Drive

Chapter Nine

“I’m gonna run across and grab something to eat,” Blanche said. “I saw a Pizza Hut over there and I’m starved. Sausage and extra cheese okay?”

“Sure,” he said, standing near the door, by one of those picture windows on aluminum tracks that all motels seem to have. The lower left corner had sprung out of the frame and he could feel warm air from outside pouring in. They were in a second-floor room facing front, with only the balcony, stairway and twenty yards or so of parking lot between them and the interstate. The motel itself had three separate exits. One ramp onto the interstate was off the intersection beyond the parking lot. Another was just up the street.

First thing you do, room, bar, restaurant, town or crib, is check and memorize the ways out.

Earlier, road weary, bodies vibrating from far too many hours in the car, they’d watched a movie on TV, a caper film set in Mexico with an actor who’d been big for about three days before sinking into drugs, guest-star gigs in films like this one shot on the cheap, and the meager, trailing fame of tabloid headlines.

Driver marveled at the power of our collective dreams. Everything gone to hell, the two of them become running dogs, and what do they do? They sit there watching a movie. Couple of chase scenes, Driver’d be willing to swear it was Shannon driving. Never saw him, of course. But definitely his style.

Has to be Blanche, Driver thought, standing by the window. No other way that Chevy was down there in the parking lot.

She’d taken a brush out of her purse and started into the bathroom.

He heard her say “What-”

Then the dull boom of the shotgun.

Driver went in around Blanche’s body, saw the man in the window, then slipped in blood and slammed into the shower stall, shattering the glass door and ripping his arm open. The man still struggled to free himself. But now he was lifting the gun again and swinging it towards Driver, who, without thinking, picked up a piece of the jagged glass and threw. It hit the man full on in the forehead. Pink flesh flowered there, blood poured into the man’s eyes, and he dropped the shotgun. Driver saw the razor by the sink. He used it.

The other one was doing his best to kick the door in. That’s what Driver had been hearing all along without realizing what it was, that dull drumming sound. He broke through just as Driver came back into the room-just in time for the shotgun’s second load. Thing was maybe twenty inches long and it kicked like a son of a bitch, doing more damage to his arm. Driver could see flesh and muscle and bone in there.

Not that he was complaining, mind you.

Sitting with his back against the wall in a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, Driver watched blood lapping toward him. Traffic sounds rolled in from the interstate. Someone wept in the next room. He realized he’d been holding his breath, listening for sirens, for the sound of people gathering on stairways or down in the parking lot, for the scramble of feet beyond the door, and took a deep draw of room air gone foul with the smell of blood, urine, feces, cordite, fear.

Neon flashed on the skin of the tall, pale man near the door.

He heard the drip of the tub’s faucet from the bathroom.

He heard something else as well, a scratching, a scrabbling, more drumlike sounds. Realized at length that it was his own arm jumping involuntarily, knuckles rapping at the floor, fingers scratching and thumping as the hand contracted.

The arm hung there, apart from him, unconnected, like an abandoned shoe. When Driver willed it to move, nothing happened.

Worry about that later.

He looked back at the open door. Maybe that’s it, Driver thought. Maybe no one else is coming, maybe it’s over. Maybe, for now, three bodies are enough.