“I can live with it.”
“So we have a deal.”
“We do.”
“Good. You up for another shot?”
“Why not?”
Just as the alto sax jumped on the tune’s tailgate for a long, slow ride.
Chapter Five
Walking away from Benito’s, Driver stepped into a world transformed. Like most cities, L.A. became a different beast by night. Final washes of pink and orange lay low on the horizon now, breaking up, fading, as the sun let go its hold and the city’s lights, a hundred thousand impatient understudies, stepped in. Three guys with skinned heads and baseball caps flanked his car. Couldn’t have looked like much to them. An unprepossessing 80’s Ford. Without popping the hood they’d have no way of knowing what had been done to it. But here they were.
Driver walked to the door and stood waiting.
“Cool ride, man,” one of the young toughs said, sliding off the hood. He looked at his buddies. They all laughed.
What a hoot.
Driver had the keys bunched in his hand, one braced and protruding between second and third fingers. Stepping directly forward, he punched his fist at alpha dog’s windpipe, feeling the key tear through layers of flesh, looking down as he lay gasping for air.
In his rear view mirror he watched the young tough’s buddies stand over him flapping hands and lips and trying to decide what the hell to do. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.
Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that’s what life was, a long series of things that didn’t go down the way you thought they would.
Hell with it. Either they’d figure it out or they wouldn’t. Most people never did.
Home was relative, of course, but that’s where he went. Driver moved every few months. In that regard things hadn’t changed much from the time he inhabited Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s attic room. He existed a step or two to one side of the common world, largely out of sight, a shadow, all but invisible. Whatever he owned, either he could hoist it on his back and lug it along or he could walk away from it. Anonymity was the thing he loved most about the city, being a part of it and apart from it at the same time. He favored older apartment complexes where parking lots were cracked and stained with oil, where when the guy a few doors down played his music too loud you weren’t about to complain, where frequently tenants loaded up in the middle of the night and rode off never to be heard from again. Even cops didn’t like coming into such places.
His current apartment was on the second floor. From the front the dedicated stairway looked to be the only way up and down. But the back opened onto a general gallery, balconies running the length of each level, stairwells every third unit. A claustrophobic entryway just inside the door broke off to a living room on the right, bedroom to the left, kitchen tucked like a bird’s head under wing behind the living room. With care you could store a coffeemaker and two or three cookpans in there, maybe half a run of dishes and a set of mugs, and still have room to turn around.
Which Driver did, putting a pan of water on to boil, coming back out to look across at blank windows directly opposite. Anyone live over there? Had an inhabited look somehow, but he’d yet to see any movement, any signs of life. A family of five lived in the apartment below. Seemed like whatever time of day or night he looked, two or more of them sat watching TV. A single man dwelled to the right, one of the studio apartments. He came home every night at five-forty with a six-pack and dinner in a white bag. Sat staring at the wall and pulling steadily at the beers, one every half-hour. Third beer, he’d finger out the burger and munch down. Then he’d drink the rest of the beers, and when they were gone he’d go to bed.
For a week or two when Driver first moved in, a woman of indeterminate age lived in the unit to the left. Mornings, post shower, she’d sit at the kitchen table rubbing lotion into her legs. Evenings, again nude or nearly so, she’d sit speaking for hours on a portable phone. Once Driver had watched as she threw the phone forcibly across the room. She stepped up to the window then, breasts flattening against the glass. Tears in her eyes-or had he just imagined that? He never saw her again after that night.
Returning to the kitchen, Driver poured boiling water over ground coffee in a filtered cone.
Someone was knocking at his door?
This absolutely did not happen. People who lived in places like Palm Shadows rarely mixed, and had good reason to expect no visitors.
“Smells good,” she said when he went to the door. Thirtyish. Jeans looking as though small explosions had taken place here and there, outwards puffs of white showing. An oversize T-shirt, black, legend long since faded, only random letters, an F, an A, a few half consonants remaining. Six inches of blonde hair with a half-inch of dark backing it up.
“I just moved in down the hall.”
A long narrow hand, curiously footlike, appeared before him. He took it.
“Trudy.”
He didn’t ask what white bread like her was doing here. He did wonder about the accent. Alabama, maybe?
“Heard your radio, that’s how I knew you were home. Had myself a batch of cornbread all but ready to go when it came to me I didn’t have a single egg, not a one. Any chance-”
“Sorry. There’s a Korean grocer half a block up.”
“Thanks… Think I could come in?”
Driver stepped aside.
“I like to know my neighbors.”
“You’re probably in the wrong place for that.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. I have a history of bad choices. A downright talent for them.”
“Can I get you something? I think there may be a beer or two left in the fridge-what you’d probably call the icebox.”
“Why would I call it that?”
“I thought-”
“Some of that coffee I smelled would be great, actually.”
Driver went into the kitchen, poured two mugs, brought them back.
“Kind of a strange place to live,” she said.
“L.A.?”
“Here, I meant.”
“I guess.”
“Guy below me’s always peeking out his door when I come in. Apartment next to me, their TV’s going twenty-four hours a day. Spanish channel. Salsa, soap operas with half the characters getting killed and the rest screaming, godawful comedy shows with fat men in pink suits.”
“See you’re fitting right in.”
She laughed. They sat quietly sipping coffee, chattering on about nothing in particular. Driver hadn’t developed the capacity for small talk, could never see the point of it. Nor had he ever had much sensitivity to what others were feeling. But now he found himself talking openly about his parents and sensing, in his momentary companion, some deep pain that might never be lessened.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she said at length. “For the conversation even more. But I’m fading fast.”
“Stamina’s the first thing to go.”
They walked together to the door. That long, narrow hand came out again, and he took it.
“I’m in 2-G. I work nights, so I’m home all day. Maybe you’ll come by sometime.”
She waited and, when he said nothing, turned and walked away down the hall. Hips and rear end a marvel in her jeans. Growing ever smaller in the distance. Carrying that pain and sadness back with her to the lair where it, and she, lived.
Chapter Six
Second job he ever drove on, everything went wrong that could. Guys had passed themselves off as pros. They weren’t.
The mark was a pawn shop out towards Santa Monica, near the airport, by a couple of buildings that put you in mind of old time computer punch cards. Shop wasn’t much to look at if you went in the front door, the usual accordions, bikes, stereos, jewelry and junk. All the good stuff went in and out the back door. The money to pay the toll on that back door was stashed in a safe so old that Doc Holliday could have kept his dental tools in it.