He was working the Ford hard, letting it out, bringing it back in, slow, fast, slow again, learning its bounce and feed, but this was a little more testing than he anticipated.
The guy in front was good. Driver slowed enough to let him pass and he did, but then he let it ride, kept his distance. Knowing this wouldn’t be an easy take down, and in no hurry.
The one in the rear car was there for good reason. A tightness to his steering. And he didn’t hug his speed, he’d inch it up, fall back, whenever Driver picked up or dropped a few mphs.
Take him out first.
Driver slowed, started to speed, then slowed again and slammed the brakes. Watched the car behind try to stop and realize it couldn’t. Watched it cut to the left and, knowing that’s what he’d do, swung toward it. The car cut hard again to avoid collision and, losing its center, careened off the road, came within a hair’s breadth of turning over, came back down on four wheels rocking. Out of the count for the while if not for good.
So Driver whipped a quick U and floored it, heading back toward lights, traffic, civilization.
Aggressors are like cats: they’ll instinctively follow if you run. And that can give you the edge.
In the rearview he watched the lights of the lead car come around, watched them move in fast. Man had himself a good ride under that bland Chevy hood. Driver could hear the throatiness of the engine going full-out as it approached.
Been a long time since he’d done this, and he had to wonder if it would be there when he needed it. The instincts were good, but. And buts are what do you in.
The wall just ahead, he recalled from before. Earth color, like most everything else out here, with a sketchy lizard or cactus panel every few yards, the whole thing maybe 200 feet in length. Basically a sound baffle, houses, a small community, packed in beyond.
A median strip separated the lanes. There was fencing, but there were also gaps left for police, service vehicles and such. At the next gap, Driver turned hard, crossed the median and, with gravel spitting behind him, plunged into oncoming traffic. Not a lot of cars, but still dodgy. And horns aplenty. In the rearview mirror he saw his pursuer take down a stretch of fencing as he followed.
The wall, a couple of feet of packed ground, a low curb. If he could get the speed up, hit the curb just right…
Like that first gig back at the studio.
Driver cut left, coming in as straight as he could to the curb, then at the last moment hauled the wheels hard to the right. His head banged against the car’s roof as he struck the curb-and he was up. The left wheels came back down, and came down rough, but on the wall, with the Ford running along at a fifty-degree tilt.
Then, as the Chevy closed in, Driver swung right again, bouncing back onto the highway and running full-tilt toward him. You haven’t quite registered what’s going on, you see a car rocketing toward you, you react. The Caprice slewed to the median, careened off the fencing and back onto the road, clipping a battered passenger car with its front end, a bright, new-looking van with its tail, as it spun.
Then everything got still, the way it does just before reload, and Driver was listening, listening for the sounds to start up. Slammed doors. Screams. Sirens.
He’d brought the Ford to a stop with a one-eighty down the road quite a ways, and now he looked back at the pile-up as though well apart from it all, an observer just come upon the scene. There would be injured. And very soon there would be police. Police and cameras and questions.
Driver closed his eyes to focus on heart rate and breathing, slow long intake. Battlefield breathing: five in, hold five, five out. As he opened his eyes, a black van was pulling in behind him. The driver stayed inside. The passenger got out, held up his hands palm outward, grew slowly larger in the rearview mirror as he approached. Grey suit, thirtyish, short-cut hair, walk and bearing suggesting military, athlete, both.
Driver rolled down his window.
The man kept his distance. “Mr. Beil says hello.”
“He was having me followed?”
“Actually, we were watching them.” He nodded toward the Chevy. “That one, and his friend you left up the road.” He looked off a moment to the west. Moments later, Driver heard the sirens. “Cell phones. Never give you much time these days. Leave now. We’ve got it.”
“People in the other cars could be seriously injured.”
“We’ll do this. Check them all, get those who need it to the hospital and make sure they get the best care, talk to them, eyewitness the cops. When we clean, we clean everything.” His smile was the width of a line of light showing under a snugly fit door. “It’s a package deal.” The man nodded. The nod was about the same girth as the smile. “You’ll be wanting to give Mr. Beil a call, first chance you get.”
“Opinions are like assholes,” Shannon used to say, “everybody has one. But convictions, that’s a different horse-convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
That last was from Nietzsche, though Driver didn’t know it at the time. These past years, Driver had caught up on a lot of things. He didn’t think Shannon believed in any kind of truth that you could put in a box and take home with you. But he definitely knew his way around lies. The lies that are told to us from birth, the ones we’re swimming in, the ones we tell ourselves in order to go on.
He’d left the Fairlane parked by the garage and, with no home temporary or otherwise to return to, found a motel up toward town. The clerk, who kept patting at his hair with flat fingers, made him wait in a smelly lobby chair with burn holes (Driver counted sixteen in the hour he waited) because it wasn’t check-in time. The room was everything the chair promised.
He turned on the TV, which didn’t work, and turned it off. What the hell, he could hear the one from the adjoining room perfectly anyway. The stains in the toilet bowl and tub were a world to themselves. When he sat on it, the bed made a sound that reminded him of buckboards in old westerns.
But he needed rest, he was going to have a shitload of work to do tomorrow to get the car back up, and this was as good a place as any to go to ground. No one would find him, no one would look for him here.
He believed that right up until he came awake to the sound of his room door closing.
The intruder would stand there for a time, of course. Not moving, hardly breathing, listening. That’s how it was done. Driver coughed lightly, a half cough, the way we do when sleeping, and turned on his side, made to be settling back in.
One tentative footstep, a pause, then another. A couple of people went by just outside, stepping hard and talking, causing Driver to narrow his focus. The intruder would ride that noise, use it to cover his approach.
Don’t think, act, as Shannon had told him over and over. Driver never really saw or heard the man-sensed him more than anything-and was off the bed at a roll, able to make out the man’s form now, the outline of it against window light, striking out with his elbow at where the man’s face should be, feeling and hearing the crunch of bone.
Driver had his foot on the man’s throat by the time he was down, but he wasn’t going to be getting up anytime soon. Driver grabbed a towel from the bathroom and dropped it by him, then sat on the floor nearby, opening his pocket knife and holding it so that would be the first thing the man saw when he came around.
It didn’t take long. His eyes opened, swam a bit before they cleared, went to Driver. He turned his head to spit out blood. Looked back and waited.
“From around here?” Driver asked.
“Dallas.”
Imported talent, then. Interesting. He put away the knife. “What about the others?”
“I don’t know anything about any others, man.”
“What do you know?”
“I know there was five large waiting for me once I walked out of here.”
“But you’re not walking out, are you.”
“There is that.”
“You want to see Texas again?”
The man licked his lips, tasting blood. He put two fingers up and lightly touched his ruined nose. “That would be the most agreeable outcome, yes.”
“Then let’s get you in a chair and talk.”
“About?”
