“Here’s your chance, kid. Show me what you have.”
So he did.
Afterwards they went for Mexican food to a place on Sepulveda the size of a train boxcar where everyone, waitress, busboy, cook, seemed to be family. They all knew him, and Shannon spoke to them in what Driver later discovered was perfect idiomatic Spanish. He and Shannon had a couple of scotches to start, chips and salsa, a blistering caldo, green enchiladas. By the end of the meal, several Pacificos having passed by on parade, Driver was fairly wiped.
That morning he woke up on Shannon’s couch, where he lived for the next four months. Two days later he had his first job, a fairly standard chase scene in a low-end cop show. Script had him hitting a corner, taking it on two wheels, coming back down-simple, straightforward stuff. But just as he pulled into the turn Driver saw what could be done here. Swinging in closer to the wall, he dropped those airborne wheels onto the wall. Looked like he’d left the ground and was driving horizontally.
“Holy shit!” the second-unit director was heard to say. “For God’s sake print that-now!”
A reputation was being born.
Standing in the shadow of one of the trailers, Shannon smiled. That’s my boy. He was working a top-grade movie four stages over, swung by on a break to see how the kid was doing.
The kid was doing all right. The kid was still doing all right ten months later when, on a perfectly routine call, a stunt the like of which he’d done a hundred times, Shannon’s car went over the edge of the canyon he was speeding along and, cameras rolling, catching the whole thing, plunged a hundred yards straight down, somersaulted twice, and sat rocking on its back like a beetle.
Chapter Nine
“I’m gonna run across and grab something to eat,” Blanche said. “I saw a Pizza Hut over there and I’m starved. Sausage and extra cheese okay?”
“Sure,” he said, standing near the door, by one of those picture windows on aluminum tracks that all motels seem to have. The lower left corner had sprung out of the frame and he could feel warm air from outside pouring in. They were in a second-floor room facing front, with only the balcony, stairway and twenty yards or so of parking lot between them and the interstate. The motel itself had three separate exits. One ramp onto the interstate was off the intersection beyond the parking lot. Another was just up the street.
First thing you do, room, bar, restaurant, town or crib, is check and memorize the ways out.
Earlier, road weary, bodies vibrating from far too many hours in the car, they’d watched a movie on TV, a caper film set in Mexico with an actor who’d been big for about three days before sinking into drugs, guest-star gigs in films like this one shot on the cheap, and the meager, trailing fame of tabloid headlines.
Driver marveled at the power of our collective dreams. Everything gone to hell, the two of them become running dogs, and what do they do? They sit there watching a movie. Couple of chase scenes, Driver’d be willing to swear it was Shannon driving. Never saw him, of course. But definitely his style.
Has to be Blanche, Driver thought, standing by the window. No other way that Chevy was down there in the parking lot.
She’d taken a brush out of her purse and started into the bathroom.
He heard her say “What-”
Then the dull boom of the shotgun.
Driver went in around Blanche’s body, saw the man in the window, then slipped in blood and slammed into the shower stall, shattering the glass door and ripping his arm open. The man still struggled to free himself. But now he was lifting the gun again and swinging it towards Driver, who, without thinking, picked up a piece of the jagged glass and threw. It hit the man full on in the forehead. Pink flesh flowered there, blood poured into the man’s eyes, and he dropped the shotgun. Driver saw the razor by the sink. He used it.
The other one was doing his best to kick the door in. That’s what Driver had been hearing all along without realizing what it was, that dull drumming sound. He broke through just as Driver came back into the room-just in time for the shotgun’s second load. Thing was maybe twenty inches long and it kicked like a son of a bitch, doing more damage to his arm. Driver could see flesh and muscle and bone in there.
Not that he was complaining, mind you.
Sitting with his back against the wall in a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, Driver watched blood lapping toward him. Traffic sounds rolled in from the interstate. Someone wept in the next room. He realized he’d been holding his breath, listening for sirens, for the sound of people gathering on stairways or down in the parking lot, for the scramble of feet beyond the door, and took a deep draw of room air gone foul with the smell of blood, urine, feces, cordite, fear.
Neon flashed on the skin of the tall, pale man near the door.
He heard the drip of the tub’s faucet from the bathroom.
He heard something else as well, a scratching, a scrabbling, more drumlike sounds. Realized at length that it was his own arm jumping involuntarily, knuckles rapping at the floor, fingers scratching and thumping as the hand contracted.
The arm hung there, apart from him, unconnected, like an abandoned shoe. When Driver willed it to move, nothing happened.
Worry about that later.
He looked back at the open door. Maybe that’s it, Driver thought. Maybe no one else is coming, maybe it’s over. Maybe, for now, three bodies are enough.
Chapter Ten
After four months at Shannon’s he’d put away enough money to move out to his own place, an apartment complex in old east Hollywood. The check Driver wrote for deposit and rent was the first he’d written in his life and among the last. Soon enough he learned to operate on cash, stay off the radar, leave as few footprints as possible. “Good God, we’re in a Forties movie,” Shannon said when he saw the place. “Which apartment’s Marlowe live in?” Except that, these days, sitting out on the plank-like balcony, one heard far more Spanish than English.
He’d been coming up the stairs when the door next to his opened and a woman asked, in perfect English but with the unmistakable lilt of a native Spanish speaker, if he needed any help.
Seeing her, a Latina roughly his age, hair like a raven’s wing, eyes alight, he wished to hell he did need help. But what he had in his arms was about everything he owned.
“How about a beer, then?” she asked when he admitted to it. “Help you recover from all that heavy lifting.”
“That, I could do.”
“Good. I’m Irina. Come over whenever you’re ready. I’ll leave the door ajar.”
Minutes later, he stepped into her apartment, a mirror image, really, of his own. Soft music playing in three-quarter time, something with accordion fills and frequent appearances of the word corazon. Driver remembered once hearing a jazz musician claim that waltz time was the closest thing to the rhythm of the human heart. Sitting on a couch identical to his though considerably cleaner and more worn, Irina watched a soap opera on one of the Spanish-language TV channels. Novellas, they called them. They were huge.
“Beer on the table here, you want it.”
“Thanks.”
Settling onto the couch beside her, he smelled her perfume, smelled the morning’s soap and shampoo and the smell of her body beneath, subtler and solider at the same time.
“New in town?” she asked.
“Been here a few months. Staying with a friend till now.”
“Where are you from?”
“Tucson.”
Expecting the usual remarks about cowboys, he was surprised when she said, “I’ve got a couple of uncles and their families living out there. South Tucson, I think they call it? Haven’t seen them in years.”
“That’s a world apart, South Tucson.”
“Like L.A. isn’t?”
It was for him.
How much more for her?