She stepped almost up to him. The awareness was still there, but the watchfulness, for whatever reason, was gone.
“Could you do with a cup of coffee, piece of pie, something on that order? There’s a place up the street. If it’s a slow night we stand a fair chance of not getting shot, robbed, or poisoned by the food.”
In past lives, Butch’s had been a Steak Pit, a Hamburger Palace, a Mexican restaurant, and quite possibly a drive-through bank. Artifacts of those lives-general layout, smell, signs and tiles, an extensive driveway system-lingered. A “piece” at Butch’s turned out to be a quarter of a pie, and came on a dinner plate. Coffee arrived in cups the size of soup bowls. Probably did killer business once the bars skirting the edge of town shut down for the night. Which wasn’t too far off, come to think of it.
He stirred milk into his coffee, looked at his piece of pie, and felt vaguely challenged by both. “Your father’s a cop.”
“One of them, yeah. And my mother was an illegal. He married her, made an honest woman of her. What does that make me?”
“Interesting?”
“Not really.”
“Like your name then. Not interesting, you said before.”
“When I was little, I climbed on everything. Chairs, trees, people’s legs, toilets, cardboard boxes. Like a goat, my mother said. And Dad was Bill-”
“I get it.”
“With an — ie to make it feminine.”
Outside, two cars tried to pull into the parking lot at the same time. Both stopped. One driver got out, leaving the door open, and started toward the other car. That driver threw it in reverse, backed into the street, and floored it.
And just like that, for no good reason at all, he found himself telling Billie about his mother. How he’d sat chewing his Spam sandwich watching her go after his old man with a butcher knife and a bread knife, one ear on his plate and blood shooting out of the gash in his neck. How that was about it for the rest of her life, she’d used it all up.
“They were good knives, I hope,” Billie said.
“Probably not, it was a cheap house. But they did their work.”
“Her too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Last thing she did, from what you say. A mother, protecting you.”
Somehow that had never occurred to him. He always figured she’d just had enough.
“What’s the story there?” Billie nodded to a booth where a fiftyish woman and a man in his twenties sat, she with eggs and bacon, he with salad. Was Billie picking up on his uneasiness, changing the subject in accord?
“Not mother and son,” he said.
“And not lovers, the body language is all wrong.”
“Yet they’re both leaning in slightly.”
“Dispensing and ignoring advice?”
“Confessing to one another, maybe.” He braved the pie and for moments they were silent. The couple rose from the booth to leave by separate doors. “Law school, huh?”
“Second year.”
“That’s a longish walk from fixing people’s cars.”
“I don’t know. How much of what we do in our lives, what we think, is chosen, and how much is just what comes at us? My dad was always fooling with cars, parking his on the street because some junker was getting fixed up in the garage. Same with my mother’s cousins that came to live with us. Didn’t have any money, and sent most of what they had back home, so they’d build these cars from spare parts and pieces. I’d watch them, and they’d hand me a wrench to pretend I was helping, and before long I was. Discovered I had a weird talent for it, like I could see how things were supposed to work, how they’d fit together, how much strength was needed here, how much relief there. At one point we had twelve people living in the house. Kids, cousins, hard to tell which were which. Mechanic’s pay put me through undergrad, and I’ll be out of ASU free and clear, no loans, nothing.”
“And then?”
“Hard to say. See what turns up, I guess.”
“What comes at you.”
“Right.”
“And if nothing does?”
“You never know. But it’s not like I’ll just be sitting around waiting, is it?”
He drank the rest of his coffee. There were grounds in the bottom of the cup. “You want another piece of pie? You could try the strawberry this time.”
“I think this’ll do me until about next March.” She pushed the remains, crust, a smear of yellow, three tiny strands of coconut, toward him. “Have at it, big boy.”
“Your father still a cop?”
“Some days more than others. But he hasn’t worn the badge for almost ten years. He’s in an assisted care facility full of nice retired shoe salesmen, dentists, and insurance brokers who keep trying to get him to play cards or checkers or some damn thing.” She looked to the window outside which three Harleys (no mistaking the sound of them) cruised by in a rough V. “I kick in what his pension doesn’t cover.”
“And your mother?”
“Died three weeks after he hung the job up. And they had all these plans…” She leaned back against the half wall, legs stretched out on the booth’s seat, cradling her coffee cup in both hands. “Don’t we all.”
A cook leaned forward to peer through the service slot from the kitchen, then came out and stood looking around, like a bus driver counting heads. He wore a green surgical scrub cap and was stick-thin except for a huge swell of belly.
“What about you?” Billie said.
“Plans? Not really.” None he could talk about.
“That ride you’re working on, that’s just a lark? You can’t be racing, or the guys would know you.”
“I did race, down around Tucson, but that was long ago.”
“You’re not old enough to have a long ago, Eight.”
“It’s not always just years.”
She met his eyes (beat-and-a-half, the director would say) and nodded.
They picked him up the next morning out by Globe. Two cars this time, and they’d waited for an isolated stretch of road. Chevy Caprice and a high-end Toyota. The message he sent back at the food court in the mall had been received.
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.