by James Sallis
He stirred milk into his coffee, looked at his piece of pie, and felt vaguely challenged by both. “Your father’s a cop.”
“One of them, yeah. And my mother was an illegal. He married her, made an honest woman of her. What does that make me?”
“Interesting?”
“Not really.”
“Like your name then. Not interesting, you said before.”
“When I was little, I climbed on everything. Chairs, trees, people’s legs, toilets, cardboard boxes. Like a goat, my mother said. And Dad was Bill-”
“I get it.”
“With an — ie to make it feminine.”
Outside, two cars tried to pull into the parking lot at the same time. Both stopped. One driver got out, leaving the door open, and started toward the other car. That driver threw it in reverse, backed into the street, and floored it.
And just like that, for no good reason at all, he found himself telling Billie about his mother. How he’d sat chewing his Spam sandwich watching her go after his old man with a butcher knife and a bread knife, one ear on his plate and blood shooting out of the gash in his neck. How that was about it for the rest of her life, she’d used it all up.
“They were good knives, I hope,” Billie said.
“Probably not, it was a cheap house. But they did their work.”
“Her too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Last thing she did, from what you say. A mother, protecting you.”
Somehow that had never occurred to him. He always figured she’d just had enough.
“What’s the story there?” Billie nodded to a booth where a fiftyish woman and a man in his twenties sat, she with eggs and bacon, he with salad. Was Billie picking up on his uneasiness, changing the subject in accord?
“Not mother and son,” he said.
“And not lovers, the body language is all wrong.”
“Yet they’re both leaning in slightly.”
“Dispensing and ignoring advice?”
“Confessing to one another, maybe.” He braved the pie and for moments they were silent. The couple rose from the booth to leave by separate doors. “Law school, huh?”
“Second year.”
“That’s a longish walk from fixing people’s cars.”
“I don’t know. How much of what we do in our lives, what we think, is chosen, and how much is just what comes at us? My dad was always fooling with cars, parking his on the street because some junker was getting fixed up in the garage. Same with my mother’s cousins that came to live with us. Didn’t have any money, and sent most of what they had back home, so they’d build these cars from spare parts and pieces. I’d watch them, and they’d hand me a wrench to pretend I was helping, and before long I was. Discovered I had a weird talent for it, like I could see how things were supposed to work, how they’d fit together, how much strength was needed here, how much relief there. At one point we had twelve people living in the house. Kids, cousins, hard to tell which were which. Mechanic’s pay put me through undergrad, and I’ll be out of ASU free and clear, no loans, nothing.”
“And then?”
“Hard to say. See what turns up, I guess.”
“What comes at you.”
“Right.”
“And if nothing does?”
“You never know. But it’s not like I’ll just be sitting around waiting, is it?”
He drank the rest of his coffee. There were grounds in the bottom of the cup. “You want another piece of pie? You could try the strawberry this time.”
“I think this’ll do me until about next March.” She pushed the remains, crust, a smear of yellow, three tiny strands of coconut, toward him. “Have at it, big boy.”
“Your father still a cop?”
“Some days more than others. But he hasn’t worn the badge for almost ten years. He’s in an assisted care facility full of nice retired shoe salesmen, dentists, and insurance brokers who keep trying to get him to play cards or checkers or some damn thing.” She looked to the window outside which three Harleys (no mistaking the sound of them) cruised by in a rough V. “I kick in what his pension doesn’t cover.”
“And your mother?”
“Died three weeks after he hung the job up. And they had all these plans…” She leaned back against the half wall, legs stretched out on the booth’s seat, cradling her coffee cup in both hands. “Don’t we all.”
A cook leaned forward to peer through the service slot from the kitchen, then came out and stood looking around, like a bus driver counting heads. He wore a green surgical scrub cap and was stick-thin except for a huge swell of belly.
“What about you?” Billie said.
“Plans? Not really.” None he could talk about.
“That ride you’re working on, that’s just a lark? You can’t be racing, or the guys would know you.”
“I did race, down around Tucson, but that was long ago.”
“You’re not old enough to have a long ago, Eight.”
“It’s not always just years.”
She met his eyes (beat-and-a-half, the director would say) and nodded.
They picked him up the next morning out by Globe. Two cars this time, and they’d waited for an isolated stretch of road. Chevy Caprice and a high-end Toyota. The message he sent back at the food court in the mall had been received.
He was working the Ford hard, letting it out, bringing it back in, slow, fast, slow again, learning its bounce and feed, but this was a little more testing than he anticipated.
The guy in front was good. Driver slowed enough to let him pass and he did, but then he let it ride, kept his distance. Knowing this wouldn’t be an easy take down, and in no hurry.
The one in the rear car was there for good reason. A tightness to his steering. And he didn’t hug his speed, he’d inch it up, fall back, whenever Driver picked up or dropped a few mphs.
Take him out first.
Driver slowed, started to speed, then slowed again and slammed the brakes. Watched the car behind try to stop and realize it couldn’t. Watched it cut to the left and, knowing that’s what he’d do, swung toward it. The car cut hard again to avoid collision and, losing its center, careened off the road, came within a hair’s breadth of turning over, came back down on four wheels rocking. Out of the count for the while if not for good.
So Driver whipped a quick U and floored it, heading back toward lights, traffic, civilization.
Aggressors are like cats: they’ll instinctively follow if you run. And that can give you the edge.
In the rearview he watched the lights of the lead car come around, watched them move in fast. Man had himself a good ride under that bland Chevy hood. Driver could hear the throatiness of the engine going full-out as it approached.
Been a long time since he’d done this, and he had to wonder if it would be there when he needed it. The instincts were good, but. And buts are what do you in.
The wall just ahead, he recalled from before. Earth color, like most everything else out here, with a sketchy lizard or cactus panel every few yards, the whole thing maybe 200 feet in length. Basically a sound baffle, houses, a small community, packed in beyond.
A median strip separated the lanes. There was fencing, but there were also gaps left for police, service vehicles and such. At the next gap, Driver turned hard, crossed the median and, with gravel spitting behind him, plunged into oncoming traffic. Not a lot of cars, but still dodgy. And horns aplenty. In the rearview mirror he saw his pursuer take down a stretch of fencing as he followed.
The wall, a couple of feet of packed ground, a low curb. If he could get the speed up, hit the curb just right…
Like that first gig back at the studio.
Driver cut left, coming in as straight as he could to the curb, then at the last moment hauled the wheels hard to the right. His head banged against the car’s roof as he struck the curb-and he was up. The left wheels came back down, and came down rough, but on the wall, with the Ford running al
ong at a fifty-degree tilt.
Then, as the Chevy closed in, Driver swung right again, bouncing back onto the highway and running full-tilt toward him. You haven’t quite registered what’s going on, you see a car rocketing toward you, you react. The Caprice slewed to the median, careened off the fencing and back onto the road, clipping a battered passenger car with its front end, a bright, new-looking van with its tail, as it spun.
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 threeor 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.
