James Sallis: Drive

She waited and, when he said nothing, turned and walked away down the hall. Hips and rear end a marvel in her jeans. Growing ever smaller in the distance. Carrying that pain and sadness back with her to the lair where it, and she, lived.

Second job he ever drove on, everything went wrong that could. Guys had passed themselves off as pros. They weren’t.

The mark was a pawn shop out towards Santa Monica, near the airport, by a couple of buildings that put you in mind of old time computer punch cards. Shop wasn’t much to look at if you went in the front door, the usual accordions, bikes, stereos, jewelry and junk. All the good stuff went in and out the back door. The money to pay the toll on that back door was stashed in a safe so old that Doc Holliday could have kept his dental tools in it.

They didn’t need any accordions or jewelry. Money in that safe was another thing.

He was driving a Ford Galaxie. Right off the line this thing had more power than made any kind of sense, and he’d been seriously under the hood. From an alley alongside, he watched the principals, two of whom he figured as brothers, head towards the pawn shop. Minutes later, he heard the shots, like whip cracks. One. Two. Three. Then a sound like a cannon going off and a window blowing out somewhere. When he felt a load hit the car behind him, without even looking to see, he peeled out. Half a dozen blocks away, cops pulled in hard behind, two cars at first, then three, but they didn’t have much chance against the Galaxie or the route he’d mapped out-not to mention his driving-and he soon lost them. When it was all over he discovered he’d got away with two of the three principals.

Fucker pulled a shotgun on us, you believe it? A fuckin’ shotgun.

One of the presumed brothers they’d left behind, shot dead or dying on the pawn shop floor.

They’d also left the fuckin’ money behind.

He wasn’t supposed to have the money. He wasn’t supposed to be a part of it at all. And he damned well ought to be back at work doing double-eights and turnarounds. Jimmie, his agent, probably had a stack of calls for him. Not to mention the shoot he was supposed to be working on. The sequences didn’t make much sense to him, but they rarely did. He never saw scripts; like a session musician, he worked from chord charts. He suspected the sequences wouldn’t make a lot more sense to the audience if they ever stopped to think about them. But they had flash aplenty. Meanwhile all he had to do was show up, hit the mark, do the trick-“deliver the goods,” as Jimmie put it. Which he always did. In spades.

That Italian guy with all the forehead creases and warts was on the shoot, starring. Driver didn’t go to movies much and could never quite remember his name, but he’d worked with him a couple of times before. Always brought his coffeemaker with him, slammed espressos the whole day like cough drops. Sometimes his mother showed up and got escorted around like she was queen.

That’s what he was supposed to be doing.

But here he was.

The score’d been set for nine that morning, just after opening. Seemed ages ago now. Four in the crew. The cook-New Guy-who’d put it together, engineer and pit boss. Fresh muscle up from Houston by the name of Dave Strong. Been a Ranger, supposedly, in the Gulf War. The girl, Blanche. Him driving, of course. They’d pulled out of L.A. at midnight. All of it pretty straightforward: Blanche would set up the room, grab and hold attention, as Cook and Strong moved in.

Driver’d been out three days before to get a car. He always picked his own car. The cars weren’t stolen, which was the first mistake people made, pros and amateurs alike. Instead, he bought them off small lots. You looked for something bland, something that would fade into the background. But you also wanted a ride that could get up on its rear wheels and paw air if you needed it to. Himself, he had a preference for older Buicks, mid-range, some shade of brown or gray, but he wasn’t locked in. This time what he found was a ten-year-old Dodge. You could run this thing into the side of a tank with no effect. Drop anvils on it, they’d bounce off. But when he turned the motor over, it was like this honey was just clearing its throat, getting ready to talk.

“Got a back seat for it?” he asked the salesman who’d gone along on the test drive. You didn’t have to push the car, just turn it loose, see where it went. Watch and feel how it cornered, if its center stayed put when you accelerated, slowed, cut in or out. Most of all, listen. First thing he’d done was turn off the radio. Then, a couple of times, he had to hush the salesman. There was a little too much play in the transmission for his taste. Clutch needed to come up some. And it pulled to the right. But otherwise it was about as perfect as he had any right to expect. Back at the lot, he crawled underneath to be sure the carriage was straight, axles and ties in good shape. Then asked about the back seat.

“We can find you one.”

He paid the man cash and drove it off the lot to one of several garages he used. They’d give it the works, new tires, oil and lube, new belts and hoses, a tune-up, then store it, where it would be out of sight till he picked it up for the job.

Next day, his call was at six a.m., which in Hollywoodese translated to show up around eight. Guy working second unit held out for a quick take (why wouldn’t he, that’s what he got paid for) but Driver insisted on a trial run. Buggy they gave him was a white-over-aqua ’58 Chevy. Looked cherry, but it drove like a goddamned mango. First run, he missed the last mark by half a yard.

Good enough, the second-unit guy said.

Not for me, Driver told him.

Man, Second Unit came back, this is what? ninety seconds in a film that lasts two hours? That rocked!

Plenty of other drivers out there, Driver told him. Make the call.

Second run went like a song. Driver gave himself a little more time to get up to speed, hit the ramp to go up on two wheels as he sailed through the alley, came back down onto four and into a moonshiner’s turn to face the way he’d come. The ramp would be erased in editing, and the alley would look a lot longer than it was.

The crew applauded.

He had one other scene blocked for the day, a simple run against traffic down an interstate. By the time the crew finished setting up, always the most complicated part, it was coming onto two in the afternoon. Driver nailed it on the first run. Two-twenty-three, and the rest of the day belonged to him.

He caught a double-header of Mexican movies out on Pico, downed a couple of slow beers at a bar nearby making polite conversation with the guy on the next stool, then had dinner at the Salvadoran restaurant up the street from his current crib, rice cooked with shrimp and chicken, fat tortillas with that great bean dip they do, sliced cucumbers, radish and tomatoes.

By then he’d killed most of the evening, which is pretty much what he aimed for when he wasn’t working one job or the other. But even after a bath and half a glass of scotch he couldn’t get to sleep.

Now he knew: that was something he should have paid attention to.

Life sends us messages all the time-then sits around laughing over how we’re not gonna be able to figure them out.

So at three a.m. he’s looking out the window at the loading dock across the street thinking no way the crew over there, hauling stuff out of the warehouse and tucking it away in various trucks, is legit. There’s no activity anywhere else on the dock, no job boss or lights, and they’re moving at a good, nonunion pace.

He thinks about calling the police, see how that plays out, watch while it all got a lot more interesting. But he doesn’t.