Driven: The Sequel to Drive by James Sallis Page B

parking lot.
Then the shotgun blast.
Blanche and her accent, saying she was from New Orleans, sounding like Bensonhurst.
There it was: Brooklyn again.
“Blanche Davis,” Felix said.
“Not the name she was using.”
“Lady had a casual way with names. Blanche Dunlop, Carol Saint-Mars, Betty Ann Proulx. Pretty much a moving target, too. Dallas, St. Louis, Portland, Jersey City. Scams, hard hustles. Coupla hinky marriages in there. She got around.”
“And what, her name just popped up?”
“Not quite. Doyle had to kind of stick his finger in there and pull. You know.” Felix was quiet for a moment. “There’s more.”
“Okay.”
“Your man Dunaway?”
Driver waited.
“He’s in town.”
“Where?”
“About four feet away from me. Want to come say hello?”
— • —
     
Driver had gone less than a mile before traffic slowed almost to a halt as one of Phoenix’s epic dust storms rolled in. You felt it at the base of your throat, behind your eyelids, could barely make out the car in front of you, or road’s edge and the banks beyond. Dust burrowed in like guilt or regret, you couldn’t get away from it, couldn’t get rid of it. And Driver couldn’t get rid of thoughts of Bernie Rose. He sat in the landlocked car thinking about that last time, how Bernie had asked if he thought we choose our lives and he’d said no, what it felt like was, they’re forever seeping up under us.
“You don’t think we change?” Driver had asked as they walked out of the restaurant.
“Change? No. What we do is adapt. Get by. Time you’re ten, twelve years old, it’s pretty much set in you, what you’re going to be like, what your life’s going to be.”
Moments before he had to put Bernie down.
So maybe Bernie was right.
Driver pulled into the parking lot just as the storm abated. People would be sneezing wee mudballs and wiping dirt out of every crease and crack in themselves, their houses, cars, and property for a week.
Not a Motel 6, but its kissing cousin. Spiderwebbed asphalt patched with tar, roof drooping above the second-floor walkway, blinds cockeyed in windows. Three cars in the lot, two of them questionably mobile. A café and bar sat to other side, back a bit. Take a brave man to hit that café, but Driver guessed the bar did good business. Run-down apartments all around, bus stop across the street.
Room 109 was at the end, abutting a slump block wall with grout that looked like poorly healed scars and, past that, an abandoned convenience store, every possible surface scribbled over with tags.
Guy has money to burn, he winds up here? Driver thought.
But not his idea, most likely.
Slats in the blinds fell back into place as Driver approached. Felix opened the door without speaking.
Inside, a man in his late sixties sat watching CNN, a news report about upcoming democratic elections somewhere halfway across the world. Driver tried to remember the last time he’d seen a seersucker suit. The man was sipping whiskey from a plastic cup, not cheap stuff from the smell of it. So was Felix.
“Doyle.” Felix nodded toward the corner. Doyle had light blue eyes, an expression that could be a wide smile or pain. Looked younger than Driver knew he must be. Mom’s favorite, a good all-American boy.
Doyle nodded.
The older man glanced away from the TV. “You’re the driver.” Then to Doyle: “He doesn’t look quite dead.”
“No sir. I suppose I did stretch the truth just a little.”
Felix poured more for himself, then for the man in the chair. “Doyle persuaded Mr. Dunaway, by way of an anonymous phone call, that those pursuing you had finally been successful, and that you’d left behind something in which he might well be interested. ‘Something to do with Blanche?’ Mr. Dunaway asked.
“Doyle followed him, picked him up here at Sky Harbor. Too many walls and fences back in New Orleans, the need was to get him away.”
“And out here to the golden west,” Doyle said. “He came along without protest. At the