Chance

The way of the blade

The folks at the House of Space and Time were not so far off the grid as to be off-line as in quick order two laptop computers appeared side by side on the old coffee table… all Google Earth and YouTube… aerial and street views of the Blue Dolphin Motel that was situated at the northern extremity of Ocean Beach where the Great Highway narrowed and turned into Point Lobos Avenue, winding uphill to the Golden Gate National Recreational Area with the park at Lands End and the blue Pacific in close proximity and Big D arranged before them, a great hairless Buddha in military fatigues, his fingers at play upon the keys, his small dark eyes darting between the screens.

“This is interesting over here,” someone said. D said, “Copy that,” introducing the speaker as Gunnery Sergeant Hernandez, the latter now directing their attention to the coast very near the motel where the Cliff House restaurant and Camera Obscura backed by stairwells and concrete footpaths perched atop steep cliffs falling to the sea with the old city baths due north and these joined to the hiking trails in and around Lands End, as at the big man’s direction a plan began to form.

It would begin with on-site reconnaissance on the parts of D and Carl with Chance following on his own and it would be all about getting Blackstone out of the motel to a place of D’s choosing. It would be about selling the detective, not on détente, but on what Chance was willing to believe about détente. It was, at a certain level—his brashness in the use of a dead man’s phone notwithstanding—about Chance selling his own naiveté regarding the world according to Raymond. And finally it was about a handful of shadowed angles and Big D waiting… silent as a stroke, serious as a heart attack.

It was Gunny who added this last bit, the poetic flourish. As to what Chance thought, no one bothered to ask. The thing had acquired its own momentum and Chance in its wake. Which is not to say that he had abandoned his most recent epiphany or hope for a more reasonable outcome. So that even as the Primary Case continued with his examination of angles the doctor was quietly at work on his own variation, the most salient feature of which had to do with Chance’s luring Blackstone from the room. For D this was all about Chance selling his naiveté. For Chance it was a crack in the edifice, the place where the light got in, and naiveté had nothing to do with it but he was not about to share. Which was how he came to find himself in an open place beneath the trees, a blunted “training blade” in his hand, face-to-face with Big D, an alarming spectacle even in play.

It was the last bit of D’s planning, his preparation for the admittedly undesirable but not unthinkable, given the unfolding goat fuck of men at war, possibility that Chance might actually find himself in such close proximity to Blackstone, life and death in the balance and things gone sideways, that it would fall to him to deliver the fatal strike.

Their movements were based around a template of strikes, each aimed at a vital part of the body, each fatal. Chance was tasked with, if not the mastery, then at least some rudimentary grasp of three such strikes, “three of nine,” as D was wont to repeat, their two pairs of shoes scraping at the ground and Chance aware for the first time in his forty-nine years of his very own pyramid of power.

All three strikes were made with what D called a reverse grip—that is, with the hand made to a fist with the blade pointing down. It was, he said, a good grip by which to conceal the weapon. For when the hand was hanging at the side of the body, as when walking, the blade could very easily be made to lie along the inside of the wrist and forearm, all but invisible to an approaching target, a scenario by which the first of the three strikes could be particularly effective as it was delivered below the eye line, along the inguinal crease and into the high femoral artery. Off this strike came a second, with the hand lifting up into what D called the psycho position for one more quick strike down, this aimed for that soft area behind the subclavicle with the intention of piercing the aortic arch above the heart. While either of these strikes was capable of inflicting a fatal wound, they were particularly lethal as a one-two combination, ending life in a matter of seconds, the body bled out at both ends. And lastly there was what D called the money shot, a single fatal strike delivered to the chest at a point roughly even with the second button of a shirt and like the others it was also made with a reverse grip, a psycho strike in and down, aimed once more for the aortic arch.

There were, D said, a number of advantages to this strike, not the least of which was what he referred to as “fluid management.” Severing a femoral artery was a messy business. When striking through the chest, however, and presumably as many as two shirts, under and outer, the blade might be counted upon to carry a certain amount of material into the wound. Now if in conjunction with this, one’s strike has been true and one is able to hold the blade in place, for a two-count let’s say, there will simply no longer be enough pressure left in the system to drive the blood any appreciable distance. The downside of this strike, particularly in the hands of a novice, was that it had to be made with sufficient force to break through the chest cavity and sufficient accuracy to find its target. Unlike the slash at a femoral, which even if not wholly accurate, was almost certain to result in a debilitating wound, the money shot, if not carried out with absolute precision and wholehearted commitment, was likely to prove a disaster.

And so it went… with the minutes going by and the sweat beading at Chance’s brow and running down and Big D forever in front of him, patient as Job, amazingly quick with his hands and light on his feet, inviting, if one cared to go there, a renewed appreciation of what had transpired that night in the alley and how poor the chances of those would-be muggers had really been when matched against the size, speed, expertise, and power that was Big D in motion.

Aside from the fact that he could never imagine himself actually butchering another human by way of what the big man was trying to teach, Chance found that he rather enjoyed the workout. At first he had not wanted to get up, but once up he didn’t want to sit down. He was coming to appreciate the utility of motion in holding thoughts at bay, not to mention reality, although at one point near what he took to be the end of their session he allowed his curiosity to get the better of him, to inquire about the odds… of his actually making any of this work, in real time in the real world, of his actually hitting the target.

“You’ve just hit it about a hundred times in a row.”

“Under pressure, would be my point. I mean, if you had to give a number.”

“Do you know Hamlet?” D asked. He really was no shortage of wonders.

Chance allowed that he did.

“Well,” D told him. “There you have it. Time comes… trust your training. Do what you’ve been told. Worry it to death and you’re fucked.”

When they were done, or at least as done as they were going to get and the big man geared up, the vest inside his coat hung with throwing blades, handgun clipped to a boot, collapsible baton hung from his waistband and Chance with his blade, a double-edged six-inch dagger that he would, at least in theory, know how to use—if that was really what it came to—when they were done with all of that, they set out from the House of Space and Time, Chance, Carl, and D, first to the warehouse and Chance’s Olds and then on to Lands End, two cars now… rolling out from the alley behind the warehouse… into the last golden flaring of afternoon light, soldiers of the cross, loosed upon an unsuspecting metropolis.