Chance

Chance in the wind

Chance remained at the hospital just long enough for the police to contact Carla’s provider. The number Nicole had dialed proved a dead end, a call-and-drop job, the kind favored by those types not eager to be found and was not, according to the detective who gave them the news, a promising sign and nothing for it in the here and now but to go home and wait… for a call… from someone from somewhere… for some news… to live in hope.

In the end, the missing persons report was filed and sent. Chance himself had shared in its completion. The dyslexic personal trainer had said they would be in touch. His wife, with whom he was apparently no longer speaking, had accordingly said nothing at all and they had begun to disperse, survivors of some unspeakable disaster, which is to say that while Carla and her support team made for the elevators and visitor parking, Chance used the stairs and went out alone. It should be noted that he did not do so without first inquiring after one Darius Pringle but the big man was gone with no forwarding address save for that of the family. Good luck in that quarter and Chance went on. He found it fitting that the stairs it was necessary to tread ran down instead of up and it was not only because he doubted his ability to climb. With each step along the descent his mind ran to an ever darker and more dreary place, to a world of systemic failure, of impotent restraining orders and missing children, of pedophiles and snuff flicks, of prostitution and drug addiction, of undue influence and bodies in shallow graves.

It was in just this mind-set that he came upon the flyer pinned beneath the windshield wiper of his car. It was an advertisement for the opening of a new restaurant somewhere in the city. The flyer’s most salient feature was that the restaurant in question was not just any restaurant but one specializing in Thai cuisine.

He looked to see if other cars in the lot had also been left with such advertisements but found they had not. He looked about the great cavernous structure in which he had parked. He heard the distant screeching of tires upon a concrete ramp, the faraway hum of a car in retreat. The message was subtle and ambiguous to be sure but how else to interpret it other than as the work of Detective Raymond Blackstone, the same who had once threatened him by way of his daughter in that other restaurant specializing in Thai cuisine, east of the bay?

The claustrophobic solitude of his own quarters not even about to be borne, he made directly for the old warehouse in a state of profound dissociation, his thoughts moving by pathways both familiar and concentric, gaining exponentially with regard to speed, paranoid ideation, and general depravity. He simultaneously imagined the reach of Blackstone, bad boyfriends, broken marriages, a soul in torment… a girl in rebellion. Add to which the recitation without end of the sins of the father, in this case none but his own. He couldn’t make it stop. He couldn’t get over on it or under it or past it or around it. Nor could he imagine a move that did not end in some further catastrophe. He could not see beyond the frightful combination of impotence and rage, the certainty of knowing that in the event of some unspeakable ending it would always be his word against Blackstone’s, and that if the latter was compromised so was he, the doctor who had slept with a patient, a woman suffering her own brand of dissociation, quite possibly possessed of multiple personalities to those willing to go there, a full-blown borderline to others, crazy as a shithouse bat to your average citizen, of whom pretty much any future selection of any twelve jurors was likely to be composed. Such was the sound track by which he ran at least two red lights, possibly more, narrowly missing at least one pedestrian in the person of a uniformed parking attendant in the act of posting a ticket. That he was able to do so with impunity seemed quite right and proper, suggesting to him a new way of being in the world.

As if on cue from what must surely have qualified as some demiurge among the lower levels of management, a call arrived from Jaclyn Blackstone. Chance was still en route to the Mission and stuck in traffic.

“The fuck were you even there?” she began.

He took her to mean the massage parlor, the very thing she had so recently warned him never to cop to. “Why don’t you just help me find my daughter?” he asked.

She gave it a long beat. “I might have something.”

Chance had become one in a long line of cars in approach to a distant row of changing lights, his pulse quickening. “Might or do?” he asked.

She chose to ignore the question. “I saw him for the first time since he was in the hospital. He’s gone completely off the rails. Some kind of near-death experience or some fucking thing.”

Chance gripped the wheel, breaking a sweat as the cause of the delay came into view, roadwork squeezing traffic into a single lane, Caltrans workers in orange vests and hard hats—what appeared to be three guys explaining the parts of a shovel to a fourth. The cars inched forward.

“All he can talk about is getting out. He wants to take early retirement. Go away someplace…”

“Getting out of what?”

“Everything. And he wants me to go with him.”

“I guess he would.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. You said you had something.”

“I just wanted you to know. I’m really scared. There would be nothing but me and him and him with nothing to do but keep me there.” She allowed a moment to pass. “I’d rather take a beating,” she said, and then, “I’m leaving. I don’t know how yet but I am and I’m going to give you something. I want you to have something you can hold over his head, to use as leverage.”

“What?”

“It’s just something. Where are you?”

“I’m in my car.”

“Where?”

“I’m in the city, stuck in traffic. You’re not going to tell me?”

“It won’t mean anything for me to tell you. It’s something you need to have. How is she?”

“Gone. We think the boyfriend may have picked her up at the hospital. She got hold of my wife’s phone.”

“God… Is there a place we can meet?”

“Why?”

“I told you,” she said.

“I need to know what we’re talking about, Jaclyn.”

“You asked about Jane. I know what’s in those files you saw. And I know what’s not.”

“Ah.”

“Jane was good with numbers,” she told him.

“What does that mean, Jaclyn? You have his books? You’re giving him up?”

“To you.”

“Why now? Why me?”

“I see your daughter.”

“Where are you?”

“There’s a motel at the coast, up by Lands End. It’s called the Blue Dolphin.”

He eased past the last of the construction, gathering speed, the city like bleached bones in the white light of a skittish sun.

“What are you telling me?”

“I’m telling you there’s a place we can meet.”

“You said you could see my daughter.”

“I thought you would know what I meant.”

“Christ, Jaclyn. I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

Chance sighed. “I need to talk to someone,” he told her.

“My God, you’re going to the police.”

“Hardly.” He might well have mentioned that movements of extreme complexity were taking place he no longer felt competent to judge, that help was needed and not of the sort to be found between him and her, alone in yet one more grotesque motel. “Where are you?” is what he asked instead. The place she had mentioned was in the opposite direction but not so far away as to rule out the half a chance he would turn around and go for it.

“I’m here.”

“In the motel?”

“In my apartment.”

Chance eased his grip on the wheel. “And where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then you don’t actually know that he is involved with my daughter. You don’t know any more now than the last time we spoke.”

“You asked if there was anything I could do.”

“They may still find her,” he said, if for no other reason than to hear it spoken aloud, as if saying it might make it so and the world restored to its more recognizable assemblage of shadow and light, comedy and horror. “The missing persons report has gone out. It’s not like no one is looking.”

“Right.”

Time passed.

“Do you remember the name of the motel?”

“The Blue Dolphin, but like I said…”

“You have to talk to someone.”

“Will you call me when you get there?”

“I’m there, buddy. And then I’m gone.”

“I have to be smart about this,” he told her. And then, after a beat, “I want us both to be smart.”

“I think it might be a little late for all of that.”

He found the old man in back of the warehouse where he appeared to be placing luggage into the trunk of the Starlight coupe. “Thank God you’re here,” he said. “I’m just going.”

“You’ve found him, then?”

“Not exactly but I know where to look.”

“Should I drive?” Chance asked. But the old man was already behind the wheel of the coupe and in the end Chance joined him. It was, after all, the reason he’d come. He went heeding the advice of Jaclyn Blackstone, or at least of someone calling herself by that name, hoping against all reason that the magic rabbit was still among the living, neither institutionalized nor incarcerated, and above all still his friend.