James Sallis - Driven

“But it wasn’t. I walked away.”

“Right.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Sanderson said.

“Not the kind of sense you’ve been trying to make,” Bill said to Driver. “You can’t find a straight line because there isn’t one. There’s more than one and they don’t meet. They’re parallel.”

Cruising away cross-city, Camelback in his rearview mirror, Driver saw a billboard, one of those horrendous new digital ones that changed every few minutes. Jesus Died For Your Sins, it said, above a stylized figure that could be rabbi, priest, or big-hair preacher, hand raised in supplication. That went away to be supplanted by the close-up of a man who had the look of running-for-office about him. Probably born with the look, but he’d worked on it some. Wide face, sincere eyes, hair perfectly parted. Don’t Make A Move Till You Talk To Us, the legend read. Sims and Barrow, Attorneys at Law.

Driver laughed.

Shannon would have loved it.

Minutes ago, he was thinking about Bernie Rose. Now Shannon. Thinking about how almost everyone he knew was gone.

About Elsa.

That smile she got when he said or did something really dumb. Her voice beside him in the night. The drowned-dog look of her hair as she stepped out of the shower and the way she looked that last day, propped against the wall of the empty cafe, blood pumping from her chest.

The cell phone rang. Driver flipped it open.

Felix. “You know someone named Blanche?”

“No.” Driver pulled up at a light behind an ancient van whose rear doors were covered with stickers. They’d been there so long that none of them were legible. Shapes and blurred patches of color. “Yes.”

Blanche’s shoulders lying across the bathroom door’s threshhold, the pool of blood lapping toward him. Not much of her head left in there.

And he was back at the Motel 6 not far from here, standing again at the window thinking it had to be Blanche, no other way that Chevy was down there in the parking lot.

Then the shotgun blast.

Blanche and her accent, saying she was from New Orleans, sounding like Bensonhurst.

There it was: Brooklyn again.

“Blanche Davis,” Felix said.

“Not the name she was using.”

“Lady had a casual way with names. Blanche Dunlop, Carol Saint-Mars, Betty Ann Proulx. Pretty much a moving target, too. Dallas, St. Louis, Portland, Jersey City. Scams, hard hustles. Coupla hinky marriages in there. She got around.”

“And what, her name just popped up?”

“Not quite. Doyle had to kind of stick his finger in there and pull. You know.” Felix was quiet for a moment. “There’s more.”

“Okay.”

“Your man Dunaway?”

Driver waited.

“He’s in town.”

“Where?”

“About four feet away from me. Want to come say hello?”

Driver had gone less than a mile before traffic slowed almost to a halt as one of Phoenix’s epic dust storms rolled in. You felt it at the base of your throat, behind your eyelids, could barely make out the car in front of you, or road’s edge and the banks beyond. Dust burrowed in like guilt or regret, you couldn’t get away from it, couldn’t get rid of it. And Driver couldn’t get rid of thoughts of Bernie Rose. He sat in the landlocked car thinking about that last time, how Bernie had asked if he thought we choose our lives and he’d said no, what it felt like was, they’re forever seeping up under us.

“You don’t think we change?” Driver had asked as they walked out of the restaurant.

“Change? No. What we do is adapt. Get by. Time you’re ten, twelve years old, it’s pretty much set in you, what you’re going to be like, what your life’s going to be.”

Moments before he had to put Bernie down.

So maybe Bernie was right.

Driver pulled into the parking lot just as the storm abated. People would be sneezing wee mudballs and wiping dirt out of every crease and crack in themselves, their houses, cars, and property for a week.

Not a Motel 6, but its kissing cousin. Spiderwebbed asphalt patched with tar, roof drooping above the second-floor walkway, blinds cockeyed in windows. Three cars in the lot, two of them questionably mobile. A cafe and bar sat to other side, back a bit. Take a brave man to hit that cafe, but Driver guessed the bar did good business. Run-down apartments all around, bus stop across the street.

Room 109 was at the end, abutting a slump block wall with grout that looked like poorly healed scars and, past that, an abandoned convenience store, every possible surface scribbled over with tags.

Guy has money to burn, he winds up here? Driver thought.

But not his idea, most likely.

Slats in the blinds fell back into place as Driver approached. Felix opened the door without speaking.

Inside, a man in his late sixties sat watching CNN, a news report about upcoming democratic elections somewhere halfway across the world. Driver tried to remember the last time he’d seen a seersucker suit. The man was sipping whiskey from a plastic cup, not cheap stuff from the smell of it. So was Felix.

“Doyle.” Felix nodded toward the corner. Doyle had light blue eyes, an expression that could be a wide smile or pain. Looked younger than Driver knew he must be. Mom’s favorite, a good all-American boy.

Doyle nodded.

The older man glanced away from the TV. “You’re the driver.” Then to Doyle: “He doesn’t look quite dead.”

“No sir. I suppose I did stretch the truth just a little.”

Felix poured more for himself, then for the man in the chair. “Doyle persuaded Mr. Dunaway, by way of an anonymous phone call, that those pursuing you had finally been successful, and that you’d left behind something in which he might well be interested. ‘Something to do with Blanche?’ Mr. Dunaway asked.

“Doyle followed him, picked him up here at Sky Harbor. Too many walls and fences back in New Orleans, the need was to get him away.”

“And out here to the golden west,” Doyle said. “He came along without protest. At the airport.”

The man said, “Rabbits that survive know when to go to ground.”

Driver moved around to meet his eyes. “You’re a rabbit, Mr. Dunaway?”

“A survivor. And surrounded by foxes. Like him.” Dunaway pointed to the TV. Driver turned to look. An elderly man with his arms in the air, circled by others, all young, wearing rags and tatters of uniforms and carrying automatic weapons. “Strange missions. We’re all chockful of strange missions. Often we don’t even know what they are. But they push us, they ride us.”

“You’re saying you didn’t choose to pursue me?”

“Not at all. That was one thing I understood. But the rest…”

“Who was Blanche, sir?”

“Only a sweet, troubled girl. They’re everywhere. All around us.”

He said nothing more. They listened to a car pull into the lot outside, sit with speakers blasting, and pull away.

“Why are you trying to kill me, Mr. Dunaway?”

The screen showed hundreds of birds rising from a lake. It was as though the surface of the lake itself were drifting skyward. Dunaway glanced there, then back.

“Kill you? Not at all. Quite the contrary.”

He finished his Scotch and set the cup on the floor.

“The story’s not much different from what you hear from parents everywhere, We did what we could. We could see her getting wilder every year, every day. Small things at first, stealing from friends, shoplifting, then gone for days at a time. One night she’s passed out in bed with all her clothes on and I’m looking in her purse hoping I won’t find drugs, and I don’t. I find a gun. Not long after that, she was gone for good.”

“Blanche was your daughter.”

Dunaway nodded. “We knew she was bad, just a lost person, hurtful, destructive. But that made no difference.”