Chance

Down these mean streets a man will go…

It was to this end that Chance’s days acquired a new and heretofore unimaginable pattern. As it turned out, D was more than short on wheels. He was without a driver’s license as well, having failed to renew the old one since returning from his last tour of duty. Road rage had been a problem, but that was only one of several. And so it began. Chance would work till late afternoon then drive to the Mission to retrieve Big D. From there they would strike out in pursuit of Raymond Blackstone.

On a number of occasions they took the Olds. Once they took the Studebaker. Other times they would rent something so as not to become conspicuous by virtue of repetition. In this and apparently all other matters Chance had given himself almost entirely to the counsel of Big D. Later, usually after a dinner consumed in one of the cheap, high-calorie restaurants favored by his companion, they would return to the old warehouse to discuss the day’s discoveries, or lack thereof.

Such discussions might last well into the night, including, as they often did, lengthy digressions on the part of Big D regarding any number of topics, everything from the warrior’s mind-set to the origins of such metalwork as had been brought to bear on Chance’s furniture, the chemical makeup of a particular acid wash, or the means by which the patterns once made by the natural sponge might in fact be duplicated. These in turn might give way to a twenty-minute dissertation on the proper way to prepare a grilled cheese sandwich.

Carl, once recovered, was often there too, pondering his books, crunching numbers. He’d hear the two come in and be around back in a matter of minutes. It didn’t take long for Chance to see that the two had no secrets, though it was usually the old man who, after joining them for a time, was also the first to opt out. “He can go on all night,” he once said in reference to Big D. “He doesn’t sleep.” And it was true, as near as Chance could tell, he didn’t. No mention was ever made about Chance’s furniture or the message he’d left on Carl’s machine or the old man’s response. As far as that went, no mention was ever made about Chance’s having taken over what apparently was to have been Carl’s job, that of Big D’s wheelman, but there were never any weird vibes about any of it either. It was the church of Big D and Chance was just one of the gang.

He’d spoken exactly once to his daughter during this period. He found her contrite but less than forthcoming. Still… there had, according to Carla, been no further incidents. She was attending classes. If she was seeing the guy, she was at least spending her nights at home. Chance’s insistence that she never be alone seemed to fall on deaf ears. Trying to have her stay at his place, in light of both recent and potential events, seemed altogether out of the question, though as part of their forays across the bay Chance had taken to scouting neighborhoods in appropriate school districts, sometimes stopping to take down the number of a place for rent then listening as Big D offered his critique. D was big on risk assessment with respect to break-ins and general defensibility in the event of martial law. Nor was the possibility of a full-blown zombie apocalypse to be taken lightly. The big man paid particular attention to window height and door placement together with angles of sight. Fences were of interest, as was the proximity of power lines and trees.

The absurdity of all this was not lost on him, the sheer outrageousness of it. D was cutting him some slack on the bill in return for his willingness to drive. “You never know what you’re capable of till you find out what you’re capable of,” the big man was fond of saying. And so it was proving to be. The thing was… he was finding a kind of contentment in his work, not at the office but here, at the wheel of the aging Oldsmobile, Charlie Parker on the stereo, Big D filling up the seat at his side. He felt that he was actually doing something. What he was doing was a little sketchy it was true, a little fucked up, possibly dangerous. On the other hand, he was spared the tedium of his own company, spared too from any more disastrous solo outings, and in that regard, Big D, with his talk of feeders, receivers, and frozen lakes, a kind of stand-in for the tranquilizers he had thus far declined.

It was true that sleep was down to no more than three hours per night but there were benefits in this too. Acuity felt sharpened. He was more aware, more present for the patients who continued to come and go. Mornings passed quickly in anticipation of the afternoons. Afternoons passed in a sepia tone blur, shadows lengthening into night. He could no longer recall if this was what it had been like before, the elevator lift to a full-blown mania worthy of a bipolar 1 diagnosis ending in flames and blood, a suicide watch lasting the better part of a month. But then he no longer gave it much thought. There was no time and those moments of existential dread in which he was seized upon by his own absolute inability to explain himself were growing fewer and farther apart. The thrill of the hunt was upon him, the seminal imperative of mortal blood.

On the third day of the second week, they caught a break. At least D said it was a break. Who was Chance to disagree? His beloved James had been right, it really was all faith or fear. The detective did not go straightaway to the condo where he lived. Nor did he stop at the cop’s bar he sometimes frequented near the waterfront where the parking lot was close to the street and always crowded. He drove instead to the outskirts of downtown Oakland in the general direction of the airport, to a land of single-story buildings, strip malls, and gas stations where much of the signage was written in Korean, entering at last among a particularly tawdry collection of storefront operations including one with the incongruous moniker of European Massage printed out in both English and Korean in bold block lettering across blacked-out plate glass. He drove through the lot, passing in front of the buildings before circling round to an alley that ran at their backs.

Believing it unwise to drive into the alley, Chance parked nearby, allowing D to go in on foot. He was back in ten with more good news. “Fucker parked in back of the massage parlor and went in.” He looked toward the building. “More to that place than meets the eye,” he said. “There’s a little lot in back, half a dozen cars, all high-end. You’d never guess it, tucked away down here.”

“Maybe that’s part of the attraction.”

“Maybe.”

“So Blackstone’s either working a case or getting laid.”

“Yep, saw a woman letting him in. He’s been there before. I’ll say that much. We’ll see how long he stays. An hour or more, I’d say he’s a customer, which means at some point he’ll be back. He does and we’re on it. Lot’s fucking perfect.”

Detective Blackstone was gone for a full hour and twenty-two minutes. “Putting a little stink on his johnson,” D said. Chance looked to see if he was smiling but he wasn’t. The color had risen in the big man’s cheeks. He was staring into the alley with the intensity of a hawk in search of a field mouse, that and cracking his knuckles, first one hand and then the other, though he did not seem conscious of the act.

A day later and Blackstone was back, same time same place. “Lock and load,” D told him. “I’m going in.”

Chance let him out a block from the bar, in possession of a screwdriver, a portable power drill, and a blank thumb drive, which he carried in a nondescript nylon backpack, then drove to a large park nearly two miles away and waited. Little more than an hour had passed when D reappeared. Chance spotted him through the trees on the far side of the park that was maybe a hundred yards across and featured at its center an ornate fountain and pool. It was approaching the dinner hour. In the streets the cars were turning on their lights. Looking east into the Oakland hills one might judge the fire line by where the lights of the houses began and ended. Nearer to where Chance waited, the fountain and pool were particularly well lit, their jets of water thrown skyward in a rush of white light to fall like sparks before a darkening sky.

There had been some discussion about this part of the plan. They had been seated in D’s quarters at the rear of the warehouse and Chance had argued for a closer rendezvous point. “Better like this,” D had told him. “Something goes wrong, I want time to distance myself from the scene before you and I meet up.”

“Seems like you’d want me closer if something went wrong.” The prospect of something going wrong seemed so unimaginably fucked up it was difficult even to say. The old man had attempted to calm his fears. “You’d never believe it,” Carl told him. He was looking at D as might a proud father on a favored son. “Knows how to make himself invisible.”

“Part of my training,” D said by way of acknowledging this improbability. “I was in the Teams… we used to do these drills… guy gets dropped off in some part of the city, San Diego usually… where I did my basics but it could be anywhere. Whatever… Point is… it’s the rest of the team’s job to find this guy and what he has to do… is make it back to some agreed-upon location without being spotted. You learn how to move, how to use the shadows, play the angles, lines of sight from any given point… Sneak and peek, we called it…”

“You’d never think a guy of his size could pull that off, but I’ve seen him do it.”

“I take Carl out sometimes, try to show him shit.”

“Got me working on my template of nine.” The old man drew a fixed-blade knife from his pocket and waved it about in the air, appearing to strike at what Chance took to be three different targets. “So far I’m only up to three, three of nine.” He struck at the invisible targets for a second time. “Pretty quick, huh?”

Chance had no idea what the old man was talking about but expressed his admiration, asking only if he carried the thing around in his pocket like that, with nothing to cover the blade.

Carl removed a small leather sheath and let Chance look at it. “See those little wires?” There were four very fine wires, looped to make little prongs, coming out from four different places on the sheath. “D put those on there. They hang up on the lining in your pocket, hold the sheath so you can draw the knife.” He felt compelled to reenact the demonstration yet again.

Chance advised him to keep up the good work.

“You bet,” Carl told him.

And that was pretty much the end of it. The point of rendezvous had remained the park, where Chance now waited, still living in hope that all of those sneak-and-peek drills honed by the big man in the course of his training would prove forever unnecessary.

He watched as D ducked into a public restroom where he remained for some time before reappearing to start once more in the direction of the car. The park was a lively enough place at dusk. Joggers made their way around the park’s perimeter. A few teenagers had gathered near the fountain, assorted musical devices plugged into their ears, taking pictures with their phones. Here and there were mothers in tandem pushing baby strollers, toddlers in their wake. Many turned to look as D rumbled by. He was not, under normal circumstances—i.e., when not on one of his sneak-and-peek missions—one to go unnoticed, with his massive bulk, his naked dome showing white as he passed beneath the trees. Children and pigeons scattered in his wake.

Chance wondered what the others must make of him. Did they think him homeless? Did they know he never slept? Might they imagine he’d fought for his country in the dark and dangerous places of the world, seeing and experiencing things that few others ever would? Two little black girls seemed to take a particular delight in the spectacle of D. They giggled and waved and skipped along behind him across the weathered grass of a late summer for some distance rather like pilot fish in the shadow of a whale. D paid them no mind. The fallen leaves danced about the cuffs of his cargo pants. His jacket was open and flapped about his ample waist, accentuating his mass.

As D reached the car and heaved himself inside, Chance could see that he’d managed to splash a good deal of water on his shirt and pants. His face, even more reddened than usual, was still wet and dripping. It looked, in what was left of the light, more or less as if the big man had been crying. “How did it go?” Chance asked. The absurd inquiry seemed to fly from this throat of its own accord, infused with a false gaiety.

“You might want to get us out of here,” D said.

Seated side by side in the front seat of Chance’s Olds, the breadth of D’s shoulders was such that the two men were nearly touching. It was, Chance thought, like being in the water in a very small boat next to an immense liner. If the big boat went down, it was taking you with it. Perhaps, he thought, this was why he was just now lowering his window, an unconscious desire for escape. “For Christ’s sake,” Chance said. He had yet to start the car.

D’s eyes ticked toward the car’s ignition. Chance turned the key. The engine came to life. “What happened?”

“That’s a story,” D said. “But I got you this, you still want it.” He pulled the thumb drive from the nylon backpack and held it up for Chance to see.

Chance was hesitant to take it. “Why wouldn’t I still want it?” he asked. There was something about his continuing in darkness as to the exact nature of its acquisition that had him spooked. D was apparently waiting for him to leave the curb before further disclosures.

Chance put the car into gear. He checked both rear- and side-view mirrors like any other resident of the real world and entered the flow of traffic.

“The mission was compromised,” D said.

Chance imagined that he might be sick. A moment passed. “But you have his files,” Chance began. A second moment passed. A second thought occurred. “Or was that why you asked if I still wanted it? There’s nothing on it? You didn’t have time to download?” A happy enough outcome, he thought, when placed alongside all other possible outcomes in which a mission had been compromised.

“I didn’t say the mission was aborted,” D said. “I said it was compromised. There was collateral damage. It’s been taken care of.”

Chance drew as deep a breath as he was able. The road they were on circled the park before intersecting with the street that would take them to the freeway, but the intersection slipped past as Chance continued on around the park, passing once more the spot in which he had waited for Big D. “What exactly are you telling me?” Chance asked.

“You’re driving in fucking circles,” D said.

Chance found it necessary to pull over. They were by now on the opposite side of the park from which they had begun yet still on the circling road. “What are you saying, D?”

“What about collateral damage and taken care of don’t you understand, Doc?”

“Any of it, neither in part nor in whole. I don’t understand it because you haven’t told me.”

D just looked at him.

Had Chance not known what D was capable of, he might have considered punching him in the face. With this off the table, he proceeded as best as he could. “I need it in plain English, D. I’m part of this. I need to know what happened back there.”

“Actually you don’t.”

“Actually I do.”

“The more you know, the more you’re in.”

“I’d say I’m in pretty goddamn deep already.”

“Get on the freeway, will you?”

“You’re telling me you killed him.”

“If by him you mean Blackstone, no, I didn’t kill him. Least I don’t think I did. I put one in his chest but it didn’t look like a kill shot. Be good to get across the bridge. I’m not saying they’ll close it, but you never know… one of their own goes down.”

This time Chance failed to check his mirrors. Talk of a closed bridge had panicked him. He pulled directly into the path of a diminutive gray-haired woman at the helm of a silver Prius, barely tall enough to see over the wheel.

God only knew how much time was consumed by what followed. Chance and the lady, a former high school English teacher for the city of Oakland in the days before movies had sound, exchanged pleasantries and insurance cards. The Oldsmobile was relatively unharmed. The Prius would require a new bumper and fender assembly. “We’ll not worry about my car,” Chance told her. It was all on him, he said. Damned blind spot is what it was, but not to worry. And no need for police reports or insurance companies, what with rate hikes and all of that…

“The newer cars have little cameras in them,” the lady said. She was looking with obvious disdain upon Chance’s Cutlass.

“Take your car anywhere you like,” he told her. “Put whoever does the work in touch with me and I will take care of it.”

“There were blind spots,” she said.

“Yes, I understand. That is absolutely correct. But really… this will all be fine. And you have all of my numbers. I can be reached at any one, at any time.”

She looked once more at the offending Oldsmobile. “And you really don’t think we should call the police?”

Chance guessed her to be well past eighty, in what appeared to be the early stages of Parkinson’s disease and probably not long for the road. Report of an accident was probably no more in her interest than it was in his. He’d so far stopped just short of telling her this for fear of depressing her but certainly hoped that it might yet be implied, that she would catch his drift. “Well,” he said. “You know the police, and you know the insurance companies.” He mustered his best smile, no small feat given the circumstances.

In the end, she was willing to go along. It might have been that she did in fact catch his drift. It might also have been his business card or the fact that, in her words, he was possessed of an honest face. Writing out the last of his information, he heard sirens and found that his hand had begun to shake. “There, there…” the woman told him. She went so far as to pat him on the arm. Her name was Delores Flowers, now of Alameda. “Let’s just be thankful no one was hurt.”

He returned to the car. D was seated with his great head tilted back on the headrest, his eyes on the car’s headliner in which a small tear had begun near the windshield. “Good one, Doc.”

While the Bay Bridge would certainly have been the more direct route to Allan’s Antiques, they opted for a more circuitous return. To put a finer point on it, D opted for the more circuitous return. For Chance, mileage was the last thing on his mind as eventually the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge was made to appear before them. Thankfully, it appeared to be open. Chance had a FasTrak transponder on his windshield, meaning they would not have to stop and pay the toll but D reached over and took it down. “Use this, there’ll be a record you were here.”

“Could be already, given what just happened and how she handles it.”

“Thought you said she was cool.”

“Just now, she was. Who knows about tomorrow?” They reached the tollbooth where Chance gave a five-dollar bill to an obese woman in a conductor’s hat and drove on.

“You’re worried about that old lady, say the word,” D said. “We’ll go back and take care of that right now. You got her address, I take it.”

Chance hadn’t the courage to ask if he was serious. The Richmond–San Rafael Bridge rose before them, a regular stairway to the stairs. The city of San Francisco appeared on their left. Chance held to the wheel. Soon they would be within sight of the federal prison at San Quentin. It occurred to him that a guy like Big D might actually find a home there. Given enough time, he might well run the place. Chance figured his own life expectancy in such an establishment at around six and a half minutes. He attempted to force such thoughts from his mind by concentrating on the ribbon of concrete that ran before them, unfurling into the night.