Drive by James Sallis

family spilled from its van with dogs in tow, parents shouting at kids, kids shouting at dogs and one another.
    The Mustang materialized behind him, in his mirror.
    Okay then, he thought. My game now.
    Popping the clutch, he shot along the service road. As he gained speed, his eyes swept constantly from rear view mirror to highway and back again. With a car length to spare, he slid onto the highway between two semis.
    But he couldn’t lose the son of a bitch whatever he tried.
    Periodically he’d go off-road, blend into local traffic to take advantage of it, interpose traffic lights like blockades between himself and his pursuer. Or back on the interstate he’d accelerate with blinkers going as though to take the off ramp, drop in front of a rig, then, once out of sight, floor it and surge ahead.
    Whatever he did, the Mustang hung there behind like a bad memory, history you can’t escape.
    Desperate times, desperate measures.
    Well out of the city, out where the first of a crop of white windmills, lazily turning, wound sky down to desert, Driver sailed without warning onto an exit ramp and into a one-eighty. Sat facing back the way he’d come as the Mustang raced towards him.
    Then he hit the gas.
    He was out for a minute or two, no more. An old stunt man’s trick: at the last moment, he’d thrown himself into the back seat and braced for the collision.
    The cars struck head-on. Neither was going to leave on its own steam, but the Mustang, predictably, got the worst of it. Kicking his door open, Driver climbed out.
    “You okay?” someone shouted from the window of a battered pickup idling at the bottom of the off ramp.
    Then the long blare of a horn and a squeal of brakes as a Chevy van skidded to a stop, rocking, behind the pickup.
    Driver stepped up to the Mustang. Sirens in the distance.
    Gordon Ligocki’s ducktail would never look good again. His neck was broken. Internal damages too, judging from the blood around his mouth. Probably slammed into the steering wheel.
    Driver still had the coupons for Nino’s Pizza.
    He tucked one into Gordon Ligocki’s shirt pocket.

Chapter Twenty-four
    He hitched a ride with the guy in the pickup, whose emergence with an aluminum baseball bat had sufficiently adjusted attitudes among the youthful crew of the van as to send them spinning away into traffic.
    “What I’m guessing is you may have good reason not to be around once the Man arrives,” he said when Driver approached him. “Know more than a little about that myself. Get on up here.”
    Driver climbed aboard.
    “Name’s Jodie,” he said a mile or so down the road, “but nearabouts everyone calls me Sailor.” He pointed to a tattoo on his right bicep. “Supposed to be a bat wing. Looks like a mainsail.”
    Professionally done tattoos—the bat, a woman in a grass skirt with coconut shells for breasts, an American flag, a dragon—covered his biceps. Hands on the steering wheel bore another sort of tattoo. Jailhouse tattoos, crudely done with ink and the end of a wire. Most times, that meant a guitar string.
    “Where’re we headed?” Driver asked.
    “Depends….Town not far up the road has a decent enough dinner. You hungry by any chance?”
    “I could eat.”
    “How did I know?”
    It was a classic small-town noontime buffet, steam trays piled high with slices of meat loaf, shrimp, hot wings, beans and franks, home fries, roast beef. Sides of cottage cheese, three-layer Jell-O salad, green salad, pudding, carrot and celery sticks, green bean casserole. Clientele a mix of blue-collar workers, men and women from offices nearby in short-sleeve dress shirts and polyester dresses, blue-haired old ladies. These last came out in their tank-like cars around one o’clock each afternoon, Jodie told him, heads barely visible above steering wheel and dash. Everyone else knew to get off the streets then.
    “You don’t have work you need to be tending to?” Driver asked.
    “Nope, time’s my own. Have Nam to thank