Kem Nunn - Chance

And so it went… with the minutes going by and the sweat beading at Chance’s brow and running down and Big D forever in front of him, patient as Job, amazingly quick with his hands and light on his feet, inviting, if one cared to go there, a renewed appreciation of what had transpired that night in the alley and how poor the chances of those would-be muggers had really been when matched against the size, speed, expertise, and power that was Big D in motion.

Aside from the fact that he could never imagine himself actually butchering another human by way of what the big man was trying to teach, Chance found that he rather enjoyed the workout. At first he had not wanted to get up, but once up he didn’t want to sit down. He was coming to appreciate the utility of motion in holding thoughts at bay, not to mention reality, although at one point near what he took to be the end of their session he allowed his curiosity to get the better of him, to inquire about the odds… of his actually making any of this work, in real time in the real world, of his actually hitting the target.

“You’ve just hit it about a hundred times in a row.”

“Under pressure, would be my point. I mean, if you had to give a number.”

“Do you know Hamlet?” D asked. He really was no shortage of wonders.

Chance allowed that he did.

“Well,” D told him. “There you have it. Time comes… trust your training. Do what you’ve been told. Worry it to death and you’re fucked.”

When they were done, or at least as done as they were going to get and the big man geared up, the vest inside his coat hung with throwing blades, handgun clipped to a boot, collapsible baton hung from his waistband and Chance with his blade, a double-edged six-inch dagger that he would, at least in theory, know how to use—if that was really what it came to—when they were done with all of that, they set out from the House of Space and Time, Chance, Carl, and D, first to the warehouse and Chance’s Olds and then on to Lands End, two cars now… rolling out from the alley behind the warehouse… into the last golden flaring of afternoon light, soldiers of the cross, loosed upon an unsuspecting metropolis.

As Carl and D made for the Blue Dolphin, Chance made for his apartment and the ancient paperwork. D had argued against his actually bringing it but Chance thought otherwise. He drove the streets of his city, at once familiar and unspeakably strange, struck through with a certain dumb wonder that it should come to this, that the artifacts of an aberration he had expended so much time and energy in trying to put behind him could, on this particular day, serve as the last bit of thread still binding him to any recognizable version of life on planet Earth, even as the flat, thin blade of Big D’s razor-sharp dagger lay upon the seat at his side.

He collected the paperwork in a slim leather case with a zipper and a shoulder strap and returned to his car. He had not yet heard from Big D. The three hours he had promised Blackstone were only now about to be up as he turned onto the Great Highway. There were still, of course, his fellow citizens. He looked upon them as he had the streets, both familiar and strange. Most were in cars but there were still a few on foot, people out and about, surfers calling it a day, dog walkers, the last of the beachgoers, life going on… Might one say as usual? God only knew what sorts of fires, wrecks, and love nests lay beneath the apparently mundane or in what chambers of the heart men would in the end be brought to the dance, their steps in time from the day of their birth till that of their death the number by which they might one day be called before the Bar of Heaven. Or not. At which point a call arrived. “It’s looking good,” the big man told him. “What’s your twenty?”

Chance told him. “Here’s the deal,” D said and it was all pretty perfect. The motel was a little ways inland but close to that stuff they had looked at, the Cliff House and Camera Obscura, and he asked if Chance remembered and Chance said that he knew them well, that the Cliff House was just that, a building on a cliff with the sea below and the Camera Obscura just behind it—a smaller building shaped like a giant camera with a little red pyramid atop its roof—a trick done with the light wherein tourists might observe their surroundings in a somewhat altered form and D named it as the place, that he had checked angles and lines of sight, that there was plenty of parking along the street and that if Chance could get Blackstone to meet him there, and most specifically, to join him on the path leading from the sidewalk at the street to the Camera Obscura, at least as far as the first little turnout that would be obvious when he got there, it was a done deal and a sixty-foot fall to the water and rocks below.

Chance asked if he had seen them yet, one or both.

“Negative on that,” D said. “But I’ve got eyes on and I can see the room and it’s the number she gave you. Place is one of those old-fashioned motor courts. Separate room, no adjoining walls. They’re on an end in the back. Curtains are all drawn but the Crown Vic is parked in front next to some other car that could be hers. There’s a black Mercedes sedan parked around back and I saw some guy come out from the back door about ten minutes ago with a bucket to get ice. Looked like the twin of that fucker I sent away. Game’s on, bro.”

Chance could feel the string going from the backs of his knees even as he drove. “Plan’s good though,” D told him. “Weather’s getting the whole place ass raped right on time so there aren’t that many people out there by where you need to go but you can still pitch it as a public place. You make that happen, I can probably see his play. He won’t come by himself but he’ll try to make it look like that’s what he’s doing… maybe give me a moment alone with whatever asshole follows him out.”

The Cliff House rose in the distance, a pale edifice above seawater the color of asphalt.

“You copy?”

Chance did.

“Eyes in the back of your head, Doc. Wind shifts… don’t wait to be the receiver. You good for the call?”

Chance said that he was, rolling up on Ocean Beach, the Pacific nothing but wind chop, salt spray blowing in as far as the highway, mixing with the fog, finding his windshield. He set his wipers to intermittent as the big man spoke once more. “Roll the dice, brother.”

Chance got Blackstone on the phone. “She’s giving you up, pal.” Saying it and hearing himself say it and the voice he was hearing not altogether his own. “There’s no point in killing me ’cause that’s just one more thing you’ll do time for because believe me, you will do time.”

“The hell is this?” Blackstone asked.

“It’s me,” Chance told him.

There was a moment of silence on the line. “For Christ’s sake,” Blackstone said. “Are you insane?”

Chance went on. “Only way out of this is for us all to walk and never look back.”

“Way out of what?”

“And that involves me giving you this shit you asked for and for you to give me whatever it is she has there with her.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in front of the Cliff House.”

He could hear Blackstone breathing. “You need to quit fucking around,” Blackstone said, and hung up.

Chance had made the call on the dead man’s cell phone, his own resting on the seat beside him, both set to Speaker so that D might listen in. “He hung up,” Chance said.

“You’re doing great, now call the play.”