The Driver (28 page)

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER
6, 2005
NEW YORK CITY

“So whaddya think?” said Cory at the end of the world's first screening of
32 Hours, 7 Minutes.
She was sitting on my couch in between The Weis and Nine, Team Polizei consigliere Shawn Canter on my emergency movie-watching futon, Skylar in my lap on one recliner, Lelaine Lau—my Audrey Hepburn-esque business partner—on the other.

“Maaaaaaan,” said Nine, “I can't believe these Diem/Turner guys had a spotter plane.”

I turned to Cory. “Now we know where the spotter-plane legend came from.”

“Cory, Alex,” said The Weis, “if all these Express guys said they'd go again, how come no one has? Why haven't you?'”

Cory cracked a smile at him, then at me. “It
would
be great to shoot some B-roll in the M5.”

“Aliray,” said The Weis, “do you think 32:07 can be broken? Seriously.”

Everyone's eyes darted between us.

“I don't know.”

“So you,” said The Weis, “supposedly one of the best in the world at this kind of thing, even with all your scanners and gear, say it can't be broken?”

“Of all the drivers I've ever met, Rawlings is the only one who thinks it's possible, but he's basing that on far less information than we have.”

“Alex,” said The Weis, “what does Yates say about the old records?”

“Remember, he only recognizes the 32:51 record from the '79 Cannonball. Once the movie comes out, the 32:07 time will be recognized.”

“But what does he say is possible now?”

“Thirty-six hours.”

“I'll quote Diem,” said Cory. “Records are meant to be broken.”

“Call it a recon run,” said Canter. “Shoot your B-roll, drive safe, see what happens. Alex does some talking-head stuff, and there's your movie.”

Cory nodded. “A peek over the edge.”

Nine glared at me. “Moron…is this what you wanted?”

“Aliray,” said The Weis, “you do it, I'll help you prep.”

“Alex,” said Canter, “what time are you going to shoot for?”

“It's just a recon,” I said, looking Cory in the eye. “I'll do the math, let's say…36 hours?”

“I say 37,” said Nine.

“I say 34,” said The Weis.

“Guys,” I said, “if we don't do it by mid-December, we have to wait until April.”

“Are you insane?” Cory shook her ahead at Nine, then turned to me. “I can't believe
you
of all people want to wait until April. Suppose we go and get some amazing time, and
then
you decide you want to give 32:07 a shot. The real deal. We'll have to wait until
after
next summer. We've got to do this
now,
just in case.
Just
in case.”

The silence made it clear that everyone had greatly underestimated this young independent filmmaker from L.A. Everyone else went to Sundance and prayed. Cory didn't care. She would do anything for this movie, including a run. A big run.
The
run only Rawlings and I, whatever our motives, were willing to attempt. Everyone else, the rally people who didn't run, or come back, the muscle-car guys, the Ferrari guys, the Cipriani diners, the mattress-tamers, every sports-car-driving banker in New York except Maher—all of them were joking. Cory Welles was not joking.

“Cory, the M5 will be ready within four weeks. Whatever it takes.”

“Christ,” said Nine, “you're talking right before Christmas. The weather, man, it's suicide. This is like
badidea.com
.”

“I'll buy max-performance all-season tires. Everyone, even
I
don't know the legal ramifications of what we're going to do, so this conversation
cannot
leave this room.”

“Always inventing drama,” said The Weis. “I'm hungry and I miss my wife. I say we adjourn.”

Everyone sighed with relief until I stood and said, “I think we should all sign nondisclosures. Cory?” She nodded. “Good, in that case, I love you all, thanks.”

Cory cornered me immediately. “Alex,
you're
scared that if Rawlings finds out we're going, he'll go solo, no matter what.”

“Precisely. If anything goes wrong, if he's caught, or kills someone, we're screwed. My name's on a movie called
32:07
. If some crazy prosecutor starts digging around and asks
anyone
who's the most likely to try to break it, I'm probably in the top three. Then we'll never go, ever.”

“Done. I'll have my attorney prepare NDAs for everyone. We'll keep it secret until…I guess until we figure out what to do?”

“At least until we're back safe, or maybe until the movie comes out. The beauty of it is that no one who knows Team Polizei will
ever
believe that I could make a run and not go public the same day. Any leak will sound like a bullshit rumor. They know I can't keep my mouth shut. Enough talk; time for pizza, ice cream, and bed.”

“Good boy,” The Weis said on his way out. “You're gonna be fine. I'm proud of you.”

“Enough man love,” said Nine, behind him. “Aliray, do I have to ask who's copiloting?”

“No.”

“I hate you.”

“I hate you, too, but think of it! The first ones to try in twenty years! Nine, if we beat 36 hours then Yates is wrong, which means everyone is wrong.”

“Man, you're gonna owe me a lot more than Taco Bell this time.”

“I'll buy you In-N-Out Burger when we get to L.A. And I'll even split the driving with you.”

“That sounds like a really good deal, Mr. Trump, now should I turn around and bend over, too? Try this one…I take the burger and you do all the driving.”

“Cute. FYI, I can't drive in Arizona. If we're stopped for any reason, my '04 Bullrun arrest might come up on a police computer. We have to stop at one or both ends of Arizona so you can drive that leg.”

“Wait a second, if you're driving and we're pulled over outside Arizona, how do you know all the police databases aren't connected?”

“I don't. In fact Homeland Security has been trying to connect them since 9/11.”

“Thank God,” said Nine, whose new IT consultancy lent him unique insight into such matters. “That'll take years. Anything else?”

“I need you here every day after work, six to ten, Monday through Thursday, until we go. Someone's got to double-check my nav and fuel tables.”

“But I suck at math.”

“Me, too. Get some sleep, Mr. Goodrich.”

Everyone left but Skylar, with whom I watched TV in bed until she fell asleep without a word about the evening's events. Only now did I see how much I'd changed since we'd met a year earlier. I wondered if she loved me too much to try to deter me, or if she feared being sacrificed because nothing would.

At 2
A.M
. I snuck out of bed, my vibrating phone noisily walking itself across my hardwood floor. “Aliray,” Nine whispered, his words spoken from a tiled bathroom like that in which I, too, now hid, “have you thought about what happens if we break 36? I mean…in a big way?”

“Take a wild guess.”

“Dammit, now I'm
definitely
not gonna get any sleep. Seriously, do you think we can?”

“Do
you
? Now I've got to go to bed before my girlfriend leaves me over this, and so should you.” I hung up, but suspected he hung up on me first. I closed my eyes and tried in vain to sleep.

 

I stopped answering the phone roughly two weeks later, uncomfortable with having to lie even to close friends about why I'd stopped going out, and why my visit to the West Coast, purportedly to work on the film, might last as long as several months. I wondered how career criminals explained their periodic long absences to civilian friends, then quickly understood.

I needed eight weeks to complete work for which I had three. Our conversations, although held in English, became a hybridized jumble of military and mathematical terminology utterly impenetrable to all but Cory, The Weis, and Nine. Nine and I had each already spent at least 40 off-work hours preparing and test-driving the M5. I'd spent another 20 on police-radio-frequency research, barely a quarter of what I thought necessary. We spent painstaking hours of slowly scrolling, at maximum screen resolution, mile by mile through the Garmin's
Shortest Route
feature's best guess at the shortest route. The elimination of errant turns and gratuitous mileage was so important we began eyeballing the trip on-screen in near-real time, an ordeal made worse during our shift change, groans punctuating the hourly prying of a computer mouse from an atrophied claw that had once been a hand. Having cut the route down to 2,817 miles and revised the fuel/time tables, we attempted to correct the errors cascading down the spreadsheet with every mile and minute shaved.

We cursed Microsoft tech support's policy of hanging up on anyone using their software for what might be a criminal endeavor, then cursed each other for not suggesting we tell them it was a high school science project. Whatever errors remained on our increasingly complex driveplan, we settled on its projection of 36:27.

Between Nine's IT background and my love of the Military Channel, countless driveplan revisions led to nomenclature such as
Version .86Beta (Recon-12)
. Not only did this add gravitas to a document of such vast felonious import that we fought to conceal our giggles from The Weis (seated at my desk, hoping to save our lives through nightly analysis of National Weather Service forecasts), but the numerical suffix also counted down the days to departure, a constant reminder no fear-inspired levity could cloak.

On Friday, December 2, I began my survey of potential departure points as close as possible to one of Manhattan's three Hudson River crossings. The Garmin's mystical calculations suggested the Holland Tunnel was one mile closer to Los Angeles than the Lincoln, and nine miles closer than the George Washington Bridge. The Garmin also listed thirteen parking lots within one-quarter mile of our dream pick, which on a Friday night at midnight was only 10 minutes from my garage. I prayed, circling the tunnel entrance in increasing, stepladdered arcs around Tribeca's complex network of one-way streets, always returning to the center to gauge its distance from the few indoor, guarded lots I found suitably proximate. A cluster of Port Authority police officers awaited me on my sixth slow tunnel drive-by. One pointed at me, another raised his radio, and just when I thought another pass might get me arrested under suspicion of scoping out one of New York's most visible terror targets, I spotted a familiar but unexpectedly placed sign over their heads. The London-based Classic Car Club, a high-end sports-car time-share dealership, had just opened its gorgeous New York showroom 50 feet from the mouth of the tunnel. The patron saint of Nonviolent and Unprofitable Crimes must have been listening, because in a fortuitous coincidence I'd long ago met the CCC's owners, and they'd been more than familiar with both Gumball and Team Polizei.

Cory returned Sunday, December 11, with a mountain of large, hard plastic camera and DV deck cases. With the surprise addition of James Petersmeyer, a twentysomething assistant cameraman Cory deemed essential on the run, four of us would share a space smaller than allotted just one in supermax solitary confinement.

“Two best friends who've run out of good jokes,” said Nine, “a hot, nonsmoking, hippie black belt who's got us by the balls if we tell a bad joke on camera, and some surfer dude we don't know? It's the worst road trip of all time, only ten times longer.”

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER
14, 2005
AI DESIGN—TUCKAHOE, NEW YORK
58
HOURS TO DEPARTURE

“But how are you going to prove it?” said Matt Figliola, president of AI Design, the
Robb Report
's pick for the country's best automotive customization specialists. Matt's six feet three inches barred him from sitting in clients' cars of Italian origin. Resembling Paul Sorvino, he alternated between the latter's on-screen grimace and his own young son's red-cheeked glee whenever I personally appeared to request installation of yet another illegal device. The Weis, Nine, and Cory approached as we stood by the M5, by far the dirtiest, most dented, highest-mileage car present, its $35,000 book value (not including thousands of dollars of modifications useless to anyone else) but a fraction of the next cheapest car in the garage. Charles Graeber, a six-five, thirty-two-year-old, Hunter Thompson-esque writer for
Wired,
the
New York Times,
and
National Geographic,
who spoke like he gargled with charcoal and gravel, and who, unarmed, had survived many unexpected meetings with Africa's surliest meat-loving predators, sat uncomfortably hunched forward in my driver's seat, already pushed back against its detent. Kenny Karasinski, AI's young, goateed, shaved-headed Master Electronics Specialist, a man as responsible for keeping me out of jail as Seth, sat beside Graeber, pointing out and explaining how much of my gear had been concealed from prying eyes—and what couldn't be.

“We wanted to bring
him,
” I whispered, looking down at Graeber, “but he wouldn't fit in the back that long without crying for mercy. We're doing witnesses at the start and finish, all the video, E-ZPass, gas and toll receipts.”

“Why bother if you're not trying to break it?”

“Maybe something good will happen,” Cory piped in, poking me in the arm.

“If Aliray had any balls,” said The Weis, “he'd give it a shot.”

I gave him a nasty glare. “You'd try to stop me if I really wanted to.”

“What a coincidence.” Cory chuckled. She gave me a furtive glance and silently mouthed the letters
N, D,
and
A
.