Driven: The Sequel to Drive by James Sallis Read Free Book Online

darkness thinking this might be a little what it was like being buried. I knew I had to get out of there.”
A crash sounded far off, back in the kitchen perhaps. Beil’s eyes didn’t go to the sound, but a smile came close to touching down on his lips. “Do you believe that some are born with a proclivity, a talent? For music, say, or for leadership?”
Driver nodded. “Only a few find it.”
“Exactly. Mine, I realized early on, was for problem solving. But I was also something of a contrarian, not as much interested in confronting problems as I was in finding a way around them. It would have made of me an extremely poor scientist, the discipline at which I first dabbled, but in other pursuits….Well, there you are, as they say.”
“And here I am.”
“Wondering why, no doubt.”
“It was an interesting invitation.”
“We work with what we have. You once drove, and now you drive again. Is that recidivism? Adaptive behavior? Or simply returning to what you are?”
“Yes would probably answer all those.”
“People attempting to kill you might well be construed a problem.”
“For which you have the solution.”
“Not at all. The problem is yours.” All sound from the restaurant had ceased. Through a small pane of glass in the door Driver saw the lights go out. “A solution, though—this could be another thing we have in common.”
A fterward, he drove to South Mountain. Well past
eleven, and not a lot of activity out here, two or three convenience stores, a scatter of Mexican drive-throughs along Baseline. He found a boulder halfway up and sat looking down at the city’s lights. Planes came and went from the airport ten or twelve miles away, ripples in the dark and silence and boundless sky.
Driver didn’t want to go back to the new place, trashed or not. He couldn’t think of any place he did want to go. What he wanted was to get back in the car and drive. Drive away from all this. Or just drive. Like the guy back at the garage had said: just you and the road, leaving all the rest of this shit behind.
But he couldn’t. And what Beil had proposed—once they’d snaked past I work alone and They’ll keep coming —seemed, if not the best alternative, then certainly a feasible one.
“The people who engaged me—”
“As a problem solver.”
“Exactly. Like all of us, primarily they wish to restore order, to have things the way they were. But now there are imbalances. Problems with those moving the pieces around.”
“None of which has anything to do with me.”
“Your presence has introduced wholly unexpected variables. You’ve become a crux, of a sort.”
Driver’s attention went to what looked to be a collision down on Baseline. First, headlights moving toward one another too fast, then a hitch in time, then the lights gone suddenly askew. Did he hear the crash, a horn, seconds later? He remembered a night years ago back in L.A. when he sat in Manny’s banged-to-hell Mercedes on the northern flank of Baldwin Hills, in oil fields that appeared deserted but might for all he knew still be functioning. The gate was open, and they’d entered along a dirt road. The entire city lay before them. Santa Monica, the Wilshire District, downtown. Hollywood Hills in the distance.
“The diminutive fires of the planet,” Manny had said. “What Neruda called them. All those lights. The ones inside you, too. Your house is burning, that’s all you see. But get up here, get some distance, it’s just another tiny fire.
“We go through our lives agonizing over income or what others think, getting wound up about Betty LaButt’s new CD, who shot or fucked Insert-name-here on some TV show, or the latest skinny on the latest idiot with cheekbones who’s making a run for office, and all the while, governments go on killing their citizens, children die from food additives and advertising, women get beaten or worse, meth labs now take over the rural south the way kudzu once did, and we’re getting lies spoon fed