Chance (91 page)

Chance went to meet her, as if there were a choice in the matter, across pockmarked blacktop strewn with trash, the sun impossibly bright off such dead neon and stucco walls as bound them in on all sides, sorry storefronts in colors of the Mexican flag before flat asphalt roofs on which coolers the size of small foreign-built automobiles labored against the heat, the whole place smelling of car exhaust, garbage, and spice, ovens working overtime at the Mongolian Grill.

He came at her from an odd angle, quite certain he had not yet been made. She turned only when he called her name then stopped in her tracks, her mouth open, a series of expressions, or rather the possibilities of such, rippling across her features in the time it took to draw a breath. “Oh my God.” Her first words, then once more with feeling, “Oh . . . my . . . God . . .” as with the dawning recognition of some heretofore unimagined truth. At which point the curtain fell and she turned away as if nothing at all had just now passed between them. It was, in the shadowy realm of dissociative identity disorder, as remarkable a performance as one was likely to find. Her hair had been died to a blue black, cut short enough to suggest the androgynous and parted on the left. She was dressed in what he took to be the uniform of a Catholic schoolgirl.

Chance moved to block her passage. She squared off to face him. “I don’t know you, buddy,” is what she said. Her voice was loud and harsh and strange and very nearly put him off stride.

“I think you do,” he told her. He’d taken a position with regard to her affectations and was intent upon maintaining it.

“The fuck do you think you are?” she asked.

“I won’t play this game with you, Jaclyn.” He spoke to her as if to a recalcitrant patient, in his finest authoritarian tone. He might have been wrong but it seemed to him that something flickered in the depths of her eyes, that she wavered momentarily before steeling herself once more. “You need to leave,” she hissed. But the momentary hesitation had been enough. “Got you,” he said.

She turned without saying more and started back in the direction of the parlor. Chance fell in beside her. “I’ve no time for games,” he told her. “Things have happened . . .”

It was as far as he got for she’d stopped short once more, suddenly shaking her hands as if trying to rid them of some unpleasant and possibly toxic substance, her face crumbling. It was a strange gesture bordering on the hysteric yet it touched him all the same, his bird with the broken wing. “This isn’t happening,” she said.

At which point Chance saw that a burly, dark-haired man in jeans, a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt with a gold chain around his neck, had walked from the front of the massage parlor to stand before it lighting a cigarette. What he felt next was Jaclyn Blackstone’s hand on his wrist, a fearsome grip. “For Christ’s sake,” she said and pulled him into the doorway of the adult bookstore before which they had stopped, its interior all books, tapes, DVDs, and magazines, their lurid covers wrapped in plastic to discourage handling, shimmering in the fluorescent glare. “Tell me something,” she asked. “How insane are you?”

“I guess we know each other after all.”

“Listen,” she said. There was a heavyset Mexican man of perhaps fifty looking at them from behind the counter. When she gave him the finger he looked away. “I don’t know why you’re here and I don’t want to know. What I
do
know is this: You have to leave before someone sees you . . . they’re watching everything right now . . . my God . . .” She paused for breath. “What if
he
sees you?” He assumed her to be talking about the man in black who had exited the store and triggered this latest in what seemed a bottomless bag of tricks.

“And why would that matter?”

“Listen to me,” she said once more. “You’re a good person. I’m not.”

“Yes . . . you said something to that effect that night on the bridge.”

“What night was that?” she asked, but Chance wasn’t buying. “Something good has come into your life but you don’t feel worthy, or are un
able
to feel worthy . . .” To which she produced a look of pained exasperation. “Don’t even go there,” she said, her voice suddenly distant, shot through with sad reservations. “You don’t know shit.”

“You could try telling me.”

Through the open doorway by which they had entered it was possible to see that the man in the leather jacket had begun to walk in their general direction. She took him by the arm once more. “Pray he hasn’t seen us,” she said, then something quick in perfect Spanish to the man behind the counter, the one she had just flipped off. The man nodded toward the back where they moved in a rush, single file, her
reaching back to lead him by the hand, down a hallway made narrow by stacked boxes and into the alley where D had broken into Blackstone’s car, where a man had died by way of a strange curved blade and broken neck, hooked through his ocular cavities. They hurried along behind the Dumpsters, hugging the walls of buildings then came up short near the mouth of the alley where it opened to the street, stopping just back in a small alcove formed by the walls of adjoining buildings where they paused to look back in the direction from which they had come, the alley empty as the moon.

“Who is he?” Chance asked.

Jaclyn shook her head.

“Talk to me, Jaclyn.” It seemed important to him to persevere in the use of her name, for both their sakes.

“You tell
me
something,” she said. “Did you do it for me?”

There was scarcely time to formulate a response, as she was suddenly right up on him, her thigh pressing between his, once more the creature he’d met that night at the entrance to his own apartment. Jackie Black. He may even have spoken it aloud.

“You are crazy,” she told him.

He might of course have said the same, especially in light of the sudden revelation that she was possessed of a familiar scent, quite possibly the very one she had tried in his apartment then recoiled from to flee down the stairs. But there would, at just this moment, be no inquiring into that or anything else so obvious and nothing more in heaven or earth than just these two, meaning him and her and the promise of naked thighs beneath schoolgirl plaid, a desire beyond reason to lose himself once more in her magic.

“I have a car,” Chance whispered.

“I’ll bet you do,” she answered.

He drove them to one of the many hotels that lined the highway in approach to the Oakland airport. He had always looked upon such establishments with disdain, corporate and soulless on the high end, heartbreak seedy on the low, buildings in whose sorry rooms one
might expect to find cigarette burns in the bedding, condom dispensers in the bathrooms, a land meant for drug deals and cheap assignations.

Deep into this particular blazing afternoon however, they seemed to offer anonymity as well and so beckoned with a new light. Little time was spent in the selection of the one they arrived at. It featured a neon sign that included a sleepwalking raccoon in cap and nightgown. There were apparently live, nude girls at a club across the street, this according to the marquee-type signage that fronted the road leading almost directly to airport rental returns and long-term parking. The lobby was all in shades of blue and orange with potted rubber plants and large slabs of tinted plate glass. The room they at last retired to featured views of telephone poles and billboards with ads for cars and the racetrack at Golden Gate Fields, a skimpy balcony from which one might take in the Oakland airport while jet planes in traffic patterns thundered overhead by the score and where, as the sun failed and the darkness rose to take its place, a pale frosting might be seen to appear in the far west that Chance was willing to take for the lights of San Francisco. It was a room in which he would spend the better part of two days before finding a cigarette burn on one of the house blankets and where he found even less in the way of food or sleep.

He really did think he might fuck the truth out of her and that any such truth so arrived at would be his truth and not some other, that the woman he had walked with that night in the city and made love to in his apartment might be called forth once more, conjured of hot desire and bodily fluids. But where she had once been so present there were now only shades and variations and places he couldn’t reach. One of her was all about games with words. One wanted to try things, the cock ring in her leather bag . . . the loop of surgical tubing . . . a silver device hooked like a scimitar with attached ball and meant for the enhancement of male orgasm through stimulation of the prostate gland. One asked for permission to pee, inviting him to slap her. Another wept
when he did so. One of their troubles, and the night and day that followed were filled with troubles, was that once she had gotten over on him with that routine in the alley . . . there was nowhere to go with it, not really, when all was said and done, and quite a lot really did get said and done.

They wore themselves out at it; he would give them that. Freud had famously said that he had come to regard any sexual act as one involving at least four people. Chance had no idea how many of them were there in the room, coming and going at all hours of the day and night, but between the two of them he imagined it was how it had been with the madman among the tombs, that their number was legion, far in excess at any rate of the number listed on the back of the door as the room’s maximum occupancy.