Driven: The Sequel to Drive Read Online Free PDF

gleam in their eyes and a credit card. They’d be huge now or selling real estate somewhere.
That night, as a predicted rain eased down outside, memories mixed with twisted versions of scenes from the movie in his dreams. The next day he caught the Crown Vic in the rear view and realized what it meant, he almost laughed.
— • —
     
No doubt about its following him. Late model, nondescript gray, two men. He’d turned off Indian School, swung up to Osborn, then onto Sixteenth and they were still there. He took a residential street, one that looked wide and inviting but that, at the end of a long, curving block, ran headlong into a maze of apartment complexes and curlicue feeders. He’d come across it months ago and from sheer force of habit filed the location away. The area was riddled with stubs of pavement abutting the street, where private driveways had been before the complexes took over. Accelerating and taking a turn or two, just enough to get out ahead, he backed into one of those stubs and shut off the engine. Cars were parked along the streets on both sides—another plus. Across from him two young men unloaded furniture looking to be mostly veneer from a van that dipped alarmingly each time one of them climbed aboard.
DOS AMIGOS MOVERS
WE GET THE JOB DONE
     
Driver got out and walked over.
“Give you a hand there?”
They looked at him, then at one another, and rightfully so, with suspicion. One was crowding six foot, light complected with startlingly black hair that swept to either side like a crow’s wings. The other was short and deeply brown, hair sparse but long, upper arms like bags filled with rocks.
“I live just up the block.” Driver hooked his head. “Back there. Work at home, fourteen-fifteen hours a day I’m nose to nose with a computer screen. Then I got to get out, move around some. You know?”
“We can’t pay you, friend.” This from the shorter one, who seemed more or less to be in charge and more or less to be doing the lion’s share of the heavy lifting.
“Don’t expect it.”
Moments later, as Driver came down the ramp with an end table in one hand, lamp in the other, he saw the Crown Vic cruise past at a slow trot. It pulled up by the Fairlane, the passenger got out and checked, looked around, got back in. Never did more than glance across at three poor slobs unloading furniture. The Crown Vic came back by twice as they emptied the van, four minutes or so between laps, so they were sweeping the complexes, looking hard for whatever signs they thought they might see. Last lap, the guy on the passenger side was talking on a phone. The Crown Vic picked up speed and was gone.
“Better get back to it, I guess,” Driver said.
“Back in the saddle, right. Hey, man—much thanks for the help. Cold beer in the cooler up front if you want one.”
“Next time.”
“ Any time.”
— • —
     
Two days later he’s sitting at the mall swallowing bitter coffee when the guy at the next table says “You’ve made Carl unhappy.”
Driver looked over. Thirtyish, dress shirt and slacks, could be a sales rep on break or the manager of Dillard’s across the way.
“Carl is good at one thing and one thing only. That is pretty much his life. But you lost him.”
“I take it Carl drives a grey Crown Vic.”
“And when Carl’s unhappy, it’s like…well, it’s as though small black clouds spring up everywhere.” He held up his cup. “Grabbing a refill, get you anything?”
“I’m good.”
While the man was gone, a couple of teenagers took the table. He came back and stood there silently until they got up and moved away. He sat down. Some kind of slush drink, so that he kept tilting his head back, letting the soft ice slide down his throat.
“You and Carl of the Black Cloud, I assume you’d both have the same business address.”
“More or less.”
Pretty much , more or less : evidently his visitor came from a world of approximations, one where perception, judgment, even facts,