Drive

by James Sallis

  Wine Man, fiftyish, wore a dark dress shirt with gold cufflinks but no tie, black Reeboks, and had his grey hair pulled back into a stubby ponytail. Where his young partner walked with the deliberate, measured step, the meatiness, of a bodybuilder, Wine Man just kind of drifted. Like he was in moccasins, or touched down only every third or fourth step.

  999

  Second day, right after breakfast, Espresso Man stepped behind the building to have a smoke. Inhaling deeply, he drew in a lungful of slow poison, exhaled, then tried to draw in another but it wouldn’t come.

  Something around his neck. What the fuck—wire? He claws at it, knowing it’ll do no good. Someone behind pulling hard. And that warmth on his chest would be blood. As he struggles to look down, an ingot of bloody flesh, his flesh, drops onto his chest.

  So this is it, he thinks, here in a fucking alley, with shit in my pants. Goddamn.

  Driver tucks a Nino’s coupon into Espresso Man’s coat pocket. Earlier he’s circled “We Deliver” in red ink.

  999

  God damn, Wine Man echoed minutes later. Nino’s bodyguard brought him out here after one of the cooks, emerging to empty a grease trap, tripped over Junior.

  Who the hell would name their kid Junior anyway?

  Boy was gone, no doubt about it. Eyes bulging, star-patterns of burst capillaries all over his face. Tongue stuck out like a meat cork.

  Amazing. Boy still had a hard-on. Sometimes he’d thought that was about all there was to Junior.

  “Mr. Rose?” the bodyguard said. What was this one’s name? They came and went. Keith something.

  Son of a bitch, he thought. Son of a bitch.

  Not that he cared much for the guy, who could be a royal pain in the ass, all pumped iron, carrot juice and steroids. And enough caffeine to kill a team of horses. But goddamn it, whoever did this had brought it where it never should have come.

  “Looks like the boss needs to kick it up a notch or two, Mr. Rose,” Keith-something said behind him.

  He stood with his wineglass in one hand, pizza coupon in the other. The circle of red ink. We deliver.

  “I’d say that’s already been taken care of.”

  Couldn’t have been more than minutes. How far away could the son of a bitch have gotten? But it wasn’t for now.

  He drained his glass.

  “Let’s go tell Nino.”

  “He ain’t gonna like it,” Keith-something said.

  “Who the hell does?”

  999

  Bernie Rose sure as hell didn’t.

  “So you’ve sicced the hounds on this guy and the first I hear of it is when he steps up in my own backyard and takes down my partner….Good thing there ain’t no union for our kind of work. That’s my business, Nino. You damn well know it is.”

  Nino, who hated pasta of every kind, tucked the last of a chocolate croissant into his mouth and followed it with a mouthful of Earl Grey tea.

  “We’ve known each other since we were what, six years old?”

  Bernie Rose said nothing.

  “Trust me. This was off to the side, not business as usual. Made sense to farm it out.”

  “Off to the side’s the sort of thing gets you taken down, Nino. You know that.”

  “Times are changing.”

  “Times are for damn sure changing when you send amateurs out on a kill and don’t even bother to let your own men know what’s going on.”

  Bernie Rose poured another glass of wine. Still called it dago red. Nino’s eyes never left him.

  “Tell me.”

  If he’d been in films he’d have asked what the back story was. Movie folk had this vocabulary of their own. Back story, subtext, foreshadowing, carry-through. Producers who couldn’t diagram a sentence to save their lives loved to talk about the “structure” of a script.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I bet it is.”

  He listened while Nino laid it out for him, the mock robbery gone south, this guy who’d taken it personally, the payoff.

  “You fucked up,” he said.

  “Big time. Believe me, I know it. I should have brought you in. We’re a team.”

  “Not any more,” Bernie Rose said.

  “Bernie—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Nino.”

  Bernie Rose poured another glass of wine, killing the bottle. Old days, they’d jam a candle into the neck, put it on one of the tables. Goddamn romantic.

  “Here’s how it’s gonna go. I’ll take this guy down, but it’s on my dime, nothing to do with you. And once it’s done, I’m out of here—just a bad memory.”

  “Not that easy to walk away, my friend. You’re bound.”

  They sat unmoving, eyes locked. It was some time before Bernie Rose spoke.

  “I ain’t asking your fucking permission, Izzy.” His use of Nino’s childhood nickname, something he’d never done before in all these years, had a visible effect. “You got your money back. Be content.”

  “It’s not about the money—”

  “—it’s about the principle. Right….So you’re gonna do what? Write op-ed columns for the New York Times? Dispatch more of your amateurs?”

  “They wouldn’t be amateurs.”

  “They’re all amateurs nowadays. All of ’em. Carbon-copy Juniors with their goddamn tattoos and cute little ear rings. But it’s your call, do what you have to.”

  “I always do.”

  “Two things.”

  “I’m counting.”

  “You send people after me, anyone up the line sends people after me, best keep the loading docks open for regular deliveries.”

  “This the same Bernie Rose that said ‘I don’t ever threaten’?”

  “It’s not a threat. Neither is this.”

  “What?” Nino’s eyes met his.

  “You don’t get a free ride for old time’s sake. I look in the mirror and see someone in the back seat, next thing I see—once I’ve taken care of that—is you.”

  “Bernie, Bernie. We’re friends.”

  “No. We’re not.”

  999

  What to make of this? Every time you thought you had a take on it, the world thumbed its nose and shifted back to its own track, becoming again—still—unreadable. Driver found himself wishing he had Manny Gilden’s opinion. Manny understood at a glance things others spent weeks puzzling out. “Intuition,” he said, “it’s all intuition, just a knack I have. Everyone thinks I’m smart, but I’m not. Something in me makes these connections.” Driver wondered if Manny’d ever made it to New York or if, as usual, six or seven times in as many years, he’d backed out.

  Wine Man came out to look at Espresso, no expression showing on his face, and went back inside. Half an hour later he floated out the door again and saddled up. A sky-blue Lexus.

  Driver thought about the way he’d stood looking down, wineglass in his hand, and how he’d looked getting into the Lexus, almost weightless, and understood for the first time what Manny had been talking about.

  The guy who went in and the one who came out were different people. Something happened in there to change things.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Bernie Rose and Isaiah Paolozzi grew up in Brooklyn, the old Italian section centering around Henry Street. From the roof where Bernie had spent a good portion of his teen years you could look left to the Statue of Liberty and, right, to the bridge like a huge elastic band holding two distinct worlds together. In Bernie’s time, those worlds had become ever less distinct as skyrocketing rents in Manhattan drove young people across the river, and Brooklyn rents, on the teeter-totter, rose to meet the demand. Manhattan, after all, was still but minutes away by F train. In Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and lower Park Slope, trendy restaurants catering to the new residents sat jarringly among cluttered used-furniture stores and ancient, flyblown, hole-in-the-wall bodegas.

  It was a part of town where stories about the mob circulated like the latest jokes.

  One of the new residents, out
walking her dog, had let it crap on the sidewalk and, in a hurry to meet her date, failed to clean up after it. Unfortunately the sidewalk fronted the home of a mobster’s mother. Days later the young woman came back across the river to find the dog gutted in her bathtub.

  Another, circling block after block seeking a parking place, had pulled into one just vacated. “Hey, you can’t park there, that’s a private spot,” a kid on the stoop shouted to him. “No such thing,” he’d said. Next day when he hiked the eight blocks to pull his car to the other side to make room for street cleaning and so avoid a ticket, it was gone. He never saw it again.

  Back around 1990, Nino’d got fed up. “This ain’t my town anymore,” he told Bernie. “How’s California sound?” Sounded pretty good. Not much for Bernie to do here; the business ran itself. He was bone tired of old men waving him over to their dinner and domino tables to complain, tired of the slew of cousins and nephews and nieces that comprised most of Brooklyn. And he’d drunk enough espresso to last him a lifetime. Had his last cup, in fact, the day they left. Never touched it again.

  Hadn’t taken Nino long to pull up ties. Sold the restaurant with its red-flocked wallpaper and big-hair waitresses to one of the newcomers with plans to make it a “sushi palace.” Laid off the news stand and new chi-chi coffee houses to a couple of nephews. Uncle Lucius, urged on by wife Louise, who wanted him out of the house whatever the cost, took over the bar.

  They drove cross-country in Nino’s cherry and cherry-red Cadillac, pulling into truck stops a couple times a day for hamburgers and steaks, making do the rest of the time with chips, Vienna sausages, sardines, Fritos. Before this, those few times they had reason to venture into it, even Manhattan seemed a foreign country. Brooklyn was the world. Now here they were, coursing through the wilderness of America, traversing its back lots.

  “Hell of a country,” Nino said, “hell of a country. Anything’s possible, anything at all.”

  Well, yeah. You had family, connections, money, sure it was. Little difference between this and the political machines that spat out all those Kennedys and kept the like of Mayor Daley in office. Or the ones that chocked Reagan and a couple of Bushes under the wheels of the republic while tires got changed.

  “Even if it does look,” Nino added—they were in Arizona by then—“like God squatted down here, farted, and lit a match to it.”

  Nino stole home in their new world as though he’d always been here, taking command of an array of pizza parlors, mall-based fast food concessions, bookie action, enforcement. It was just like they’d never left, Bernie thought, only now when they looked out they didn’t see elevated train tracks and painted ads for restaurants on the side of buildings, they saw blue sky and palm trees.

  Bernie Rose hated it all. Hated the procession of beautiful days, hated giving up seasons and rain, hated the clotted streets and highways, hated all these so-called communities, Bel Air, Brentwood, Santa Monica, insisting on sovereignty even as they drained away L.A.’s resources.

  He’d never thought of himself as a political person, but hey.

  Thing was, it made him a kinder man. He went out on a collection to a doublewide or a co-op some idiot had paid two mill for, that kindness went with him. He tried to understand, tried to put himself in the others’ shoes. “You’re going soft, boy,” Uncle Ivan said—the only person back east he kept in touch with. But he wasn’t. He was just seeing how some people never had half a fucking chance and never would have.

  In China Belle, well into his third cup of green tea, nibbling at the edges of an egg roll too hot to eat, Bernie sat thinking about the guy who’d set sights on Nino.

  “Everything all right, Mr. Rose?” his favorite waitress, Mai June, asked. (“My father owned little aside from his sense of humor, of which he was inordinately proud,” she’d told him when he asked about her name.) Like everything she said, even so phatic a statement, with its lilt and rising tones, sounded like a poem or a piece of music. He assured her the food was exemplary as always. Moments later, she brought his entrée, five-flavor shrimp.

  Okay. Run it down, then.

  Nino out here in Wonderland had begun fancying himself some kind of goddamn producer, no longer just a good maintenance man (and he’d been one of the best), but a mover and shaker. Such unwarranted ambition was in the very water and air, and in this pounding sunlight. Like a virus, it got into you and wouldn’t let go, dog of the American Dream gone dingo. So Nino’d set up the grab, or more likely had it foisted on him, then farmed it out, probably to the foister. Director put a team together, a package. Brought in the driver.

  Shouldn’t be too hard to step in those footprints. Not that he knew offhand who to call, but there’d be no problem getting numbers. He’d put it out that he was a mover and shaker himself, of course, one with a heavy job waiting on the runway, only before takeoff he needed the best driver to be had.

  Mai June materialized beside him, refilling his tea cup, asking if he needed anything else.

  “Brave shrimp,” he said. “Heroic shrimp.”

  Bowing her head, Mai June withdrew.

  999

  As Bernie Rose chomped egg rolls and five-flavor shrimp, Driver was approaching the Lexus where it sat in the empty lot next door. Thing had an onboard alarm system that hadn’t been activated.

  A black-and-white swung by, slowed momentarily. Driver leaned back against the hood as if it were his own ride, heard the crackle of the radio. The cruiser went on.

  Driver straightened and moved to the window of the Lexus.

  Steering wheel crossed with a Club—but Driver had no use for the car, and it took him less than a minute to slimjim the door. The interior was spotless. Seats clean and empty. Nothing on the floorboards. A scant handful of refuse, drink cup, tissues, ballpoint pen, tucked neatly into a leatherette pocket hanging off the dash.

  Registration in the glove compartment gave him what he wanted.

  Bernard Wolfe Rosenwald.

  Residing at one of those woodland names out in Culver City, probably some apartment complex with a half-assed security gate.

  Driver taped one of the pizza coupons to the steering wheel. He’d drawn a happy face on it.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  His eyes went up, to plastic IV bags hanging on trees above the bed, six of them. Below those a battery of pumps. They’d need to be reset every hour or so. One beeped in alarm already.

  “What, another goddamn visitor?”

  Driver had spoken with the charge nurse, who told him there’d been no other visitors. She also told him his friend was dying.

  Doc raised a hand to point shakily to the IVs.

  “See I’ve reached the magic number.”

  “What?”

  “Back in med school we always said you have six chest tubes, six IVs, it’s all over. You got to that point, all the rest’s just dancing.”

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  “Fine’s a town I don’t even visit anymore.”

  “Is there anyone I can call?” Driver asked.

  Doc made scribbling motions on air. There was a clipboard on the table. Driver handed it to him.

  “This is an L.A. number, right?”

  Doc nodded. “My daughter.”

  At a bank of pay phones in the lobby, Driver dialed the number.

  Thank you for calling. Your call is important to us. Please leave a message.

  He said that he was calling from Phoenix, that her father was seriously ill. He left the name of the hospital and his own phone number.

  When he got back, a Spanish-language soap opera was playing. A handsome, shirtless young man came struggling up out of swampland, plucking leeches off well-muscled legs.

  “No answer,” Driver said. “I left a message.”

  “She won’t call back.”

  “Maybe she will.”

  “Why should she?”

  “Because she’s your daughter?”

  Doc shook his head.

  “How’
d you find me?”

  “I went by your place. Miss Dickinson was outside, and when I opened the door she rushed in. You two had a routine. If she was there, then you should be. I started knocking on doors, asking around. A kid across the street told me paramedics had come and taken you away.”

  “You feed Miss Dickinson?”

  “I did.”

  “Bitch has us all well trained.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Doc?”

  His eyes went to the window. He shook his head.

  “I figured you could use this,” Driver said, handing him a flask. “I’ll try your daughter again.”

  “No reason to.”

  “Okay if I come back to see you?”

  Doc tilted the flask to drink, then lowered it.

  “Won’t be much reason for that, either.”

  Driver was almost to the door when Doc called out: “How’s that arm?”

  “The arm’s good.”

  “So was I,” Doc said. “So was I.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  This son of a bitch was beginning to piss him off.

  Bernie Rose came out of China Belle picking his teeth. He tossed the fortune cookie in the Dumpster. Even if the damn thing held the gospel truth, who in his right mind would want to know?

  Ripping the coupon off his steering wheel, he balled it up and sent it after the fortune cookie.

  Pizza. Right.

  Bernie drove home, to Culver City, not far from the old MGM studios, now Sony-Columbia. Jesus, one hand wrapped around a hamburger, held two fingers of the other up to his head in greeting, then hit the button to open the gate. Bernie gave him a thumbs-up in reply, wondering if Jesus knew he’d just passed a good facsimile of the Boy Scout salute.

  Someone had shoved over a dozen pizza ads under his door. Pizza Hut, Mother’s, Papa John’s, Joe’s Chicago Style, Pizza Inn, Rome Village, Hunky-Dory Quick Ital, The Pie Place. Son of a bitch probably went around pulling them off doors all over the neighborhood. On every one of them he’d circled Free Delivery.