Drive Read Free

the chair, pushed the beer towards him. “I’m just messing with you, man, checking you out.” He fingered the small hoop in his right ear. Later, Driver decided that was probably a tell. “Four on the team, we split five ways. Two shares for me, one for each of the rest of you. That work?”
    “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