Kem Nunn - Chance

He’d spoken exactly once to his daughter during this period. He found her contrite but less than forthcoming. Still… there had, according to Carla, been no further incidents. She was attending classes. If she was seeing the guy, she was at least spending her nights at home. Chance’s insistence that she never be alone seemed to fall on deaf ears. Trying to have her stay at his place, in light of both recent and potential events, seemed altogether out of the question, though as part of their forays across the bay Chance had taken to scouting neighborhoods in appropriate school districts, sometimes stopping to take down the number of a place for rent then listening as Big D offered his critique. D was big on risk assessment with respect to break-ins and general defensibility in the event of martial law. Nor was the possibility of a full-blown zombie apocalypse to be taken lightly. The big man paid particular attention to window height and door placement together with angles of sight. Fences were of interest, as was the proximity of power lines and trees.

The absurdity of all this was not lost on him, the sheer outrageousness of it. D was cutting him some slack on the bill in return for his willingness to drive. “You never know what you’re capable of till you find out what you’re capable of,” the big man was fond of saying. And so it was proving to be. The thing was… he was finding a kind of contentment in his work, not at the office but here, at the wheel of the aging Oldsmobile, Charlie Parker on the stereo, Big D filling up the seat at his side. He felt that he was actually doing something. What he was doing was a little sketchy it was true, a little fucked up, possibly dangerous. On the other hand, he was spared the tedium of his own company, spared too from any more disastrous solo outings, and in that regard, Big D, with his talk of feeders, receivers, and frozen lakes, a kind of stand-in for the tranquilizers he had thus far declined.

It was true that sleep was down to no more than three hours per night but there were benefits in this too. Acuity felt sharpened. He was more aware, more present for the patients who continued to come and go. Mornings passed quickly in anticipation of the afternoons. Afternoons passed in a sepia tone blur, shadows lengthening into night. He could no longer recall if this was what it had been like before, the elevator lift to a full-blown mania worthy of a bipolar 1 diagnosis ending in flames and blood, a suicide watch lasting the better part of a month. But then he no longer gave it much thought. There was no time and those moments of existential dread in which he was seized upon by his own absolute inability to explain himself were growing fewer and farther apart. The thrill of the hunt was upon him, the seminal imperative of mortal blood.

On the third day of the second week, they caught a break. At least D said it was a break. Who was Chance to disagree? His beloved James had been right, it really was all faith or fear. The detective did not go straightaway to the condo where he lived. Nor did he stop at the cop’s bar he sometimes frequented near the waterfront where the parking lot was close to the street and always crowded. He drove instead to the outskirts of downtown Oakland in the general direction of the airport, to a land of single-story buildings, strip malls, and gas stations where much of the signage was written in Korean, entering at last among a particularly tawdry collection of storefront operations including one with the incongruous moniker of European Massage printed out in both English and Korean in bold block lettering across blacked-out plate glass. He drove through the lot, passing in front of the buildings before circling round to an alley that ran at their backs.

Believing it unwise to drive into the alley, Chance parked nearby, allowing D to go in on foot. He was back in ten with more good news. “Fucker parked in back of the massage parlor and went in.” He looked toward the building. “More to that place than meets the eye,” he said. “There’s a little lot in back, half a dozen cars, all high-end. You’d never guess it, tucked away down here.”

“Maybe that’s part of the attraction.”

“Maybe.”

“So Blackstone’s either working a case or getting laid.”

“Yep, saw a woman letting him in. He’s been there before. I’ll say that much. We’ll see how long he stays. An hour or more, I’d say he’s a customer, which means at some point he’ll be back. He does and we’re on it. Lot’s fucking perfect.”

Detective Blackstone was gone for a full hour and twenty-two minutes. “Putting a little stink on his johnson,” D said. Chance looked to see if he was smiling but he wasn’t. The color had risen in the big man’s cheeks. He was staring into the alley with the intensity of a hawk in search of a field mouse, that and cracking his knuckles, first one hand and then the other, though he did not seem conscious of the act.

A day later and Blackstone was back, same time same place. “Lock and load,” D told him. “I’m going in.”

Chance let him out a block from the bar, in possession of a screwdriver, a portable power drill, and a blank thumb drive, which he carried in a nondescript nylon backpack, then drove to a large park nearly two miles away and waited. Little more than an hour had passed when D reappeared. Chance spotted him through the trees on the far side of the park that was maybe a hundred yards across and featured at its center an ornate fountain and pool. It was approaching the dinner hour. In the streets the cars were turning on their lights. Looking east into the Oakland hills one might judge the fire line by where the lights of the houses began and ended. Nearer to where Chance waited, the fountain and pool were particularly well lit, their jets of water thrown skyward in a rush of white light to fall like sparks before a darkening sky.

There had been some discussion about this part of the plan. They had been seated in D’s quarters at the rear of the warehouse and Chance had argued for a closer rendezvous point. “Better like this,” D had told him. “Something goes wrong, I want time to distance myself from the scene before you and I meet up.”

“Seems like you’d want me closer if something went wrong.” The prospect of something going wrong seemed so unimaginably fucked up it was difficult even to say. The old man had attempted to calm his fears. “You’d never believe it,” Carl told him. He was looking at D as might a proud father on a favored son. “Knows how to make himself invisible.”

“Part of my training,” D said by way of acknowledging this improbability. “I was in the Teams… we used to do these drills… guy gets dropped off in some part of the city, San Diego usually… where I did my basics but it could be anywhere. Whatever… Point is… it’s the rest of the team’s job to find this guy and what he has to do… is make it back to some agreed-upon location without being spotted. You learn how to move, how to use the shadows, play the angles, lines of sight from any given point… Sneak and peek, we called it…”

“You’d never think a guy of his size could pull that off, but I’ve seen him do it.”

“I take Carl out sometimes, try to show him shit.”

“Got me working on my template of nine.” The old man drew a fixed-blade knife from his pocket and waved it about in the air, appearing to strike at what Chance took to be three different targets. “So far I’m only up to three, three of nine.” He struck at the invisible targets for a second time. “Pretty quick, huh?”

Chance had no idea what the old man was talking about but expressed his admiration, asking only if he carried the thing around in his pocket like that, with nothing to cover the blade.