Driven: The Sequel to Drive by James Sallis Page B

to say, “everybody has one. But convictions, that’s a different horse—convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
That last was from Nietzsche, though Driver didn’t know it at the time. These past years, Driver had caught up on a lot of things. He didn’t think Shannon believed in any kind of truth that you could put in a box and take home with you. But he definitely knew his way around lies. The lies that are told to us from birth, the ones we’re swimming in, the ones we tell ourselves in order to go on.
He’d left the Fairlane parked by the garage and, with no home temporary or otherwise to return to, found a motel up toward town. The clerk, who kept patting at his hair with flat fingers, made him wait in a smelly lobby chair with burn holes (Driver counted sixteen in the hour he waited) because it wasn’t check-in time. The room was everything the chair promised.
He turned on the TV, which didn’t work, and turned it off. What the hell, he could hear the one from the adjoining room perfectly anyway. The stains in the toilet bowl and tub were a world to themselves. When he sat on it, the bed made a sound that reminded him of buckboards in old westerns.
But he needed rest, he was going to have a shitload of work to do tomorrow to get the car back up, and this was as good a place as any to go to ground. No one would find him, no one would look for him here.
He believed that right up until he came awake to the sound of his room door closing.
The intruder would stand there for a time, of course. Not moving, hardly breathing, listening. That’s how it was done. Driver coughed lightly, a half cough, the way we do when sleeping, and turned on his side, made to be settling back in.
One tentative footstep, a pause, then another. A couple of people went by just outside, stepping hard and talking, causing Driver to narrow his focus. The intruder would ride that noise, use it to cover his approach.
Don’t think, act , as Shannon had told him over and over. Driver never really saw or heard the man—sensed him more than anything—and was off the bed at a roll, able to make out the man’s form now, the outline of it against window light, striking out with his elbow at where the man’s face should be, feeling and hearing the crunch of bone.
Driver had his foot on the man’s throat by the time he was down, but he wasn’t going to be getting up anytime soon. Driver grabbed a towel from the bathroom and dropped it by him, then sat on the floor nearby, opening his pocket knife and holding it so that would be the first thing the man saw when he came around.
It didn’t take long. His eyes opened, swam a bit before they cleared, went to Driver. He turned his head to spit out blood. Looked back and waited.
“From around here?” Driver asked.
“Dallas.”
Imported talent, then. Interesting. He put away the knife. “What about the others?”
“I don’t know anything about any others, man.”
“What do you know?”
“I know there was five large waiting for me once I walked out of here.”
“But you’re not walking out, are you.”
“There is that.”
“You want to see Texas again?”
The man licked his lips, tasting blood. He put two fingers up and lightly touched his ruined nose. “That would be the most agreeable outcome, yes.”
“Then let’s get you in a chair and talk.”
“About?”
“How you’re getting paid, where, who. That sort of thing.”
Driver helped him up. Blood streamed from his face once the man was upright. He held the towel to his nose, speaking through it. “You know you can’t outrun this, right? When I’m gone, there’ll be someone else.”
So for the moment this was what it came down to, perched with a failed killer at world’s edge in the middle of the night, thinking about convictions. Had he ever had any? And what kind of lies was he telling himself, to think he might somehow find a way through all this?
— • —
     
He’d driven back out Van Buren to Sky