Kem Nunn - Chance

Carl removed a small leather sheath and let Chance look at it. “See those little wires?” There were four very fine wires, looped to make little prongs, coming out from four different places on the sheath. “D put those on there. They hang up on the lining in your pocket, hold the sheath so you can draw the knife.” He felt compelled to reenact the demonstration yet again.

Chance advised him to keep up the good work.

“You bet,” Carl told him.

And that was pretty much the end of it. The point of rendezvous had remained the park, where Chance now waited, still living in hope that all of those sneak-and-peek drills honed by the big man in the course of his training would prove forever unnecessary.

He watched as D ducked into a public restroom where he remained for some time before reappearing to start once more in the direction of the car. The park was a lively enough place at dusk. Joggers made their way around the park’s perimeter. A few teenagers had gathered near the fountain, assorted musical devices plugged into their ears, taking pictures with their phones. Here and there were mothers in tandem pushing baby strollers, toddlers in their wake. Many turned to look as D rumbled by. He was not, under normal circumstances—i.e., when not on one of his sneak-and-peek missions—one to go unnoticed, with his massive bulk, his naked dome showing white as he passed beneath the trees. Children and pigeons scattered in his wake.

Chance wondered what the others must make of him. Did they think him homeless? Did they know he never slept? Might they imagine he’d fought for his country in the dark and dangerous places of the world, seeing and experiencing things that few others ever would? Two little black girls seemed to take a particular delight in the spectacle of D. They giggled and waved and skipped along behind him across the weathered grass of a late summer for some distance rather like pilot fish in the shadow of a whale. D paid them no mind. The fallen leaves danced about the cuffs of his cargo pants. His jacket was open and flapped about his ample waist, accentuating his mass.

As D reached the car and heaved himself inside, Chance could see that he’d managed to splash a good deal of water on his shirt and pants. His face, even more reddened than usual, was still wet and dripping. It looked, in what was left of the light, more or less as if the big man had been crying. “How did it go?” Chance asked. The absurd inquiry seemed to fly from this throat of its own accord, infused with a false gaiety.

“You might want to get us out of here,” D said.

Seated side by side in the front seat of Chance’s Olds, the breadth of D’s shoulders was such that the two men were nearly touching. It was, Chance thought, like being in the water in a very small boat next to an immense liner. If the big boat went down, it was taking you with it. Perhaps, he thought, this was why he was just now lowering his window, an unconscious desire for escape. “For Christ’s sake,” Chance said. He had yet to start the car.

D’s eyes ticked toward the car’s ignition. Chance turned the key. The engine came to life. “What happened?”

“ That’s a story,” D said. “But I got you this, you still want it.” He pulled the thumb drive from the nylon backpack and held it up for Chance to see.

Chance was hesitant to take it. “Why wouldn’t I still want it?” he asked. There was something about his continuing in darkness as to the exact nature of its acquisition that had him spooked. D was apparently waiting for him to leave the curb before further disclosures.

Chance put the car into gear. He checked both rear- and side-view mirrors like any other resident of the real world and entered the flow of traffic.

“The mission was compromised,” D said.

Chance imagined that he might be sick. A moment passed. “But you have his files,” Chance began. A second moment passed. A second thought occurred. “Or was that why you asked if I still wanted it? There’s nothing on it? You didn’t have time to download?” A happy enough outcome, he thought, when placed alongside all other possible outcomes in which a mission had been compromised.

“I didn’t say the mission was aborted,” D said. “I said it was compromised. There was collateral damage. It’s been taken care of.”

Chance drew as deep a breath as he was able. The road they were on circled the park before intersecting with the street that would take them to the freeway, but the intersection slipped past as Chance continued on around the park, passing once more the spot in which he had waited for Big D. “What exactly are you telling me?” Chance asked.

“You’re driving in fucking circles,” D said.

Chance found it necessary to pull over. They were by now on the opposite side of the park from which they had begun yet still on the circling road. “What are you saying, D?”

“What about collateral damage and taken care of don’t you understand, Doc?”

“Any of it, neither in part nor in whole. I don’t understand it because you haven’t told me.”

D just looked at him.

Had Chance not known what D was capable of, he might have considered punching him in the face. With this off the table, he proceeded as best as he could. “I need it in plain English, D. I’m part of this. I need to know what happened back there.”

“Actually you don’t.”

“Actually I do.”

“The more you know, the more you’re in.”

“I’d say I’m in pretty goddamn deep already.”

“Get on the freeway, will you?”

“You’re telling me you killed him.”

“If by him you mean Blackstone, no, I didn’t kill him. Least I don’t think I did. I put one in his chest but it didn’t look like a kill shot. Be good to get across the bridge. I’m not saying they’ll close it, but you never know… one of their own goes down.”

This time Chance failed to check his mirrors. Talk of a closed bridge had panicked him. He pulled directly into the path of a diminutive gray-haired woman at the helm of a silver Prius, barely tall enough to see over the wheel.

God only knew how much time was consumed by what followed. Chance and the lady, a former high school English teacher for the city of Oakland in the days before movies had sound, exchanged pleasantries and insurance cards. The Oldsmobile was relatively unharmed. The Prius would require a new bumper and fender assembly. “We’ll not worry about my car,” Chance told her. It was all on him, he said. Damned blind spot is what it was, but not to worry. And no need for police reports or insurance companies, what with rate hikes and all of that…

“The newer cars have little cameras in them,” the lady said. She was looking with obvious disdain upon Chance’s Cutlass.

“Take your car anywhere you like,” he told her. “Put whoever does the work in touch with me and I will take care of it.”

“There were blind spots,” she said.

“Yes, I understand. That is absolutely correct. But really… this will all be fine. And you have all of my numbers. I can be reached at any one, at any time.”

She looked once more at the offending Oldsmobile. “And you really don’t think we should call the police?”

Chance guessed her to be well past eighty, in what appeared to be the early stages of Parkinson’s disease and probably not long for the road. Report of an accident was probably no more in her interest than it was in his. He’d so far stopped just short of telling her this for fear of depressing her but certainly hoped that it might yet be implied, that she would catch his drift. “Well,” he said. “You know the police, and you know the insurance companies.” He mustered his best smile, no small feat given the circumstances.