Kem Nunn - Chance

Chance said nothing but watched as Jean-Baptiste sat back down. He looked awfully tired, Chance thought, and was quite moved by the generosity of spirit with which his old friend had undertaken the journey to see him. Given Jean-Baptiste’s enthusiasm for things, the reach of his mind, you sometimes had to remind yourself that he was dying.

“And what about him?” Jean-Baptiste asked.

“Him?” Chance had been thinking about his friend.

“This Blackstone. Final thoughts?”

Chance gave it a moment. “I think he was like me,” he said finally. “I think he loved that whore.”

“I want you to have my photographs,” Jean-Baptiste told him.

“I’d like that,” Chance said. “I’d like that very much.”

It was only later that he would learn Jean-Baptiste had died on the very day Chance had fallen, that someone in the office had thought it best to withhold the information, perhaps until he was stronger. But he would never quite be able to believe that they had not by some means communicated or that Jean-Baptiste had not by some means beyond his reckoning been there with him in the room, so that when Lucy Brown finally did come in with the news, it was he who told her about having inherited the collection. “He was here, then?” she asked. “With you, in the room?”

“How else would I have known?”

Lucy said nothing for a good long while but advised him on her way out to journey safely among the spheres.

Of his last visitor there was less doubt as to his actual physicality but no relief from the surreal. The man was built like a spark plug, a personal injury attorney with the dress and manner of a strip club barker. Having read in the papers of Chance’s fall he had already been out to Lands End to visit the spot. “I want you to listen to me,” the guy told him. “I took a ride out there and I saw that sight. It’s a joke. Tape where there ought to have been some form of barricade… It was their job to protect people and they failed. You’re a doctor with a head injury. Your entire livelihood is at stake.” He went on to wonder if anyone from the city had perhaps been by, “looking to settle,” and was relieved to find that they had not. “That’s a good thing,” he said. “Fuzzy state you’re in, you might have signed something and then where would you be? Now on, anyone wants to talk to you, they talk to me instead.” As apropos of very little save his prowess to wrest great sums from large, impersonal institutions, he went on to tell of a former client who, while attempting to draw money from an ATM, had been struck by a drunken driver, losing both legs from the knees down. The bank had offered a million dollars. The attorney had gotten him ten. “You know what he does now?” the attorney asked.

“I can’t imagine,” Chance said.

“He pulls a rickshaw in Chinatown on prosthetic limbs, ten million in the bank. Go figure.”

Chance saw that the guy was not so different from himself, or for that matter from the late detective. They had all spent a good deal of time prowling among the ruins. In time he would learn that the man had offices on the Great Highway with a view of the beach. On each step of the stairway leading upward was an old surfboard. Inside there were photographs of the waves of Ocean Beach and Chance would find that he liked looking at them. “These fuckers are liable and they’re going to pay,” the surfing attorney told him before leaving the hospital. “I need two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Chance said. The guy just laughed, told him “ the Big Guy ” upstairs must’ve heard already and to start adding zeros. “And you should get in the water sometime,” he added, apropos of almost nothing. “It’s good for the head.” Chance, who had not yet been to the man’s offices or seen his pictures, had no idea what he was talking about but he was no longer paying much attention either. He was thinking about the big guy and not necessarily the one upstairs. He was thinking that between Jean-Baptiste, the cop, and the surfing attorney he was ready for yet one more go at the old kaleidoscope, one more turn of the wrist.

It would have begun, would had to have begun, with D and Carl trailing the Mercedes from the motel to the restaurant where D would have gotten out, eyes on the men, waiting for them to make their move, to come at Chance from behind and the whole thing set to play out more or less when and where and even how the big man had said it would. But Chance throwing the block into those gears with his dead phone and headless chicken act, that must have left them all guessing. Then Blackstone gets a visual and everybody is set to improvising… the Romanians coming by car now, but still slow enough for D to shadow in the failing light, and the big man seeing it like Chance had seen it, and calling in what might pass for air support in the person of Carl Allan and his Starlight coupe—the great diversion beneath which Chance makes his play… It was only everything else that continued to elude him. Blackstone stabbed by the beach but found in the room? And why no murder weapon? The best he could come up with was something like… D arriving at the scene to find Blackstone already dead, the knife still in his chest, and not only removing the blade but guessing it was Chance who’d gone over the wall, and calling it in, just in case, anonymously of course, as a man and his dog… and then goes even further and stuffs Blackstone into the Crown Vic (the keys would have been on Blackstone’s body) and drives him back to the Blue Dolphin, trying to make it look like it all happened there, and kills the Romanian who’d been left to guard her and the two of them walk out, him and her, and disappear… back into the cool gray city of love… Was that all too much, or was it like the old man thought, and Big D a kind of ongoing magic act? Maybe it had something to do with that book his grandmother had mentioned— Unlocking Your Hidden Powers . But when at last an opportunity presented itself and he’d limped with the aid of a walker to a pay phone in the lobby and gotten D on his burner and asked how he’d managed it, in truth that is, and had she mentioned his name? D would say no more than, “Managed what?” adding only that he was happy that Chance was happy… it all having worked out so well with his furniture and all, because when you got right down to it… these things were, in point of fact, never an exact science and happy endings a long way from written in the stars and there was little for it but for Chance to agree that yes, timing was indeed everything, and to return to his room where for the first time in a good long time, he actually stopped to consider the possibility of his being happy and of what that might look like, the war in his prostate notwithstanding.

The better part of a week and his doctors were ready to discharge him. He was brought by a male nurse to the front of the building in a wheelchair, dressed in the baggy gray sweat suit Lucy had picked out and delivered to his room along with the pair of red felt house slippers he was also wearing that she had declared to be cool and a real find. Romeos, she had called them. Any remainders of the clothes he had come with were apparently languishing in a police lab in some quarter of the city and there still had been no word regarding what if anything had been found in his pockets. His shoes on the other hand had been inexplicably returned and rode now in his lap along with his overnight bag and a magazine promoting men’s health, the promise of six-pack abs in thirty days.