Kem Nunn - Chance

He worried for a moment the big man might take offense but D just laughed at him. “Right,” he said. “But here’s the thing about that. There’s a whole bunch of people out there who think the world is some kind of orderly place, that if things get weird they can run to the cops, hire an attorney… They’re the ones who think it’s a game. They even think there are rules. Go to the cops with what you’ve got right now and see where it gets you. Rules favor the people who make them. Only time you or I mean anything to those fuckers, they’re looking for cannon fodder, or a vote. I’m not saying it was ever much different. World’s the world. Tour of duty’ll put a new slant on things… you want to talk about going crazy. Now there are of course people for whom the fucked-up thing never happens… live their entire life in that happy bubble we call civilization. But really… what I think… you look at the big picture, it’s relatively fucking few. People like you maybe, no offense, doctors, lawyers, and such. I’d say Indian chiefs but I’d guess those fuckers’ve known the score since pretty much day one.”

Chance had fallen to thinking about his patients and how it was with them—the light they hadn’t seen, the horn they hadn’t heard, the blind alley, the sleeper wave, the mutating cell—boned beyond all recognition in the blink of an eye, and not a cloud in the sky. He’d never been on a field of battle but he’d seen something about the frailty of things and was willing to concede the big man had a point.

“So then,” D said. He was absently using one hand to pop the knuckles of the other. “We ready to talk numbers?”

The numbers looked like this. Five large bought Blackstone’s computer, ten a beating, if for nothing else than the principle of the thing. Twenty made Blackstone go away.

“That would be five thousand we’re talking about?” Chance had asked. He was thinking it best not to have even heard about the others.

“It’s what you were trying to do with that bit about going to the DA, you stop and think about it. Slow boat to China, you want my opinion, but let’s say you did get next to someone over there… you’d still have to have something to give them. You didn’t, it would be your word against his and you wouldn’t want that.”

It was true, Chance thought, he wouldn’t. “I’d like a night to sleep on it,” he said.

“Take ten nights. But here’s the deal with that. This guy’s shown you what he can do. My take… he’s still hoping to back you off. He’s probably not going to do anything more till he sees what you do. Which is pretty much one of two things, show him your ass and make sure he sees it, or man up and call his bluff.”

“I’ve got a little time then, in your opinion?”

“I’ve got something I’d like to give you.” D went to a bookshelf he’d made of blocks and one-by-sixes. He returned with three books.

Not surprisingly, one was by Friedrich Nietzsche. “I’ve read the Zarathustra,” Chance said.

D nodded and put the book aside. “No one’s born a warrior, and no one a slave. We become what we are.”

“Yes… life as a literary exercise. To what extent do we write our own script or allow it to be written by others? It’s an interesting question.”

“Let’s face it,” D told him. “The guy had balls. Go big or go home.”

Chance assumed they were still talking about Nietzsche. “You’ll have the money by noon tomorrow,” he said suddenly. “The five large.” A no doubt superfluous clarification but he was feeling that he’d just run a mile at altitude.

Somewhere between the warehouse and his apartment a new and somewhat more acceptable way of looking at all of this presented itself. How was hiring D so different from hiring a private detective? While it was true that Chance had never done so himself, it was equally true that others had, and many of them professionals like himself, upstanding citizens. And while D was not exactly a licensed private investigator he was certainly a capable man, a retired military combatant with training few could match. It was almost, Chance thought, as if he’d chosen the course of prudent behavior after all.

It was shortly thereafter that he reached home amid a fog so dense he’d not seen the Oldsmobile’s hood ornament in more than a mile, nosed into the underground, and climbed the stairs to his apartment, where a number of items were lying in wait. One was a small envelope with his name on it taped to the locked steel door that led to his stairs. He opened it on the spot. There was a scrap of paper inside with the words Scaredy-cat written on it in what he took to be a feminine hand, this and a small troubling spot it was impossible not to interpret as blood . There could be little doubt as to the identity of its author. His eyes searched the street but there was little to be seen in the hopeless fog. At some distance an invisible homeless person had begun to bang at a steel lamppost with what sounded like a steel pipe. Chance let himself into the stairwell and went up. A second message waited on his answering machine. It was from Carla announcing that Nicole had a boyfriend and had apparently already spent a night with him, away from home and without permission. There was a third message from his tax attorney telling him that the IRS had come up with a number. It was big, the attorney admitted, but at least there was a number. And finally there was a note from Big D sent via e-mail to Chance’s computer, the same that contained Raymond Blackstone’s lecherous porn.

Battle is a joyous thing. We love each other so much in battle. If we see that our cause is just and our kinsmen fight boldly, tears come to our eyes. A sweet joy rises in our hearts… This brings such delight that anyone who has not felt it cannot say how wonderful it is. Do you think that someone who feels this is afraid of death?… He is so strengthened, so delighted, that he doesn’t know where he is. Truly, he fears nothing in the world.

“My God,” Chance said to no one in particular, the fleeting sense of euphoria so recently experienced having by now pretty much deserted him altogether. He was staring into the small mirror attached to the medicine cabinet where he’d gone in search of a suitable pharmaceutical cocktail with which to knock himself out. “See poor Alice.” He was making new friends and they all knew where to find him, as from the fogbound street the invisible homeless person continued to announce his or her presence, authoring their own script no doubt and he guessed that soon enough someone would call the appropriate authorities, and that the appropriate authorities would come, much as they’d come for that other crazy whose cries might yet be heard, even through the mists of time, on the Piazza Carlo Alberto in the city of Turin, because that was the thing about the proper authorities… rightly or wrongly… they were never as far away, or as proper, as one might like.

Of D’s other books, the ones Chance came home with, one was entitled The Virtues of War, by Steven Pressfield. It was a novel of Alexander the Great, as told by the great man himself, and Chance saw that D had underlined certain passages. The willingness to die and out of that a sanctification for the willingness to kill scored well, as did any passage celebrating the glory of combat and what the book’s author took as the “seminal imperative of mortal blood.”

The second book, Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod, was a collection of cartoon drawings accompanied by aphoristic observations on the nature of creativity, principally on the willingness to carve out one’s own path, a celebration of the road less traveled. Somewhere near dawn, Chance put the books aside to sleep fully clothed, albeit fitfully, on his living room couch, his reading lamp still on.