Kem Nunn - Chance

“And how would I do that?” Chance posed the question more or less in spite of himself. Half an hour ago he’d been ready to piss himself. Then he’d been ready to puke, then he’d been ready to never see the big man again, and now he was asking advice, the thing he had come for.

“First thing,” D said, “is to collect intel on this prick. She says he’s dirty. What does that mean? It’s not that hard to kill a clean cop. They put themselves in dangerous situations all the time. Any one of them could go wrong. But a guy that’s dirty? His whole life is a dangerous situation. You just need to pay attention. Where does he go? Who does he see? When is he most vulnerable?”

“The idea, I think, would be to see him arrested.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say I’d feel better about it that way.”

“Play by the rules?”

Chance shrugged.

“You think that’s how he feels?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how he feels. But let’s say I like the idea of getting something on him…”

“That’s fucked up, but all right.”

“I can’t just start following him around. He knows what I look like.”

“You might hire it done.”

“You?”

“We could talk about it.”

“And how expensive might this become?”

“I know you’ve got eighty large.”

It was not always easy to tell when the big man was fucking around. He was, as Chance had learned, not without a sense of humor, of sorts anyway. “I guess I’d have to think about that one.”

“Absolutely. But as long as you think, he’s the feeder. So think about that.”

Chance was thinking about it when headlights appeared at the far end of the alley. His first impulse was to believe they had been followed or found out. He imagined the rotating red light that would momentarily explode like a ruptured artery on the alley’s narrow way. What they got was the lemon yellow Starlight coupe that in time drew even with them.

They were standing at its passenger side. A window dropped. There was a leather boy of no more than twenty on the other side of it. He was looking bored and smoking a joint, his greasy head resting on the seat back. Carl Allan was behind the wheel, dapper in what appeared to be a three-piece brown and yellow pin-striped suit. The sweet scent of marijuana drifted into the night from the car’s interior, lit only by the dim illumination of its own dashboard.

“Sup, Big Dog?” D asked of Carl. He bent down a little to look inside.

Carl, meanwhile, was peering out at them, one to the other and then back again, as if the sight of them standing there together in the alley at the rear of his store at four in the morning were cause for neither question nor alarm but rather some secret merriment. “Boys, boys, boys,” he said. His delivery was that of a headmaster prepared to lecture. The light in his eyes suggested the parody thereof. But that was it. He had nothing more to say. The window went up. D and Chance stepped back. The car drove on, passing from sight at the opposite end of the alley from which it had emerged.

D sighed, watching as the Studebaker’s taillights faded into the night. “What did I tell you?” he said. “He’s at it again.”

“Those guys, in the alley…” Chance said finally. He was beyond sleep deprived. The Blackstone of it would have to wait. “How could you know they wouldn’t all be armed? How could you know they wouldn’t have guns, that it wouldn’t be the two of us left for dead?”

D reached down to lift the cuff on one enormous pant leg, far enough for Chance to see some type of handgun at the top of his boot. He didn’t say anything, he just showed Chance the gun. The next thing he did was to open his jacket, far enough to permit the exhibit of three simple but lethal-looking blades hung in a row by way of some bit of nylon webbing stitched into the fabric. “Most fights are over before they begin,” D said. “Those guys followed us into an alley. What kind of idiot runs into an alley trying to escape? No one. But they didn’t think about that. They just reacted. Emotion over logic and by which they allowed me to dictate the terms and setting of the encounter.” He gave Chance a moment to consider. “Think of it like this,” he said. “There are no victims, only volunteers.”

There were victims for Christ’s sake. Chance had spent half his life in the same room with many of them. What was Bernard Jolly if not a victim, bereft of protectors, damaged beyond repair, mentally and physically, to the point that he now too was a predator, not yet old enough to buy a drink and already caught in the jaws of a gorged and lumbering bureaucracy, one more bit of human excrement on his way to the sea?

Perhaps, Chance thought, he was being too literal. It was equally possible his own ruminations on the subject, running to the obsessive in the wake of an evening with Big D, were, on the morning in question, exacerbated by his surroundings. He was, after all, seated between his wife and daughter on a leather couch, lined up like ducks in the proverbial shooting gallery in the principal’s office of the Havenwood Academy, and feeling every bit the receiver.

They were all there. Holly Stein, a male vice principal whose name kept escaping him, a favored teacher… The question before them was his daughter’s status. They’d been there for the better part of two hours. He supposed some progress, however painful, had been made. But life was short, and at just that point when it had been pretty much concluded that Nicole could stay, albeit on some probationary status, Chance elected to inform them that, in point of fact, she would be leaving. One might have heard a pin drop. What Chance heard was the great foghorn at the mouth of the bay.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Holly said when the foghorn had retreated once more into silence.

“What part don’t you understand?” Chance asked. He was thinking he might take a run at being the feeder.

“What are you do ing?” Carla asked him.

“I’m explaining the thing,” Chance said.

Nicole, he noted, was not even looking at him. Nor, he thought, did she seem particularly interested in the proceedings, which he took as a bad sign. Her eyes were fixed on a window behind the principal’s desk by which the masts of boats in the marina might be seen glimmering in the morning light.

“It’s really very simple,” Chance told them. He was very pleased she would be able to finish out the semester. Beyond that, it was a question of money. Until the divorce was final and terms set, until the IRS was off his back, money was the deciding factor in his decision. His approach was, for him, uncommonly direct. When it was over he rose and left the room. He was aware of their faces, vacant as the moons of Jupiter, or any of those other planets having more than one, staring after him as he went out into the light.

Carla was livid but she was the easy one. It required little more to shut her up than Chance telling her she was welcome to keep Nicole at Havenwood. All she had to do was pick up the tab. “Maybe,” he suggested, “what’s-his-name would be able to help.”

Nicole was more difficult, having more in common with Bernard Jolly than the rest of them, a victim of her parents’ ineptitude and folly. They walked along a tree-lined strip of grass with views of Marin County, hills green as Ireland, crowned in fog beyond the rust red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, the city falling way at their backs. From this vantage it was all white light and shimmering surfaces, a sensory beauty. Fucking San Francisco. “I’m flying down to UCLA to deliver a paper,” Chance told her. “I get back, I’m going to find an apartment in Berkeley. The schools are better there.”