Chance

Of feeders and receivers and brave volunteers

The front of the old warehouse was dark and Chance went round to the alley where a pale light could be found issuing from the storage door he knew to be D’s and knocked softly. He soon heard the tumble of locks, the door rolling on its iron rail, enough for D to look out. The big man was fully dressed, clearly awake and not at all, it would seem, surprised to find Chance at his door in the dead of night. “I was in the neighborhood,” Chance told him.

A pair of black leather Eames chairs complete with footrests had been arranged sociably enough in D’s space and they seated themselves in these. “Nice,” Chance said. He slapped an armrest with the flat of his hand. He guessed them fresh from the showroom floor.

“Sup?” D asked. They were just like two regular guys, Chance thought. “Hell if I know,” he said, and he didn’t. But he proceeded to talk. He talked about many things, his divorce, his wife and daughter, the IRS, the practice of medicine, the inequities of a broken system. He may even have mentioned Bernard Jolly, Mariella Franko, and/or Doc Billy for all he could remember about it later on. Eventually of course he got to the reason he was there, Jaclyn Blackstone, a.k.a. Jackie Black, and her former husband, the homicidal homicide detective Raymond Blackstone.

D proved a good listener. He listened right up to the part where Chance had gone to the restaurant expecting Jaclyn and getting Raymond. At which point D stopped him.

“This was an arranged meeting?”

“Yes, I’d planned to meet this woman.”

“And this guy shows up?”

“Indeed he did.”

“How do you think he knew about it?”

“I’ve given that some thought. He overheard something, found a note. One cannot rule out the possibility she tipped him off in some way…”

“She would do that?”

“Depends on how sick she is,” Chance said, echoing Janice.

“Well,” D said. “Big picture… it doesn’t really make any difference how he found out. Just being there is a threat. Unless… it’s some kind of game the two of them play and they’re setting you up for something. You’ve thought of that?”

“Yes, but what I think more likely is that he just found out, or that if she did in some way allow him to find out, it was an unconscious thing.”

“You’re the doctor,” D said. “Anyway… there he is… in the restaurant. What I would do now… I’m him… I’d be very fucking friendly. That’s how you scare someone. Was he friendly?”

“To a point. She came in. It got a little weird.”

“Define ‘weird.’ ”

“Good. Okay. Tense. Let’s just say it was tense.”

“But he never made any overt threats?”

“He got into this weird bit about my daughter, how it was tough being a parent in a predatory world. Something to that effect.”

“That’s not so good.”

“No. And he gave me his card.”

“You still have it?”

Chance produced it.

D sat looking at it. “And now you wonder if he was behind this thing… with Nicole.”

“It’s what I wonder.”

“Could be some trouble she’s gotten into on her own.”

“It could be.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I think it was him, making a point about coincidence. Letting me know what I have to look forward to if I don’t back off.”

“He’s smart then.”

“He’s half a gangster, you hear her tell it. Never gets his hands dirty but he gets things done.”

“Like putting this woman in the hospital.”

“Like that.”

“Like this, with your daughter.”

“It’s what worries me.”

D returned the card. “Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into something, Doc.”

“That’s a terrible way of putting it. But I think you may be right.”

“There’s no right or wrong about how you put it. It is what it is. A guy like this can be a problem.”

“He knows how to game the system.”

“He is the system.”

A moment passed during which the big man, who had till now treated pretty much everything with a rather Buddha-like equanimity, became suddenly more animated. It was the mention of the system that seemed to have done it. His face colored. The hand that lay upon the armrest nearest Chance rolled itself into a fist the size of a lunch pail. “This is bullshit,” D said finally. “This cheap fuck… gun and a badge… tough guy. I’d like to see him meet me someplace.”

“There’s one other thing,” Chance said.

“What’s that?”

“Last night… after the restaurant… she came to my apartment. He may have followed her.” He told D about the unmarked Crown Vic.

“Let’s walk,” D said.

It wasn’t exactly the response Chance was expecting. But then it wasn’t really a question, either. Chance didn’t ask where and D didn’t say. Given the strangeness of the past forty-eight, the idea of going for a walk with Big D at two in the morning seemed to make about as much sense as anything else.

They went out by way of the alley where the night smelled of garbage and there was a slight chill on the noxious air, winter waiting in the wings. D wore the old Army Rangers jacket over jeans and a black T-shirt. One of his heavy black combat boots was patched with duct tape. Chance was still dressed in the clothes he’d put on that morning, dark slacks, a pale yellow sweater, and brown loafers. Only thing needed to make the oddness of their pairing complete, he concluded, was the white doctor’s coat with his name on it that hung more or less as a prop from his office door, that he sometimes wore in front of those patients for whom he thought such outward signs of competency might help in allaying their fears.

For the most part they walked in silence. D set a good enough pace that Chance actually had to work to keep up. They went east on Market and then north. It was neither the hour nor direction Chance would have chosen. “Not the best part of town,” was how he voiced his concern. D grunted and kept walking.

Lights failed briefly nearing the Tenderloin, though here and there some bit of neon hung frosted in the dank air. Figures half realized rustled among the shadows as might insects disturbed by their passing. In time they came to a street where the tawdry neon was more prevalent. There were hookers on corners now and dimly lit bars, men with bottles on the stoops of flophouses, their liquor in brown paper bags. There was also the occasional flare of a butane lighter beneath the bowl of a glass pipe and small bands of prowling youth.

Chance found that he’d broken a sweat. It beaded up on his hairline in the chill of the improbable night, made ever more improbable with each step, whereupon something new, equally improbable, and profoundly disturbing began to occur. Big D began to limp. He began to do something else as well. He began to hold his right arm up, bent at the elbow, his left hand bunched at his side in the manner of a stroke victim so that his entire body might be seen to participate in the ruse, if ruse it was. Chance’s first instinct was to indulge in the luxury of doubting his observation. It was after all the night on the heels of the day in the wake of the previous night. He was short on sleep, nerves wrung to the breaking point. Unhappily D continued to limp, possibly even to refine his limp, till Chance could doubt it no more. “Are you all right?” he asked. He was a little afraid of the answer but D only nodded and turned forthwith into a brightly lit liquor store at the heart of the broad way, still dragging a leg and favoring an arm.

The store was as shabby and inherently threatening as any Chance had been in for some time. A large, surly man with the well-muscled, heavily tattooed arms of an aging gangbanger noted their entrance from behind the safety of what Chance could only interpret as bulletproof glass, the latter heavily pitted and scratched, as was the wooden counter beneath. The glass had a hole cut from it by which the tattooed man might exchange pleasantries with his customers, of whom there were several milling about in the aisles, locals one and all, or so it appeared. Chance was aware of their eyes on him. The next thing he was aware of was Big D turning to face him. “Got a money card?” D asked.

Chance was not immediately certain as to what was meant. “Excuse me?” he said.

D looked toward an ATM machine squeezed between a rack of pornographic magazines and a sweating cooler jammed with beer. The money machine was anchored to the floor by way of a chain one might only have described as maritime.

By the harsh light of the store Chance was able to regard his companion anew then wished at once that he hadn’t. Exercise and the night air had served to further redden D’s face. Sweat beaded up on his naked, tattooed dome. The military jacket was threadbare and tattered, and for the first time Chance noticed what appeared to be a nearly empty half-pint bottle of Jim Beam Kentucky bourbon protruding from the side pocket of the ragged coat. And then there was the boot patched in tape, the same that the big man had taken to dragging along the pavement behind him. Was it Chance’s imagination or had he also, in asking about the card, begun to slur his words?

“Excuse me?” Chance said again. It was apparently the best he could do.

“ATM card,” D repeated, only slightly testy. He was, Chance thought, definitely slurring his words. “Are we buying something?” he asked.

“That’d be one way of putting it.”

Chance looked to the sorry machine. “You know… if you need something in here… I’ve got cash.” He was trying to keep his voice down, still aware of being watched.

“Just use the machine, brother.”

My God, Chance thought, they were through the looking glass. A pair of mutually exclusive propositions seemed possible. D was consciously establishing them as targets or he had brought Chance here to rob him, the former only slightly less disturbing than the latter. As to the factualness of either, he absolutely could not say. The thing was opaque.

They might, he supposed, have continued to stand there, discussing at such lengths the use of Chance’s card and whether or not he was being held up till they had come to resemble the characters of a Beckett play with no shortage of spectators. A small, or perhaps not so small, group had collected at the end of an aisle near the tattooed man and his bulletproof glass.

Faced with the situation’s mounting complexities, Chance remained as he was, rather like a rabbit in the headlights, as D gimped off in the direction of the machine. As for what the locals might be making of Chance, or of the two of them together, he could only guess: father and prodigal, huckster and mark, or maybe something a bit more on the kinky side. He supposed they were in a part of town where everything went, where from behind the shelter of his worried glass their tattooed host had, as the saying went, seen it all.

Aside from his being caught away in the clouds or beamed directly back to the mother ship, Chance was where he was. It was not likely he would attempt escape. Good luck finding a cab. In the end, he opted for the course of least resistance. “Any particular amount?” he asked, having followed D to the machine. The question seemed to emanate from his throat as little more than a croak.

“Go big or go home,” D told him.

Chance pulled out three hundred dollars in crisp new twenties.

“My man,” D said. He took the bills from Chance’s hand and counted them back to him, an absurd and attenuated exercise given D’s recently acquired physical limitations. “Machines’ll shortchange you now and then,” he added. “But you’re okay.” He kept twenty for himself and made his way to the bulletproof glass. He bought a pack of smokes and a short dog of Silver Satin. He managed all of this with his left hand, the occasional assist of a right elbow. Exiting, however, in some apparent attempt to replace the bourbon with the short dog, he succeeded only in dropping the former. It broke upon impact, the scent of cheap bourbon filling the night. The man behind the glass shouted, his words indistinct. Chance was not about to seek clarification. They went on another half block before it occurred to him that a lanky black kid of indeterminate age but certainly no older than thirty had come with them from the store and was now trailing them along the sidewalk.

“There’s a guy back there,” Chance said when they’d gone another block and the guy was still with them. D nodded, attempting to open a pack of smokes with his teeth, leading them ever deeper into the heart of the slum, another block and a half, at which point the young man ducked into a strip joint and was gone.

Chance’s relief was immense. He’d given up trying to diagnose the man at his side. He would leave him to his Jim Beam and his Silver Satin. Not since moving into the new apartment had his quarters seemed so thoroughly inviting as they did just now. His euphoria lasted for perhaps one more block whereupon he was made aware not only of the lanky man’s return, but of the fact that he had done so in the company of reinforcements, three men of roughly his own size, age, and bearing, two black and one white. Three of the men wore jeans and work boots and loose flannel shirts in the manner of gang members. One wore a blue bandanna around his head. The man from the liquor store wore a leather jacket, his hands thrust deep into the pockets. All four looked mean and thuggish, intent on their prey.

Chance’s stomach performed several intricate and delicate maneuvers. He looked to the man at his side. “Do you see what I see?” he asked. “Man’s got a friend.”

“He’s got three friends,” D said. He stuffed the cigarettes, still unopened, back into his coat.

“I don’t like this, D. I’m not happy with this. This is not good.”

“For somebody.”

They came to an alley.

“Down here,” D said.

“Jesus Christ,” Chance said.

The alley was rank and narrow. It ran for only a few yards before angling off to the right. Chance hesitated at its mouth. D, who had already started down it, stopped and looked back. “Stay here if you want to, but I wouldn’t recommend it.” His speech, Chance realized, had come full circle; nothing there he failed to understand now. D turned and moved on. Chance went with him. He saw that the big man had lost his limp and was moving at a good clip toward that place where the alley turned and the light failed.

The others followed a beat or two behind, apparently what D had wanted but Chance’s throat had gone dry as a bone. Up ahead, past where it had angled off, the alley ended in a shallow turnaround lined with Dumpsters and ancient bricks, the backs of warehouses. Both arms swung loosely now at D’s sides, and as they came to the end of the alley he stopped abruptly to rest both hands on Chance’s shoulders, steering him between a pair of Dumpsters, putting his back to a wall. “Anybody starts shooting,” D said, “duck. Other than that, don’t fucking move.” D gave him a last look then stepped into the alley where the four men were coming to meet him.

Chance heard a soft clicking sound and saw that the man from the liquor store had drawn a switchblade from the pocket of his coat. He felt a weird tingling sensation along the inside of one thigh he was willing to take as an early indicator that he was about to piss himself. What happened next was both very fast and very slow, and ultimately did not include pissing himself. What it did include would have been more difficult to define.

It became clear almost at once that the would-be muggers were put off their game by the big man moving to face them, for surely this is what he had intended all along. It had been his call and here they were. There followed a moment’s hesitation among their ranks. Their line buckled. The guy with the knife stepped forward but even he seemed suddenly more tentative. “We need to borrow some money,” he said.

The psychological dimensions of the thing were quite something. Had D shown fear, they would have been on him in a heartbeat. Chance was certain of it. Numbers favored the attackers and yet they were the ones showing weakness, the evident bravery of the one calling forth the cowardice of the mob. It probably didn’t hurt that the one in question was the size of a small house. Still, it was the word borrow that seemed to do them in. Someone should have tipped them to the philosophy of Big D. Go big or go home. They would have done better to run. They stayed. The lanky man, still a bit forward of the others and seemingly aware of his position as their leader, turned his hand as if to display the knife, as though D had not seen it already, as if this show of weaponry would prove somehow the final arbiter of the action, and in a sense this was so.

D closed the distance faster than Chance would have thought possible. He reached the man’s knife hand even before the other could bring the blade to bear, turned it with his own, and drove it back toward its owner, burying the instrument in the man’s midline below the abdomen, in the general vicinity of the abdominal aorta. The man staggered back, clutching at his wound with both hands, at last removing the blade and dropping it to the asphalt amid a torrent of blood as D now went straight at the remaining muggers.

The men had made their original approach four abreast with the obvious intent of encircling their prey, and while clearly taken aback by the loss of their leader, the remaining three had not given up on the strategy. D prevented it by moving to the outside shoulder of the man on his far left, striking to the throat with an open hand, effectively depriving the man of breath while at the same time forcing him into the path of the man nearest him. The net effect of D’s movement was to keep the attackers lined up in front of him, one behind the other with himself at their head.

And so it went. The big man proved impossible to flank. Perhaps if there had been more of them—another five or ten, let’s say—but this was all happening very fast and none of the attackers seemed to be quite getting it, so that as the one guy staggered back gasping for air, D was already on the outside shoulder of the next, striking to the eyes, and then there was one.

The would-be muggers never had a chance. The stabbed man had managed an escape of sorts, limping from the alley, spraying blood. The others were not so lucky, but Chance’s elation at D’s prowess was short-lived as he was suddenly and at close quarters made witness to the sheer volume of the big man’s violence and it was unlike anything he had ever seen. D would not be content with escape or even victory as in sport. This was Sherman’s march to the sea, the United States Army at Wounded Knee. It was three men beaten beyond recognition, the most extreme not four feet from where Chance stood watching as D drove the man’s face into a corner edge of the Dumpster till there was no face left to drive, teeth broken at the gum lines, lips sheared away, reduced in seconds to a thing both bloody and skeletal, left to fall among the others, so much refuse upon the alley’s floor. And then they were gone, just the two of them now, running like schoolboys from the scene of a prank, D snatching him from the wall, propelling him headlong in the direction from which they had come, one or two lifetimes ago and the streets exactly as they had left them, neither augmented nor diminished. Stars had not fallen nor had the moon turned to blood and the fog rolling in as the fog was wont to do with the regularity of the darkness itself and this in concert with the rather fecund scent of the city’s beaches while Chance for his part would, on the day that followed and many more besides, search the local papers front to back, going so far as to return on two separate occasions by car, looking for some word or sign… crime tape at the mouth of the alley… a wreath perhaps, like what you might see at the side of a road where some fatal accident has occurred… anything really to give indication of what had transpired here, that might say something about what had become of the men who’d hoped to rob them, possibly to beat them, maybe even to murder them and he would remind himself about that, that it was they who had come after them, but there was nothing in the papers and nothing in the street nor would there ever be, and definitely no colored bouquets at the mouth of the alley where it was hard to believe that one or more of the men had not died.

“There’s two things,” D told him. It was the first either had spoken since running from the alley and they were back where they had begun behind the warehouse and Big D calm once more, unusually so one might think, given the magnitude of their ordeal. Though perhaps, Chance thought, it had only been an ordeal for him, him and the ones they had left behind. “The old man says you were asking after that guy who bought your stuff, rethinking the sale,” Big D said. “I wouldn’t go there, brother.”

“Go where?” Chance asked. It was taking him a moment to get his bearings.

D went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Might reflect on Carl in a negative way. Might reflect on me too, as far as that goes.” He took an oversized manila envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket and passed it to Chance. “Here’s your money,” he said. “You might want to count it.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Chance said.

“What’s to understand? That’s eighty thousand dollars. Message you left got the boss a little spooked. Canceled the check and pulled it out in cash.”

Chance stood holding the envelope. “I have any say in this?”

“You did.”

“And you had this on you… the whole time?”

“Fucking A,” D told him.

“My God,” Chance said. “Is that what all this was about?” by which he meant the beating in the alley. “You scaring me?”

Big D just looked at him. “That was about me getting right,” he said. “What you do with it is up to you.”

Chance was at a momentary loss. He really could not decide which was more distressing, what it took for D to get right, his being forced to take money against his will, or that Big D had been so willing to put the entire amount at risk in a Tenderloin alley. “You said there were two things,” was what he finally got to. “What’s the other?”

“It’s this cop, Blackstone. There’s ways of handling guys like that.” Now that he’d gotten his fix, D was back to the matter-of-fact way he had. “’Cause right now, he’s the feeder.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“That’s a problem,” D said. He gave it a moment’s thought. “That shit in the alley… How did I work that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You watched it, bro.”

“It was very fast and very violent.”

D gave him a look, as might an adult called upon to explain some simple fact to a rather dull child. “I made sure they were reacting to me. People talk about self-defense. Self-defense is bullshit. I’m defending, I’m losing. I want the other guy defending while I attack. Doesn’t make any difference how many people I’m fighting, I want them all defending because that means I’m dictating the action. I’m the feeder. As long as I’m the feeder, I win. I don’t care if it’s a dozen. Right now, this cop is the feeder. You’re the receiver. You need to turn that around.”

“And how would I do that?” Chance posed the question more or less in spite of himself. Half an hour ago he’d been ready to piss himself. Then he’d been ready to puke, then he’d been ready to never see the big man again, and now he was asking advice, the thing he had come for.

“First thing,” D said, “is to collect intel on this prick. She says he’s dirty. What does that mean? It’s not that hard to kill a clean cop. They put themselves in dangerous situations all the time. Any one of them could go wrong. But a guy that’s dirty? His whole life is a dangerous situation. You just need to pay attention. Where does he go? Who does he see? When is he most vulnerable?”

“The idea, I think, would be to see him arrested.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say I’d feel better about it that way.”

“Play by the rules?”

Chance shrugged.

“You think that’s how he feels?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how he feels. But let’s say I like the idea of getting something on him…”

“That’s fucked up, but all right.”

“I can’t just start following him around. He knows what I look like.”

“You might hire it done.”

“You?”

“We could talk about it.”

“And how expensive might this become?”

“I know you’ve got eighty large.”

It was not always easy to tell when the big man was fucking around. He was, as Chance had learned, not without a sense of humor, of sorts anyway. “I guess I’d have to think about that one.”

“Absolutely. But as long as you think, he’s the feeder. So think about that.”

Chance was thinking about it when headlights appeared at the far end of the alley. His first impulse was to believe they had been followed or found out. He imagined the rotating red light that would momentarily explode like a ruptured artery on the alley’s narrow way. What they got was the lemon yellow Starlight coupe that in time drew even with them.

They were standing at its passenger side. A window dropped. There was a leather boy of no more than twenty on the other side of it. He was looking bored and smoking a joint, his greasy head resting on the seat back. Carl Allan was behind the wheel, dapper in what appeared to be a three-piece brown and yellow pin-striped suit. The sweet scent of marijuana drifted into the night from the car’s interior, lit only by the dim illumination of its own dashboard.

“Sup, Big Dog?” D asked of Carl. He bent down a little to look inside.

Carl, meanwhile, was peering out at them, one to the other and then back again, as if the sight of them standing there together in the alley at the rear of his store at four in the morning were cause for neither question nor alarm but rather some secret merriment. “Boys, boys, boys,” he said. His delivery was that of a headmaster prepared to lecture. The light in his eyes suggested the parody thereof. But that was it. He had nothing more to say. The window went up. D and Chance stepped back. The car drove on, passing from sight at the opposite end of the alley from which it had emerged.

D sighed, watching as the Studebaker’s taillights faded into the night. “What did I tell you?” he said. “He’s at it again.”

“Those guys, in the alley…” Chance said finally. He was beyond sleep deprived. The Blackstone of it would have to wait. “How could you know they wouldn’t all be armed? How could you know they wouldn’t have guns, that it wouldn’t be the two of us left for dead?”

D reached down to lift the cuff on one enormous pant leg, far enough for Chance to see some type of handgun at the top of his boot. He didn’t say anything, he just showed Chance the gun. The next thing he did was to open his jacket, far enough to permit the exhibit of three simple but lethal-looking blades hung in a row by way of some bit of nylon webbing stitched into the fabric. “Most fights are over before they begin,” D said. “Those guys followed us into an alley. What kind of idiot runs into an alley trying to escape? No one. But they didn’t think about that. They just reacted. Emotion over logic and by which they allowed me to dictate the terms and setting of the encounter.” He gave Chance a moment to consider. “Think of it like this,” he said. “There are no victims, only volunteers.”