The Double (27 page)

“Come on.”

“I’m gonna break your fuckin neck.”

Like rams, they charged. Lucas bounced off King as if he’d hit concrete.

“How’d
that
feel?” said King.

Lucas came in again, tried to wrap up King’s arms, but King windmilled and broke free. King moved forward, backed up Lucas, and got him in a hug. He picked him up off his feet and threw him into a wall. The plaster cracked and Lucas felt a sting. As he turned his head he came into a punch that split his ear. Lucas righted himself, got square, and covered up, his elbows tucked into his chest. King, close in, threw a roundhouse and got nothing, then went high and hit Lucas square in the jaw, and Lucas saw white explode in his head. He felt a tooth loosen; his mouth filled with blood. King faked a right, and when Lucas brought up his arms to cover, King threw a left into his ribs and a right that stood Lucas up.

King dipped and went low for Lucas’s legs. Lucas threw his legs back and pancaked against the shot, but King was too strong, and he drove Lucas back to the wall and put him up against it. Lucas smelled sour breath as King squeezed him in a crushing hug. He fought for air, and in a panic he drove his forehead into King’s face. Lucas did it again, this time with fury, and he felt the cartilage give way on King’s nose; King released him and put a hand to his face. A great deal of blood leaked through his fingers.

“Okay,” said King. He dropped his hand.

They circled each other in the center of the hall.

King was in a stagger stance, his right leg farther forward than the left. Lucas circled to the trail leg. King came forward and grabbed Lucas by the shoulders, and Lucas cross-faced, pushing on King’s cheek with his right biceps. King grunted in frustration and broke free, and as he did his hand raked Lucas’s face.

King came in strong, faked a shot, and charged bull-like, his massive legs propelling him forward in a steamroller rush. He danced Lucas back toward the stairwell. At its opening Lucas dragged King’s right arm at the same time he dropped and held on, pulling King with momentum, and they both tumbled down the stairs.

For a few seconds, maybe longer, Lucas blacked out. He was lying at the foot of the stairs. He came to and got to his feet. The room spun. He shook the spin from his head. His left shoulder felt wrong. Blood covered his T-shirt. He swallowed blood and coughed.

King was standing, cradling his right hand. It was bent unnaturally at the wrist. Bone pushed out against bluing skin. He willed the pain from his face when he saw Lucas staring. He stood straight and smiled. His teeth were pink. His nose was a stew of smashed bone and blood.

Lucas walked toward King. He knew that King had only his left hand. But the left came fast, and he couldn’t stop it. Lucas’s head snapped back. The tooth that had loosened was now free, and Lucas spit it out onto the hardwood floor. King wheezed in laughter.

Lucas came back in, threw a wild right that missed and carried him too far, and King hit him with his left fist, once, and again, a granite head blow and a glancing punch to the split ear. Lucas staggered and righted himself, and got back into a straight stance, his weight on his back foot. He balled his fists and touched the thumb of each hand to his nose, his eyes dead on King. Lucas was finding his hands.

King jabbed with his left, and Lucas stepped away from it. He moved in quickly, grabbed King’s left triceps in a monkey grip, and with his free hand got hold of King’s broken wrist and twisted it. King screamed. Lucas dropped to one knee, shot one arm behind King’s leg, and hooked him there. In one motion he put his good shoulder into King’s torso and exploded up, and with rage and adrenaline he lifted King and tripped him. They both tumbled back to the floor, with Lucas on top. He punched through King’s nose, aiming for the back of his head. He punched him again and again until his hand was slick with blood.

Lucas rolled off of him and stood. He looked down at King, lying still on his back. His face was unrecognizable, his breathing ragged and labored.

Lucas turned and went up the stairs, gripping the handrail for support. He found his .38 on Serge’s bed, hefted it, and held it by his side. He rested for a moment, then walked back down to the ground floor.

Billy King was standing in the center of the room, a .45 in his right hand, an aluminum baseball bat held loosely in his left. One of the cushions of the couch had been pushed aside.

Lucas raised the S&W and pointed it at King.

“Fucker,” said King, a hint of regard in his voice.

“It’s over.”

King winced and let go of the bat. It dropped and rolled across the floor.

“Almost,” said King.

“Drop the gun, Billy.”

“I can’t do that, fella,” said King, and his gun hand went up.

Lucas squeezed the trigger of the .38. The slug entered King’s chest. He stumbled and fell. Lucas walked forward and fired, the cylinder of the revolver advancing with each shot. When the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, Lucas lowered his gun.

King sat with his back against the couch, blood flowing down his shredded polo shirt and into the lap of his shorts. He stared at Lucas as he took short, desperate breaths and the light leaked from his eyes. King stopped breathing. Lucas kicked him viciously between his legs and there was no reaction at all.

Lucas picked up King’s Colt, turned it on its side, and racked the slide several times. There had been no chambered round. With only one good hand, King hadn’t managed to ready the gun.

Lucas holstered the Colt in the small of his back and dropped his .38 in the pocket of his Dickies. He searched the living room floor and found his tooth, and pocketed that as well. There was nothing else he could fix or do. From the kitchen’s refrigerator he liberated a plastic bottle of water, drank half of it down, refilled it with tap water, and walked from the house.

He entered the woods, short of breath and in pain, and slowly navigated his way back to his Jeep. An hour later, he found his vehicle, parked in the lot of the shuttered gas station, a half mile away.

TWENTY-SEVEN

L
ucas stood before the bathroom mirror of his apartment. One ear was torn and bloody, and several knuckles were raw and skinned. His face had sustained scratches from the close-in fight. His jaw was swollen and bruised. It was difficult to fully bite down. When he raised his arms to remove his T-shirt, his left shoulder pained him greatly, telling him that his rotator cuff had been strained or torn in the fall down the stairs. It hurt to take deep breaths. When he smiled he could see the space where his incisor had been. He looked like a hillbilly meth dealer who’d taken a beat-down at the hands of police.

Lucas took a long shower. After he’d dried off, he phoned Marquis Rollins.

“I could use some help,” said Lucas. “I’m at my apartment.”

“What do you need?”

Lucas gave him a list. “No questions, Marquis.”

Marquis said, “Right.”

Lucas was in bed when Marquis knocked on the door. He got up with effort and let him in. Marquis took a look at him and shook his head. But he asked him nothing.

Straightaway, Lucas ate a couple of the Vicodin that Marquis had been given at the VA Hospital. They went into the bathroom, where Lucas sat on the edge of his tub while Marquis worked on his friend. He poured hydrogen peroxide on his cuts, his torn earlobe, and knuckles, applied Neosporin to the same areas, and gauzed and taped him where it was needed. Lucas himself rubbed Anbesol on the bloody gap where his tooth had been, and Orajel on the cuts inside his mouth. Marquis wrapped Lucas’s chest with tape. He could do nothing for Lucas’s shoulder.

“I’m no doctor,” said Marquis.

“For real?”

“Sayin, you need to
see
one.”

“This is going to have to do me for now.”

“You start pissin blood…”

“I know.”

“I don’t like that your chest hurts, man. If that rib broke and pierced your lung…”

“I
know.
Help me up.”

Marquis reached his hand out and Lucas took it. They moved to the living room, and Lucas sat on his couch.

“Couple of cold ones would be nice,” said Lucas.

By the time Marquis returned with two beers, Lucas was in the process of rolling a joint. They smoked it down to a roach, and Lucas lay back on the couch. Marquis went to the stereo and put on an Ernest Ranglin CD that he knew Lucas liked. That was what Lucas was listening to when the Vicodin, alcohol, and weed kicked in and gave him a nice slow kiss.

When Lucas next woke it was the middle of the night. Marquis was still with him, sleeping in a chair.

He spent the next several days in relative quiet. When his phone rang he checked the ID, but didn’t pick up. Every morning, Lucas went outside to get his morning
Post
off the front lawn, and once hit the Safeway on Piney Branch Road for beer and essentials, but pretty much stayed inside his apartment. He read, watched movies, and allowed himself time to recover.

It no longer hurt when he breathed. He threw the rest of the Vicodin away. Marquis didn’t use them, and Lucas didn’t want them anymore.

He scoured his laptop for any up-to-the-minute news. The first hit came on the Crime Scene blog of the
Washington Post
’s Internet site. A body had been discovered in a house in Croom, Maryland, when the home’s owner had stopped by to check on his tenants. The item said only that local police were treating the death as a homicide.

In the following day’s print edition of the
Post,
a longer, more detailed article appeared inside Metro. The piece did not give the victim’s name but simply described Billy King as an adult white male, the victim of multiple gunshot wounds.

Lucas knew that the crime scene, a forensic professional’s nightmare, would pose a great challenge to investigators. Three bedrooms, three men wearing different-size clothing, two men missing. The house contained stolen paintings, other burgled goods, guns, and probably drugs. Its furnishings were riddled with rounds, and sections of the walls had been torn away with buckshot. King had been both beaten and shot. Police would surmise that the victim had been involved in some sort of criminal enterprise. That he was murdered in a home invasion. A retaliation, or a turf war, or a message kill. He was in the business and he’d paid a price.

The story deepened the next day, when uniformed police and dogs, combing the surrounding woods, came upon a shallow grave. In it was a lime-covered body in a state of decomposition. Again, the victim went unidentified in print. But the unfolding event had now made the television news, and the column inches grew in the
Washington Post.
DEA agents were said to be on the scene. A spokesman said that they had been investigating drug rings and bikers in the largely rural area, and were exploring a possible connection to this crime in which two men had violently died.

Lucas put down the newspaper.

Two dead.

They were trying to kill
me.

But he’d made the first move.
He’d
gone out to the house, twice, and sought out conflict with Bacalov and King.

You want to try me.
Don’t
you?

It was true. He’d wanted to test himself with King.

You
are
me, fella.

No,
thought Lucas.
I’m not.

At first, he’d paced the apartment, pulled back curtains, and eyed the street. But soon he willed himself to put the outcome of his raids out of his mind. Short of Louis Smalls coming forward with information, the police had no concrete way to connect him to Bacalov and King. If the law came, he’d lawyer up with Petersen. Make do the best he could.

A week passed, and the law didn’t come.

When he finally reentered the world, he spent the first two days with various doctors and medical technicians. He started with Dr. Tanya Nikolic at the clinic in Manor Park. Lucas stripped to his boxer briefs and waited for her in the small white room.

“How did you sustain these injuries, Mr. Lucas?” she said, as she examined him. “You fall down in a bunch of glass again?”

He was lying on his back on a papered table. She was poking around his stomach.

“Car accident,” he said.

“Okay. That’s possible, I guess. But these abrasions and ecchymoses are not new.”

“Ecky what?”

“Your bruises. The nature of their coloration suggests you’ve had them for some time.”

“The accident happened over a week ago.”

“You waited a week to come in?”

“I’m shy.”

“Open your mouth.”

“Aaah,” said Lucas.

She shined a penlight there. “See your dentist. As for today, let’s get some chest X-rays. We can do that here. For your shoulder I’m going to have to send you to an orthopedist. He’ll probably want an MRI. You might need therapy or just a shot of cortisone. That’ll be up to Dr. Abend. He’s up in Wheaton.”

“But I don’t want to go to Wheaton,” said Lucas. “I want to stay here with you.”

Dr. Nikolic smirked. “Who told you to take your pants off?”

“Was that presumptuous of me?”

“Put ’em back on. A nurse will be in to take care of your X-rays. I’ll talk to you in a little bit.”

She returned a while later. She told him he’d cracked a rib. It hadn’t punctured his lung. It would hurt for a while and it would heal itself. The ear was gnarly, and he’d have a scar, but that would heal, too. The shoulder injury was going to be stubborn.

The next day, he got an MRI at an open-air facility in Silver Spring. In Wheaton, he saw Dr. Abend, who studied the pictures and told him that they revealed inflammation and strain. The doctor administered a cortisone injection there in the office. A few hours later, back at his apartment, Lucas began to have more mobility in his shoulder as the steroid did its work.

He was beginning to feel whole again. He went to bed early that night and slept soundly till morning.

While he’d been asleep, he’d gotten a message from Tom Petersen, asking him to stop by. Lucas phoned to check that he was in, dressed, and drove downtown.