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Fry’s, and began his report:
     
William Fry is a 92-year-old right-handed dentist who has been retired for 30 years. He is single, has never been married, and has resided for the past 55 years in a second-floor apartment in the Castro District of San Francisco. Questions have been raised regarding the possibility of elder abuse by a female in-home care provider to whom Mr. Fry has apparently given more than $1,000,000 in the form of a series of checks from a money market fund. . . .
     
    That was as far as he got. He hadn’t the heart for it. Not tonight. He turned instead to the wine, sipping from a ridiculously large glasscontainer that had once housed a drink called a Hurricane from a bar in New Orleans and was the only clean bit of glassware he’d been able to find after a thorough search of his apartment. He thought about his wife ratting him out. He thought about Jaclyn Blackstone with her fractured face. He thought about the darkness in the hearts of men. He recalled something Doc Billy had said to him in the course of their long afternoon: “You can’t imagine how it feels . . . ninety-two fucking years old and feeling loved for the first time. Money just doesn’t matter that much anymore.”
    Chance believed he could imagine all too well how it might feel being ninety-two fucking years old. Unhappily, this did not serve to make him any less anxious about his own difficulties and his eye fell upon the slick French furniture crammed into a corner of his tiny living room and he resolved to sell it forthwith, for as much money as he possibly could. The consequences could go fuck themselves. It was, for Chance, an unusually rash call. Later he would blame it on the cheap wine, this in concert with the simple fact that he had been unable to find a suitably clean smaller glass.

D
     
    T HE FOLLOWING day was Saturday and he made his way to Allan’s Antiques upon rising. He found the building even more dimly lit than on previous visits and so quiet as to appear deserted, although the front door was open to the sidewalk off Market as always. He went in. He did not hear Carl’s voice nor could he find him. He’d half expected to see the crack-smoking leather boy around somewhere but he was absent as well. He went to the big table where they’d looked at the computer images of his furniture, called a tentative hello to no response, then moved on to the back of the building.

     
    A flickering blue light came from the hole in the wall that led to Big D’s work area. Approaching this and looking in, he was able to see Big D himself at work with some kind of handheld torch on a shining piece of metal. Chance waited for a bit, watching as D worked. The scene had about it some archetypal aspect Chance found satisfying to observe and was reluctant to disturb, the big man at work amid the tools of his trade, intent upon the task before him. There was something in the absolute physicality of it. It spoke, Chance thought, of another more rudimentary and therefore, perhaps, simpler time. Though itoccurred to him as well that simpler times were surely more a function of longing than of history, that life on planet Earth had never been all that simple.
    Chance waited till D had paused in his labors then knocked on the wall to get his attention. D placed the thing he was working on atop a bench and came to the window, using a heavily gloved hand to push a darkened pair of safety glasses to his forehead as he walked. “Doc Chance,” he said. His face was flushed from the labor and the sweat ran from his cheeks but his voice was flat and matter-of-fact, as though Chance’s being there was of little or no surprise.
    “Hello, D,” Chance replied. He was hoping to sound upbeat. “Is Carl around?”
    “Stayed home today.”
    “Is he well?”
    “Little under the weather,” D replied.
    The big man was dressed as he had been the day they’d met, minus the jacket, allowing for the observation that the sleeves had been cut