Looking into Bernie Rose’s failing eyes, he thought: This is what people mean when they use words like grace.
He drove the rest of the way down to the pier, bore Bernie’s body to the edge of water and released it. From water we come. To water we return. The tide was going out. It lifted the body, carried it ever so gently away. City lights spackled the water.
Afterwards Driver sat feeling the fine roar and throb of the Datsun around him.
He drove. That was what he did. What he’d always do.
Letting out the clutch, he pulled from beach parking onto the street, reentering the world here at its very edge, engine a purr beneath him, yellow moon above, hundreds upon hundreds of miles to go.
Far from the end for Driver, this. In years to come, years before he went down at three a.m. on a clear, cool morning in a Tijuana bar, years before Manny Gilden turned his life into a movie, there’d be other killings, other bodies.
Bernie Rose was the only one he ever mourned.