Chance (44 page)

Time ground to a halt in the Church of Big D, dust motes like dwarf celestials in lazy circles beneath rent canvas. In the end, Chance took his wallet from his pocket and removed the card Detective Blackstone had given him. There was a photograph of his daughter in the wallet as well. It had been taken as she clung to a child’s merry-go-round in a little park in Cambria where the family had once rented a house for the summer, at a happier time than the present, and he studied it for some indeterminate period before placing his own phone on the table between them and lifting the one belonging to the dead man. It was heavier than anything he might have imagined.

“It was what they told us at the hospital,” he said, holding the phone as if it were sharing time in homeroom and this were the thing he’d come with. “About the number my daughter called . . . that it was one of these.”

The others sat watching.

“Nice,” D said.

I
T WAS
just here, in the wake of all that had transpired, awash in the big man’s logic, susceptible in other words to the undue influence of a highly intelligent and charismatic if mentally unstable individual, having dialed the number and Blackstone answering on the third ring in a voice with more air in it than Chance could recall, pitched perhaps at a higher octave, that a number of things happened at more or less the same time. One might envision it as the movement of certain types of objects toward the occupation of the same point in space and time, the act of coinciding as it were, the very thing he and the detective had once quarreled over at the Little Thai Hut, with Chance saying, “I want my daughter . . .” and the words no sooner out of his mouth than a text message appeared on
his
phone, on the table at his knees—much, Chance suspected, as the writing on the wall had once affronted the Babylonian king. In Chance’s case it was his soon-to-be ex-wife, Carla, saying simply, “She’s back.”

Blackstone didn’t say anything but he didn’t hang up either. Neither did Chance. Their connection seemed possessed of a particularly malevolent form of white noise, in the midst of which Chance elected for a
kind of voluntary mutism while engaged in the forced review of what the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
has to say about shared psychotic disorder and this in concert with the rather jarring realization that Carl Allan had been right, that at the heart of the matter were the whore and cop and that everything else . . . everything that had led just now to his use of the dead man’s phone . . . to his speaking in tongues in the Church of Big D . . . might just as well be written off to Chance under the influence, caught between the twin magnetic poles of Heavy D and Jaclyn Blackstone.

He was very close to simply hanging up when Blackstone, sensing perhaps an existential crisis, began to speak. “Listen to me, you twisted little prick. I don’t have your daughter and I didn’t hurt her, but I will now.”

The rank pronouncement was followed by a strange hissing Chance was willing to take for an oxygen tank. It was a sound he’d grown more or less accustomed to in the tiny kitchen of Doc Billy and he guessed that Blackstone, having suffered a collapsed lung, might well be in possession of one, at least temporarily. “You don’t want that to happen,” the detective said. “You’d better drive straight to where I tell you to drive, and you’d better come alone. Now, I’ve got someone here that’s just dying to talk to you and that’s not a figure of speech.”

Chance was treated to the somewhat strangled voice of Jaclyn Blackstone. “I’m so sorry, Eldon, I didn’t know. He found out. He knows. Just do what he tells you to.” Her voice broke then came back. “Please. He means what he says.”

Raymond followed. “Here’s the way it’s going to be,
Eldon
. The three of us are going to talk and we’re going to get straight on some things, and if you say and do the
right
things . . .” There was a pause, the faint whispering of the mechanism. “Then maybe you can go back to being the type of shitbird who sleeps with his patients. You don’t and I’m going to destroy you. I’m going to destroy you professionally and I’m going to destroy you privately. I’m going to destroy your family.” He let that one settle as Chance waited. “We’re in a motel. Do you know which one?”

Chance did.

“I thought you might. Now I’ll tell you something else . . . that little incident that you were involved in, back in your days at med school and we both know what I’m talking about. I’m willing to bet you still have some paperwork attached to that . . . restraining order, court docs . . . You strike me as the anal-retentive type of asshole that would keep that sort of shit locked away somewhere. I want you to get that and I want you to bring it with you.” There was another pause on the line. “You’re going to want something to trade. Now where are you?”

“Palo Alto.”

“I’m giving you two hours. Now one more thing and this is very important. Be alone. I will know if you’re not. You won’t like what happens next.”

Chance asked for three.

“Three what?” D asked when Chance had returned the phone.

Chance repeated, as best he could, everything Raymond Blackstone had said to him in his new unpleasant voice.

“He really said all of that?” D asked.

Chance, hoping to avoid being sick, managed only to nod.

“That’s far fucking out. What did I tell you? Calling him on that phone . . .”

“The subject of the phone never came up,” Chance said, cutting him short. “He never mentioned it. It was like it wasn’t even part of the equation.”

“Yeah, you kind of fucked up that part of it,” D said.

Chance snatched his phone from the table and turned it on, illuminating Carla’s text once more. He passed the phone to Big D. “This came,” he said. “In case you didn’t notice . . . just now . . . as I was calling Blackstone. She’s back.”

D studied the small screen before returning the phone. He appeared unfazed. “Her showing up is not proof he wasn’t involved. Think it through.”

“The message is from my wife, D. My daughter is back. He never had her.”

“I think you’re missing the larger point, Doc.”

“The larger point is my family is now in danger. They weren’t
before. It was something we made up. All this guy wants is this woman.”

“And you as a loose end?”

Chance was silent.

“This is exactly what I said it would be, Doc, him getting you to a meeting you don’t come back from.”

“That ignores
my
larger point that I just made, which is that all I wanted was for my daughter to be safe and now she’s not. I just made sure of it. I’m not into doing what you and I did that night in the alley, D. I’m not into hunting the bad guys . . .”

“I thought you wanted to save this woman.”

“I’ve since come to a better understanding of just how fucked up it is between the two of them . . . and of why doctors in my line of work don’t involve themselves with patients. . . .”

“I’d say it’s a little late for that.”

“Yes and thanks to that call on that phone, I’d say I’m pretty well fucked.”

“You’re not fucked.”

“Yeah, I kind of am.”

“That’s a poor attitude, man. Let me tell you a little story. Second tour in the Hindu Kush . . .”

“Darius,” Chance said. Rage, hopelessness, and a sense of impending doom had empowered him. “With all due respect, my friend . . . I’ve read your medical files. You were never in the Hindu Kush. You were never in the Middle East. You were never in the military, Darius.”

It grew very quiet beneath the trees. Chance was vaguely aware of the old antiques dealer turning to a study of the ground between his feet, of even the insects having abandoned their song. “Two things,” Big D told him, his eyes never leaving Chance’s. “These are emotions talking. You’re scared. You’re in the middle of an adrenaline dump. Enough time . . . I could teach you to deal with that, to think through it, but here’s the other thing and you’ll want to get straight on this . . . you ever call me Darius again I’m gonna punch you right in the face.”

“I feel you,” Chance said.

“Pull yourself together,” D said, and he told his story, something about the chance meeting of a Team on a mission with an old man and
a boy. It was no doubt intended as some illustration of the battlefield’s moral ambiguities coupled with irrevocable choice and ended badly, but Chance was barely listening. He was thinking about the irrevocable choices that had led him here, considering for what would most certainly be the last time the possibility of his going to the police, in this the eleventh hour, and of what that might look like . . . the unraveling of his career, the end of Jaclyn, his daughter in more or less permanent jeopardy. But he was thinking too of what Blackstone had only now told him . . . that if he would only say and do the right things and of how this in concert with what Jaclyn had said . . . that Blackstone was changed, talking early retirement, wanting out, and he was asking himself . . . Did not
all
of these things, when taken together, argue for some permanent stalemate between the two, Blackstone and himself, an ending in which further bloodletting might actually be avoided? He put the question to D when it appeared as if the story were at an end but the big man just wagged his head and the grotesque tattoo along with it.

“You know what
that
is?” D asked. “You running out there with copies of some old incriminating shit that he’s proven he already knows about? That’s him doing two things. It’s giving you hope that you can still weasel your way out of this. But what it really is, is you dead with old incriminating shit found at the scene. Cops find you like that, it will look like someone’s been blackmailing you, or trying to, that the thing went south. And that’s where they’ll leave it.”

It was true, Chance thought, it would look like that, and he thought for the first time in a long time about Myra Cohen, her violent death consigned to the streets, forever unsolved. “I just want to be smart,” is what he said. It was of course the same lame thing that he had said to Jaclyn.

“Be smart as you want but here’s the deal. You either face this now or show him your ass and pray to God that you get lucky, that he backs off, that you can still go back to being who you were.”

Chance exhaled. He’d always thought that he knew who he was. Recent events had called him into question.

“My humble opinion . . .” D told him. “It’s a moot fucking point
anyway. The man knows where you live. Good news is . . . you can still call the play. . . .”

“He’s already called it, D. It’s me alone at the motel.”

“That ain’t gonna happen.”

“He says he will know.”

“Listen to me . . . that call on that phone . . . that bought you some street cred brother, whether you know it or not. The time will come to spend it.”

“I call him now, he’s gonna know I’m with someone. He’s probably going to guess who, generically speaking.”

“And then what does he do, call a cop? Besides . . . you’re not going to call from here. You’re going to call when we get there. You’re going to get him out of that room and then you’re going to let me do my thing.” He slipped a flat, double-edged blade from inside the old military jacket and placed it on the table between them. “Trust me, brother. As of right now, you are not the one in over his head. He is.” A final chorus of assent arose from the residents of the House of Space and Time, acolytes in the Church of Big D.