Drive by James Sallis Page B

assembled the table. By the time feet had been fitted with rubber stoppers and the bottom half of legs were in place, the expression on her face, to which he was ever attentive, had gone from happy to puzzled. As she spliced on upper legs, cross-supports and screws, her expression turned sad. That prospect of sadness spread throughout her body, washed out into the room.
    Watch closely: that’s the second rule.
    Mother lifted the table top out of the bottom of the box and set it in place.
    An ugly, cheap-looking, wobbly thing.
    The room, the world, got very quiet. Both stayed that way for a long time.
    I just don’t understand, Mother said.
    She sat on the floor still, pliers and screwdrivers ranged about her. Tears streamed down her face.
    It looked so pretty in the catalog. So pretty. Not at all like this.

Chapter Twenty-six
    Jodie’s former ride was a Ford F-150, graceless as a wheelbarrow, dependable as rust and taxes, indestructible as a tank. Brakes that could stop an avalanche cold, engine powerful enough to tow glaciers into place. Bombs fall and wipe out civilization as we know it, two things’ll come up out of the ashes: roaches and F-150s. Thing handled like an ox cart, rattled fillings from teeth and left you permanently saddle sore, but it was a survivor. Got the job done, whatever the job was.
    Like him.
    Driver steered the mostly black beast with patches of Bond-It back down I-10 towards L.A. He’d found a college station playing Eddie Lang-Lonnie Johnson duets, George Barnes, Parker with Dolphy, Sidney Bechet, Django. Funny how so small a victory, finding that station, could change your whole outlook.
    At a barbershop on Sunset he had his head buzzed almost to the scalp. Bought oversize clothes and wraparound mirror shades next door.
    Nino’s shouldered up against a bakery and a butcher shop in an Italian neighborhood where old women sat out on porches and front steps and men played dominos at card tables set up on the sidewalk. What with supermarkets, Sam’s Clubs and so on, Driver hadn’t known butcher shops still existed.
    Two guys in dark suits, in particular, put in a lot of time at Nino’s. They’d show up early in the morning, have breakfast and sit around a while, then leave. Hour or so later, they’d be back. Sometimes that’d go on all day long. One slammed espressos, the other went with wine.
    Came right down to it, they were a study in opposites.
    Espresso Man was young. Late twenties maybe, black hair cut short and troweled in place with what looked for all the world like Vaseline. Shine UV on that hair, it would fluoresce. Round-toed, clumsy-looking black shoes stuck out under the cuffs of his pants. Beneath his coat he wore a navy blue polo shirt.
    Wine Man, fiftyish, wore a dark dress shirt with gold cufflinks but no tie, black Reeboks, and had his grey hair pulled back into a stubby ponytail. Where his young partner walked with the deliberate, measured step, the meatiness, of a bodybuilder, Wine Man just kind of drifted. Like he was in moccasins, or touched down only every third or fourth step.
    999
    Second day, right after breakfast, Espresso Man stepped behind the building to have a smoke. Inhaling deeply, he drew in a lungful of slow poison, exhaled, then tried to draw in another but it wouldn’t come.
    Something around his neck. What the fuck—wire? He claws at it, knowing it’ll do no good. Someone behind pulling hard. And that warmth on his chest would be blood. As he struggles to look down, an ingot of bloody flesh, his flesh, drops onto his chest.
    So this is it, he thinks, here in a fucking alley, with shit in my pants. Goddamn.
    Driver tucks a Nino’s coupon into Espresso Man’s coat pocket. Earlier he’s circled “We Deliver” in red ink.
    999
    God damn, Wine Man echoed minutes later. Nino’s bodyguard brought him out here after one of the cooks, emerging to empty a grease trap, tripped over Junior.
    Who the hell would name their kid Junior anyway?
    Boy was gone,