by James Sallis
“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.”
“What kind of work?”
“Can’t really say. Doesn’t happen in my yard. He liaisons with a junior partner.”
“And that’s where the call, your call, came from? To send the money out with Donnie?”
Bresh nodded. “Richard Cole, that’s who you want to talk to. You can catch him at the office tomorrow, follow him home. Or—” He picked the drink up again and turned toward what was presumably the kitchen, speaking as he went. “Or I could just give you his address.”
— • —
“Don’t care for cards, do you?”
Bill didn’t look at him. Another goddamned beautiful day outside the window. The window, of course, was sealed.
“Or TV. Or much of anything ’round here, you come right down to it. Am I right?”
Wendell turned back from the blinds he’d opened. Sunlight fell like a sloppy drunk across the floor.
“’S all about choices, Mr. Bill. I can choose not to be a crackhead dog like my mother was. You can choose not to lay up in there like a man who’s dying when we both know you’re not. Not hardly.”
Wendell laughed. Lot of chest in that laugh.
“Choices. Listen to me, I sound like one of the social workers always giving ol’ mom their good advice. Not to mention, a few of ’em, six or ten inches of hard dick.”
Despite himself, Bill laughed.
“There it is. Not something dead and dying men do a lot, laugh. Good thing, too. You imagine how noisy graveyards would get to be?”
Bill sat on the edge of the bed. Wendell was handing him his shoes. Rubbed at the tops with his shirt sleeve as he did so.
“Tell you what. ’Bout ten minutes, they’re gonna be starting up a gospel singalong out there in the day room. I saw the choir members when they got off the bus, be one hell of a racket made. And I’m not much more of a mind to sit through that than you are. What say you and me go for a walk? Get good earth under our feet.”
— • —
Back his first year in town, he and Shannon were on the set of Doomtown Days, a post-apocalypse film. Studios were turning out a lot of them then, mostly on shoestring budgets. Reluctantly heroic, barely dressed man or woman stalking across the wasteland alone, communities gone feral, automotive equivalents of zip guns, zombie sheep, that sort of thing.
Shannon had just said that the director looked to be all of sixteen years old. “Kid musta clipped out an ad from the back of a comic book. Want to direct movies? Sent in his two dollars.”
There was a guy hanging around the edges, wearing a print shirt, creased high-pocket trousers. Neither young nor old, good-looking or plain, nothing to draw attention to him. Driver pointed, asked who’s that?
“Danny Louvin. Everything you see here goes back to him.”
Driver looked again. Put a Your-Name-Here ID bracelet on him, a puka-shell necklace, he’d win the award for uncool. “That’s the money man?”
“The money man’s sitting over there in the producer tent. Knit shirt, leather loafers? Danny’s the one who keeps it running, makes it all work.”
“He doesn’t seem to be doing anything.”
“That’s how good he is.”
Driver remembered that as he drove out Cave Creek Road. Clump after clump of housing developments squatted on what within easy memory had been bare desert. He wondered if, late afternoons, the coyotes still came out, and what they must think about all this. Dark swatches showed on the hills where clouds blocked sunlight, making the landscape look like parts from two different worlds hastily patched together.
He was thinking about the people you see and the ones you don’t, the ones who really run things. Take this too far, it blooms to paranoia, you start finding conspiracies in how cereal boxes get lined up on the shelf. Consider it too little, you’re a fool.
Bresh believed that he ran the office at GBS, he was the one who kept things together. Maybe he was. And what about Beil, who claimed to be merely a broker, an arranger, a middleman? How far did his influence extend? Was there a wizard for every curtain? Or just one, behind all the curtains?
Billboards advertising a new community under construction out this way showed a string of faces from infant to elderly and read The Better Life You’ve Been Looking For. Driver remembered something else Shannon had told him, the story of a traveller who gave his life because he wanted to visit a town that was like all others in its area, but forbidden. He remembered it because the writer had been there when Shannon told the story. Two days later that same situation showed up in the ongoing rewrite of the script.
Richard Cole’s home was green stucco and had fake logs or at least fake stubs of logs built high into the outside walls. Plastic barn owls stood at each corner of the roof, searching the skies. Two cars in the driveway, a midnight blue Lexus and a red two-seater BMW.
No door bell, but a knocker shaped like a bear’s head. Driver used it then stepped aside, to the edge of the peephole’s sweep, turning to look away, as if in appreciation of the landscape.
“Who is it?” came from inside.
Driver didn’t respond. After a moment the door started open. Driver waited. When it was fully open, and the man stood there, anger and presumption spilling off his face, Driver took a single step forward and hit him once, hard as he could, directly in the forehead. Watched him stagger back and go down, saw the other guy come up from the couch.
“Bad idea,” Driver said.
The guy sat down. The two of them were dressed almost like twins, loose-fitting tan slacks, blue broadcloth shirts, soft, costly leather slip-ons. As Cole got back to his feet, this one slid furtively down to reach for the cell phone in what had been designed a century ago as a watch pocket.
“Worse idea,” Driver said. The guy held up both hands, palms out.
Cole looked at his friend, made a disgusted face, and looked back. His forehead was turning dark. “Who are you?”
“A delivery boy. Like Donnie.”
No response.
“Donnie—who, at your urging, carried a padded envelope into Mail N More this morning?”
Still nothing.
“What you’re going to tell me is where your urge came from.”
“Get out of my house.”
Driver turned as if to go, then spun back, right foot hooking Cole’s knee, pulling his legs out from under him. The man went down with a loud crack that probably heralded concussion. Driver planted the foot on his stomach.
“Please,” Driver said.
Cole didn’t try to move, but his eyes were going everywhere, north, south, east, west. White ceiling. Beige walls. Furniture legs. Ivory carpet. His friend’s feet showing beneath the couch. None of it any help.
That’s how suddenly the world you were sure you understood can change, Driver thought.
— • —
Cities were so various, they wore so many different faces. Leaving the easy, spare opulence of Cave Creek and Carefree behind, he drove in past Deer Valley Road and the federal prison to the dry-stalk stretches of outer Phoenix, and it was as though he drove through not one but half a dozen cities stacked beside and atop one another. Churches had re-upped as tax offices. A huge store and lot once given over to selling farm machinery was now a swap meet. The Dairy Queen, nothing changed but the sign, had become Mariscos Juarez.
Turn left at a gated community, two blocks away people are hauling mattresses down outside stairs and cooking on driveways in vats the size of cannibal pots.
Darkness was well on its way, spreading its hand flat against the city, as he drove back in. Billie had offered her uncle’s place to him. “For as long as you need it,” she’d said, Uncle Clayton currently residing several thousand miles away “helping repair some of the damage we’d done earlier,” whatever that meant. She’s saying for as long as you need it,
but he’s thinking until they find me there, and declined. So he was at an extended-stay hotel two blocks up and another over, a knight’s move, from Colter and Twelfth. One room with a single entrance and the windows bolted shut, but they weren’t anymore. And he had full view of the approach, driveway, parking lot.
He also had a diner across the street, where he and Billie were meeting. Enough red—roof outside, booth covering, tiles, seats at the counter, aprons, napkins—to send you away color blind, but good, cheap food. Waitresses, like the diner itself, looked to be from the fifties. They took your order, stepped away, turned and came back with your food, that’s how it felt.
Billie had come directly from the garage in work clothes and boots, grease under her nails, a Nike swoosh of it down one cheek. Everyone in the diner gave the impression of having barely arrived from one place while being eager to depart for another. Feet fidgeted under tables. Eyes swung toward windows.
Not just here, Driver told himself. The whole world’s like that now.
He remembered standing over Bernie Rose’s body in L.A., there at frontier’s end, as Bernie’s final breath hissed out. Remembered getting back in the stripped-down Datsun, feeling comforted by its throb, thinking that he drove, that was what he did, that was what he’d always do.
“Interesting group,” Billie said. “Starting with the waitresses’ costumes.”
“If you mean the hair and all, I don’t think that’s a costume.”
“Uh-huh. And the cook?” Periodically his head had appeared in the gunwale through which plates passed from kitchen to servers. Thin hair parted severely at the side, nose that seemed to be drawing the face relentlessly forward. “Too many black and white movies?”
Just then a group of five, mixed men and women, came in from some affair or another, made out as zombies. Torn clothes, pasty white faces, blackened eyes, splatters of food color, beads of drool. All of them staggered about, arms flailing as though subject to a different musculature, a different gravity. They took a corner booth, where one of them began quietly to chant Flesh! Flesh!
Driver was halfway through his Breakfast-Any-Time. He put his fork down and said, “I need to tell you something.”
“Wondered when you’d get to it.”
“That obvious, huh?”
“Not really.”
“But?”
She shrugged.
“Fair enough.”
And he told her. Not so much about the older life, just the bare bones of that. But about how he had stood over Elsa’s body, how in the past he had killed, again and again. How killers were now coming for him. How they kept coming, might well keep coming for the rest of his life. How short that rest might be.
When he stopped talking, she looked away, then back at him.
“They’re eating salads,” she said. “The zombies.” She popped in the last bite of burger. “So in other words, you find yourself unaccountably pursued—fatally, you assume—by unapprehended forces.”
“Those are definitely other words. But yeah, that’s pretty much it. Hard to believe?”
“No, I’m just sitting here wondering what my philosophy teacher would have to say. Dark room, dark hat. Shoulder to the door against an unseen, silent, unknown resistance. An interesting man. ‘Actuality is something brute,’ he’d tell us. ‘There is no reason in it.’ Yet everything in his own life, how he talked, how he taught, the way he dressed, seemed nailed to logic’s door.”
Billie smiled up as the waitress refilled her coffee. Looking back to him, Billie’s eyes dropped to the waitress’ name tag. “Thanks, JoAnne.” Then, as JoAnne moved on: “What I’m thinking is, you could use some help with this.”
— • —
Late morning, Raymond Phelps was half asleep in the reclining lawn chair on his patio, half thinking about where to grab lunch, Thai maybe, or one of those crushed grilled sandwiches at the Cuban place. Something took his attention, woke him. A sound, insect, hunger. Something.
When he opened his eyes a face hovered upside down above his.
“You don’t want to be moving,” the face said.
And when he did, a hammer struck him full force in the belly.
“That’s why you don’t want to.” The hammer and the hand holding it came into view. “Found this over by the wall. A long time ago you must have cared, worked at trying to keep things shipshape. Now just look at it. Rust, handle rotting. How much can you tell about a man from his tools, Ray?”
“Who the fuck—”
The hammer struck again before he could finish. He vomited, coffee, juice and stomach acids searing his throat.
The man waited till he was done.
“Eight inches to either side, you’ve got gravel for a hip. Ten inches south…”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to understand that this is not going to be a conversation. I’ll ask questions. You’ll answer. Briefly, directly.”
Raymond started to lift a hand to wipe his mouth, stopped and looked back at the man.
“Go ahead.” Again, he waited. “We’re good?”
Raymond nodded.
“Two days ago you called Richard Cole, had him arrange for a money drop out in Glendale.”
Raymond nodded. More coffee, juice and acid was at the gate.
“That money was to pay talent brought in from Dallas.”
“Yes.”
“Who was the hit on?’
“I’m guessing you know that.” He vomited again, but all that came up were some strings of thin, gluey fluid.
“Did you have a photo?”
“A description. Vehicle. Probable locations.”
“Who placed the order?”
Raymond started to talk, stopped when he thought he was going to vomit but managed to swallow it down. “Can we go inside?”
The man stood from his crouch, waving the hammer toward the patio door.
The office inside was everything Raymond wasn’t: well appointed, orderly, efficient, clean. Metal shelving covered two walls, folders aligned and held in place by letter boxes, numbers on the shelves, index tabs protruding along the bottom of the folders here and there. Glancing into the kitchen beyond—smeared counters, greasy stovetop, ragtag piles of dishes—Driver was newly astonished at the contrast.
He looked back at the shelves.
“This is what the world looked like before computers took over.”
“Computer files, yeah. Easy to copy, easy to erase. And I have duplicates of all this hidden away.”
“Insurance?”
“Insurance, memory, archives. Whatever word suits you.”
Raymond pointed questioningly to the shelves. When Driver nodded, he walked over and plucked a folder. No scanning, no hesitation. Went right to it. Brought it back and handed it over.
Driver flipped it open. Email transcripts. Account records and financial paperwork. Reports from credit agencies, a Better Business Bureau, a licensing organization. Photocopies of handwritten notes that looked to have originated in a daybook or pocket notebook. Membership lists.
“Won’t take you there, but it’s a map.”
“Not someone you’ve worked with before, then.”
“And a lot of blinds. I always look in the water, deep as I can. Same as you, I’m sure. Near as I can make out, this one came by way of a lawyer in or around New Orleans.”
“No idea who’s behind it?”
“Someone with a shitload of money.” Raymond held out his hand for the folder. “Give me a minute. I’ll run copies.”
— • —
“There’s a couple old running buddies down that way I could send round.”
“Tattoos may not work here, Felix.”
“Doyle’s will. Semper Fi. And the leg’s prosthetic. Heartbreaker of a limp when he wants. The one that’ll be with him…Never says much, but he asks a question, you’re just naturally inclined to answer.”
“Sounds good.”
“I’ll get them on it, get back
to you when.”
“Care, my friend.”
“I’ll take it.”
Billie had her head on the seat, eyes closed, when he climbed back in the car. They’d tried multiple places. Now they were out behind a long-closed bowling alley on its way to becoming a flea market and swap mart. Workers were grinding down pink stucco with belt sanders.
“Your friend always that hard to find?”
