Chance (81 page)

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.

In the end, she was willing to go along. It might have been that she did in fact catch his drift. It might also have been his business card or the fact that, in her words, he was possessed of an honest face. Writing out the last of his information, he heard sirens and found that his hand had begun to shake. “There, there . . .” the woman told him. She went so far as to pat him on the arm. Her name was Delores Flowers, now of Alameda. “Let’s just be thankful no one was hurt.”

He returned to the car. D was seated with his great head tilted back on the headrest, his eyes on the car’s headliner in which a small tear had begun near the windshield. “Good one, Doc.”

While the Bay Bridge would certainly have been the more direct route to Allan’s Antiques, they opted for a more circuitous return. To put a finer point on it, D opted for the more circuitous return. For Chance, mileage was the last thing on his mind as eventually the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge was made to appear before them. Thankfully, it appeared to be open. Chance had a FasTrak transponder on his windshield, meaning they would not have to stop and pay the toll but D reached over and took it down. “Use this, there’ll be a record you were here.”

“Could be already, given what just happened and how she handles it.”

“Thought you said she was cool.”

“Just now, she was. Who knows about tomorrow?” They reached the tollbooth where Chance gave a five-dollar bill to an obese woman in a conductor’s hat and drove on.

“You’re worried about that old lady, say the word,” D said. “We’ll go back and take care of
that
right now. You got her address, I take it.”

Chance hadn’t the courage to ask if he was serious. The Richmond–San Rafael Bridge rose before them, a regular stairway to the stairs. The city of San Francisco appeared on their left. Chance held to the wheel. Soon they would be within sight of the federal prison at San Quentin. It occurred to him that a guy like Big D might actually find a
home there. Given enough time, he might well run the place. Chance figured his own life expectancy in such an establishment at around six and a half minutes. He attempted to force such thoughts from his mind by concentrating on the ribbon of concrete that ran before them, unfurling into the night.

A
RED MOON
broke from among the clouds to light the bay. San Francisco, made ethereal in the aqueous night, seemed to float somewhere just below it, hovering above the blackened waters, apparently free of the earth and therefore unbound by any of the usual constraints.

As some embodiment of the Crystal City, the place never failed to disappoint. It had been so since Chance first laid eyes on it, twenty years ago, fresh from the east and hoping to put the past behind him . . . the red-haired dancer, the death of his father, the calamity his life was in danger of becoming. He’d come like so many before him, in flight from history and he’d thought for a good long time that he’d actually managed it. He supposed he should have known. He thought of the note a professor had once attached to an important paper he’d written for a class. It had been toward the end of things, the girl having claimed him, the downward spiral begun. “It’s harder than this,” the man had written.

“The fuck?” Chance said. They had been riding in silence for a good ten minutes.

D draped an arm over the back of the seat and shifted his weight, apparently quite at ease. “Some asshole came out of the place,” he said finally.

“The massage parlor?”

“No, man, the Mongolian Grill, a midget with takeout.”

A moment went by. They had begun their descent. Chance realized that he had begun to speed and forced his foot from the accelerator. The cops kept an eye on the bridge. Fines for speeding were over the moon.

“Yeah,” D said. “The massage parlor. Some goon that worked there would be my guess. Guy was all geared up.”

Chance was forced to ask what was meant by “all geared up.”

“Mace, stun gun. Could’ve been strapped but I never saw it. Fucker caught me dead to rights getting out of Blackstone’s Crown Vic. He might have been another cop but I’m thinking private security, kind of an Eastern European–looking guy. Russians are deep into the whole massage parlor racket. Romanians too. It’s all about white slavery. Moving women. It’s a dirty business. Whatever this guy was, he knew the car and he knew it wasn’t mine; he came right at me. What I’m wondering is, how does he know that? He either works with Blackstone or he works for the joint. Thing that fucking
worries
me is how did he
know
to come out? Could be it was just some random thing, like having a smoke or making his rounds, looking in on that lot because that’s what he does.
Or . . .”
And it was here that D paused. “They’ve got some kind of surveillance system. Now if they do, it’s gonna have to be pretty fucking high-tech ’cause I looked around and didn’t see dick, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility.” He looked to the west, a distant sea. “That would not be good,” the big man said. “That would be fucked up in the extreme.”

It took another half mile for Chance to inquire as to just how fucked up in the extreme it all might be. The big man held up a hand. On the first finger was a heavy ring Chance was certain had not been there when D had gotten out of the car at the mouth of the alley. The band
had no sheen to it in the muted light. It appeared as dull silver and quite wide. It looked big even on D’s hand and D’s hands were the size of shovels.

Chance watched as best he could while D turned his hand, revealing the ring as part of an exotic-looking blade that lay flat against his palm. A second movement brought the blade into play so that it extended for maybe two inches from the side of a closed fist where it curved like the fang of some predatory animal. “Called a karambit,” D told him. “Lots of ways you can use it . . . hook, stab, slice . . . great for controlling an opponent.” He made some small movements with his hand in the air between them. “You can enter a joint, separate vertebrae . . . It’s a very effective weapon, easy to conceal. Almost impossible to disarm a guy who knows how to use one. You want . . . I’ll teach you someday.”

“Thanks,” Chance told him. “I believe I’ll pass.”

“That’s a poor attitude, Doc.”

Chance declined a response.

“There are three kinds of people.”

“Here we go.”

“Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. The sheep are afraid of the wolves but they don’t like the dogs much either. You look at it from the sheep’s point of view, the dog is a lot like the wolf. He’s got teeth like the wolf. He growls like a wolf. He smells like a wolf. Only time the sheep like the sheepdog is when the wolf comes.
Then
they like him. Rest of the time . . . they don’t even want to have to think about him, much less see him. You catch my drift?”

“A little like the warrior–slave dichotomy.”

“It’s not a little like it, it’s a lot like it. You learn to use the blade or wait on the dog, and hope the wolf doesn’t get there first.”

Chance saw in this the opportunity for a broader discussion of free will but declined to go there.

“Fucker pepper sprayed me,” D said at length.

“Why your eyes were so red. I thought maybe you’d been crying.”

“Oh absolutely. That’s what you thought?”

“My attempt at gallows humor.”

“That’s good, Doc. You had me fooled.”

“So he pepper sprayed you, then what?”

“Then nothing. Then his problems began. Christ . . . I was in the Teams. We pepper sprayed each other for laughs. Shit’s for girls, something they can carry in their purses to make them feel safer on blind dates or some fucking thing. Next thing after that is, he pulls a Taser. If he’d pulled a piece and started shooting he might’ve had a chance, but there he was with his pepper spray and Taser.” D gave it a moment’s thought. “Could be he was just trying to handicap me . . . thought if he could do that, he could beat the shit out of me and feel tough. He was a big guy.” He paused once more to shake his head. “Thing about a Taser is, you really need two of them to be effective, and even then you can fight your way out, you know how. These guys have no training. It’s pathetic when you stop and think about it. Case of tonight . . . I used this to cut the line.” He held the blade once more for Chance to see before enclosing it in his fist. “Got myself close enough to hook him through the ocular cavities and snap his neck.”

“Jesus Christ,” Chance said. It took another moment to recover some semblance of what might pass for his bearings. “What happened to
controlling
your opponent?”

D ignored him. “That’s when things got
really
interesting,” he said. “Fucking Blackstone showed up. Guy must have beeped him or something. He pops around a corner of the building, like he’d come out the front then around to the side . . .”

“My God, he saw you?”

“Don’t know, really. He probably saw something. It was dark enough the lights were coming on, both corners of the building. I could see him pretty well but it was still pretty dark where I was. He had something in his hand. Might have been a phone. Might have been a gun. My vision was still a little fucked up from the spray. Only thing I could be sure about at that point was that I didn’t want him getting any closer to where I needed to go, which was down that alley. That’s when I put the one in his chest I was telling you about and got out.”