Chance

The wolf and the dog

A red moon broke from among the clouds to light the bay. San Francisco, made ethereal in the aqueous night, seemed to float somewhere just below it, hovering above the blackened waters, apparently free of the earth and therefore unbound by any of the usual constraints.

As some embodiment of the Crystal City, the place never failed to disappoint. It had been so since Chance first laid eyes on it, twenty years ago, fresh from the east and hoping to put the past behind him… the red-haired dancer, the death of his father, the calamity his life was in danger of becoming. He’d come like so many before him, in flight from history and he’d thought for a good long time that he’d actually managed it. He supposed he should have known. He thought of the note a professor had once attached to an important paper he’d written for a class. It had been toward the end of things, the girl having claimed him, the downward spiral begun. “It’s harder than this,” the man had written.

“The fuck?” Chance said. They had been riding in silence for a good ten minutes.

D draped an arm over the back of the seat and shifted his weight, apparently quite at ease. “Some asshole came out of the place,” he said finally.

“The massage parlor?”

“No, man, the Mongolian Grill, a midget with takeout.”

A moment went by. They had begun their descent. Chance realized that he had begun to speed and forced his foot from the accelerator. The cops kept an eye on the bridge. Fines for speeding were over the moon.

“Yeah,” D said. “The massage parlor. Some goon that worked there would be my guess. Guy was all geared up.”

Chance was forced to ask what was meant by “all geared up.”

“Mace, stun gun. Could’ve been strapped but I never saw it. Fucker caught me dead to rights getting out of Blackstone’s Crown Vic. He might have been another cop but I’m thinking private security, kind of an Eastern European–looking guy. Russians are deep into the whole massage parlor racket. Romanians too. It’s all about white slavery. Moving women. It’s a dirty business. Whatever this guy was, he knew the car and he knew it wasn’t mine; he came right at me. What I’m wondering is, how does he know that? He either works with Blackstone or he works for the joint. Thing that fucking worries me is how did he know to come out? Could be it was just some random thing, like having a smoke or making his rounds, looking in on that lot because that’s what he does. Or…” And it was here that D paused. “They’ve got some kind of surveillance system. Now if they do, it’s gonna have to be pretty fucking high-tech ’cause I looked around and didn’t see dick, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility.” He looked to the west, a distant sea. “That would not be good,” the big man said. “That would be fucked up in the extreme.”

It took another half mile for Chance to inquire as to just how fucked up in the extreme it all might be. The big man held up a hand. On the first finger was a heavy ring Chance was certain had not been there when D had gotten out of the car at the mouth of the alley. The band had no sheen to it in the muted light. It appeared as dull silver and quite wide. It looked big even on D’s hand and D’s hands were the size of shovels.

Chance watched as best he could while D turned his hand, revealing the ring as part of an exotic-looking blade that lay flat against his palm. A second movement brought the blade into play so that it extended for maybe two inches from the side of a closed fist where it curved like the fang of some predatory animal. “Called a karambit,” D told him. “Lots of ways you can use it… hook, stab, slice… great for controlling an opponent.” He made some small movements with his hand in the air between them. “You can enter a joint, separate vertebrae… It’s a very effective weapon, easy to conceal. Almost impossible to disarm a guy who knows how to use one. You want… I’ll teach you someday.”

“Thanks,” Chance told him. “I believe I’ll pass.”

“That’s a poor attitude, Doc.”

Chance declined a response.

“There are three kinds of people.”

“Here we go.”

“Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. The sheep are afraid of the wolves but they don’t like the dogs much either. You look at it from the sheep’s point of view, the dog is a lot like the wolf. He’s got teeth like the wolf. He growls like a wolf. He smells like a wolf. Only time the sheep like the sheepdog is when the wolf comes. Then they like him. Rest of the time… they don’t even want to have to think about him, much less see him. You catch my drift?”

“A little like the warrior–slave dichotomy.”

“It’s not a little like it, it’s a lot like it. You learn to use the blade or wait on the dog, and hope the wolf doesn’t get there first.”

Chance saw in this the opportunity for a broader discussion of free will but declined to go there.

“Fucker pepper sprayed me,” D said at length.

“Why your eyes were so red. I thought maybe you’d been crying.”

“Oh absolutely. That’s what you thought?”

“My attempt at gallows humor.”

“That’s good, Doc. You had me fooled.”

“So he pepper sprayed you, then what?”

“Then nothing. Then his problems began. Christ… I was in the Teams. We pepper sprayed each other for laughs. Shit’s for girls, something they can carry in their purses to make them feel safer on blind dates or some fucking thing. Next thing after that is, he pulls a Taser. If he’d pulled a piece and started shooting he might’ve had a chance, but there he was with his pepper spray and Taser.” D gave it a moment’s thought. “Could be he was just trying to handicap me… thought if he could do that, he could beat the shit out of me and feel tough. He was a big guy.” He paused once more to shake his head. “Thing about a Taser is, you really need two of them to be effective, and even then you can fight your way out, you know how. These guys have no training. It’s pathetic when you stop and think about it. Case of tonight… I used this to cut the line.” He held the blade once more for Chance to see before enclosing it in his fist. “Got myself close enough to hook him through the ocular cavities and snap his neck.”

“Jesus Christ,” Chance said. It took another moment to recover some semblance of what might pass for his bearings. “What happened to controlling your opponent?”

D ignored him. “That’s when things got really interesting,” he said. “Fucking Blackstone showed up. Guy must have beeped him or something. He pops around a corner of the building, like he’d come out the front then around to the side…”

“My God, he saw you?”

“Don’t know, really. He probably saw something. It was dark enough the lights were coming on, both corners of the building. I could see him pretty well but it was still pretty dark where I was. He had something in his hand. Might have been a phone. Might have been a gun. My vision was still a little fucked up from the spray. Only thing I could be sure about at that point was that I didn’t want him getting any closer to where I needed to go, which was down that alley. That’s when I put the one in his chest I was telling you about and got out.”

“You shot him?”

“I was thirty seconds into a compromised situation, Doc. Last thing I needed was sound. You’ve seen my throwing blades. I might have tried for a kill shot, but like I said…”

“You couldn’t see.”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see… you and I wouldn’t be sitting here. I could see who it was, I could see I hit him, and I could see he went down. There wasn’t time to close. What I couldn’t know was what had transpired between him and this goon… maybe nothing… maybe a call… maybe more help on the way and like I said…”

“You were thirty seconds in.”

“Time to go.”

“My God,” Chance said once more. “I can’t get my head around this… I can’t find the terms. A man is dead.”

“It happens. Who do you think this guy was?”

“I have no idea.”

“He was a soldier. He was armed. He had choices. He made a bad one.”

“And there was no other way to end it?”

“You think of one, I’m all ears.”

“Disarm him. Knock him out.”

“You’ve knocked out a lot of guys in the course of your practice? Disarmed them first, of course?”

Chance said nothing.

“There you go,” D told him.

They came to the freeway and southbound lanes where they drove once more in silence. The passage of time seemed of little consequence and the world changed. They came to the Waldo tunnel and the Golden Gate Bridge. San Francisco lay in the distance, disappearing even as they watched it, lost to a fog bank worthy of John the Revelator so that by the time they had reached the middle spans of the great bridge the thing toward which they pressed was gone and what they entered was no longer the Crystal City but only a vast impenetrable darkness. It was, Chance supposed, thinking now of the origin of things, how it had all begun and how at some point in the perhaps not-too-distant future it would no doubt end. How then to make sense of the evening’s progression? What difference would any of it make when all was said and done? When entropy and darkness had had their way? It was admittedly the long view. But then the long view was what he was after, the short one having been fucked up beyond all recognition.