Chance by Kem Nunn

emasculated, and murdered outright. Chance went to inquire after his furniture at noon on the following day.

     
    As on all other visits, he found the front door open, the building dark and void of customers. Finding no sign of Carl, he moved directly to the back of the building. The light was on in D’s workroom but the big man did not answer his call. Bending to look through the narrow window by which he and D had first been introduced, he could see that a rear door had been left open to the alley, a slant of yellow light spilling in. Chance took the liberty of letting himself into D’s space and making for the light. Along the way he noted his furniture, piled rather unceremoniously, it seemed to him, in a corner of the big room. If D was at work on the trim and general restoration, it was not yet in evidence.
    He found the big man outside in the alley, seated on an overturned crate, a bag from some local fast food joint at his side, a large Diet Coke in one hand and a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in the other. He looked up as Chance moved to join him. “I’ll be all around in the dark,” D said by way of greeting. He did not consult the book. “Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise, and livin’ in the houses they built . . . I’ll be there too.” He paused. “I may have left out a couple,” he said. He looked at the book.
    “That’s about the way I remember it,” Chance said. “That’s very good.”
    “Somebody mentions something I don’t know, a book or something . . . sounds interesting, I’ll track it down, try to see what it is.”
    “An admirable trait,” Chance said. He seated himself on a concrete step near D’s crate.
    D closed the book and looked at him. “Sup, Big Dog?” he asked. “You got more furniture to move?”
    “Hardly. But I can think of a few more assholes you might give the treatment to, like that guy in the street.” It flattered Chance to believe this was something they had shared, a kind of male bonding, as it were. As for the myriad fantasies the incident had inspired . . . he’d keep thatto himself. The joke about a few more assholes was about as far as he would permit himself to go but D was all over it. “Who?” he asked, and Chance did not get the feeling that D was joking around. He came this close to saying something about Jaclyn Blackstone and her predatory husband, the bad cop, before sound judgment got the better of him. The guy was an Oakland homicide detective, for Christ’s sake. He had an expensive suit, a gun, and a badge. He was, as Chance saw it, a man at home in the world, a man who knew how things worked, and how they didn’t. He would crush a person like D, not physically perhaps, not in a fight, but he would crush him all the same, and Chance along with him, grind them both beneath his shoe and never break stride. “Half the city,” Chance said finally, making light. “How’s it with the brass?”
    D seemed a bit disappointed and when he spoke again it was with considerably less enthusiasm. “Take a little time for me to get what I need,” he said. “’Nother day or two, I’ll be able to start. Should take me about a week.”
    At which point Carl Allan appeared. “Is there a doctor in the house?” he asked. He was standing in the doorway that led back into D’s workroom, puffy in the face with a still swollen nose and dark half-moons beneath his eyes, a jaunty straw hat in the style of certain fifties hipsters placed well back on his head to accommodate the white bandaging that peeked out beneath it. He was leaning on a wooden cane with an ornate silver handle. “Thought I heard your voice,” the old man said. He was looking at Chance and doing his best to smile.
    Chance rose at once. “My God,” he asked.