James Sallis - Driven

“I’m sorry.”

“You were with her.”

“When she was killed. Yes sir, I was.”

“Wasn’t likely to play out any other way. Her life.”

“No.”

“We did what we could. Once my wife was gone…” Dunaway broke off eye contact to look back at the screen. “Blanche was my only child. You took her from me.”

“No sir, the man who did that died moments after she did.”

“I’d been searching for her. One of the private detectives I hired came to my house to tell me he’d found her. Bubble of hope, for a moment there. I remember he was wearing jeans-pressed jeans with a sport coat. And a shiny shirt, like satin. Blanche had died two weeks before.”

No one said anything. Doyle watched the door and window, Felix watched the old man. Felix had no expression on his face. Dunaway’s sadness filled the room like an unseen gas.

“I wasn’t trying to kill you, young man. Quite the contrary. I wanted you alive, to go on feeling what it’s like to have the person most important to you taken away, to carry that around for the rest of your life.”

“Elsa? Those two men came for Elsa, not for me?”

“That was the plan. I don’t think they realized who, or what, you are. Few apparently do. And the plan…”

All became quiet again. Two or three rooms away, a telephone rang.

“Never mind the plan,” Dunaway said. “Things got complicated, the way things do. Might I have one last drink? I assume you brought me here to kill me.”

Felix poured and the old man drank. Onscreen, cameras panned across acre after acre of drifting dunes.

“Understand,” Dunaway said, “that this would come as a great relief.”

“He’s back in New Orleans.” Where, in a moment of strangeness Doyle had said, the magnolia blossoms smell like sweet human flesh.

“Cruelty or compassion?” Bill asked.

Driver shrugged.

Bill and Nate Sanderson had met him at a Filiberto’s on Indian School, and now they were walking along the canal, dodging crazed bikers and dogwalkers as evening settled about them. Bill was playing hooky again.

“So that part is over,” Bill said.

“For some time, really.”

“The world’s never what we think it is.”

They stopped to look down into the canal: three shopping carts had been neatly stacked like auditorium chairs, a worn blanket rolled, tied with strings into a facsimile human, and set atop them. Water flowed through the carts, up to the blanketman’s bent knees.

“Beautify your city,” Bill said. Then, “Nate and I had another talk with Bennie Capel. But this time at home, with his wife there. Bennie at home’s not the Bennie you see elsewhere. Janis and I go back a ways too.”

It took him a while, and it wasn’t in the neighborhood of smooth, but Bill stepped off the path and sat on the graveled side of the canal, legs down along the curve of the bank. Driver sat beside him. They looked back at Sanderson, who shook his head. “Bad knees.”

“It was a favor among old friends, from Dunaway’s life back in Brooklyn. A simple take-down, they’re in, they’re done, they’re out. But when it didn’t go that way, the bigger fish had to wonder what the hell happened. They dispatch two of their wing men and some guy in Bumfuck, Arizona wiped the street with them? That does not happen.”

“It was Elsa they were sent after.”

“Up to that point, yeah. But then the eyes go to you. They talk to Dunaway, they talk to his detectives, his informants. They get answers. And finally they make the connection. This Nino, and Bernie Rose. Two more of theirs, and from a long time back, but they got memories. Dunaway’s out of the picture now. Blood’s coming up in their eyes.”

“You do make an impression,” Sanderson said.

“I have Bennie’s word.” Bill picked up a piece of gravel and tossed it in. “His people won’t touch you. Doesn’t mean that when the plane from the east coast lands there won’t be others getting off it.”

“That much, I’d figured out.” Driver watched as an athletic shoe rafted lazily down the canal. For a moment he thought he saw a face peering out, a rat, a hamster. “You’re making this a habit, going over the wall.”

“Well…seems I’ve had my fill of spaghetti and jello. This time, I won’t be going back.”

“Good plan. What’ll you do?”

“Who knows? Play it by ear, see where life leads, I guess.”

“Still a good plan. And your friend Wendell? What’s he going to do without you?”

“Oh, I suspect we’ll be getting together for coffee. Maybe a night on the town, though at our age it’ll be a short night. And I suspect he won’t be long finding someone else to badger.”

“It’s been good getting to know you, Bill. Walking beside you.”

“Right back at you, young man. One thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go by and see my girl?”

Driver had tucked the Fairlane away on the middle level of a three-tier parking garage by an office building populated chiefly by doctors of the asthma, spinal injury, and cardiac sort. Lots of repeat business, lots of comings and goings, easy access and exit. As he emerged from the bare-bones stairwell, cement and featureless gray paint, a figure stepped from the shadow by his car.

“I thought I might come to you, this last time,” Beil said. “To thank you for your assistance. And to give you this.”

A business card embossed with only a phone number.

“Should you ever find yourself…at a total loss, let us say…call that number.”

Driver held up the card. “I did nothing to help you.”

“Ah, but you did, even if you are unable to see it. We so rarely understand what effects our actions have. Or will have. We in some strange power’s employ.”

A Ford F-150 swung up the ramp and too fast around the curve, braking just inches behind a Buick backing out. The Buick’s elderly driver also hit his brakes, and sat unmoving. The pickup’s horn blew.

“You’re a strange power?” Driver said.

“Not at all. Only one of many, indeed most, caught in between. Like you.” Beil stepped closer. “Ride lightly, as your friend Felix would say, and with an eye always to the mirror. Bennie’s tigers will not harm you. About the others, we can do nothing. For now.”

Driver nodded.

“And so, again,” Beil said, “you disappear. Though-” He held up a closed fist, turned it palm upward, opened it-“is that not, deep within yourself, down where the blind fish live, perhaps what you wanted all along?”

The pickup pulled into the space left vacant by the Buick. Its door opened, and first one crutch, then another, emerged. The driver hopped down between them, wearing yellow and purple running shoes.

Beil turned back. “My wife suffers from dementia. Nothing filigree and trendy such as Alzheimer’s, mind you, but plain old dementia. Each morning as I leave I go to kiss her and she tells me, I love you like butter, every morning for eleven, twelve years. This morning what she said, with no notion that something was wrong, something was different, was: I love you like rubber. Take the lesson from my wife. Love your life like butter. Like rubber.”

Driver walked to the edge and moments later watched Beil come out of the stairwell. Two black sedans pulled up immediately at curbside.

He got out of the Fairlane, walked around to the front of the garage. She straightened and leaned to look past the open hood of a ’57 Chevy Bel Air. The clamp floodlight on her bench was on. With the light behind her, he couldn’t see her face.

“You’ve come to say good-bye.”

Driver nodded.

“I saw you back there. Then you waited.” She reached behind to snap off the light, stepped to the car’s side. “Never gets easy, does it?”