Kem Nunn - Chance

The front of the old warehouse was dark and Chance went round to the alley where a pale light could be found issuing from the storage door he knew to be D’s and knocked softly. He soon heard the tumble of locks, the door rolling on its iron rail, enough for D to look out. The big man was fully dressed, clearly awake and not at all, it would seem, surprised to find Chance at his door in the dead of night. “I was in the neighborhood,” Chance told him.

A pair of black leather Eames chairs complete with footrests had been arranged sociably enough in D’s space and they seated themselves in these. “Nice,” Chance said. He slapped an armrest with the flat of his hand. He guessed them fresh from the showroom floor.

“Sup?” D asked. They were just like two regular guys, Chance thought. “Hell if I know,” he said, and he didn’t. But he proceeded to talk. He talked about many things, his divorce, his wife and daughter, the IRS, the practice of medicine, the inequities of a broken system. He may even have mentioned Bernard Jolly, Mariella Franko, and/or Doc Billy for all he could remember about it later on. Eventually of course he got to the reason he was there, Jaclyn Blackstone, a.k.a. Jackie Black, and her former husband, the homicidal homicide detective Raymond Blackstone.

D proved a good listener. He listened right up to the part where Chance had gone to the restaurant expecting Jaclyn and getting Raymond. At which point D stopped him.

“This was an arranged meeting?”

“Yes, I’d planned to meet this woman.”

“And this guy shows up?”

“Indeed he did.”

“How do you think he knew about it?”

“I’ve given that some thought. He overheard something, found a note. One cannot rule out the possibility she tipped him off in some way…”

“She would do that?”

“Depends on how sick she is,” Chance said, echoing Janice.

“Well,” D said. “Big picture… it doesn’t really make any difference how he found out. Just being there is a threat. Unless… it’s some kind of game the two of them play and they’re setting you up for something. You’ve thought of that?”

“Yes, but what I think more likely is that he just found out, or that if she did in some way allow him to find out, it was an unconscious thing.”

“You’re the doctor,” D said. “Anyway… there he is… in the restaurant. What I would do now… I’m him… I’d be very fucking friendly. That’s how you scare someone. Was he friendly?”

“To a point. She came in. It got a little weird.”

“Define ‘weird.’ ”

“Good. Okay. Tense. Let’s just say it was tense.”

“But he never made any overt threats?”

“He got into this weird bit about my daughter, how it was tough being a parent in a predatory world. Something to that effect.”

“That’s not so good.”

“No. And he gave me his card.”

“You still have it?”

Chance produced it.

D sat looking at it. “And now you wonder if he was behind this thing… with Nicole.”

“It’s what I wonder.”

“Could be some trouble she’s gotten into on her own.”

“It could be.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I think it was him, making a point about coincidence. Letting me know what I have to look forward to if I don’t back off.”

“He’s smart then.”

“He’s half a gangster, you hear her tell it. Never gets his hands dirty but he gets things done.”

“Like putting this woman in the hospital.”

“Like that.”

“Like this, with your daughter.”

“It’s what worries me.”

D returned the card. “Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into something, Doc.”

“That’s a terrible way of putting it. But I think you may be right.”

“There’s no right or wrong about how you put it. It is what it is. A guy like this can be a problem.”

“He knows how to game the system.”

“He is the system.”

A moment passed during which the big man, who had till now treated pretty much everything with a rather Buddha-like equanimity, became suddenly more animated. It was the mention of the system that seemed to have done it. His face colored. The hand that lay upon the armrest nearest Chance rolled itself into a fist the size of a lunch pail. “This is bullshit,” D said finally. “This cheap fuck… gun and a badge… tough guy. I’d like to see him meet me someplace.”

“There’s one other thing,” Chance said.

“What’s that?”

“Last night… after the restaurant… she came to my apartment. He may have followed her.” He told D about the unmarked Crown Vic.

“Let’s walk,” D said.

It wasn’t exactly the response Chance was expecting. But then it wasn’t really a question, either. Chance didn’t ask where and D didn’t say. Given the strangeness of the past forty-eight, the idea of going for a walk with Big D at two in the morning seemed to make about as much sense as anything else.

They went out by way of the alley where the night smelled of garbage and there was a slight chill on the noxious air, winter waiting in the wings. D wore the old Army Rangers jacket over jeans and a black T-shirt. One of his heavy black combat boots was patched with duct tape. Chance was still dressed in the clothes he’d put on that morning, dark slacks, a pale yellow sweater, and brown loafers. Only thing needed to make the oddness of their pairing complete, he concluded, was the white doctor’s coat with his name on it that hung more or less as a prop from his office door, that he sometimes wore in front of those patients for whom he thought such outward signs of competency might help in allaying their fears.

For the most part they walked in silence. D set a good enough pace that Chance actually had to work to keep up. They went east on Market and then north. It was neither the hour nor direction Chance would have chosen. “Not the best part of town,” was how he voiced his concern. D grunted and kept walking.

Lights failed briefly nearing the Tenderloin, though here and there some bit of neon hung frosted in the dank air. Figures half realized rustled among the shadows as might insects disturbed by their passing. In time they came to a street where the tawdry neon was more prevalent. There were hookers on corners now and dimly lit bars, men with bottles on the stoops of flophouses, their liquor in brown paper bags. There was also the occasional flare of a butane lighter beneath the bowl of a glass pipe and small bands of prowling youth.

Chance found that he’d broken a sweat. It beaded up on his hairline in the chill of the improbable night, made ever more improbable with each step, whereupon something new, equally improbable, and profoundly disturbing began to occur. Big D began to limp. He began to do something else as well. He began to hold his right arm up, bent at the elbow, his left hand bunched at his side in the manner of a stroke victim so that his entire body might be seen to participate in the ruse, if ruse it was. Chance’s first instinct was to indulge in the luxury of doubting his observation. It was after all the night on the heels of the day in the wake of the previous night. He was short on sleep, nerves wrung to the breaking point. Unhappily D continued to limp, possibly even to refine his limp, till Chance could doubt it no more. “Are you all right?” he asked. He was a little afraid of the answer but D only nodded and turned forthwith into a brightly lit liquor store at the heart of the broad way, still dragging a leg and favoring an arm.