Kem Nunn - Chance

“Now you see where this is going. Blackstone hasn’t said a direct word, but he’s shown you what he’s capable of, the overdose, the abduction… the menu on your car… very circumspect, very discreet and very ballsy. He’s a worthy fucking opponent, this guy. He’s my kind of guy if you want to know the truth. Too bad he’s a douche bag. That menu shit… that’s genius when you stop and think about it. Nothing you could point to that he couldn’t deny. It’s fucked up but you have to admire it.”

They were a moment in admiring it.

“And now?”

“Now we go at him,” D said, warming to the idea.

“And if he has my daughter?”

“You’d probably know it already.” He said this in an offhanded way as if to suggest everything with which he had just preceded it were pure speculation and quite possibly wrong.

“I thought we’d just concluded that he did.”

D went on without missing a beat. “So let’s say he has her. That breaks two ways. He calls and says we need to talk. But he hasn’t done that so we go to what’s next. He lets you sweat, and maybe needs time to put his ducks in a row. However he works it, the endgame is the same, him telling you that the two of you need to talk. He’s not going to tell you he has your daughter. Threat will never be that direct. He knows what you’re thinking because that’s how he’s set it up, and he’s counting on you to believe that if you can just talk to him and promise to be good it can still work out and he will think you will think that because that’s the world you’ve always lived in, a place where educated people talk and work things out. But all this really is, this whole charade… It’s all about setting you up. Your daughter’s a means to an end—you in a meeting you don’t come back from and that’s the salient feature of this whole deal. It’s you dead.

“He’ll probably have it set up to look like a mugging or some fucking thing. He may not even be there. The bad boyfriend will bring your daughter back to wherever. Blackstone goes back to whatever sick deal he’s got going with this woman you like. It’s what they’d call in the Teams a perfect op; you’re in, you do the job, and you’re out. No one even knows you were there. You were invisible.

“But here’s the rest of it. Let’s say Blackstone doesn’t have your girl. She’s a kid acting out, making bad choices. She’s got some shitbird boyfriend and that’s who she’s with. Where does that leave us with Blackstone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Daughter, no daughter… This is all about frozen lakes, my brother, yours and his. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’re the same. You and her getting made outside that place… that was fucked up, Doc. That’s the alpha and the omega right there.”

Chance entertained the fleeting impulse to deny it, to remind them all that he hadn’t gone to find Jaclyn but to look for evidence of surveillance, an unnecessary step had D not been moved to break a man’s neck by way of a karambit blade run through his ocular cavities. But then he supposed that was really just one piece. Had they not been tailing Blackstone, had he not gone to a man repairing furniture in the back of a warehouse for advice in extricating himself from his own ill-advised involvement in the life of a disturbed woman or, for that matter, when one went further in consideration of the simple fact that he would not have been at the warehouse in the first place had he not been hoping to alleviate the financial woes of a failed marriage by scoring on some fancy French furniture it had no doubt been foolish even to buy… and so on and so forth till the business of D’s killing a man seemed but one layer of an onion best left unpeeled and the more appropriate question was: What next?

“Let’s start with what’s not next,” D said. “I’m you… I don’t wait for him to put his ducks in a row and I sure as hell don’t go out to this fucking motel. I don’t trust her to play middleman. I go right at him and I don’t need her and whatever she’s got or hasn’t got or maybe just thinks she’s got. I call him, on this.” He pulled a phone from his jacket and placed it on the table between them. “What I took off that shitbird in the alley. You call him on this… it’s a whole new day, my brother.”

“My God. You took his phone?”

The big man shrugged. “Fell out of his pocket. I saw what it was. Why not take it?”

“But won’t the cops be on this? Monitoring calls… whatever it is that they do?” He was thinking now of Blackstone’s reports.

“No. It’s a burner, a call-and-drop job. You buy X number of minutes, use a fake name, toss it when you’re done. Check out the ghetto sometime. You can buy one on every corner.”

Chance felt no need for visual confirmation. He could imagine it all well enough, a vast incipient system by which denizens of the underworld were in more or less constant communication in anticipation of the coming darkness.

“It’s what I use, when I use one at all,” Big D said, and pulled one from his jacket identical to the one on the table. “Cops won’t be on it, but he will. He thinks you’re trouble but he still thinks he’s got the leverage. Call comes in on that…” D eyed the phone. “And he finds out it’s you… Buckle up is all I can say. Speed kills.”

Chance eyed the device with something akin to terror. “The fuck would I say?” he asked.

“Tell him you want your daughter. Tell him you want to meet, you want to trade… you could burn him down but you’d rather negotiate.”

“For my daughter.”

“He’ll never cop to having her. He’ll probably just say something like we need to talk and you say fine… we’ll talk as soon as I know she’s safe and you give him a window. I don’t hear from her in the next six hours, I’m taking everything I know and I’m going to the guys you work for. That’s a bluff but it’s a place to start.”

Time ground to a halt in the Church of Big D, dust motes like dwarf celestials in lazy circles beneath rent canvas. In the end, Chance took his wallet from his pocket and removed the card Detective Blackstone had given him. There was a photograph of his daughter in the wallet as well. It had been taken as she clung to a child’s merry-go-round in a little park in Cambria where the family had once rented a house for the summer, at a happier time than the present, and he studied it for some indeterminate period before placing his own phone on the table between them and lifting the one belonging to the dead man. It was heavier than anything he might have imagined.

“It was what they told us at the hospital,” he said, holding the phone as if it were sharing time in homeroom and this were the thing he’d come with. “About the number my daughter called… that it was one of these.”

The others sat watching.

“Nice,” D said.

It was just here, in the wake of all that had transpired, awash in the big man’s logic, susceptible in other words to the undue influence of a highly intelligent and charismatic if mentally unstable individual, having dialed the number and Blackstone answering on the third ring in a voice with more air in it than Chance could recall, pitched perhaps at a higher octave, that a number of things happened at more or less the same time. One might envision it as the movement of certain types of objects toward the occupation of the same point in space and time, the act of coinciding as it were, the very thing he and the detective had once quarreled over at the Little Thai Hut, with Chance saying, “I want my daughter…” and the words no sooner out of his mouth than a text message appeared on his phone, on the table at his knees—much, Chance suspected, as the writing on the wall had once affronted the Babylonian king. In Chance’s case it was his soon-to-be ex-wife, Carla, saying simply, “She’s back.”