Driven: The Sequel to Drive (8 page)

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 three- or 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.”