Half an hour later you’re sitting over a lunch of prime rib.”

  “Okay,” Driver said.

  “You have a vehicle?”

  “I will have. The night’s still young.” On one hand, he didn’t like so short a lead. On the other, he’d had his eye on a Buick LeSabre in the next apartment complex. Didn’t look like much, but the engine sang.

  “Done, then.” They set a meet time and rendezvous point. “Buy you dinner?”

  “I’m easy.”

  Both of them had steaks smothered in a slurry of onion, peppers and tomato, sides of black beans, pimento-studded rice, flour tortillas. Beer or two with dinner, then back to the bar after. TV’d been turned on but blessedly you couldn’t hear it. Some brainless comedy where actors with perfect white teeth spoke their lines then froze in place to let the laugh track unwind.

  Driver and Standard sat quietly together, proud men who would forever keep their own counsel. No need, use or call for banter between them.

  “Rina thinks the world of you,” Standard said after ordering a final round. “And Benicio loves you. You know that, right?”

  “Both sentiments are fully returned.”

  “Any other man got that close to my woman, I’d have cut his throat long ago.”

  “She’s not your woman.”

  Drinks arrived. Standard paid, adding
an oversize tip. Connections everywhere, Driver thought. He identifies with these servers, knows the map of their world. A certain tenderness.

  “Rina’s always claimed that I expect too little from life,” Standard said.

  “Then at least you’ll never be disappointed.”

  “There is that.”

  Clicking glasses with Driver, he drank, pulling lips back against teeth at the stringent burn of it.

  “But she’s right. How can I expect more than what I see here in front of me? How can any of us?” He finished his drink. “Guess we oughta be going. Get our beauty rest. Busy day tomorrow and all that.”

  Outside, Standard glanced up at the full moon, looked across at couples hanging out by cars, at four or five kids in gangsta finery—low-slung pants, oversize tops, head wraps—on the corner.

  “Say something happened to me…” he said.

  “Say it did.”

  “Think you might see your way clear to taking care of Irina and Benicio?”

  “Yeah…Yeah, I’d do that.”

  “Good.” They’d reached their cars by then. Uncharacteristically, Standard held out a hand. “See you tomorrow, my friend. Take care.”

  They shook.

  Bouncy accordion on the Mexican station as Driver fired up his car. Back to the current apartment. Never thought of any of them as home really, however long he stayed in them. He cranked up the sound.

  Happy music.

  Before he could pull out, two firetrucks came screaming down the street, followed by an ancient sky-blue Chevy station wagon with five or six brown faces peering out from within, coop of chickens lashed to the top.

  Life.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Nothing in the Chevy to lead him anywhere. An empty container, essentially. Impersonal as a carry cup. He’d have been surprised if it were otherwise.

  If he had some way to run the registration, nine to one it was bogus. And even if it wasn’t, all it was going to tell him was the car’d been stolen.

  Okay.

  But the hand had been dealt. He was holding.

  When their hard boys didn’t come back—the fat man, the albino—those who sent them would be sending someone in after. Too many loose ends whipping about in the wind, only a matter of time before someone got whacked in the head.

  That was the advantage he had.

  Driver figured the best thing he could do was move the Chevy. Stow it where it would be hard but not too hard to find. Then hang close by and wait.

  So for two days, arm aching like a son of a bitch the whole time, figurative knives slitting shoulder to wrist again and again, ghost axe poised and descending whenever he moved, Driver sat across from the mall where he’d parked the Chevy. He forced himself to use the bad arm, even for the chi-chi coffee he bought, $3.68 a cup, at an open stall just inside the mall’s east entrance. This was in Scottsdale, back towards Phoenix proper, a high-end suburb where each community had its own system of walls, where malls teeter-tottered on a Neiman-Marcus, Williams-Sonoma axis. Sort of place a vintage car like the Chevy wouldn’t seem too far out of place, actually, there among the Mercedes and Beemers. Driver had parked it on the lot’s outer edge in the sketchy shade of a couple of palo verdes to make it easier to spot.

  Not that it much mattered at this point, but he kept running the script in his head.

  Cook had set them all up, of course. Little doubt about that. Driver’d seen Strong go down—for good, to every appearance. Maybe Strong had been part of the set-up, maybe like the rest of them only a board piece, a shill, a beard. Blanche he wasn’t sure about. She could have been in from the first, but it didn’t feel that way. Could be she was only looking out for herself, keeping her options open, trying to find some way out of the corner she and Driver had been shoehorned into. Far as Driver knew, Cook was still a player. No way Cook had the weight or stones for those hard boys come to collect, though. So he had to be fronting.

  Making the question: Who was likely to show?

  Any minute a car could pull up with goombahs inside.

  Or maybe, just maybe, the bosses would quietly suggest, the way it sometimes worked, that Cook clean up after himself.

  Nine-forty a.m. on the third day, every breeze in the state gone severely south and blacktop already blistering, arm hanging from his shoulder like a hot anvil, Driver thought: Okay then, Plan B, as he watched Cook in a Crown Vic circle twice on the outer ring and pull into the lot just past the Chevy. Watched him get out, look around, amble toward the parked car with key in hand.

  Cook opened the driver-side door, slid in. Soon he emerged, went around back and popped the trunk. Half his body disappeared beneath the lid.

  “Shotgun’s not much good anymore,” Driver said.

  Cook’s head banged against the trunk as he tried to straighten and turn at the same time.

  “Sorry about that. Blanche isn’t much good either. But I thought a few props might put you in a nostalgic mood, help you remember what went down. Show and tell.”

  Cook’s hand rose towards the hoop in his right ear. Driver intercepted it halfway and struck with one knuckle just above the wrist, at a nerve center that shut down sensation and scrambled incoming messages. He’d picked that up on breaks from a stunt man he’d worked with on a Jackie Chan movie. Then, just like a dance step, right foot forward, slide the left, pivot on the heels, he had Cook in a choke hold. Same stuntman taught him that.

  “Hey, relax. Guy I learned this from told me the hold’s absolutely safe on a short-term basis,” he said. “After four minutes, the brain starts shutting down, but up till then—”

  Loosening his hold, he let Cook drop to the ground. Man’s tongue was extended and he didn’t seem to be breathing. M.E. would call the skin tone blue, but it was really gray. Tiny stars of burst blood vessels about the face.

  “Always a chance I didn’t get it quite right, of course. Been a while, after all.”

  Shafts of pain shot along Driver’s arm as he fished out Cook’s wallet. Nothing much of use or note there.

  Check the chariot, then.

  In the Crown Vic he found a clutch of gas-station receipts jammed into the glove compartment, all of them from the downtown area, Seventh Street, McDowell, Central. Four or five pages of scrawled directions, mostly unreadable, to various spots in and around Phoenix. Half a torn ticket from something called Paco Paco, a matchbook from “a gentleman’s cabaret,” Philthy Phil’s. An Arizona roadmap. And a sheaf of coupons bound together with crossed rubber bands.

  _________________________________

  NINO’S PIZZA

  (RESTAURANT IN BACK)

  719 E. Lynwood

  (480) 258-1433

  WE DELIVER

  _________________________________

  Chapter Seventeen

  He always had his first few drinks of the day away from the house. There were two choices, Rosie’s up on Main, a long haul without a car, or The Rusty Nail at the corner. He had a car but the driver’s license had gone south years ago and he didn’t like to take unwarranted chances. Rosie’s was a workingman’s bar, open at six a.m. You asked for bourbon or whisky here, the barkeep didn’t have to come back with what flavor, there was only one bottle of each. Man didn’t have to put up with troublesome things like windows, either, since the place was a cave. The Rusty Nail, basically a titty bar, opened at nine. From then till three or so, when the girls started straggling in and the clientele changed (he’d got caught unaware more than once), it was inhabited by mechanics from a truck garage down the street and butchers from the meat-packing house directly across, many of them wearing their blood-spotted aprons. So mostly, those days his legs weren’t too wobbly or his shakes too bad anyway, Rosie’s won out.

  All the early morning drinkers were regulars, but no one spoke. Most days the door was propped open with a chair, and whenever someone came through it, heads would swivel that way and occasionally one or another nodded a silent greeting before returning to his drink. Benny would
have a double waiting by the time he reached the bar. Missed you yesterday, he might say. Benny’d serve up the first couple of drinks in a highball glass—till his hands steadied. This morning he was later than usual. Bad night? Benny asked. Couldn’t sleep. My old man always blamed that on a bad conscience, Benny said. Well there you go, he figures it’s a bad conscience, I’m thinking it’s got a lot more to do with a bad chicken-fried steak.

  Someone tapped his shoulder.

  “Doc? You’re Doc, aren’t you?”

  Ignore him.

  “Of course you are. Buy you a drink?”

  Maybe not ignore him.

  Benny brings the guy another Bud and pours another double for Doc.

  “Thing is, I know you, man. I’m from Tucson. You used to take care of the vatos from the racetrack. Few years back, you patched up my brother after a bank job. Noel Guzman? Wiry and tall? Bleached hair?”

  No way he remembered. He’d treated dozens of them in his day. Back in the day, as they said now—and found himself wondering again where that came from. Back in the day. Up in here. You’d never heard these phrases before, then suddenly everyone was using them.

  “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Neither does my brother, now that he’s dead.”

  Doc threw back his scotch. “I’m sorry.”

  “He wasn’t much, mind you—just family.”

  Benny was there with the bottle. Be hard for the young man to do other than approve a pour. He watched with something akin to horror as the six-dollar charge came up on the register, then with a shake of his head accepted it. Benny tucked the tab under an ashtray on the bar by them.

  “Went down trying to knock off some gook mom-and-pop store. Little guy was over the counter before he knew it, the police said, had him on the floor half a second later, blood supply to his brain shut off. Not the end he imagined for himself.”

  “When’s it ever?”

  “Not that anyone else was surprised.” He drained his beer and obviously wanted another. Hesitant because that might imply another six-dollar scotch as well.