Kem Nunn - Chance

D seemed a bit disappointed and when he spoke again it was with considerably less enthusiasm. “Take a little time for me to get what I need,” he said. “’Nother day or two, I’ll be able to start. Should take me about a week.”

At which point Carl Allan appeared. “Is there a doctor in the house?” he asked. He was standing in the doorway that led back into D’s workroom, puffy in the face with a still swollen nose and dark half-moons beneath his eyes, a jaunty straw hat in the style of certain fifties hipsters placed well back on his head to accommodate the white bandaging that peeked out beneath it. He was leaning on a wooden cane with an ornate silver handle. “Thought I heard your voice,” the old man said. He was looking at Chance and doing his best to smile.

Chance rose at once. “My God,” he asked. “What happened?”

Carl waved it off. “A minor mishap,” he said. “I’ll be right as rain in no time at all.” He went on before Chance could say more. “I was pleased to see you brought your pieces in. I’ve already spoken to two buyers who may be interested.”

Interested in what, Chance wondered, copies or originals? Were the buyers in question private parties or dealers? Perhaps he should inquire. But then he had brought the stuff in. A course had been charted, and looking about him there in the alley, he felt himself, for what must have been the first time in a life noteworthy for its adherence to convention, a partner in crime. There followed a momentary, unaccountable elation and he looked once more to his co-conspirators, the one the size of Texas just now making gurgling noises with his straw as he sucked down the last of an enormous Diet Coke, the other rail thin in a plaid sharkskin jacket, head wrapped in gauze—desperadoes beneath the eaves.

“You’re done out here,” Carl said, interrupting his reverie, “come inside. I need you to fill out a couple of papers.”

“Papers?” Chance asked. He was not sure he cared for the sound of it.

“We’ll want to document the pieces,” Carl told him. “We’ll want your signature.”

The idea of actually attaching his signature to something was sufficient to stifle his momentary elation. Signing papers evoked the specter of attorneys and courts of law, the stuff of life, as opposed to fantasy. D chose this moment to repeat the gurgling sound with his straw. My God, Chance thought suddenly, what have I done? Surely this was the very kind of poor judgment his father had so often warned of. The deal would sour. It was so written. He would be found out. Additional lawsuits would be added to those in which he was already mired. His life would turn to shit.

“You youngsters keep right on talking,” Carl said. “I’ll be here when you’re ready.” He turned unsteadily in the doorway. Chance watched as he walked away, leaning heavily on the cane. “The hell happened?” he asked of D, not quite able to mask his own sense of desperation.

“Kid took him off.”

“That kid I saw in here? Leather pants and pointed boots?”

“I guess.”

“There’s more than one?”

D laughed. “The old man has a weakness, I guess you could say, but yeah, it was probably that one you saw, flavor of the fucking month. Kid wanted money. Carl said no. Kid came in here with two of his pals, beat him up pretty good and stole some shit.”

“Christ.” Chance seated himself once more on the step. “What did they take?” He supposed he was imagining how it would have been had his furniture been here a week earlier, and how it might be if they came back wanting more.

“Couple of antique chairs, some money was in that desk up front…”

“Did he go to the police?”

“He came to me. What pisses me off, I wasn’t here when they came around but I guess that’s how they planned it. Little prick knew his routine. Knew mine too, I suppose. You gotta watch it with that shit.”

“What shit would that be?” Chance asked. “I’m not sure I follow.”

D just looked at him. “Having a routine, ” he said. “Same place, same time every day? Like walking around with a fucking target on your back.”

D was, Chance thought, beginning to sound uncomfortably like certain of his patients, the ones with delusional paranoia. He kept the observation to himself and nodded, as if to confirm the position’s fundamental soundness.

D waved toward the building at his back. “Stuff’s all back in there, is what I was about to say.”

“The stuff that was stolen?”

D nodded.

“You got it back?”

“That and then some.”

Chance waited.

“I needed to make it worth my while.”

Chance shook his head, imagining what that might mean. “You make it sound easy,” he said.

“Pretty easy.”

“They weren’t armed? They didn’t want to fight you for it?”

D shrugged. “The kid knew me.” He pulled the plastic top off his Diet Coke and examined the inside of the cup, apparently wanting to be sure that he’d gotten the last of it. “One of his pals thought he’d try his luck with a baseball bat.”

Chance laughed out loud. He was thinking about the BMW driver in the street, that and Detective Blackstone, entertaining his fantasies. “Not a good idea, you’re telling me.”

“He should’ve stuck to baseballs.”

“So what then?”

D got to his feet, tossing his trash into a nearby Dumpster. “Then he went away,” D said, as matter-of-factly as ever.

Chance gave it a moment to see if D would say more, but D seemed done and was now peering into the Dumpster as if he’d found something there to interest him. “When you say he went away…” Chance started but let it drop. He was thinking maybe it was one of those “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of things. And what, after all, did he know?

In the end, Chance signed his papers and left. Funny, he thought, once more in the street, preternaturally quiet, it seemed to him now, striking for its absence of loitering youth, how these little trips to the old furniture store could put a new slant on one’s day. He returned by way of city streets to his office to find Jaclyn Blackstone in his waiting room, staring pensively at the clouds beyond the window, a silver splint on her nose, bruises not unlike the old antiques dealer’s fading beneath her eyes, which for the first time, he noted, were a rather beautiful shade of golden brown, almost yellow, he thought, like those of a cat.

Chance shared the suite of offices on Polk Street with three other doctors, Salk, Marks, and Haig. Jacob Salk was a psychiatrist, an authority on mind control, cults, brainwashing, and vulnerability to undue influence. David Marks was a neuropsychologist Chance knew from his days at UCSF. Like Chance, he was married and a father. Unlike Chance, he was still married. And finally there was Leonard Haig. At forty-five, Haig was already the most dramatically prosperous of the group, a neurologist of private means who’d managed a specialty out of defense work for the big insurance companies. He had recently purchased a house in the South of France. He was said to be an exceptionally fine tennis player and successful womanizer. If not crossing paths as dueling expert witnesses in a court of law, as had happened on a number of occasions, Chance and Haig rarely spoke. Yet it was Haig who alerted him to the presence of Jaclyn Blackstone in the building.

“I have just directed a patient to your waiting room,” Haig told him. They were standing in the hallway before a black-and-white photograph of a clearly deranged elderly woman seated in a tiny windowless room. The room was bare as a prison cell save for a string of paper dollies by some means suspended above the woman’s nearly hairless head.