James Sallis - Driven

They came for him just after 11:00 on a Saturday morning, two of them. It was hot going hotter; sunlight caught in the fine sheen of sweat on Elsa’s forehead. A hint of movement in the side of his eye as they passed a short side street-and the first one was there. He spun, slamming his foot and the whole of his body weight against the outside of the man’s right knee, and heard it give. By the time the man was down, that same foot hit his throat. He shuddered twice, trying to pull in air through the shattered windpipe, and was still. The second had come up behind by then, but Driver was down, rolling, and behind him, left arm clamped around his neck, right elbow locked over the wrist.

It was all over in minutes. He understood then what had delayed the second man’s attack. Elsa lay against the wall of an abandoned cafe, blood pumping from the wound beneath her breast.

She had been trying to smile up at him as the light went out of her eyes.

In movies the guy who almost drowned shoots up out of the water and into sunlight like a porpoise, gulping at the air so long denied him, relief writ large on his face.

When Driver first surfaced, six, seven years ago, it had been like that, only in reverse. Sunlight, air, and freedom-his impulse was to dive back in. He wanted the darkness, safety, anonymity. Needed it. Didn’t understand how he could live without it.

He was 26.

Now he was 32, sitting at a table on the deck of HIPPIE PLACE, around to the side, away from the street.

“They first set this place down,” Felix was telling him, “it was an in-your-face beachhouse. Sand every which way you looked. Kinda didn’t take in as to how the hood’s full of stray cats? Cats loved it, brought them in from miles around. Biggest sandbox ever, you know? Reassessments were made at the corporate level.” Hands still on the table, Felix leaned back, sleeves pulling to show the lower edge of tattoos gone colorless. No hearts, anchors, women or women’s names here. Knives. A flame or two. A wolf. “Long time back. And you know how few things go the distance around here. The food’s crap, but it’s dependable.”

Driver didn’t know that much about Felix, about his background anyway. Knew he’d been in Desert Storm, a Ranger he figured, from what little Felix said. And sometime before that, a gangbanger back in good old east L.A. Some kind of bodyguard or enforcer. A lifetime of walking through doors into new lives. They’d met on a job, where it seemed Felix was along mostly to look out for one of the other guys. That’s how Desert Storm came up; Felix and his boy had been in it together. Rule is, once the job’s over, you’re strangers. But something had clicked. Driver and Felix stayed in touch.

And who better to hang with when you went to ground? One way or another, Felix had been off the screen all his life.

“Appreciate your help,” Driver said. The coffee tasted faintly of the fish tacos that were HP’s specialty.

Felix’s eyes followed a pair of women being seated by the front railing. Mother and daughter? Twenty, thirty years apart, dressed alike. Same body language, same legs.

“Anything else we need to do?”

“Like?”

“Oh, like persuade whoever’s on your trail what a bad idea that could turn out to be.”

“These aren’t the kind of people you step up and talk to.”

“I wasn’t planning on a conversation.”

“You wouldn’t be. But there’s no need. I’ve gone invisible. They can’t see me. It’s over.”

“Invisible, huh? That’s why we’re sitting back here by the dumpster and you came in with a hat sitting halfway down your nose.” He sipped his own coffee, made a face. “Doesn’t smell near as bad as it tastes. That is one cool hat, though.”

The older of the women smiled at Felix. Highland Park, upper East Side, Scottsdale kind of woman. Money, class, privilege. Yet here she was smiling over at this middle-aged hardass with worn-out tats and bad hair. Something about Felix did that to people.

The younger woman glanced over to see what her companion was looking at. Then she smiled too.

“All the same to you, invisible or not, I’ll keep an eye out, watch for flares.” Some ways, Felix never left the desert, anymore than he left L.A. He hadn’t put the weight down; he carried them around inside. “Key’s where it always is. Far as I know, no one’s there. Someone is, you’ll need to have a conversation.-Johnny, my man.”

The server had come to ask if there was anything else he could do for them. Tan, blond, kid that was probably 25, looked 18 and would keep looking it till he slammed into the hard edge of 40, 45.

“We could use a couple of beers. When you get time. No one’s in a hurry here.”

Felix watched Johnny’s back as he walked off, then checked his two women again. “And you have no idea who this deadly duo was?”

“Or why they showed up. None.”

“They wouldn’t be carrying ID.”

“Doubtful. Not that I stayed around to check.”

“You’re sure it was a kill.”

“How they came in, had to be.”

“All the ways you can kill a man, that has to be the dumbest. Too many unknowns, outcome’s in the wind, you’re hanging out there. So why bring it in close?”

“And why take Elsa?”

“Which they did before putting you down. What sense does that make?”

Johnny brought the beers. He wiped the table with a damp rag, then picked up both coffee mugs with his left hand and set the bottles down with his right.

“Nothing recent to tip this,” Felix said.

Driver shook his head.

“Something from the past, then.”

“It usually is.”

Felix took a small sip of beer and rolled it around in his mouth before swallowing. “Excellent bloom.” He looked off to the tree where a bird was giving it everything it had, as though Judgment Day or final exams were in an hour. “You think birds gargle?” Then, without looking back, “In the bathroom, cabinet under the sink. Pull all the shit out, there’s a board you can pry up. Just in case it turns out you need it.”

“Thanks, Felix.”

“Nada. Ride light, my friend.”

Felix called it his warren. Unlike most souls who aren’t nailed down, once he moved on from a place, he didn’t let it go, he kept it. His you-never-know principle, that also being his rejoinder to pretty much whatever life threw at him or anything asked of him: why he did things, the actions of others, what he thought the chances were of the sun coming up tomorrow. There were Felix apartments, nondescript houses and duck-holes, scattered all around Phoenix.

This particular cell of the warren was the southeast unit of a quadraplex cut from what had been a respectable single-family house back when what was now the central city had been cozy suburbs. Latticework along one side of the drive held fragments of dead vines. Lizards scampered on the slump-block wall behind. The key was under a brick at the base of the century plant by the two-car garage that now served as storage for tenants. Driver glanced through the window. Dozens of boxes, furniture, a potbelly stove, framed paintings, an ancient Fender speaker cabinet. Looking much as it had the last time he’d seen it, better than a year ago, though chances were good that tenants had turned over two or three times since.

Driver did a quick cockroach count-two in the tub still breathing, six visible in the kitchen and mostly dead-before unpacking. Unpacking took about as long as the cockroach check had. He’d never cared much about possessions, so it had been easy walking away from the house and all the rest. Walking away from Elsa’s body had been the hard thing.

He carried utility luggage, a duffel bag, with utility clothes to match: jeans, khakis, blue dress shirts and a blazer, t-shirts, underwear, black socks, all of it common stock from Target, Sears. He put the clothes away in a bureau the color of maple syrup whose uppermost layers of laminate had worn away in stages, like riverbed rock. The roach count went up by three.