“How you’re getting paid, where, who. That sort of thing.”
Driver helped him up. Blood streamed from his face once the man was upright. He held the towel to his nose, speaking through it. “You know you can’t outrun this, right? When I’m gone, there’ll be someone else.”
So for the moment this was what it came down to, perched with a failed killer at world’s edge in the middle of the night, thinking about convictions. Had he ever had any? And what kind of lies was he telling himself, to think he might somehow find a way through all this?
He’d driven back out Van Buren to Sky Harbor, had his night visitor call from the airport to tell them it was done. Stopped at a dollar store on the way to get the man a new shirt and slacks. No way TSA was letting him through with blood all over him.
The pickup was in Glendale. Driver headed that way and parked up the street from All-Nite Diner, the only thing left alive in a threeor four-block radius, the rest given over equally to retail stores and offices. The diner itself was shared by two cops and, judging from their hats and Western finery, members of The Biscuit Band, whose van sat out front. Mail N More, halfway up the block and in easy view, opened in a little over an hour. Driver bought a carry-out coffee and went back to the car to wait. He passed the time perusing windows. Those at Mail N More read:
Boxes for rent Money Orders Photocopies
Will Call Service Messengering Packaging
Notary Inside Business cards Habla Espanol
The window at the antique store across the street read, They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To.
He was thinking about these people who kept coming after him. They bring in hired help, it suggests what? That they’re limited, maybe a small group working on their own? Which didn’t make much sense, given the professionalism of the strikes-their own people came in first, he had to assume-not to mention Beil’s presence in this. Because they wanted to maintain distance, deniability? Or they were running out of soldiers?
Yeah, right.
At 7:54 a dark brown Saturn pulled up in front of Mail N More. The driver turned off his engine and sat. When the card hanging inside the door flipped to OPEN, he got out and went in, carrying an 11x13 padded envelope. Youngish guy, black, late twenties, dark suit, white shirt, no tie. He handed the envelope to the man at the desk, took out his wallet, paid him. When he came back out, Driver was sitting behind the Saturn’s wheel.
“What, I forgot to lock it?”
“Phoenix does rate pretty high in car theft.”
“You want to come out from there?”
“Why don’t you join me instead? We can talk privately.”
Driver watched the man’s eyes check sidewalk, streets, and diner. The police car had pulled away minutes earlier. The diner was filling with people on their way to work. Driver reached under the dash, twisted together the wires he’d pulled down before. The engine came to life.
“Another minute, I drive away. You get in, I stay.”
The man came around to the passenger side, opened the door and stood with his hand on it. “This is decidedly not smart,” he said.
“I get dumber every year.”
The man climbed in, and Driver killed the engine.
“So dumb,” Driver said, “that I don’t care about the money you just left in there.”
He looked at Driver, looked back out to the street. “Yeah, okay.”
“What I do care about is knowing who it came from.”
“Why?”
“Knowledge makes us a better person, don’t you think?”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t. Don’t think that at all. Four years polishing college chairs with my bottom, three more of law school, and I end up a gopher. There’s your knowledge.”
“At some point you made the choice.”
“Choices, yeah, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Free will, the common good. Still have my class notes somewhere.”
“Choices don’t have to be forever.”
The man turned back to him. “You just get off a guest spot with Oprah, or what?”
They sat watching a white-haired oldster chug down the street in a golf cart at fifteen mph. He had a tiny American flag flying from an antenna at one corner, a dozen or more bumper stickers plastered all along the cart’s sides.
“The money?” Driver said.
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Knowledge again.” Driver put both hands in plain view on the steering wheel. “Then I’m afraid you won’t be leaving this car.”
“You think you can do that?”
“Where I live, it happens in a minute. A minute later the do-er’s grabbing a sandwich.”
The oldster pulled up by Mail N More. He took a plastic grocery bag out of his back pocket and snapped it open, went in. Came out with what looked to be only a few pieces of mail in the bag.
“Probably the high point of his day.”
“Perspective is everything,” Driver said.
“Yeah.”
They sat watching the golf cart make its way back along the street, cars stacking up behind.
“I finished school, top ten percent of my class, had it made. All these firms on campus looking for talent, gladhanding me. Grabbed at the job when a top firm offered. There’s like three chiefs and two hundred Indians, every one of them in the top ten percent, every one of them scary smart. Turns out the firm hadn’t hired another Indian, they’d just bought themselves a new horse.”
Driver was silent.
“The corral’s on Highland, near 24th Avenue. Genneman, Brewer, and Sims. This particular errand came from Joseph Brewer’s assistant, Tim. Yellow hair. Not blond, yellow. And clothes just a little too tight. That’s what I know.” The cart turned eastward off the street four blocks up. “For the record: I made the delivery. I leave, reboot at the office, everything’s square.”
“And no one knows about our conversation.”
“My point.”
“As I said, it was private.”
Driver got out, watched the Saturn as it pulled away. He found himself thinking of the man, not much younger than he was, actually, as a kid. What was that phrase Manny used? Spilled anew into the world. A new horse, the kid had said. Ridden-he was definitely ridden.
Joseph Brewer’s assistant, Tim Bresh, lived in one of the enclaves near Encanto Park, a jumble of old Craftsman homes and carport suburbans from the fifties. Half the Craftsmans looked trashed, half of them gussied up and gentrified. Lots of For Sale signs out front of both. Bresh’s sat between a long-unpainted wooden house all but invisible behind a screen of oleanders, and another of slump block painted such a vivid white that it looked unreal, not of this world. Bresh’s was off-white, ivory maybe, but where mowers and ground water and time had nibbled at borders, patches of aqua showed.
Having posed as a messenger with a sign-for package addressed to Joseph Brewer, Driver had bluffed his way into the upper digestive tract of Genneman, Brewer, and Sims, to the outer office of Brewer himself and there tagged Bresh, yellow hair and all. The package, not that it mattered, contained a book, the latest full-tilt indictment of pyramid-scheme capitalism and those who fed off it. Driver liked to imagine Brewer picking up the book repeatedly, puzzling over its source and message. Realistically, he knew the bastard had probably just tossed it in the shredder. Or had his assistant do so.
“I’ll get it,” someone said from inside when Driver hit the bell.
A woman opened the door. Tall, halter top, shorts, thin armsspindly came to mind. Her hair was wet, from a shower, from swimming. She and Driver stood listening as the intro to “Sympathy for the Devil” faded.
