Chance

The alpha and the omega

She really had wanted help. Blackstone really had beaten her. And there he was… charging into Blackstone’s deal with the universe. Forty-eight hours and there’s an incident involving Chance’s daughter. Ambiguous. Shit lands on Chance’s computer. Not so ambiguous. Blackstone’s come to play and he can’t believe this won’t work. “You’re a fucking doctor for Christ’s sake,” D said. “Big brain, tiny balls. Are we good so far?”

“Pretty much,” Chance told him. Piece by piece, the man had said.

“What he doesn’t know about is me, and all of a sudden there’s shit landing on him. He’s on his back in the fucking hospital and he’s thinking this is fucked up. I would just say welcome to my world, asshole, but that’s another story. So he’s trying to recover and he gets wind of her splitting with some guy in front of the massage parlor and it sounds a lot like you and this is starting to get serious. She’s his frozen lake. He went way out on the ice to get her. If anything ever goes wrong she can hang him good. He could hang her too of course, but that’s not what he wants and he’s always figured as long as he can keep the plates spinning… But now you’re fucking with that and he’s tried scaring you. There’s really only one thing left. But you want to be smart about that sort of thing. Fuck it up and it’ll blow back all over you. Look at all this goat fuck in the Middle East.” This last drawing murmurs of approval from a small gallery of camp denizens who’d come for the sermon.

“But why make it look like an accident?” Chance asked. He saw no reason to drag the Middle East into it and the audience was making him nervous. “If Blackstone is behind all of this with Nicole… if he’s got these guys that troll for girls like she says… if one of them has gotten to my daughter… Why put her in the ICU then break her out?”

D nodded. “I used to collect money,” he said. “I had two rules. The person I was going to collect from had to have the money and they had to know they were trying to get away with something. That’s very important, those two things. Okay. So now you’re me and you’re going to collect. You never just walk up to the guy and say so-and-so wants his money and if you don’t pay I’m gonna break your legs. Threat’s never that direct. In fact, what I liked to do was to be very nice. That freaks people out a little because I’d catch ’em someplace where we could be alone and they wouldn’t know who I was. I’m this stranger and they see what I look like and they’re a little spooked but there I am being nice to them and they can’t quite figure it, at which point I say something like, why don’t you give so-and-so a call. He’d really like to talk to you. And all of a sudden they know exactly what this is about, what kind of guy I am, and why I’m there and nine times in ten that would be all it took. They’d really like to keep being my pal. I would leave the alternative to their imaginations. But there’s always some asshole thinks he’s tough and maybe he is. What you do with a guy like that… you don’t bother talking, you just grab him in a parking lot some night and you break his legs, break his hands too while you’re at it. You break both a guy’s hands he can’t wipe his own ass. It’s very humiliating. Then you wait till he’s recovered, as much as he ever will, and that’s when you go see him and it’s the same deal. You get him someplace where you’re alone and you just start bullshitting with him. Now if you did it right that night in the parking lot or wherever it was, and it was dark and you came at him fast and hard, it’s going to be very difficult for him to remember much. It’s a fucking blur. All he really knows is he got the living shit beat out of him. So there you are… and it’s good if it’s someplace like where he got mugged. He’s still trying to recover from what happened, meals through a straw, some nurse wiping his ass, and at some point he starts getting nervous. He doesn’t know you from Adam and yet there you are bullshitting with him about some completely banal thing with no sign of stopping anytime soon. He’d like to bolt but you’re making it so he can’t, but you can see he’d like to and that’s when you say to him, maybe you ought to call so-and-so. And all of a sudden he knows. He knows what happened and he knows why. And most importantly, he knows you’re the one. He knows what you’re capable of and he knows that if he doesn’t come through it’s going to happen all over again and he picks up the phone and he makes the call and you’ve never said a direct word about it.

“Now you see where this is going. Blackstone hasn’t said a direct word, but he’s shown you what he’s capable of, the overdose, the abduction… the menu on your car… very circumspect, very discreet and very ballsy. He’s a worthy fucking opponent, this guy. He’s my kind of guy if you want to know the truth. Too bad he’s a douche bag. That menu shit… that’s genius when you stop and think about it. Nothing you could point to that he couldn’t deny. It’s fucked up but you have to admire it.”

They were a moment in admiring it.

“And now?”

“Now we go at him,” D said, warming to the idea.

“And if he has my daughter?”

“You’d probably know it already.” He said this in an offhanded way as if to suggest everything with which he had just preceded it were pure speculation and quite possibly wrong.

“I thought we’d just concluded that he did.”

D went on without missing a beat. “So let’s say he has her. That breaks two ways. He calls and says we need to talk. But he hasn’t done that so we go to what’s next. He lets you sweat, and maybe needs time to put his ducks in a row. However he works it, the endgame is the same, him telling you that the two of you need to talk. He’s not going to tell you he has your daughter. Threat will never be that direct. He knows what you’re thinking because that’s how he’s set it up, and he’s counting on you to believe that if you can just talk to him and promise to be good it can still work out and he will think you will think that because that’s the world you’ve always lived in, a place where educated people talk and work things out. But all this really is, this whole charade… It’s all about setting you up. Your daughter’s a means to an end—you in a meeting you don’t come back from and that’s the salient feature of this whole deal. It’s you dead.

“He’ll probably have it set up to look like a mugging or some fucking thing. He may not even be there. The bad boyfriend will bring your daughter back to wherever. Blackstone goes back to whatever sick deal he’s got going with this woman you like. It’s what they’d call in the Teams a perfect op; you’re in, you do the job, and you’re out. No one even knows you were there. You were invisible.

“But here’s the rest of it. Let’s say Blackstone doesn’t have your girl. She’s a kid acting out, making bad choices. She’s got some shitbird boyfriend and that’s who she’s with. Where does that leave us with Blackstone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Daughter, no daughter… This is all about frozen lakes, my brother, yours and his. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’re the same. You and her getting made outside that place… that was fucked up, Doc. That’s the alpha and the omega right there.”

Chance entertained the fleeting impulse to deny it, to remind them all that he hadn’t gone to find Jaclyn but to look for evidence of surveillance, an unnecessary step had D not been moved to break a man’s neck by way of a karambit blade run through his ocular cavities. But then he supposed that was really just one piece. Had they not been tailing Blackstone, had he not gone to a man repairing furniture in the back of a warehouse for advice in extricating himself from his own ill-advised involvement in the life of a disturbed woman or, for that matter, when one went further in consideration of the simple fact that he would not have been at the warehouse in the first place had he not been hoping to alleviate the financial woes of a failed marriage by scoring on some fancy French furniture it had no doubt been foolish even to buy… and so on and so forth till the business of D’s killing a man seemed but one layer of an onion best left unpeeled and the more appropriate question was: What next?

“Let’s start with what’s not next,” D said. “I’m you… I don’t wait for him to put his ducks in a row and I sure as hell don’t go out to this fucking motel. I don’t trust her to play middleman. I go right at him and I don’t need her and whatever she’s got or hasn’t got or maybe just thinks she’s got. I call him, on this.” He pulled a phone from his jacket and placed it on the table between them. “What I took off that shitbird in the alley. You call him on this… it’s a whole new day, my brother.”

“My God. You took his phone?”

The big man shrugged. “Fell out of his pocket. I saw what it was. Why not take it?”

“But won’t the cops be on this? Monitoring calls… whatever it is that they do?” He was thinking now of Blackstone’s reports.

“No. It’s a burner, a call-and-drop job. You buy X number of minutes, use a fake name, toss it when you’re done. Check out the ghetto sometime. You can buy one on every corner.”

Chance felt no need for visual confirmation. He could imagine it all well enough, a vast incipient system by which denizens of the underworld were in more or less constant communication in anticipation of the coming darkness.

“It’s what I use, when I use one at all,” Big D said, and pulled one from his jacket identical to the one on the table. “Cops won’t be on it, but he will. He thinks you’re trouble but he still thinks he’s got the leverage. Call comes in on that…” D eyed the phone. “And he finds out it’s you… Buckle up is all I can say. Speed kills.”

Chance eyed the device with something akin to terror. “The fuck would I say?” he asked.

“Tell him you want your daughter. Tell him you want to meet, you want to trade… you could burn him down but you’d rather negotiate.”

“For my daughter.”

“He’ll never cop to having her. He’ll probably just say something like we need to talk and you say fine… we’ll talk as soon as I know she’s safe and you give him a window. I don’t hear from her in the next six hours, I’m taking everything I know and I’m going to the guys you work for. That’s a bluff but it’s a place to start.”

Time ground to a halt in the Church of Big D, dust motes like dwarf celestials in lazy circles beneath rent canvas. In the end, Chance took his wallet from his pocket and removed the card Detective Blackstone had given him. There was a photograph of his daughter in the wallet as well. It had been taken as she clung to a child’s merry-go-round in a little park in Cambria where the family had once rented a house for the summer, at a happier time than the present, and he studied it for some indeterminate period before placing his own phone on the table between them and lifting the one belonging to the dead man. It was heavier than anything he might have imagined.

“It was what they told us at the hospital,” he said, holding the phone as if it were sharing time in homeroom and this were the thing he’d come with. “About the number my daughter called… that it was one of these.”

The others sat watching.

“Nice,” D said.