by James Sallis
“( ).”
“What?”
“Said you got family?”
“No, just me.”
“Been out here long?”
“Few years. You?”
“Close on to a year now. Hard to get to know anyone in this town. People’ll talk to you at the drop of a hat, just never seems to go much beyond that.”
Although over the next year or two they’d spend time in one another’s company, having the occasional meal together, going out for drinks, that was the longest string of words Driver ever knew Ligocki to put together. Whole evenings could go by with not much at all between “How’s it going” and “Next time,” something they were both comfortable with.
That movie was the hardest Driver ever worked on. It was also the most fun he’d ever had. One stunt in particular took him most of a day to get down. He was to come barreling along the street, see a roadblock, and go for a wall. Had to take the car almost completely sideways without turning over, so the speed and angle had to be perfect. First couple of run-throughs, he rolled. Third time he thought he had it, but the director told him afterwards that there was some sort of technical problem and they’d have to run it again. Four tries later, he nailed it.
Driver didn’t know what happened, but the movie never got released. Something about rights maybe, or some other legal issue, could be any one of a hundred problems. Most things that start out to be movies don’t ever get made. They’d had this one in the can, though, and it was good.
Go figure.
Chapter Twenty-two
Six a.m., first light of dawn, world stitching itself back together out there, reconstituting itself, as he looked on.
Blink, and the warehouse across the way reemerged.
Blink again, the city loomed in the distance, a ship coming hard into port.
Birds skittered from ragged tree to ragged tree complaining. Cars idled at curbside, took on human freight, pulled away.
Driver sat in his apartment sipping scotch from the only glass he’d kept. The scotch was Buchanan’s, a mid-range blend. Not bad at all. Big seller among Latinos. No phone service here, nothing of value. Couch, bed and chairs came with the rent. Clothes, razor, money and other essentials waited in a duffel bag by the door.
Just as a good car waited in the parking lot.
The TV, he’d found sitting beside garbage bags at curbside when he put out his own glasses, dishes and miscellaneous goods for pickup. Why not? he thought. Ten-inch screen, and pretty much banged to hell, but it worked. So now he was watching a nature program in which four or five coyotes chased a jackrabbit. The dogs were relaying: one would chase the rabbit a while, then another would take over.
Sooner or later they’d come after him, of course. Only a matter of time. Nino’d known that all along. They both had. The rest was no more than dancing, fancy footwork and misdirection, figure-eight of the bullfighter’s cape. No way they were going to just let this lie.
Driver poured the last of the Buchanan’s into his last glass.
Guests soon, no doubt about it.
Chapter Twenty-three
In his dream the jackrabbit stopped dead still and turned on the coyote, curling its lips back to reveal huge razor-sharp teeth just before it sprang.
That’s when Driver woke and knew someone was in the room. A change in the quality of darkness at the window told him where the intruder was. Driver turned heavily in bed, as though restless, bed frame banging against the wall.
The man stopped moving.
Driver turned again and kept going, springing onto his feet. The radio antenna in his hand slashed at the man’s neck. There was much blood, and for a moment, two beats, three, the man stood as if frozen. By then Driver was behind him. He kicked the man’s legs out from under and, as he went down, slashed again with the antenna, at the other side this time, then at the hand that was reaching for, presumably, a gun.
Bending down, foot planted on the man’s arm, Driver pulled it out. A short-barrelled .38. As though the poor little thing had had a nose job to help it fit in.
“Okay. On your feet.”
“Whatever you say.” His visitor held up both hands, palm out. “I’m cool.”
Hardly more than a kid, really. Bulked up from workouts and steroids in equal measure. Dark hair cut almost to the scalp on the sides, left long on top. Sport coat over a black T-shirt, couple of gold chains. Small, square teeth. Not like the jackrabbit’s at all.
Driver urged him through the front door and out onto the balcony that circled the building. All the apartments opened onto it.
“Jump,” Driver said.
“You’re crazy, man. We’re on the second floor.”
“Your call. I don’t much care either way. Either you jump or I shoot you where you stand. Think about it. It’s only what, thirty feet or so? You’ll live through it. Any luck at all, you get off with only a couple broken legs, maybe a shattered ankle.”
Driver marked the moment it changed, saw the moment when the tension went away and his body accepted what was about to happen. The man put one hand on the railing.
“Give my regards to Nino,” Driver said.
Afterwards he collected the duffel bag from inside the door and went down the back stairs to his car. Jumpin’ Jack Flash came on the radio when the engine caught.
Shit.
Obviously the station had, as they liked to say, changed its profile. Bought out? Sold down the river? Supposed to be soft jazz, damn it. Still was, just days ago, when he set the buttons. Now this.
Getting to be where you can’t rely on anything.
Driver spun the dial through country music, news, a talk show about aliens of the extraterrestrial sort, easy listening, country again, hard rock, another talk show about aliens of the earthbound sort, news again.
Concerned citizens of Arizona were up in arms because a humanitarian group had begun installing water stations in the desert that illegal immigrants had to cross to get from Mexico to the U.S. Thousands had perished trying to make the crossing. Concerned citizens of Arizona, Driver noted, came out all in a breath, like weapons of mass destruction or the red threat.
Meanwhile the state legislature was trying to pass statutes barring illegal aliens from free medical care in Arizona’s overburdened, uncompensated emergency rooms and hospitals.
Doc should start up a franchise.
Driver pulled onto the interstate.
They’d sent a single dog after him? And a new dog to boot, not even pick of the litter. That was plain stupid, made no sense whatsoever.
Or maybe it did.
Two possibilities.
One: they were trying to set him up. His designated assassin wouldn’t talk, of course. But if Driver had killed him—as whoever sent him had every reason to expect—police even now would be going door to door and checking apartment-house records. All over California and adjoining states, fax machines would be rousing from slumber to spit out stats of the photo from Driver’s old DMV records and whatever other information about him could be unearthed. There wasn’t a lot; even back then, instinctively, he kept his head down.
The second possibility hardened to reality when a blue Mustang came up around the chain of cars behind him outside Sherman Oaks, lodged in his rear view mirror, and wouldn’t be shaken.
So not only did they have a tail on him, they wanted him to know they had a tail on him.
Driver cut abruptly off the interstate and into a service area, bypassing the inner loop. Pulled in and sat, engine purring, out by the truckers. Nearby, a family spilled from its van with dogs in tow, parents shouting at kids, kids shouting at dogs and one another.
The Mustang materialized behind him, in his mirror.
Okay then, he thought. My game now.
Popping the clutch, he shot along the service road. As he gained speed, his eyes swept constantly from rear view mirror to highway and back again. With a car length to spare, he slid onto the highway between two semis.
But
he couldn’t lose the son of a bitch whatever he tried.
Periodically he’d go off-road, blend into local traffic to take advantage of it, interpose traffic lights like blockades between himself and his pursuer. Or back on the interstate he’d accelerate with blinkers going as though to take the off ramp, drop in front of a rig, then, once out of sight, floor it and surge ahead.
Whatever he did, the Mustang hung there behind like a bad memory, history you can’t escape.
Desperate times, desperate measures.
Well out of the city, out where the first of a crop of white windmills, lazily turning, wound sky down to desert, Driver sailed without warning onto an exit ramp and into a one-eighty. Sat facing back the way he’d come as the Mustang raced towards him.
Then he hit the gas.
He was out for a minute or two, no more. An old stunt man’s trick: at the last moment, he’d thrown himself into the back seat and braced for the collision.
The cars struck head-on. Neither was going to leave on its own steam, but the Mustang, predictably, got the worst of it. Kicking his door open, Driver climbed out.
“You okay?” someone shouted from the window of a battered pickup idling at the bottom of the off ramp.
Then the long blare of a horn and a squeal of brakes as a Chevy van skidded to a stop, rocking, behind the pickup.
Driver stepped up to the Mustang. Sirens in the distance.
Gordon Ligocki’s ducktail would never look good again. His neck was broken. Internal damages too, judging from the blood around his mouth. Probably slammed into the steering wheel.
Driver still had the coupons for Nino’s Pizza.
He tucked one into Gordon Ligocki’s shirt pocket.
Chapter Twenty-four
He hitched a ride with the guy in the pickup, whose emergence with an aluminum baseball bat had sufficiently adjusted attitudes among the youthful crew of the van as to send them spinning away into traffic.
“What I’m guessing is you may have good reason not to be around once the Man arrives,” he said when Driver approached him. “Know more than a little about that myself. Get on up here.”
Driver climbed aboard.
“Name’s Jodie,” he said a mile or so down the road, “but nearabouts everyone calls me Sailor.” He pointed to a tattoo on his right bicep. “Supposed to be a bat wing. Looks like a mainsail.”
Professionally done tattoos—the bat, a woman in a grass skirt with coconut shells for breasts, an American flag, a dragon—covered his biceps. Hands on the steering wheel bore another sort of tattoo. Jailhouse tattoos, crudely done with ink and the end of a wire. Most times, that meant a guitar string.
“Where’re we headed?” Driver asked.
“Depends….Town not far up the road has a decent enough dinner. You hungry by any chance?”
“I could eat.”
“How did I know?”
It was a classic small-town noontime buffet, steam trays piled high with slices of meat loaf, shrimp, hot wings, beans and franks, home fries, roast beef. Sides of cottage cheese, three-layer Jell-O salad, green salad, pudding, carrot and celery sticks, green bean casserole. Clientele a mix of blue-collar workers, men and women from offices nearby in short-sleeve dress shirts and polyester dresses, blue-haired old ladies. These last came out in their tank-like cars around one o’clock each afternoon, Jodie told him, heads barely visible above steering wheel and dash. Everyone else knew to get off the streets then.
“You don’t have work you need to be tending to?” Driver asked.
“Nope, time’s my own. Have Nam to thank for that. I’m up for armed robbery, see, and the judge says he’ll give me a choice, I can enlist or I can go back to prison. Didn’t much care for it the first time round, didn’t have any notion it would have got much better. So I slide through basic, ship out, then along about three months in, I’m sitting there having the first of my usual breakfast beers when a sniper takes me down. Spilled the whole can. Fucker’s been up there all night waiting.
“They airlift me to Saigon, take out half of one lung and pack me back Stateside. Disability’s enough to get by on, long as I don’t develop a taste for much more than greasy hamburgers and cheap hootch.”
He threw back the rest of his coffee. The hula girl on his arm shimmied. Spare flesh like a turkey’s wattles swung beneath.
“Had the feeling you might have seen action yourself.”
Driver shook his head.
“Prison, then. You’ve been inside.”
“Not yet.”
“And here I’d of sworn….” He took another try at the coffee cup, registered surprise to find it empty. “What the hell do I know, anyway.”
“How’s the rest of your day look?” Driver said.
Like shit, apparently. And like usual. Jodie’s home was a trailer in Paradise Park back towards the interstate. Abandoned refrigerators, stacks of bald tires and tireless, decaying vehicles sat everywhere. Half a dozen dogs in the compound barked and snarled nonstop. Jodie’s kitchen sink would have been heaped with dishes if he’d had enough dishes to heap. Those few he had were in the sink, and looked to have been there for some time. Grease swam in the runnels of stove-top burners.
Jodie snapped on the TV when they first came in, rooted around in the sink, rinsed out a couple of glasses with tap water and filled them with bourbon. A scabrous dog of uncertain parentage made its way out of the back of the trailer to greet them, then, exhausted by the effort, collapsed at their feet.
“That’s General Westmoreland,” Jodie told him.
They sat watching an old Thin Man movie, then a Rockford Files, steadily downing bourbon. Three hours later, just before Driver rode off in his truck, leaving behind a note that read Thank you and a stack of fifty-dollar bills, Jodie collapsed, too. Just like the dog.
Chapter Twenty-five
It came in a box not much larger than one of the encyclopedias lined up on a shelf in the front room behind dusty figurines of fish and angels. How could such a thing fit in there? A table? Accent table, the ad said, crafted by one of America’s premier designers, assembly required.
It arrived around noon. His mother had been so excited. We’ll wait and open it after lunch, she said.
She’d ordered the table by mail. He remembered being amazed at this. Would the postman ring the bell and, when she opened the door, hand it through? Your table’s here, ma’am. You draw a circle, write a number on a piece of paper and enclose a check, a table shows up at your door. That’s magic enough. But it also comes in this tiny box?
Further memories of his mother, of his early life, drift up occasionally in pre-dawn hours. He wakes with them lodged in his head, but the moment he tries consciously to remember, or to express them, they’re gone.
He was, what?, nine or ten years old? Sitting at the kitchen table dawdling over a peanut butter sandwich while his mother drummed fingers on the counter.
Through? she said.
He wasn’t, there was still almost half a sandwich on his plate and he was hungry, but he nodded. Always agree. That was the first rule.
She swept his plate away, into a stack of others by the sink.
So let’s have a look. Stabbing a butcher knife into one end of the box to rip it open.
Lovingly she laid out components on the floor. What an impossible puzzle. Lengths of cheap contoured metal and tubing, wedges of rubber, baggies of screws and fittings.
His mother’s eyes kept returning to the instruction sheet as, moment by moment, piece by piece, she assembled the table. By the time feet had been fitted with rubber stoppers and the bottom half of legs were in place, the expression on her face, to which he was ever attentive, had gone from happy to puzzled. As she spliced on upper legs, cross-supports and screws, her expression turned sad. That prospect of sadness spread throughout her body, washed out into the room.
Watch closely: that’s the second rule.
Mother lifted the table top out of the bottom of the box and set it in place.
An ugly, cheap-looking, wobbly thing.
The room, the world, got very quiet. Both stayed that way for a long time.
I just don’t understand, Mother said.
She sat on the floor still, pliers and screwdrivers ranged about her. Tears streamed down her face.
It looked so pretty in the catalog. So pretty. Not at all like this.
Chapter Twenty-six
Jodie’s former ride was a Ford F-150, graceless as a wheelbarrow, dependable as rust and taxes, indestructible as a tank. Brakes that could stop an avalanche cold, engine powerful enough to tow glaciers into place. Bombs fall and wipe out civilization as we know it, two things’ll come up out of the ashes: roaches and F-150s. Thing handled like an ox cart, rattled fillings from teeth and left you permanently saddle sore, but it was a survivor. Got the job done, whatever the job was.
Like him.
Driver steered the mostly black beast with patches of Bond-It back down I-10 towards L.A. He’d found a college station playing Eddie Lang-Lonnie Johnson duets, George Barnes, Parker with Dolphy, Sidney Bechet, Django. Funny how so small a victory, finding that station, could change your whole outlook.
At a barbershop on Sunset he had his head buzzed almost to the scalp. Bought oversize clothes and wraparound mirror shades next door.
Nino’s shouldered up against a bakery and a butcher shop in an Italian neighborhood where old women sat out on porches and front steps and men played dominos at card tables set up on the sidewalk. What with supermarkets, Sam’s Clubs and so on, Driver hadn’t known butcher shops still existed.
Two guys in dark suits, in particular, put in a lot of time at Nino’s. They’d show up early in the morning, have breakfast and sit around a while, then leave. Hour or so later, they’d be back. Sometimes that’d go on all day long. One slammed espressos, the other went with wine.
Came right down to it, they were a study in opposites.
Espresso Man was young. Late twenties maybe, black hair cut short and troweled in place with what looked for all the world like Vaseline. Shine UV on that hair, it would fluoresce. Round-toed, clumsy-looking black shoes stuck out under the cuffs of his pants. Beneath his coat he wore a navy blue polo shirt.
