The Driver

by Mark Dawson

  That settled it.

  The three guys at his door were made guys, that much was for sure. So what to do? If he let them in then the chances were they’d come up, subdue him, and Salvatore would be called in to put the final bullet in his head. Or if he went down to meet them maybe they would take him somewhere quiet, somewhere down by the dock, perhaps, and do it there. He had known exactly what he was doing when he beat Salvatore, and, the way he saw it, he hadn’t been given any other choice. There were always going to be consequences for what he’d done and here they were, right on cue. An angry Mafiosi bent on revenge could cause trouble. Lots of trouble.

  So maybe discretion was the better part of valour this morning. He dropped his cellphone in his jacket pocket and went through into the corridor. There was a window at the end; he yanked it up. The building’s fire escape ran outside it. He wriggled out onto the sill, reached out with his right hand, grabbed the metal handrail and dropped down onto to the platform.

  He climbed down the stairs and walked around the block until he had a clear view onto the frontage of the El Capitan. The Lexus was still there and the three hoodlums were still waiting by the door. One of them had his finger on the buzzer; it looked like he was pressing it non-stop.

  He collected the Explorer. It was cold. He started the engine and then put the heater on max. He took out his cellphone and swiped his finger down, flipping through his contacts. He found the one he wanted, pressed call and waited for it to connect.

  26

  THE SIGN in the window said BAXTER BAIL BONDS. The three words were stacked on top of one other so that the three Bs, drawn so they were all interlocked, were the focus that caught the eye. The shop was in Escondido, north of San Diego, and Beau Baxter hardly ever visited it these days. He had started out here pretty much as soon as he had gotten out of the Border Patrol down south. He had put in a long stint, latterly patrolling the Reaper’s Line between Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales and, worse of them all, Juárez. Beau had run his business from the shop for eighteen months until he came to the realisation that it was going to take years to make any serious coin, and, seeing as he wasn’t getting any younger, he figured he needed to do something to accelerate things. He had developed contacts with a certain Italian family with interests all the way across the continental United States and he started to do work for them. It paid well, although their money was dirty and it needed to be laundered. That was where having a ready-made business, a business that often ran on cash and dealt in the provision of intangible services, sometimes anonymously, came in very handy indeed.

  So Beau had kept the place on and had appointed an old friend from the B.P. to run it for him. Arthur “Hank” Culpepper was an hoary old goat, a real wiseacre they used to call “PR” back in the day because he was the least appropriate member of the crew to send to do anything that needed a diplomatic touch. He had always been vain, which was funny because he’d never been the prettiest to look at. That didn’t stop him developing a high opinion of himself; Beau joked that he shaved in a cracked mirror every morning because thought of himself as a real ladies’ man. His airs and graces might have been lacking but he had made up for that by being a shit hot agent with an almost supernatural ability to nose out the bad guys. He wasn’t interested in the big game that Beau went after nowadays; there was a lot of travel involved in that and there was the ever present risk of catching a bullet in some Bumblefuck town where the quarry had gone to ground. Hank was quite content to stick around San Diego, posting bond for the local scumbags and then going after them whenever they were foolish enough to abscond. He had his favourite bar, his hound and his dear old wife (in that order) and, anyways, he had a reputation that he liked to work on. Some people called him a local legend. He was known for bringing the runners back in with maximum prejudice, and stories of him roping redneck tweakers from out of the back of his battered old Jeep were well known among the Escondido bondsmen. It was, he said, just something that he enjoyed to do.

  Beau pulled up and took a heavy black vinyl sports bag from the rear of his Cherokee. He slung it over his shoulder, blipped the lock on the car, crossed the pavement and stopped at the door. He unlocked it, pushed down the handle with his elbow and backed his way inside. The interior was simple. The front door opened into the office, with the desk, some pot plants, a standard lamp and a sofa that had been pushed back against the wall. There was a second door, opposite the street door, that led to a corridor that went all the way to the back of the building. There was a kitchenette, a bathroom and, at the end, a small cell that could be locked.

  The safe was in the kitchen, the kettle and a couple of dirty mugs resting atop it. Beau spun the dial three times––four-nine-eight––and opened the heavy cast iron door. He unzipped the bag and spread it open. It was full of paper money.

  Fifteen big ones.

  The smell of it wafted into the stuffy room. Beau loved that smell.

  He took out the cash, stacked the fifties in neat piles and locked the safe.

  He locked the front door, got back into his Cherokee and headed for the hospital.

  HANK WAS SITTING up in bed, his cellphone pressed between his head and shoulder while his right hand was occupied with tamping tobacco into the bowl of the pipe is his left hand. He was in his early sixties, same as Beau was, and, lying there in bed like that, he looked it. Man, did he ever look old. The whole of his right side was swathed in bandages and there was a drip running into a canula in the back of his hand. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days and that added on a few extra years. The colour had leeched from his face and now his skin was as white as the sheets the clan folks used to bleach up special for a Saturday night cross-burning session. He wasn’t wearing anything above the waist and his arms––Beau remembered them when they were thick with muscle––looked withered and old. The tattoo of the snake that he had had done in Saigon was wrinkled and creased where once it had been tightly curled around his bicep.

  Old age, Beau thought. That was the real reaper. Coming for all of us. Still, he thought: I’d rather eat five pounds of cactus thorns and shit sharp needles than look like that.

  He raised a hand in greeting and Hank reciprocated with a nod, mouthing that he would be two minutes before speaking into the receiver again: “I’m telling you, Maxine, the judge don’t give a sweet fuck about that. What he’s gonna get now ain’t a pimple on a fat man’s ass compared to what he’s gonna get. If he don’t make it for the hearing tomorrow he’ll make an example out of him. I’m telling you, no shit, he’s looking at five years before he even gets a sniff of parole. Five. Is that what you want for him? No? Then you better tell me where he’s at.”

  Beau could hear the buzz of a female voice from the receiver.

  There was a coffee machine in the hall and Beau went outside for two brews in white Styrofoam cups. He searched the small wicker basket next to the machine for a packet of Coffee-mate, came up empty, went back through into the room and found a bowl of sugar instead. He spooned a couple into both cups, stirring the sludgy brown liquid until it looked a little more appealing.

  “Fine. Where––Pounders? Alright, then. I’m gonna send someone to go and get him.”

  Beau sat down and stared at his old friend. He thought about the first time they had met. 1976. They’d graduated from the Border Patrol Academy and been posted up in Douglas at about the same time. Hank had been a uniformed cop near the border in El Centro, California, before coming on duty with the B.P.. The two men were partnered up on a cold, dark night in February. They had been assigned a wide sector up near the old copper-smelting operation near Douglas. The air stank of sulphur and you could smell it in your clothes and taste it on your tongue for days after you had been out at night. On the other hand, it wasn’t all bad: the train that circulated the edge of the smelter’s slag piles would dump three-ton buckets of bright orange, liquid ore over the hundred-foot-high waste bed that lit up the borderland with a brilliant flow of man-made lava that you could see
for miles around.

  The two of them were thankful for the glow on that particular evening; they were laid up in wait for a group of marijuana backpackers who, according to the word they’d heard, were headed north. They were scouting the desert trails looking for them; Beau had his .357 revolver and a .12 gauge pump shotgun loaded with buckshot. Hank had the same .357 but, instead of the shotgun, he had a .30 calibre M1 Carbine with a thirty-round banana magazine for extra firepower. The M1 wasn’t legitimate load-out for the Border Patrol but, the way Hank saw it, there was truth in the adage “peace through superior firepower.” If the bad guys had .22s, you wanted .44s. You always wanted the upper hand. That was the logic and it made sense to Beau, too.

  As they walked south on the desert trail they heard the faint crunch of footsteps ahead. They thought it must have been cattle at first but then Beau remembered the rancher had moved his herd onto a different pasture the week before. The mules were coming right at them. They raised their weapons and called out the order to stop. The bad guys were armed and they capped the first shot, the muzzle flash so close at hand that Beau was temporarily blinded by the burst of bright white light that scorched across his retinas. He fired back with the .12 gauge and emptied it. Hank took over with the M1, the mules firing back as they started to retreat. The smelter train made a delivery of glowing slag and, in the sudden flare as the embers crashed to the ground, Beau’s vision cleared as he turned to look at the profile of the man beside him. It was the instant of fullest illumination and the image was vivid, clear––and weird––enough to have stayed with him ever since. Hank looked like he was close to the moment of sexual release, balls-deep with a raging hard-on and ready to blow. He was smiling in ecstasy. The son of a bitch had this wicked-ass smirk on his face as he ripped through the clip. He wasn’t scared. He was enjoying it. Beau knew that feeling from ‘Nam, too, and it was all he needed to take out his .357 and start warming up the barrel.

  “I’m serious, Maxine,” Hank was saying, “if he comes back, you call me right away. He really doesn’t want to rile me up right now. I’m not in the mood to go chasing him down all over the state and, if he makes me do that, I ain’t promising he don’t get brought back in cuffs and with a bloody nose. You hearing me straight, darling? I ain’t messing. Don’t you dare make me look like a fool, now.”

  He ended the call.

  “You ain’t chasing anyone tonight, partner,” Beau said, dropping down onto the room’s small sofa.

  “She don’t know that.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Fellow named George Bailey. Been stealing cars. This time, though, the dumb fuck had a pistol on him while he was doing it. ‘Possession of a concealed weapon,’ he’s looking at five, minimum, probably seven or eight depending on which judge he gets. He decided he’d take his chances on the road, I’m trying to persuade his lovely girlfriend”––that word was loaded with sarcasm––“otherwise. He’s out getting drunk so I’m going to send George McCoy to go pick him up. Unless you wanna do it?”

  “Uh-huh,” Beau said with a big smile, shaking his head. “I’m not into that no more.”

  “Only the big game for you now, partner?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was the last one?”

  “Mexican.”

  “And?”

  “Not so bad.”

  Beau had finished the job the night before. It had been an easy one by his usual standards. The Lucianos had interests in a couple of big casinos in Vegas and one of their croupiers, this wiry beaner by the name of Eduardo del Rio, had entertained the thought that he could run south with fifty grand of their money. The family had sent Beau after him. It had been pretty easy. He must have been the most dumbshit robber in the Mexican state of Sonora that night and it had been an easy bust. He had run straight home to his wife and Beau had just to wait there for him. He’d been a little punchy when Beau confronted him but his attitude had adjusted just as soon as he starting looking down the barrel of Beau’s .12 gauge pump.

  “Boy was as dumb as you like,” Beau said. “He wouldn’t have found his way to the kitchen for a taco in his own one-room hut.” He sipped his coffee; it was foul. “Alright,” Beau crossed his legs, the hem of his right trouser riding up a little to show more of his snakeskin cowboy boot. “Now then. You wanna tell me what in God’s name has been going down round here?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning what? Which sumbitch shot you up, Hank?”

  “Ever heard of Ordell Leonard?”

  Beau shook his head. “Can’t say I have.”

  “Big, black brother from ‘Bama. Quiet fella until he gets on the drink then you never know what you’re gonna get. They had him for driving under the influence and resisting arrest. All he was looking at was a couple of months but he reckons they’re prejudiced against black men from the South round here and so he decides he’s gonna take his chances and takes off. I ended up in Arkansas before I could catch him. Fucking Little Rock, can you believe that shit? Two thousand miles, man. It took me three days there and three days back although, course, he was in the back coming home and so I had to listen to his goddamn problems the whole way. The whole experience made me think I ain’t getting a good enough shake out of this here thing we got going on.”

  He was grinning as he said it; Beau knew he was fooling around.

  “And then?”

  “And then I got lazy, I guess. We was right back up at the store when I let him out. I was going to put him in the cell until I could transfer him to the courthouse. He’d been on best behaviour for the whole trip and I’d taken off his cuffs. Clean forgot. Dude cold-cocks me, knocks me down, then gets my shotgun from the front and fires off a load. I’m not sure how he missed, to be honest with you. Ended up catching me in the shoulder but it could’ve been a helluva lot worse.”

  “Know where he’s headed?”

  “Got a brother in Vallejo. I’d bet you a dime to a doughnut that’s where he’s gone.”

  “Alright, then. You can leave that one to me.”

  “You sure? Not much money in it, Beau.”

  Beau looked at Hank again. He was getting on. Couldn’t have that many years left in him doing what they were doing. A shotgun, at close range? He’d got lucky. Maybe it was time Beau suggested Hank took it easy. Maybe it was a message. “Ain’t about money all the time, partner. Dude shot you all up. I can’t stand for that. Bad for our reputation.”

  “Ah, shit––I’ll be fine. I was gonna enjoy seeing him again.”

  “How long they going to keep you in?”

  “Couple more days.”

  “By which time he’ll be long gone. Nah, Hank, don’t worry about it. Leave him to me.”

  Hank sucked his teeth and, eventually, nodded his assent. “Shit,” he said. “I remembered something: you had a call back at the office. Jeanette took the details down and told me about it.”

  Jeanette was the secretary who kept things ticking over. “Who from?”

  “She said he called himself Smith. Sounded like he was English, she said, he had that whole accent going on. She says you weren’t around and could she take a message for you and he says yes, she could, and he tells her that he wants you to call him pronto. He gave her a number––I’ve got it written down in my pants pocket.”

  “He say what he wanted to speak to me about?”

  “Nope,” Hank said, shaking his head, “except it was urgent.”

  27

  BEAU DROVE NORTH. It took him eight hours on the I-5, a touch under five hundred miles. He could have flown, or caught a northbound Amtrak from San Diego, but he liked the drive and it gave him some time to listen to some music and think.

  He spent a lot of time thinking about duties and obligations. He had always lived his life by a code. It wasn’t a moral code because he couldn’t claim to be a particularly moral man; that would be fatuous, given the profession he had latterly chosen for himself. It was more a set of rules that he tried
to live his life by and one of those rules insisted that he would always pay his debts. It was a matter of integrity. Beau’s father had always said that was something you either had or you didn’t have, and he prided himself that he did; he was made of integrity from the guts out. Getting the Mexican journalist away to safety had been the right thing to do, but he couldn’t in all honesty say that he thought it had completely squared the ledger between them. He figured the Englishman had done him two solids down in Mexico: he had saved him from Santa Muerta and then drew the fire of whoever it was who hit El Patrón’s mansion so that he and the girl could get away. Helping the girl had paid back only half of the debt. At the very least, he could drive up to San Francisco and hear what the Englishman had to say. If it wasn’t something he could help him with then he would book into a nice hotel for a couple of nights and enjoy the city. He really had nothing to lose.

  And, if nothing else, he could find out how on earth Smith had gotten out of Mexico. It hadn’t looked so good for him when Beau and the girl had made tracks. That guy, though; he was something else. He could fall into a tub of shit and come out smelling like a rose every time.

  Beau could mix in a spot of business, too. Ordell Leonard was up there and there was no way on God’s green Earth Beau was going to let him have even an extra second of liberty. He would never have admitted it to another person, but seeing Hank in the hospital like that, old and shot up, it had reminded him of his own advancing years. He had been thinking about his own mortality a lot recently. He was sixty-two years old. Every morning he seemed to wake up with another ache. Everyone came to the end of the road eventually, that was the one shared inevitability, but Beau was determined that he wasn’t there yet. The more he thought about it, the more he understood his own reaction: Ordell Leonard was a bad man, a dangerous man, and he would have been a challenge to collar ten years ago, when he and Hank were fitter and meaner than they were now. Bringing him in now would be his way of thumbing his nose at the notion that he was ready to retire.