Chance (96 page)

“That’s a crazy-ass story, Doc,” D said when Chance had finished. “That’s fucked up.” He looked to the old man as if for confirmation and the old man looked back and Chance sat there looking at the two of them. It occurred to him that the sun had moved to a place more directly overhead, thanks no doubt, at least in part, to the planet’s rotation upon its axis. “Well what isn’t crazy?” he asked finally. He was possessed of the sudden urge to mount a defense. In truth, he felt at the verge of some hysteria, the light coming down preternaturally bright through a tear in the canvas and burning his neck, burning right through him is what it felt like, as if he weren’t actually there or about not to be. “How is it not crazy that there’s something instead of nothing,” he railed, “or that one day the mud stood up and began to walk or that the three of us are even sitting here right now? How fucked up is all of that?”

He had after all been days with very little in the way of food or sleep. His ass was on fire. It was not inconceivable that he was developing an infection, which would also account for his almost constant need to excuse himself for the purpose of making water amid the brush. Still he persevered. He was on to the odds of things now, of anything at all really, save some featureless void, and might even in time have
worked his way round to Banach-Tarski and his particular take on their troublesome paradox had not someone at D’s direction given him a slightly odorous plastic bottle filled with water from which to drink. That he accepted without further regard for the bottle’s point of origin or even a good look at its contents, yet one more indicator of his precarious mental state.

“That’s a goddamn interesting way of looking at things, Doc,” D said as Chance paused to drink. The bottle smelled even worse at close quarters.

“Fascinating,” Carl added.

Chance mopped at his brow. “It’s just that when you say a thing is crazy . . .” He was feeling the need for a second defense in defense of the first defense. “The thing
I
want to say is . . . what isn’t crazy? What is not against the odds? And who really thinks that we are rational beings? It’s all such a goddamn joke.”

“We get all of that,” D assured him.

“The whore and the cop,” the old man added. “My God . . . it’s the stuff of song.”

“I’m good and lost,” Chance admitted. He might also have added that it felt as if a burning coal had found residence at a point just north of his perineum.

“Slow down,” the big man told him. “Let’s take a step back, see what this thing looks like piece by piece.”

“Amen to that,” Carl said.

S
HE REALLY
had
wanted help. Blackstone really had beaten her. And there
he
was . . . charging into Blackstone’s deal with the universe. Forty-eight hours and there’s an incident involving Chance’s daughter. Ambiguous. Shit lands on Chance’s computer. Not so ambiguous. Blackstone’s come to play and he can’t believe this won’t work. “You’re a fucking doctor for Christ’s sake,” D said. “Big brain, tiny balls. Are we good so far?”

“Pretty much,” Chance told him. Piece by piece, the man had said.

“What he
doesn’t
know about is me, and all of a sudden there’s shit landing on
him
. He’s on his back in the fucking hospital and he’s thinking
this
is fucked up. I would just say welcome to my world, asshole, but that’s another story. So he’s trying to recover and he gets wind of her splitting with some guy in front of the massage parlor and it sounds a lot like you and this is starting to get serious. She’s his frozen lake. He went way out on the ice to get her. If anything ever goes wrong she can hang him good. He could hang her too of course, but that’s not what he wants and he’s always figured as long as he can keep the plates spinning . . . But now you’re fucking with that and he’s tried scaring you. There’s really only one thing left. But you want to be smart about that sort of thing. Fuck it up and it’ll blow back all over you. Look at all this
goat fuck in the Middle East.” This last drawing murmurs of approval from a small gallery of camp denizens who’d come for the sermon.

“But why make it look like an accident?” Chance asked. He saw no reason to drag the Middle East into it and the audience was making him nervous. “If Blackstone is behind all of this with Nicole . . . if he’s got these guys that troll for girls like she says . . . if one of them has gotten to my daughter . . . Why put her in the ICU then break her out?”

D nodded. “I used to collect money,” he said. “I had two rules. The person I was going to collect from had to have the money and they had to know they were trying to get away with something. That’s very important, those two things. Okay. So now you’re me and you’re going to collect. You never just walk up to the guy and say so-and-so wants his money and if you don’t pay I’m gonna break your legs. Threat’s never that direct. In fact, what I liked to do was to be very nice.
That
freaks people out a little because I’d catch ’em someplace where we could be alone and they wouldn’t know who I was. I’m this stranger and they see what I look like and they’re a little spooked but there I am being nice to them and they can’t quite figure it, at which point I say something like, why don’t you give so-and-so a call. He’d really like to talk to you. And all of a sudden they know exactly what this is about, what kind of guy I am, and why I’m there and nine times in ten that would be all it took. They’d really like to keep being my pal. I would leave the alternative to their imaginations. But there’s always some asshole thinks he’s tough and maybe he is. What you do with a guy like that . . . you don’t bother talking, you just grab him in a parking lot some night and you break his legs, break his hands too while you’re at it. You break both a guy’s hands he can’t wipe his own ass. It’s very humiliating. Then you wait till he’s recovered, as much as he ever will, and that’s when you go see him and it’s the same deal. You get him someplace where you’re alone and you just start bullshitting with him. Now if you did it right that night in the parking lot or wherever it was, and it was dark and you came at him fast and hard, it’s going to be very difficult for him to remember much. It’s a fucking blur. All he really knows is he got the living shit beat out of him. So there you are . . . and it’s good if
it’s someplace like where he got mugged. He’s still trying to recover from what happened, meals through a straw, some nurse wiping his ass, and at some point he starts getting nervous. He doesn’t know you from Adam and yet there you are bullshitting with him about some completely banal thing with no sign of stopping anytime soon. He’d like to bolt but you’re making it so he can’t, but you can see he’d like to and that’s when you say to him, maybe you ought to call so-and-so. And all of a sudden he knows. He knows what happened and he knows why. And most importantly, he knows you’re the one. He knows what you’re capable of and he knows that if he doesn’t come through it’s going to happen all over again and he picks up the phone and he makes the call and you’ve never said a direct word about it.

“Now you see where this is going. Blackstone hasn’t
said
a direct word, but he’s
shown
you what he’s capable of, the overdose, the abduction . . . the menu on your car . . . very circumspect, very discreet and very ballsy. He’s a worthy fucking opponent, this guy. He’s my kind of guy if you want to know the truth. Too bad he’s a douche bag. That menu shit . . . that’s genius when you stop and think about it. Nothing you could point to that he couldn’t deny. It’s fucked up but you have to admire it.”

They were a moment in admiring it.

“And now?”

“Now we go at him,” D said, warming to the idea.

“And if he has my daughter?”

“You’d probably know it already.” He said this in an offhanded way as if to suggest everything with which he had just preceded it were pure speculation and quite possibly wrong.

“I thought we’d just concluded that he did.”

D went on without missing a beat. “So let’s
say
he has her. That breaks two ways. He calls and says we need to talk. But he hasn’t done that so we go to what’s next. He lets you sweat, and maybe needs time to put his ducks in a row. However he works it, the endgame is the same,
him
telling
you
that the two of you need to talk. He’s not going to tell
you he has your daughter. Threat will never be that direct. He knows what you’re thinking because that’s how he’s set it up, and he’s counting on you to believe that if you can just talk to him and promise to be good it can still work out and he will think
you
will think that because that’s the world you’ve always lived in, a place where educated people talk and work things out. But all this really is, this whole charade . . . It’s all about setting you up. Your daughter’s a means to an end—you in a meeting you don’t come back from and that’s the salient feature of this whole deal. It’s you dead.

“He’ll probably have it set up to look like a mugging or some fucking thing. He
may
not even be there. The bad boyfriend will bring your daughter back to wherever. Blackstone goes back to whatever sick deal he’s got going with this woman you like. It’s what they’d call in the Teams a perfect op; you’re in, you do the job, and you’re out. No one even knows you were there. You were invisible.

“But here’s the rest of it. Let’s say Blackstone doesn’t have your girl. She’s a kid acting out, making bad choices. She’s got some shitbird boyfriend and that’s who she’s with. Where does that leave us with Blackstone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Daughter, no daughter . . . This is all about frozen lakes, my brother, yours and his. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’re the same. You and her getting made outside that place . . . that was fucked up, Doc. That’s the alpha and the omega right there.”

Chance entertained the fleeting impulse to deny it, to remind them all that he hadn’t gone to
find
Jaclyn but to look for evidence of surveillance, an unnecessary step had D not been moved to break a man’s neck by way of a karambit blade run through his ocular cavities. But then he supposed that was really just one piece. Had they not been tailing Blackstone, had he not gone to a man repairing furniture in the back of a warehouse for advice in extricating himself from his own ill-advised involvement in the life of a disturbed woman or, for that matter, when one went further in consideration of the simple fact that he would not have been at the warehouse in the first place had he not
been hoping to alleviate the financial woes of a failed marriage by scoring on some fancy French furniture it had no doubt been foolish even to buy . . . and so on and so forth till the business of D’s killing a man seemed but one layer of an onion best left unpeeled and the more appropriate question was: What next?

“Let’s start with what’s not next,” D said. “I’m you . . . I don’t wait for him to put his ducks in a row and I sure as hell don’t go out to this fucking motel. I don’t trust her to play middleman. I go right at him and I don’t need her and whatever she’s got or hasn’t got or maybe just thinks she’s got. I call him, on this.” He pulled a phone from his jacket and placed it on the table between them. “What I took off that shitbird in the alley. You call him on this . . . it’s a whole new day, my brother.”

“My God. You took his phone?”

The big man shrugged. “Fell out of his pocket. I saw what it was. Why not take it?”

“But won’t the cops be on this? Monitoring calls . . . whatever it is that they do?” He was thinking now of Blackstone’s reports.

“No. It’s a burner, a call-and-drop job. You buy X number of minutes, use a fake name, toss it when you’re done. Check out the ghetto sometime. You can buy one on every corner.”

Chance felt no need for visual confirmation. He could imagine it all well enough, a vast incipient system by which denizens of the underworld were in more or less constant communication in anticipation of the coming darkness.

“It’s what I use, when I use one at all,” Big D said, and pulled one from his jacket identical to the one on the table. “Cops won’t be on it, but
he
will. He thinks you’re trouble but he still thinks he’s got the leverage. Call comes in on that . . .” D eyed the phone. “And he finds out it’s you . . . Buckle up is all I can say. Speed kills.”

Chance eyed the device with something akin to terror. “The fuck would I say?” he asked.

“Tell him you want your daughter. Tell him
you
want to meet, you want to trade . . . you could burn him down but you’d rather negotiate.”

“For my daughter.”

“He’ll never cop to having her. He’ll probably just say something like we need to talk and you say fine . . . we’ll talk as soon as I know she’s safe and you give him a window. I don’t hear from her in the next six hours, I’m taking everything I know and I’m going to the guys you work for. That’s a bluff but it’s a place to start.”