Chance (21 page)

Chance’s stomach performed several intricate and delicate maneuvers. He looked to the man at his side. “Do you see what I see?” he asked. “Man’s got a friend.”

“He’s got three friends,” D said. He stuffed the cigarettes, still unopened, back into his coat.

“I don’t like this, D. I’m not happy with this. This is not good.”

“For somebody.”

They came to an alley.

“Down here,” D said.

“Jesus Christ,” Chance said.

The alley was rank and narrow. It ran for only a few yards before angling off to the right. Chance hesitated at its mouth. D, who had already started down it, stopped and looked back. “Stay here if you want to, but I wouldn’t recommend it.” His speech, Chance realized, had come full circle; nothing there he failed to understand now. D turned and moved on. Chance went with him. He saw that the big man had lost his limp and was moving at a good clip toward that place where the alley turned and the light failed.

The others followed a beat or two behind, apparently what D had wanted but Chance’s throat had gone dry as a bone. Up ahead, past where it had angled off, the alley ended in a shallow turnaround lined with Dumpsters and ancient bricks, the backs of warehouses. Both arms swung loosely now at D’s sides, and as they came to the end of the alley he stopped abruptly to rest both hands on Chance’s shoulders, steering him between a pair of Dumpsters, putting his back to a wall. “Anybody starts shooting,” D said, “duck. Other than
that,
don’t fucking move.” D gave him a last look then stepped into the alley where the four men were coming to meet him.

Chance heard a soft clicking sound and saw that the man from the liquor store had drawn a switchblade from the pocket of his coat. He felt a weird tingling sensation along the inside of one thigh he was willing to take as an early indicator that he was about to piss himself. What happened next was both very fast and very slow, and ultimately did
not
include pissing himself. What it did include would have been more difficult to define.

It became clear almost at once that the would-be muggers were put off their game by the big man moving to face them, for surely this is what he had intended all along. It had been his call and here they were. There followed a moment’s hesitation among their ranks. Their line buckled. The guy with the knife stepped forward but even he seemed suddenly more tentative. “We need to borrow some money,” he said.

The psychological dimensions of the thing were quite something. Had D shown fear, they would have been on him in a heartbeat. Chance was certain of it. Numbers favored the attackers and yet they were the ones showing weakness, the evident bravery of the one calling forth the cowardice of the mob. It probably didn’t hurt that the one in question was the size of a small house. Still, it was the word
borrow
that seemed to do them in. Someone should have tipped them to the
philosophy of Big D. Go big or go home. They would have done better to run. They stayed. The lanky man, still a bit forward of the others and seemingly aware of his position as their leader, turned his hand as if to display the knife, as though D had not seen it already, as if this show of weaponry would prove somehow the final arbiter of the action, and in a sense this was so.

D closed the distance faster than Chance would have thought possible. He reached the man’s knife hand even before the other could bring the blade to bear, turned it with his own, and drove it back toward its owner, burying the instrument in the man’s midline below the abdomen, in the general vicinity of the abdominal aorta. The man staggered back, clutching at his wound with both hands, at last removing the blade and dropping it to the asphalt amid a torrent of blood as D now went straight at the remaining muggers.

The men had made their original approach four abreast with the obvious intent of encircling their prey, and while clearly taken aback by the loss of their leader, the remaining three had not given up on the strategy. D prevented it by moving to the outside shoulder of the man on his far left, striking to the throat with an open hand, effectively depriving the man of breath while at the same time forcing him into the path of the man nearest him. The net effect of D’s movement was to keep the attackers lined up in front of him, one behind the other with himself at their head.

And so it went. The big man proved impossible to flank. Perhaps if there had been more of them—another five or ten, let’s say—but this was all happening very fast and none of the attackers seemed to be quite getting it, so that as the one guy staggered back gasping for air, D was already on the outside shoulder of the next, striking to the eyes, and then there was one.

The would-be muggers never had a chance. The stabbed man had managed an escape of sorts, limping from the alley, spraying blood. The others were not so lucky, but Chance’s elation at D’s prowess was short-lived as he was suddenly and at close quarters made witness to the sheer volume of the big man’s violence and it was unlike anything he had ever seen. D would not be content with escape or even victory
as in sport. This was Sherman’s march to the sea, the United States Army at Wounded Knee. It was three men beaten beyond recognition, the most extreme not four feet from where Chance stood watching as D drove the man’s face into a corner edge of the Dumpster till there was no face left to drive, teeth broken at the gum lines, lips sheared away, reduced in seconds to a thing both bloody and skeletal, left to fall among the others, so much refuse upon the alley’s floor. And then they were gone, just the two of them now, running like schoolboys from the scene of a prank, D snatching him from the wall, propelling him headlong in the direction from which they had come, one or two lifetimes ago and the streets exactly as they had left them, neither augmented nor diminished. Stars had not fallen nor had the moon turned to blood and the fog rolling in as the fog was wont to do with the regularity of the darkness itself and this in concert with the rather fecund scent of the city’s beaches while Chance for his part would, on the day that followed and many more besides, search the local papers front to back, going so far as to return on two separate occasions by car, looking for some word or sign . . . crime tape at the mouth of the alley . . . a wreath perhaps, like what you might see at the side of a road where some fatal accident has occurred . . . anything really to give indication of what had transpired here, that might say something about what had become of the men who’d hoped to rob them, possibly to beat them, maybe even to murder them and he would remind himself about that, that it was
they
who had come after
them,
but there was nothing in the papers and nothing in the street nor would there ever be, and definitely no colored bouquets at the mouth of the alley where it was hard to believe that one or more of the men had not died.

“There’s two things,” D told him. It was the first either had spoken since running from the alley and they were back where they had begun behind the warehouse and Big D calm once more, unusually so one might think, given the magnitude of their ordeal. Though perhaps, Chance thought, it had only been an ordeal for him, him and the ones
they had left behind. “The old man says you were asking after that guy who bought your stuff, rethinking the sale,” Big D said. “I wouldn’t go there, brother.”

“Go where?” Chance asked. It was taking him a moment to get his bearings.

D went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Might reflect on Carl in a negative way. Might reflect on me too, as far as that goes.” He took an oversized manila envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket and passed it to Chance. “Here’s your money,” he said. “You might want to count it.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Chance said.

“What’s to understand? That’s eighty thousand dollars. Message you left got the boss a little spooked. Canceled the check and pulled it out in cash.”

Chance stood holding the envelope. “I have any say in this?”

“You did.”

“And you had this on you . . . the whole time?”

“Fucking A,” D told him.

“My God,” Chance said. “Is that what all this was about?” by which he meant the beating in the alley. “You scaring me?”

Big D just looked at him. “That was about me getting right,” he said. “What you do with it is up to you.”

Chance was at a momentary loss. He really could not decide which was more distressing, what it took for D to get right, his being forced to take money against his will, or that Big D had been so willing to put the entire amount at risk in a Tenderloin alley. “You said there were
two
things,” was what he finally got to. “What’s the other?”

“It’s this cop, Blackstone. There’s ways of handling guys like that.” Now that he’d gotten his fix, D was back to the matter-of-fact way he had. “’Cause right now, he’s the feeder.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“That’s a problem,” D said. He gave it a moment’s thought. “That shit in the alley . . . How did I work that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You watched it, bro.”

“It was very fast and very violent.”

D gave him a look, as might an adult called upon to explain some simple fact to a rather dull child. “I made sure
they
were reacting to
me
. People talk about self-defense. Self-defense is bullshit. I’m defending, I’m losing. I want the other guy defending while I attack. Doesn’t make any difference how many people I’m fighting, I want them all defending because that means I’m dictating the action. I’m the feeder. As long as I’m the feeder, I win. I don’t care if it’s a dozen. Right now, this cop is the feeder. You’re the receiver. You need to turn that around.”

“And how would I do that?” Chance posed the question more or less in spite of himself. Half an hour ago he’d been ready to piss himself. Then he’d been ready to puke, then he’d been ready to never see the big man again, and now he was asking advice, the thing he had come for.

“First thing,” D said, “is to collect intel on this prick. She says he’s dirty. What does that mean? It’s not that hard to kill a clean cop. They put themselves in dangerous situations all the time. Any one of them could go wrong. But a guy that’s dirty? His whole life is a dangerous situation. You just need to pay attention. Where does he go? Who does he see? When is he most vulnerable?”

“The idea, I think, would be to see him arrested.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say I’d feel better about it that way.”

“Play by the rules?”

Chance shrugged.

“You think that’s how he feels?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how he feels. But let’s say I like the idea of getting something on him . . .”

“That’s fucked up, but all right.”

“I can’t just start following him around. He knows what I look like.”

“You might hire it done.”

“You?”

“We could talk about it.”

“And how expensive might this become?”

“I know you’ve got eighty large.”

It was not always easy to tell when the big man was fucking around. He was, as Chance had learned, not without a sense of humor, of sorts anyway. “I guess I’d have to think about that one.”