“Fly? You barely crawl.”
So maybe Driver was feeling the drinks too.
“Be that as it may,” Manny went on, “I was wondering if you’d consider driving me. I’d pay top dollar.”
“Don’t see how I can. I’ve got shoots scheduled. But even if I could, no way I’d ever take your money.”
Having wrestled his way out of the car, Manny leaned back down to the window: “Just keep it in mind, okay?”
“Sure I will. Why not? Get some sleep, my friend.”
Ten blocks away, a police unit hove up in his rear view mirror. Careful to maintain speed and to signal turns well in advance, Driver pulled into a Denny’s and parked facing the street.
The cop went by. He was patrolling solo. Window rolled down, takeout cup of coffee from 7-Eleven in one hand, radio crackling.
Coffee sounded good.
Might as well have some while he was here.
Chapter Fourteen
From inside he heard the bleating of a terminally wounded saxophone. Doc had ideas about music different from most people’s.
“Been a while,” Driver said when the door opened to a nose like a bloated mushroom, soft-poached eyes.
“Seems like just yesterday,” Doc said. “Course, to me everything seems like just yesterday. When I remember it at all.”
Then he just stood there. The sax went on bleating behind him. He glanced back that way, and for a moment Driver thought he might be getting ready to yell over his shoulder for it to shut up.
“No one plays like that anymore,” Doc said with a sigh.
He looked down.
“You’re dripping on my welcome mat.”
“You don’t have a welcome mat.”
“No-but I used to. A nice one. Then people somehow started getting the notion I meant it.” That strangled sound-a laugh? “You could be the blood man, you know. Like the milk man. Making deliveries. People’d put out bottles with a list of what they need rolled up in the mouth. Half a pint of serum, two pints of whole, small container of packed cells… I don’t need any blood, blood man.”
“But I will, and a lot more besides, if you don’t let me in.”
Doc backed off, gap in the door widening. Man had been living in a garage when he and Driver first met. Here he was, still living in a garage. Bigger one, though; Driver’d give him that. Doc had spent half a lifetime dispensing marginally legal drugs to the Hollywood crowd before he got shut down and moved to Arizona. Had a mansion up in the Hills, people said, so many rooms that no one, even Doc himself, ever knew who was living there. Guests wandered up stairwells during parties and didn’t show up again for days.
“Have a taste?” Doc asked, pouring from a half-gallon jug of generic bourbon.
“Why not?”
Doc handed him a half-filled water tumbler so bleary it might have been smeared with Vaseline.
“Cheers,” Driver said.
“That arm doesn’t look so good.”
“You think?”
“You want, I could have a look at it.”
“I didn’t call ahead.”
“I’ll work you in.”
Driver watched as dissembling fell away.
“Be good to be of use again.”
Doc scurried about gathering things. Some of the things he gathered and laid out in a perfect line were a little scary.
Easing Driver out of his coat, scissoring blood-soaked shirt and pasty T-shirt away, Doc whistled tunelessly, squinting.
“Eyesight’s not what it used to be.” As he reached to probe at the wound with a hemostat, his hand shook. “But then again, what is?”
He smiled.
“Takes me right back. All those muscle groups. Used to read Gray’s Anatomy obsessively when I was in high school. Lugged the damn thing around like a Bible.”
“Following in your father’s footsteps?”
“Not hardly. My old man was eighty-six per cent white bread and a hundred per cent asshole. Spent his life selling roomfuls of furniture on credit to families he knew couldn’t afford it only so he could repossess it and go on charging them.”
Pulling the top off a bottle of Betadine, Doc dumped it into a saucepan, found a packet of cotton squares and threw them in as well. Fished one out with two fingers.
“Mother was Peruvian. How the hell they ever met’s beyond me, circles he traveled in. Back home she’d been a midwife and curandera. A healer. Important person in the community. Here, she got turned into goddam Donna Reed.”
“By him?”
“Him. Society. America. Her own expectations. Who can say?”
Doc swabbed gently at the wound.
His hands had quit shaking.
“Medicine was the great love of my life, the only woman I ever needed or went after… Been a while, though-like you say. Sure hope I remember the how of it.”
Yellowing teeth broke into a grin.
“Relax,” he said. He swiveled a cheap desk lamp closer. “Just having my fun with you.”
The bulb in the desk lamp flickered, failed, came back when Doc thumped it.
Taking a healthy swig himself, he handed Driver the jug of bourbon.
“Think that record’s got a skip in it?” Doc said. “Sounds to me like it’s been going round and round for some time.”
Driver listened. How could you tell? Same phrase over and over. Kind of.
Doc nodded to the jug.
“Take a few more hits off that, boy. Chances are you’ll need them. Probably both of us will, before this is over. You ready?”
No.
“Yes.”
Chapter Fifteen
As always, the set-up took most of the time. Spend five hours on the prep, then you drive it in a minute and a half flat. Driver got paid the same for that five hours as he did for the minute and a half. If it was a high-end shoot, he’d been in the day before to check out the car and test-drive it. Budget variety, he’d do that first thing the day of the shoot, while the rest of the staff scrambled about like ants, getting in line. Then he’d spend his time hanging out with writers, script people and bit players, taking advantage of the buffet table. Even on a “wee small” film (as Shannon described them) there’d be enough food to feed a midsize town. Cold cuts, various cheeses, fruit, pizza, canapes, bite-size hot dogs in barbecue sauce, doughnuts and sweet rolls and Danish, sandwiches, boiled eggs, chips, salsa, onion dip, granola, juices and bottled water, coffee, tea, milk, energy drinks, cookies, cakes.
Today he was driving an Impala and the sequence was: double-vehicle ram, bootlegger’s turn, moonshiner’s turn, sideswipe. Ordinarily they’d break it down to segments, but the director wanted to try for a straight shoot in real time.
Driver was on the run. Coming over a hill he’d see a blockade, two State Police cars pulled in nose to nose.
What you do is start off from almost a full stop, car in low gear. You come in from the right, a quarter of a car-width or so-just like finding the pocket by the headpin for a strike. Gas to the floor, you’re going between fifteen and thirty mph when you hit.
And it worked like a charm. The two State Police cars sprang apart, the Impala shot through with a satisfying fishtail and squeal of tires as Driver regained traction and floored it.
But it wasn’t over. A third cop car lugged down the hill. Seeing what happened, he’d jumped the road up there and now came sliding and crashing down through trees, throwing up divots of soil and vegetation, bottoming out more than once, hitting the road fifty yards behind.
Driver let off the gas, dropping to twenty-five, maybe thirty mph, then hauled the steering wheel just over a quarter-turn. At the very same moment he hit the emergency brake and engaged the clutch.
The Impala spun.
Ninety degrees into the spin, he released the brake, straightened the wheel and hit the gas, let the clutch out.
Now he faced back towards the oncoming car.
Accelerating to thirty, as he came abreast-cop’s head swiveling to follow, incredulous-he hauled the wheel to the left hard and fast. Dropped into low, hit the gas, righted the wheel.