“Get out of my house.”
Driver turned as if to go, then spun back, right foot hooking Cole’s knee, pulling his legs out from under him. The man went down with a loud crack that probably heralded concussion. Driver planted the foot on his stomach.
“Please,” Driver said.
Cole didn’t try to move, but his eyes were going everywhere, north, south, east, west. White ceiling. Beige walls. Furniture legs. Ivory carpet. His friend’s feet showing beneath the couch. None of it any help.
That’s how suddenly the world you were sure you understood can change
, Driver thought.
— • —
Cities were so various, they wore so many different faces. Leaving the easy, spare opulence of Cave Creek and Carefree behind, he drove in past Deer Valley Road and the federal prison to the dry-stalk stretches of outer Phoenix, and it was as though he drove through not one but half a dozen cities stacked beside and atop one another. Churches had re-upped as tax offices. A huge store and lot once given over to selling farm machinery was now a swap meet. The Dairy Queen, nothing changed but the sign, had become Mariscos Juarez.
Turn left at a gated community, two blocks away people are hauling mattresses down outside stairs and cooking on driveways in vats the size of cannibal pots.
Darkness was well on its way, spreading its hand flat against the city, as he drove back in. Billie had offered her uncle’s place to him. “For as long as you need it,” she’d said, Uncle Clayton currently residing several thousand miles away “helping repair some of the damage we’d done earlier,” whatever that meant. She’s saying for as long as you need it, but he’s thinking until they find me there, and declined. So he was at an extended-stay hotel two blocks up and another over, a knight’s move, from Colter and Twelfth. One room with a single entrance and the windows bolted shut, but they weren’t anymore. And he had full view of the approach, driveway, parking lot.
He also had a diner across the street, where he and Billie were meeting. Enough red—roof outside, booth covering, tiles, seats at the counter, aprons, napkins—to send you away color blind, but good, cheap food. Waitresses, like the diner itself, looked to be from the fifties. They took your order, stepped away, turned and came back with your food, that’s how it felt.
Billie had come directly from the garage in work clothes and boots, grease under her nails, a Nike swoosh of it down one cheek. Everyone in the diner gave the impression of having barely arrived from one place while being eager to depart for another. Feet fidgeted under tables. Eyes swung toward windows.
Not just here, Driver told himself. The whole world’s like that now.
He remembered standing over Bernie Rose’s body in L.A., there at frontier’s end, as Bernie’s final breath hissed out. Remembered getting back in the stripped-down Datsun, feeling comforted by its throb, thinking that he drove, that was what he did, that was what he’d always do.
“Interesting group,” Billie said. “Starting with the waitresses’ costumes.”
“If you mean the hair and all, I don’t think that’s a costume.”
“Uh-huh. And the cook?” Periodically his head had appeared in the gunwale through which plates passed from kitchen to servers. Thin hair parted severely at the side, nose that seemed to be drawing the face relentlessly forward. “Too many black and white movies?”
Just then a group of five, mixed men and women, came in from some affair or another, made out as zombies. Torn clothes, pasty white faces, blackened eyes, splatters of food color, beads of drool. All of them staggered about, arms flailing as though subject to a different musculature, a different gravity. They took a corner booth, where one of them began quietly to chant
Flesh! Flesh!
Driver was halfway through his Breakfast-Any-Time. He put his fork down and said, “I need to tell you something.”
“Wondered when you’d get to it.”
“That obvious, huh?”
“Not really.”
“But?”
She shrugged.
“Fair enough.”
And he told her. Not so much about the older life, just the bare bones of that. But about how he had stood over Elsa’s body, how in the past he had killed, again and again. How killers were now coming for him. How they kept coming, might well keep coming for the rest of his life. How short that
rest
might be.
When he stopped talking, she looked away, then back at him.
“They’re eating salads,” she said. “The zombies.” She popped in the last bite of burger. “So in other words, you find yourself unaccountably pursued—fatally, you assume—by unapprehended forces.”
“Those are definitely other words. But yeah, that’s pretty much it. Hard to believe?”
“No, I’m just sitting here wondering what my philosophy teacher would have to say. Dark room, dark hat. Shoulder to the door against an unseen, silent, unknown resistance. An interesting man. ‘Actuality is something brute,’ he’d tell us. ‘There is no reason in it.’ Yet everything in his own life, how he talked, how he taught, the way he dressed, seemed nailed to logic’s door.”
Billie smiled up as the waitress refilled her coffee. Looking back to him, Billie’s eyes dropped to the waitress’ name tag. “Thanks, JoAnne.” Then, as JoAnne moved on: “What
I’m
thinking is, you could use some help with this.”
— • —
Late morning, Raymond Phelps was half asleep in the reclining lawn chair on his patio, half thinking about where to grab lunch, Thai maybe, or one of those crushed grilled sandwiches at the Cuban place. Something took his attention, woke him. A sound, insect, hunger. Something.
When he opened his eyes a face hovered upside down above his.
“You don’t want to be moving,” the face said.
And when he did, a hammer struck him full force in the belly.
“That’s why you don’t want to.” The hammer and the hand holding it came into view. “Found this over by the wall. A long time ago you must have cared, worked at trying to keep things shipshape. Now just look at it. Rust, handle rotting. How much can you tell about a man from his tools, Ray?”
“Who the fuck—”
The hammer struck again before he could finish. He vomited, coffee, juice and stomach acids searing his throat.
The man waited till he was done.
“Eight inches to either side, you’ve got gravel for a hip. Ten inches south…”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to understand that this is not going to be a conversation. I’ll ask questions. You’ll answer. Briefly, directly.”
Raymond started to lift a hand to wipe his mouth, stopped and looked back at the man.
“Go ahead.” Again, he waited. “We’re good?”
Raymond nodded.
“Two days ago you called Richard Cole, had him arrange for a money drop out in Glendale.”
Raymond nodded. More coffee, juice and acid was at the gate.
“That money was to pay talent brought in from Dallas.”
“Yes.”
“Who was the hit on?’
“I’m guessing you know that.” He vomited again, but all that came up were some strings of thin, gluey fluid.
“Did you have a photo?”
“A description. Vehicle. Probable locations.”
“Who placed the order?”
Raymond started to talk, stopped when he thought he was going to vomit but managed to swallow it down. “Can we go inside?”
The man stood from his crouch, waving the hammer toward the patio door.
The office inside was everything Raymond wasn’t: well appointed, orderly, efficient, clean. Metal shelving covered two walls, folders aligned and held in place by letter boxes, numbers on the shelves, index tabs protruding along the bottom of the folders here and there. Glancing into the kitchen beyond—smeared counters, greasy stovetop, ragtag piles of dishes—Driver was newly astonished at the contrast.
He looked back at the shelves.
“This is what the world looked like before computers took over.”
“Computer files, yeah. Easy to copy, easy to erase. And I have duplicates of all this hidden away.”
“Insurance?”
“Insurance, memory, archives. Whatever word suits you.”
Raymond pointed questioningly to the shelves. When Driver nodded, he walked over and plucked a folder. No scanning, no hesitation. Went right to it. Brought it back and handed it over.
Driver flipped it open. Email transcripts. Account records and financial paperwork. Reports from credit agencies, a Better Business Bureau, a licensing organization. Photocopies of handwritten notes that looked to have originated in a daybook or pocket notebook. Membership lists.
“Won’t take you there, but it’s a map.”
“Not someone you’ve worked with before, then.”
“And a lot of blinds. I always look in the water, deep as I can. Same as you, I’m sure. Near as I can make out, this one came by way of a lawyer in or around New Orleans.”
“No idea who’s behind it?”
“Someone with a shitload of money.” Raymond held out his hand for the folder. “Give me a minute. I’ll run copies.”
— • —
“There’s a couple old running buddies down that way I could send round.”
“Tattoos may not work here, Felix.”
“Doyle’s will.
Semper Fi
. And the leg’s prosthetic. Heartbreaker of a limp when he wants. The one that’ll be with him…Never says much, but he asks a question, you’re just naturally inclined to answer.”
“Sounds good.”
“I’ll get them on it, get back to you when.”
“Care, my friend.”
“I’ll take it.”
Billie had her head on the seat, eyes closed, when he climbed back in the car. They’d tried multiple places. Now they were out behind a long-closed bowling alley on its way to becoming a flea market and swap mart. Workers were grinding down pink stucco with belt sanders.
“Your friend always that hard to find?”
“Until he knows who’s looking.”
“Ever think about trying a phone?”
“He’s more a face-to-face guy.”
“In-your-face from the look.”
“It’s happened.”
She had a rubber band in her teeth as she pulled her hair back. Talked around it, then slipped the hair through. “Any butts you need to kick for the next hour or so?”
“It can wait. You had something in mind?”
“I was going to see my father, thought maybe you’d come along.”
Willow Villa was in a stretch of commercial property that sprang up unannounced. One minute they were cruising past ranch houses and shrubs and double driveways, then signs were all around them.
Bernard Capes, Chiropractor
.
Action Limbs and Prosthetics
.
Spine Mechanics
.
Physical Therapy Associates
. As though some weird medical mall had claimed squatter’s rights and was taking form before your eyes.
Two cars in the visitor’s parking lot around back, one of them a 1968 Pontiac GTO that could have just come off the showroom floor. Driver and Billie watched as seven elderly ladies came out of the building, spent at least three minutes getting into the car, and drove slowly down the drive, hitting the street with a dip and loud clang.