James Sallis - Driven

They went over the wall together, into the lot of a quickie car service long closed down. Someone, kids most likely, had piled up a bunch of used tires back here and set them afire. Been a while, but the smell had moved in to stay.

“That does bring back memories,” Felix said, looking at the mound. “Your ride?”

“Over by Food City.”

They walked that way.

Half an hour ago Driver had returned to his room to find that things were not as he left them. Did their best to keep it from showing, but they’d been in the drawers where clothes had been refolded, his razor and toothbrush were out of place by an inch, and there was a faint odor, like an aftertaste, of sweet cologne. The smell’s what tipped him.

He went downstairs to the front desk. A stocky twentyish woman was on duty, her arms so thickly tattooed that she seemed to be wearing comic books for sleeves. She looked up. “Room got messed with, huh?”

He nodded.

“Dark blue sedan parked ’round back. Police, or claim to be.”

“See a badge?”

“You mean like the one I could buy off the street for the price of a cup of highlife coffee?”

When Driver pointed to the doorway leading back to storage and services, she nodded.

“No one back there?”

“Rarely.”

Minutes later Driver exited the rear door onto the parking lot pushing a steel cart piled with everything heavy he could find. Nested metal trashcans, five cinder blocks, a footlocker, an unopened box of foot-long rebar. He made as though to go left, toward the dumpsters. Both heads in the blue sedan swivelled to look, then turned back. When they did, Driver broke to a run, slamming the cart into the sedan so hard that he all but fell from the rebound. The passenger door buckled. The man on his side couldn’t get out. The other one came at him over the top of the car.

Driver pulled the cart back, caught the man between it and the car as he clambered down. The other one was out of the car now too, but that had to wait. Driver pulled the cart back, slammed it again into the man. Then again. And again. Till he heard a voice.

“Think we’re done here, friend.”

When Driver pulled the cart back, his man fell. Blood snailed from his mouth. His legs twitched.

Felix stood over the other one. “Heard the commotion back this way, occurred to me you might not be far off.”

Just before they’d gone over the wall, an elderly security guard had stepped around from the front of the building carrying a walkie-talkie. Seeing the wreck and the two on the ground, he’d stopped, raised both hands over his head, and quick-stepped back the way he came.

Now they were crossing the street to Food City. A Gran Torino, expertly streeted out and bearing a sprawl of exotic birds and equally exotic women painted in metallic blues and yellows pulled up at the light, bass pounding such that Driver and Felix could feel it coming up their legs from the pavement. The battered Toyota next to it had Rochelle, Juan, and Stephanie painted in script on the rear window, with tiny crosses beneath each.

“Still hanging in with the ride, anyway,” Felix said as they approached the Fairlane. “Even if you can’t seem to hold on to a residence for shit.”

As they walked, Felix told him what he’d come to tell him, before what he called that little mash-up in the parking lot.

“Doyle was on his best behavior, even made an appointment. Went limping in on time and took his seat politely in the waiting area. Plastic that looked like leather, he said, stuck to your skin, crackled every time you moved. Woodreau and Levin, Attorneys at Law. Out in Metairie. Lore was with him. Pretending to read a book, Doyle said, you shoulda seen it. Receptionist kept looking over at him.

“Doyle gets back there and it’s some kid, looks like he’s sixteen. An associate, he says. ‘Didn’t come all this way to talk to an associate,’ Doyle tells him. ‘I assure you,’ the kid begins, and Doyle stops him. ‘Why don’t you save us both some worry and go bring back a grown man?’

“He does, and Doyle apologizes, tells this grown man how sometime when his leg gets to hurting he just turns a little cranky, you know? Asks the man if he served and the man says yes. ‘Navy?’ Doyle says, ‘you got that look about you.’ Man nods and asks how he can be of help.”

Felix had stopped at that point and said, “Amazing what simple courtesy can accomplish.”

“Absolutely. The Marine way.”

“Took him less than thirty minutes. And with only a little insistence. Didn’t even have to call in Lore, boy stayed out there pretending to read his book and smiling back at the receptionist whenever she’d look his way.

“Lawyers were blind. You knew that. Brokers, as Mr. Levin himself put it, to which Doyle responded that broke-ing was something he got forced to do as well, upon occasion. That, he said, had Mr. L’s attention.

“It was at that point that Mr. L thought it wise to call security and Doyle disagreed to such extent that Mr. L’s hand is now in a cast. Doyle was thinking maybe he should drop by again, be the first to sign it.”

“Probably not.”

“Yeah, probably.”

Someone behind them had said excuse me and when they turned, parting, two middle-aged men in shorts and sandals stepped between them. One held aloft a whitewashed cross, the other a four-foot wooden sword.

“There goes the human race and its entire history in a nutshell,” Felix said. He and Driver turned under the overpass and walked on.

“Doyle wants you to know how tracking this guy resembled looking for one specific snake in the Atchafalaya swamp.”

“But he did it.”

“Your man’s a cipher,” Felix said. “A businessman, one of those whose footprint shows up all over the place. Owns a car dealership, a theater or two, a chain of sporting goods stores, an import company, high-end wine shops, a dozen others. No trouble with the law, half a dozen court cases in civil court, mostly settled, no hands across the sea or across a checkered tablecloth with Sinatra singing. No apparent connection to you. Gerald Dunaway.”

“And he’s the one who wants to shut me down?”

Felix nodded. “That’s where it starts. One step off Dunaway’s porch, though, and riders start showing up.”

“Hired help.”

“Maybe just that. Hitchhikers, pilot fish. Or could be shared interests, whatever they might be. Alliances, coalitions, all those gentrified, uptown words for gangs. Doyle’s still poking at the anthill.”

They were at the car now. The door hadn’t fit right or worked well since the set-to with the Chevy Caprice and Toyota out by Globe. Driver kept meaning to fix it. He’d done the essential engine and suspension resets but let the body work hang. When he pulled the door open, it made a sound like swords coming out of scabbards in bad fantasy movies.

“Nice,” Felix said. “Distinctive.” He ran his hand along the door’s edge. “Interesting thing about this Dunaway is how he came into the money, the bulk of it anyway. Doyle has a friend, a service buddy, who works in the sheriff’s office over in Jefferson Parish. Says Dunaway’s one of those who lived uptown, stuck it out through Katrina. And afterwards, right after, he made a fortune or three selling food and water to the un- and re-located. No one knows where the food and water came from for sure, but rumors have them as diverted relief and humanitarian goods. After that, he started buying up huge sections of the city for pennies-all of this paper-legal, of course.”

“Sounds like carpetbaggers.”

“What I said. Doyle claims that New Orleans grows its own, always has. No need to bus them in.”

“This Dunaway married? Family? Children?”

“Wife died in 1998, accidental death according to official reports, suicide according to some unofficial ones. No one else we can tag.”