“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 cafe and bar sat to other side, back a bit. Take a brave man to hit that cafe, 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 airport.”
The man said, “Rabbits that survive know when to go to ground.”
Driver moved around to meet his eyes. “You’re a rabbit, Mr. Dunaway?”
“A survivor. And surrounded by foxes. Like him.” Dunaway pointed to the TV. Driver turned to look. An elderly man with his arms in the air, circled by others, all young, wearing rags and tatters of uniforms and carrying automatic weapons. “Strange missions. We’re all chockful of strange missions. Often we don’t even know what they are. But they push us, they ride us.”
“You’re saying you didn’t choose to pursue me?”
“Not at all. That was one thing I understood. But the rest…”
“Who was Blanche, sir?”
“Only a sweet, troubled girl. They’re everywhere. All around us.”
He said nothing more. They listened to a car pull into the lot outside, sit with speakers blasting, and pull away.
“Why are you trying to kill me, Mr. Dunaway?”
The screen showed hundreds of birds rising from a lake. It was as though the surface of the lake itself were drifting skyward. Dunaway glanced there, then back.
“Kill you? Not at all. Quite the contrary.”
He finished his Scotch and set the cup on the floor.
“The story’s not much different from what you hear from parents everywhere, We did what we could. We could see her getting wilder every year, every day. Small things at first, stealing from friends, shoplifting, then gone for days at a time. One night she’s passed out in bed with all her clothes on and I’m looking in her purse hoping I won’t find drugs, and I don’t. I find a gun. Not long after that, she was gone for good.”
“Blanche was your daughter.”
Dunaway nodded. “We knew she was bad, just a lost person, hurtful, destructive. But that made no difference.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You were with her.”
“When she was killed. Yes sir, I was.”
“Wasn’t likely to play out any other way. Her life.”
“No.”
“We did what we could. Once my wife was gone…” Dunaway broke off eye contact to look back at the screen. “Blanche was my only child. You took her from me.”
“No sir, the man who did that died moments after she did.”