Free Driven: The Sequel to Drive by James Sallis

sat on the edge of the bed. Wendell was handing him his shoes. Rubbed at the tops with his shirt sleeve as he did so.
“Tell you what. ’Bout ten minutes, they’re gonna be starting up a gospel singalong out there in the day room. I saw the choir members when they got off the bus, be one hell of a racket made. And I’m not much more of a mind to sit through that than you are. What say you and me go for a walk? Get good earth under our feet.”
— • —
     
Back his first year in town, he and Shannon were on the set of Doomtown Days , a post-apocalypse film. Studios were turning out a lot of them then, mostly on shoestring budgets. Reluctantly heroic, barely dressed man or woman stalking across the wasteland alone, communities gone feral, automotive equivalents of zip guns, zombie sheep, that sort of thing.
Shannon had just said that the director looked to be all of sixteen years old. “Kid musta clipped out an ad from the back of a comic book. Want to direct movies? Sent in his two dollars.”
There was a guy hanging around the edges, wearing a print shirt, creased high-pocket trousers. Neither young nor old, good-looking or plain, nothing to draw attention to him. Driver pointed, asked who’s that?
“Danny Louvin. Everything you see here goes back to him.”
Driver looked again. Put a Your-Name-Here ID bracelet on him, a puka-shell necklace, he’d win the award for uncool. “That’s the money man?”
“The money man’s sitting over there in the producer tent. Knit shirt, leather loafers? Danny’s the one who keeps it running, makes it all work.”
“He doesn’t seem to be doing anything.”
“That’s how good he is.”
Driver remembered that as he drove out Cave Creek Road. Clump after clump of housing developments squatted on what within easy memory had been bare desert. He wondered if, late afternoons, the coyotes still came out, and what they must think about all this. Dark swatches showed on the hills where clouds blocked sunlight, making the landscape look like parts from two different worlds hastily patched together.
He was thinking about the people you see and the ones you don’t, the ones who really run things. Take this too far, it blooms to paranoia, you start finding conspiracies in how cereal boxes get lined up on the shelf. Consider it too little, you’re a fool.
Bresh believed that he ran the office at GBS, he was the one who kept things together. Maybe he was. And what about Beil, who claimed to be merely a broker, an arranger, a middleman? How far did his influence extend? Was there a wizard for every curtain? Or just one, behind all the curtains?
Billboards advertising a new community under construction out this way showed a string of faces from infant to elderly and read The Better Life You’ve Been Looking For . Driver remembered something else Shannon had told him, the story of a traveller who gave his life because he wanted to visit a town that was like all others in its area, but forbidden. He remembered it because the writer had been there when Shannon told the story. Two days later that same situation showed up in the ongoing rewrite of the script.
Richard Cole’s home was green stucco and had fake logs or at least fake stubs of logs built high into the outside walls. Plastic barn owls stood at each corner of the roof, searching the skies. Two cars in the driveway, a midnight blue Lexus and a red two-seater BMW.
No door bell, but a knocker shaped like a bear’s head. Driver used it then stepped aside, to the edge of the peephole’s sweep, turning to look away, as if in appreciation of the landscape.
“Who is it?” came from inside.
Driver didn’t respond. After a moment the door started open. Driver waited. When it was fully open, and the man stood there, anger and presumption spilling off his face, Driver took a single step forward and hit him once, hard as he could, directly in the forehead. Watched him stagger back and go down, saw the other guy come up from the