Chance (35 page)

“I think we’re safe on that score.”

“Speak for yourself on that score,” Carl told him. “And you don’t know the family.”

“Right,” Chance said. “But I
have
seen his medical history. And I met some of them today, at the hospital.”

“Hovering like carrion fowl?”

“Hovering at least.” He was trying to imagine how best to articulate his impressions of Norma Pringle and her strange son. In the end, he gave up, stating rather simply that it was the mother and some kid.

“Some kid indeed. Happy to see you, were they?”

“Not the first word that comes to mind.”

“Listen,” Carl said. He put a hand on Chance’s arm. “They’ll try to pull something. They’ll have him put away. We’ll never see him again.” The old man’s eyes were tearing up, his grip tightening.

“They can’t,” Chance said. “He’s an adult.”

“What if they drug him, get him to sign something?”

“He can argue he was drugged.”

The old man appeared unconvinced. Chance sighed and tried again. “It is almost impossible,” he said, as deliberately as he was able, “in this day and age, to gain that kind of conservatorship over someone against his or her will. . . .”

“You don’t know the father. He’s a wealthy and powerful man with friends in high places. And he hates his son.”

“That may be, but disinheriting him is one thing, putting him away is another.”

“You’re a gift from the Almighty,” Carl said suddenly, his voice filled with conviction.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Chance said.

“Nonsense. You’re a doctor. You know how the game is played. Imagine if it were just he and I.”

Chance was a moment in imagining it, Carl and D. Could it be they were actually a couple? Or was it simply that D was the son Carl never had and the reverse true for Heavy D? Could it possibly matter? Live and let live would be Chance’s position, though he remained for a moment or two in the grip of the situation’s seemingly limitless permutations,
it being his experience that few things in the realm of human interaction ever qualified as simple.

“Hates him for what
he
did to him,” Carl said.

Chance took him as once more on the subject of D’s father. “Yes, or hates himself for having
allowed
it.”

“But takes it out on D either way.”

“Maybe, but I really don’t think the old man is what we have to worry about just now.”

Carl lifted a brow.

“It’s this business in Oakland,” Chance said. “He didn’t tell you?”

“He was out cold when I found him.”

“Right.”

“There was a hiccup, then, east of the bay?”

“One might say.” He proceeded to bring the old man up to speed on the exact nature and proportions of the hiccup in question. Carl received the news with a surprising measure of his old equanimity. “You’re worried that his being in some form of custody . . . he might be linked to events in the East Bay.”

“I’m worried the massage parlor may have surveillance cameras. I’m worried about digital images. There just aren’t that many that would fit the description, if you catch my drift.”

Carl did and they stood with that. On a nearby stoop an emaciated woman of indeterminate age was attempting unsuccessfully to right herself.

“Well,”
Carl said finally, “I suppose if you’re going to go
there
 . . . there are any number of things he is in danger of being found out about.”

As to what exactly this might mean, Chance was not in a hurry to know. Nor did he feel inclined to comment on what Jaclyn had said, about how Blackstone was going to handle things himself. The old man had his hands full imagining dire moves on the part of D’s family and Chance saw no point in burdening him further. This last was his to bear and bear it he did, in the dark confines of his apartment, in the
still dark of one more not yet dawn as the din of the streets faded and the distant drumroll of the Ocean Beach surf rose to take its place. The old man had his worries. Chance had his.

There was, however, a place where Carl’s fears of familial machinations bumped up against the business in Oakland and before long he’d managed to find it. If someone were to tie D to the Oakland murder, and if what Carl believed was true, that the good professor really
did
want to put his son away, then possibly, if you wanted to get really paranoid about it, and why wouldn’t you, to undermine any such charges as D might one day bring for child abuse and parental neglect . . . then D as a convicted killer might serve and a permanent home in the Napa State Hospital for the Criminally Insane not so far beyond the pale as Chance had at first surmised. And how then the clock did tick, with Blackstone convalescing, not only expected to recover but with minions to aid his revenge. To wait on him was to be again the receiver and it was not just Chance at risk, it was D and Carl and Jaclyn and maybe even his own daughter, and it was up to him to think for them all.

It was to this end that he took D’s thumb drive from the dresser drawer where he’d hidden it away beneath his socks and looked at it for the first time since the night of its acquisition. In saying that he looked at it, it should be stipulated that the drive was not yet
in
his computer. He was not looking at its contents but rather at the drive itself, an absurdly small device when viewed in consideration of all that it had cost, a pale plastic obelisk, a retractable plug at one end, a tiny silver ring at the other.

The thought occurred while sitting there, the device in hand, the overwhelming desire really . . . that it might be good to speak with
her,
for any number of reasons, and he called her cell and it really was the first time he had done so since their night together, only to be greeted by a recorded message informing him that the number was no longer in service, a crushing enough turn though not entirely unexpected for reasons he thought it best not to dwell on at length. It was perhaps his
desire to avoid doing just that which prompted at last the lifting of his own computer from its case, his opening it upon his kitchen table, his inserting of the device.

But even then he did not begin to read or even to open the files. Given the recent slant of things, who could say that by doing so he would not inadvertently send up a flare or some other thoroughly unexpected and fucked-up thing? Add to this the question of what he actually hoped to find. Incriminating data? Really? The guy was supposed to be smart for Christ’s sake and the more Chance thought about it all, the more absurd it all became, yet more evidence of his own unsound judgment, as if further evidence were required.

Suffice it to say that a kind of paralysis set in. Time passed. Somewhere near dawn, however, a renewed sense of purpose fueled by a cheap cabernet having trumped inertia, Chance sat finally looking into the work of Raymond Blackstone himself, the man in his own words, in black and white.

Sirens had thus far not gone off. There were no red lights from the street or footsteps upon his stairs. In the downstairs apartment the programmer and his invisible lady friend had begun to fight. This was not unexpected. What
was
unexpected was the sense of intimacy the files provoked. They consisted almost entirely of reports, that is reports on crimes the detective had or was investigating and were in their way not unlike Chance’s own reports, for he found in them the trajectories of the utterly clueless, the flat-out unlucky, and hopelessly fucked up.

There was the eighteen-year-old drug addict who kills a friend over a stolen sound system in a moment of drug-addled rage, is afterward unable to remember the incident but charged nonetheless with home invasion, armed robbery, and murder, charges which, if successfully prosecuted, and why wouldn’t they be given the boy’s certain reliance on public defenders, are bound to carry with them a mandatory
sentence of life in prison. There was the troop of homeless heroin addicts who buried one of their own, dead from an overdose, then got to thinking about what they had done. Sensing a missed opportunity, they exhumed the body, removed the head with a tree saw stolen from a local Home Depot, and attempted to sell it to a number of equally homeless Satanists for thirty dollars. The Satanists were keen on the head but short on cash. A terrible fight ensued. There were injuries and one fatality when one of the head peddlers was stabbed through the eye with a screwdriver. The perpetrator of the crime, a twenty-seven-year-old homeless veteran of the war in Iraq, was now in custody.

It was the kind of stuff you couldn’t make up and yet it was everywhere in every turning of the world and Raymond Blackstone had borne witness. And so had Chance. Their combined reports spoke to the absolute absurdity and utter frailty of things, to the shining truth that lay beneath what they were trying to sell and he wondered if the detective had ever been worn down by it or had wanted in some way of his own to strike through, to break free, to go under that he might rise above, before time and circumstance came for him as they will come for us all, never guessing, as people never do, that in a darkened alley behind the European Massage Parlor, yet one more of the walking wounded, skilled beyond reckoning in the art of the blade, was waiting to say hello.