Driven: The Sequel to Drive (6 page)

The card was thick stock, light blue with embossed silver letters, just the name, James Beil. Inscribed on the back in handwriting every bit as precise as the printing:

Fifth Corner, off 16th Ave, 9 p.m
. A little over two hours away.

“Everything good?” It was the guy with the clown-puke BKs.

“
Está bien.
”

“We were not far. We were watching, all of us.”

Like most statements, Driver thought, you could read it more than one way. But he nodded and said that was good to hear.

The man started off but, before Driver could put down the wrench, turned. “We had your back, is what I mean to say.”

— • —

Beil lifted his cup. Steam passed like a sweep of rain across his glasses. He blinked. “Do you know who I am?”

“Not the sous chef, I take it.”

“Hardly.”

“No clue, then.”

“Good. As it should be.” He downed a slug of the coffee. “Something we appear to have in common.” He drank again and set the cup down empty. “Among other things, I own this restaurant. I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for you, thought we might have a drink first. Your preference is single malt, I believe.” A waiter stepped up carrying a crystal tumbler. “From Orkney. This Scotch has spent an appreciable time in its cask. Waiting, as it were?”

Driver lifted the glass in thanks and sipped, held it in his mouth.

“Age twelve, you watched your mother kill your father. You then lived for four years with a couple named Smith in Tucson—they are still in the house, by the way. Leaving with no good-byes, you became a stunt driver in L.A., one of the best, they say. I have seen your work, and would agree. It was the
other
career that didn’t go so well.

“You fall away from sight at that point, leaving bodies behind this time instead of a home. You surface a bit later, a new day, a new city, as Paul West. Years pass and again you vanish, only to pop up—or to stay low, it might better be said—here.

“Ah…and here it is.”

Driver thinking back to what Felix said,
they know more about me than anyone should
, as waiters lowered plates and platters onto the table. A pasta dish with clams, veal in a wine sauce studded with bright red peppers and capers, a cutting board of prosciutto and cheeses, a bowl of salad. Glasses set out for white and red wines. Sparkling water.

“Eat. Please.”

Driver tried to remember the last time he had done so. He’d had a breakfast burrito, what, yesterday, eleven or so in the morning? Once he’d served himself, the waiters conveyed the platters down the table to Beil, who spooned out small portions from each. They ate without speaking. Sounds gradually subsided past the doors to this private dining room.

“The restaurant is closing early tonight,” Beil said.

Looking around, Driver realized that the waiters had withdrawn. They were alone.

Beil finished with a final bite of salad, placed the fork on his plate diagonally, and crossed it with his knife. He poured himself fresh tea from a tulip-shaped pitcher. Sweet tea in the Southern fashion, Driver had discovered. He’d put the glass down and not touched it since.

“I grew up in Texas,” Beil said. “Not in the piney woods and not in any town, but in the wild, unclaimed stretches—unclaimable, really. Bare land every way you looked, and the horizon so far off it may as well have been The Great Hereafter. My mother and father were there but forever busy, he as foreman for one of the huge ranches, she as librarian for the county library in the nearest town. I had my room at the rear of the house, all but a separate domicile, and there I went about feeling my way along the years, putting together a life from pieces of things, shiny things, discarded things, useless things, that I found around me, much as a bird builds its nest.

“In many ways it was like living in another country, another world. Even the air was different. The wind would shift, and you’d smell cattle, their rankness, their manure, coming from the ranch where my father worked, miles and miles away. Smells of earth, mold, stale water, and rot as well. And dust. Always the smell of dust. I’d lie in bed at night in absolute darkness thinking this might be a little what it was like being buried. I knew I had to get out of there.”

A crash sounded far off, back in the kitchen perhaps. Beil’s eyes didn’t go to the sound, but a smile came close to touching down on his lips. “Do you believe that some are born with a proclivity, a talent? For music, say, or for leadership?”

Driver nodded. “Only a few find it.”

“Exactly. Mine, I realized early on, was for problem solving. But I was also something of a contrarian, not as much interested in confronting problems as I was in finding a way
around
them. It would have made of me an extremely poor scientist, the discipline at which I first dabbled, but in other pursuits….Well, there you are, as they say.”

“And here I am.”

“Wondering why, no doubt.”

“It was an interesting invitation.”

“We work with what we have. You once drove, and now you drive again. Is that recidivism? Adaptive behavior? Or simply returning to what you are?”

“Yes
would probably answer all those.”

“People attempting to kill you might well be construed a problem.”

“For which you have the solution.”

“Not at all. The problem is yours.” All sound from the restaurant had ceased. Through a small pane of glass in the door Driver saw the lights go out. “A solution, though—this could be another thing we have in common.”

A
fterward, he drove to South Mountain. Well past
eleven, and not a lot of activity out here, two or three convenience stores, a scatter of Mexican drive-throughs along Baseline. He found a boulder halfway up and sat looking down at the city’s lights. Planes came and went from the airport ten or twelve miles away, ripples in the dark and silence and boundless sky.

Driver didn’t want to go back to the new place, trashed or not. He couldn’t think of any place he did want to go. What he wanted was to get back in the car and drive. Drive away from all this. Or just drive. Like the guy back at the garage had said: just you and the road, leaving all the rest of this shit behind.

But he couldn’t. And what Beil had proposed—once they’d snaked past
I work alone
and
They’ll keep coming
—seemed, if not the best alternative, then certainly a feasible one.

“The people who engaged me—”

“As a problem solver.”

“Exactly. Like all of us, primarily they wish to restore order, to have things the way they were. But now there are imbalances. Problems with those moving the pieces around.”

“None of which has anything to do with me.”

“Your presence has introduced wholly unexpected variables. You’ve become a crux, of a sort.”

Driver’s attention went to what looked to be a collision down on Baseline. First, headlights moving toward one another too fast, then a hitch in time, then the lights gone suddenly askew. Did he hear the crash, a horn, seconds later? He remembered a night years ago back in L.A. when he sat in Manny’s banged-to-hell Mercedes on the northern flank of Baldwin Hills, in oil fields that appeared deserted but might for all he knew still be functioning. The gate was open, and they’d entered along a dirt road. The entire city lay before them. Santa Monica, the Wilshire District, downtown. Hollywood Hills in the distance.

“The diminutive fires of the planet,” Manny had said. “What Neruda called them. All those lights. The ones inside you, too. Your house is burning, that’s all you see. But get up here, get some distance, it’s just another tiny fire.

“We go through our lives agonizing over income or what others think, getting wound up about Betty LaButt’s new CD, who shot or fucked Insert-name-here on some TV show, or the latest skinny on the latest idiot with cheekbones who’s making a run for office, and all the while, governments go on killing their citizens, children die from food additives and advertising, women get beaten or worse, meth labs now take over the rural south the way kudzu once did, and we’re getting lies spoon fed to us at every turn.

“The most interesting thing about us as a species may be all the ways we figure out so we don’t have to think about those things.”

This from a the man who spent most of his life writing crap movies. Well, mostly crap anyway.

Emergency vehicles pulled in below, so yes, a collision.

Driver stood. The boulder he’d been sitting on was all but covered with paint-sprayed tags, scribblings, and knife etchings—Manny would have insisted upon calling them modern petroglyphs. In the dark Driver could only make out that they were there, not distinguish them. Tags, he figured, tags and hearts and dates and jumbled-up names. And if he could read them, they’d make about as much sense as everything else.

— • —

He drove back in along Southern and Buckeye, then spilled over to Van Buren and, surprised to see lights on at the garage, turned in. The door was unlocked. As he stepped through, a head leaned out from behind the hood of a bottle-green BMW.

“Everything all right?” he said.

“Would I be under here if it was?”

“I mean…” He looked around. The only lights were two floods over her space. Strange to have the place so silent. “It’s late.”

“And quiet.”

His face must have carried the question.

“You tilted your head, the way people do when they’re listening—just for a second there. Nice, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“Love it. Being alone in the night, nothing much else in the world except what I’m working on.” She came out from behind the BMW. “I have a key. Lupa’s daughter and I, we went to school together. Anyway, this monster’s almost done.”

“Yours?”

“No way I could afford it. Or want it. But I can get it running smooth again, and the guy who owns it can’t do that. You notice the sidewalks just up the way?”

“Not really.”

“WPA, from 1928. More cracks than cement, so the city finally decides to repair them. One look and you can tell the old good stuff from the new crappy stuff.”

“I’ve got some poorly repaired cracks myself.”

“Not the right vintage.”

“A
little
earlier, true. Interesting thing to notice about the neighborhood.”

“Everything’s interesting. You just have to look closely.”

“And most people don’t.”

She shrugged. “Their loss.”

He was careful not to move closer. And while she seemed wholly at ease, body language told him she was every bit as watchful and aware. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

“You never had it.”

Caught without a response, he shook his head.

“You have legal motives in mind, say—oh, I don’t know, applying for a marriage license, checking my credit—put down Stephanie. Real life, I’m Billie. Long story, not very interesting.”

“I thought everything was.”

She turned to put down the feeler gauge she was holding and turned back. “You have possibilities, Eight.”

When he held his hands out and apart in mock supplication, she pointed to the stall where he usually worked. Right. Number eight.