Driven

by James Sallis

  Then everything got still, the way it does just before reload, and Driver was listening, listening for the sounds to start up. Slammed doors. Screams. Sirens.

  He’d brought the Ford to a stop with a one-eighty down the road quite a ways, and now he looked back at the pile-up as though well apart from it all, an observer just come upon the scene. There would be injured. And very soon there would be police. Police and cameras and questions.

  Driver closed his eyes to focus on heart rate and breathing, slow long intake. Battlefield breathing: five in, hold five, five out. As he opened his eyes, a black van was pulling in behind him. The driver stayed inside. The passenger got out, held up his hands palm outward, grew slowly larger in the rearview mirror as he approached. Grey suit, thirtyish, short-cut hair, walk and bearing suggesting military, athlete, both.

  Driver rolled down his window.

  The man kept his distance. “Mr. Beil says hello.”

  “He was having me followed?”

  “Actually, we were watching them.” He nodded toward the Chevy. “That one, and his friend you left up the road.” He looked off a moment to the west. Moments later, Driver heard the sirens. “Cell phones. Never give you much time these days. Leave now. We’ve got it.”

  “People in the other cars could be seriously injured.”

  “We’ll do this. Check them all, get those who need it to the hospital and make sure they get the best care, talk to them, eyewitness the cops. When we clean, we clean everything.” His smile was the width of a line of light showing under a snugly fit door. “It’s a package deal.” The man nodded. The nod was about the same girth as the smile. “You’ll be wanting to give Mr. Beil a call, first chance you get.”

  — • —

  “Opinions are like assholes,” Shannon used to say, “everybody has one. But convictions, that’s a different horse—convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

  That last was from Nietzsche, though Driver didn’t know it at the time. These past years, Driver had caught up on a lot of things. He didn’t think Shannon believed in any kind of truth that you could put in a box and take home with you. But he definitely knew his way around lies. The lies that are told to us from birth, the ones we’re swimming in, the ones we tell ourselves in order to go on.

  He’d left the Fairlane parked by the garage and, with no home temporary or otherwise to return to, found a motel up toward town. The clerk, who kept patting at his hair with flat fingers, made him wait in a smelly lobby chair with burn holes (Driver counted sixteen in the hour he waited) because it wasn’t check-in time. The room was everything the chair promised.

  He turned on the TV, which didn’t work, and turned it off. What the hell, he could hear the one from the adjoining room perfectly anyway. The stains in the toilet bowl and tub were a world to themselves. When he sat on it, the bed made a sound that reminded him of buckboards in old westerns.

  But he needed rest, he was going to have a shitload of work to do tomorrow to get the car back up, and this was as good a place as any to go to ground. No one would find him, no one would look for him here.

  He believed that right up until he came awake to the sound of his room door closing.

  The intruder would stand there for a time, of course. Not moving, hardly breathing, listening. That’s how it was done. Driver coughed lightly, a half cough, the way we do when sleeping, and turned on his side, made to be settling back in.

  One tentative footstep, a pause, then another. A couple of people went by just outside, stepping hard and talking, causing Driver to narrow his focus. The intruder would ride that noise, use it to cover his approach.

  Don’t think, act, as Shannon had told him over and over. Driver never really saw or heard the man—sensed him more than anything—and was off the bed at a roll, able to make out the man’s form now, the outline of it against window light, striking out with his elbow at where the man’s face should be, feeling and hearing the crunch of bone.

  Driver had his foot on the man’s throat by the time he was down, but he wasn’t going to be getting up anytime soon. Driver grabbed a towel from the bathroom and dropped it by him, then sat on the floor nearby, opening his pocket knife and holding it so that would be the first thing the man saw when he came around.

  It didn’t take long. His eyes opened, swam a bit before they cleared, went to Driver. He turned his head to spit out blood. Looked back and waited.

  “From around here?” Driver asked.

  “Dallas.”

  Imported talent, then. Interesting. He put away the knife. “What about the others?”

  “I don’t know anything about any others, man.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know there was five large waiting for me once I walked out of here.”

  “But you’re not walking out, are you.”

  “There is that.”

  “You want to see Texas again?”

  The man licked his lips, tasting blood. He put two fingers up and lightly touched his ruined nose. “That would be the most agreeable outcome, yes.”

  “Then let’s get you in a chair and talk.”

  “About?”

  “How you’re getting paid, where, who. That sort of thing.”

  Driver helped him up. Blood streamed from his face once the man was upright. He held the towel to his nose, speaking through it. “You know you can’t outrun this, right? When I’m gone, there’ll be someone else.”

  So for the moment this was what it came down to, perched with a failed killer at world’s edge in the middle of the night, thinking about convictions. Had he ever had any? And what kind of lies was he telling himself, to think he might somehow find a way through all this?

  — • —

  He’d driven back out Van Buren to Sky Harbor, had his night visitor call from the airport to tell them it was done. Stopped at a dollar store on the way to get the man a new shirt and slacks. No way TSA was letting him through with blood all over him.

  The pickup was in Glendale. Driver headed that way and parked up the street from All-Nite Diner, the only thing left alive in a three- or four-block radius, the rest given over equally to retail stores and offices. The diner itself was shared by two cops and, judging from their hats and Western finery, members of The Biscuit Band, whose van sat out front. Mail N More, halfway up the block and in easy view, opened in a little over an hour. Driver bought a carry-out coffee and went back to the car to wait. He passed the time perusing windows. Those at Mail N More read:

  Boxes for rent Money Orders Photocopies

  Will Call Service Messengering Packaging

  Notary Inside Business cards Habla Espanol

  The window at the antique store across the street read, They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To.

  He was thinking about these people who kept coming after him. They bring in hired help, it suggests what? That they’re limited, maybe a small group working on their own? Which didn’t make much sense, given the professionalism of the strikes—their own people came in first, he had to assume—not to mention Beil’s presence in this. Because they wanted to maintain distance, deniability? Or they were running out of soldiers?

  Yeah, right.

  At 7:54 a dark brown Saturn pulled up in front of Mail N More. The driver turned off his engine and sat. When the card hanging inside the door flipped to OPEN, he got out and went in, carrying an 11x13 padded envelope. Youngish guy, black, late twenties, dark suit, white shirt, no tie. He handed the envelope to the man at the desk, took out his wallet, paid him. When he came back out, Driver was sitting behind the Saturn’s wheel.

  “What, I forgot to lock it?”

  “Phoenix does rate pretty high in car theft.”

  “You want to come out from there?”

  “Why don’t you join me instead? We can talk privately.”

  Driver watched the man’s eyes check sidewalk, streets, and diner. The police car had pulled away minutes earlier. The diner was filling with people
on their way to work. Driver reached under the dash, twisted together the wires he’d pulled down before. The engine came to life.

  “Another minute, I drive away. You get in, I stay.”

  The man came around to the passenger side, opened the door and stood with his hand on it. “This is decidedly not smart,” he said.

  “I get dumber every year.”

  The man climbed in, and Driver killed the engine.

  “So dumb,” Driver said, “that I don’t care about the money you just left in there.”

  He looked at Driver, looked back out to the street. “Yeah, okay.”

  “What I do care about is knowing who it came from.”

  “Why?”

  “Knowledge makes us a better person, don’t you think?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t. Don’t think that at all. Four years polishing college chairs with my bottom, three more of law school, and I end up a gopher. There’s your knowledge.”

  “At some point you made the choice.”

  “Choices, yeah, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Free will, the common good. Still have my class notes somewhere.”

  “Choices don’t have to be forever.”

  The man turned back to him. “You just get off a guest spot with Oprah, or what?”

  They sat watching a white-haired oldster chug down the street in a golf cart at fifteen mph. He had a tiny American flag flying from an antenna at one corner, a dozen or more bumper stickers plastered all along the cart’s sides.

  “The money?” Driver said.

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Knowledge again.” Driver put both hands in plain view on the steering wheel. “Then I’m afraid you won’t be leaving this car.”

  “You think you can do that?”

  “Where I live, it happens in a minute. A minute later the do-er’s grabbing a sandwich.”

  The oldster pulled up by Mail N More. He took a plastic grocery bag out of his back pocket and snapped it open, went in. Came out with what looked to be only a few pieces of mail in the bag.

  “Probably the high point of his day.”

  “Perspective is everything,” Driver said.

  “Yeah.”

  They sat watching the golf cart make its way back along the street, cars stacking up behind.

  “I finished school, top ten percent of my class, had it made. All these firms on campus looking for talent, gladhanding me. Grabbed at the job when a top firm offered. There’s like three chiefs and two hundred Indians, every one of them in the top ten percent, every one of them scary smart. Turns out the firm hadn’t hired another Indian, they’d just bought themselves a new horse.”

  Driver was silent.

  “The corral’s on Highland, near 24th Avenue. Genneman, Brewer, and Sims. This particular errand came from Joseph Brewer’s assistant, Tim. Yellow hair. Not blond, yellow. And clothes just a little too tight. That’s what I know.” The cart turned eastward off the street four blocks up. “For the record: I made the delivery. I leave, reboot at the office, everything’s square.”

  “And no one knows about our conversation.”

  “My point.”

  “As I said, it was private.”

  Driver got out, watched the Saturn as it pulled away. He found himself thinking of the man, not much younger than he was, actually, as a kid. What was that phrase Manny used? Spilled anew into the world. A new horse, the kid had said. Ridden—he was definitely ridden.

  — • —

  Joseph Brewer’s assistant, Tim Bresh, lived in one of the enclaves near Encanto Park, a jumble of old Craftsman homes and carport suburbans from the fifties. Half the Craftsmans looked trashed, half of them gussied up and gentrified. Lots of For Sale signs out front of both. Bresh’s sat between a long-unpainted wooden house all but invisible behind a screen of oleanders, and another of slump block painted such a vivid white that it looked unreal, not of this world. Bresh’s was off-white, ivory maybe, but where mowers and ground water and time had nibbled at borders, patches of aqua showed.

  Having posed as a messenger with a sign-for package addressed to Joseph Brewer, Driver had bluffed his way into the upper digestive tract of Genneman, Brewer, and Sims, to the outer office of Brewer himself and there tagged Bresh, yellow hair and all. The package, not that it mattered, contained a book, the latest full-tilt indictment of pyramid-scheme capitalism and those who fed off it. Driver liked to imagine Brewer picking up the book repeatedly, puzzling over its source and message. Realistically, he knew the bastard had probably just tossed it in the shredder. Or had his assistant do so.

  “I’ll get it,” someone said from inside when Driver hit the bell.

  A woman opened the door. Tall, halter top, shorts, thin arms—spindly came to mind. Her hair was wet, from a shower, from swimming. She and Driver stood listening as the intro to “Sympathy for the Devil” faded.

  “Gets me every time,” the woman said.

  “That’s quite a doorbell. Is Tim—”

  But there Tim was, stepping up behind her. In his hand he had what looked to be a brandy snifter filled with what smelled to be Bailey’s. He stared a moment.

  “Don’t I know you?”

  Then he had it.

  “The package. That book, Street Smarts, with the S made of dollar signs. Cute. I’m sure Joe’s home wading into the thick of it as we speak, just his sort of thing.” He stopped, as though taking a minute to wonder what Driver’s sort of thing might be. Hard to say what was showing in his face. Wariness? Speculation?

  “What can I do for you?” he said. “You don’t seem to be making a delivery.”

  “Carry-out this time.” Driver had edged into the room.

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe your friend should leave.”

  “Or you should.”

  Driver shook his head.

  “Look.” Bresh moved farther inside, to allow him more room. “GBS has eighteen lawyers, not to mention paralegals, secretaries, and the usual office trash. That’s a lot of personalities, a lot of egos—even without the clients, who, given the firm’s fees, tend to be a demanding lot. And who do you think keeps the thing running? Me. So, same as I say day after day, just tell me what you want.”

  “One of your lawyers made a drop out in Glendale early this morning. Black, late twenties, driving a Saturn.”

  “I can’t—”

  “I know what he dropped, and why. I need to know who made the call, who sent him. Your name floated to the top.”

  “I see. And you need to know this because?”

  Driver didn’t answer right away. Finally he said, “Because I’m here and asking quietly.”

  “You followed me.”

  Driver nodded. He saw in Bresh’s eyes that he had it all, the fake delivery, the tag, all of it.

  “It wasn’t me,” Bresh said. “I called Donnie, sure, passed the message along. That’s what I do mostly. It’s a big place, GBS.”

  The woman nodded, though it was more of a bob. “Huge. It just kinda goes on and on.”

  “You work there too?”

  “Computer geek. Timmy thinks he runs the show. I’m the one who really does.”

  “You know those guys you always see in the mall and so on,” Bresh said, “old guys with bowling pin heads, a big round belly, and pipestem legs sticking out the bottom? That’s what GBS is like, only under the round belly there’s like a hundred legs, all of them going in different directions.”

  “Now’s when Timmy usually breaks into his rogue bulldozer speech. Hope you’re not in a hurry.”

  “You ever read Weber?” Bresh went on. “About bureaucracies? Firms like GBS, that’s what they came down to long ago. It’s all about not losing one’s seat on the bus, all about keeping the machine running the way it always has. Everything else—clients, employees, law itself—is secondary.”

  “Doesn’t sound much like your loyalty oath took.”

  “I’m part of the machine—”


  “I am the bulldozer!” his friend said.

  “—but that doesn’t mean I can’t see it.”

  Bresh put his drink down on the narrow table just inside the door. Its far end was taken up by a transparent blue vase of silk flowers, cattails, and feather fans on long handles. In the center sat a wicker basket heaped with milky-white crystal eggs not much larger than marbles.

  “There’s a man kept on retainer who does work for the company from time to time. Supposedly a messenger service, that’s how it’s billed, though there’s no listing for such anywhere I’ve looked.”