“Sure. I’ll see you soon.”
Smalls eyed him warily. King picked up his bag, walked to his Monte Carlo, and opened its trunk.
Lucas and Dupree crouched at the edge of the woods in darkness, several yards in from the tree line. The curtains were drawn in the windows of the house and they couldn’t see inside. Lucas had made a sketch of the colonial. He also drew a circle in the front of the house that estimated the size of the pool of light thrown out from the motion detector mounted above the gallery roof.
When the light had come on, Dupree had instinctively moved back a little, causing a branch to snap. The sudden illumination had surprised them when King and the one named Louis had walked out the front door. So had King’s presence and size.
He was as Grace Kinkaid had described him: strong legs, low center of gravity, powerfully built. Blond and wrinkled by the sun. An aging beach stud, his thighs filling out his shorts, sockless feet in boat shoes, polo shirt stretched tight across his upper frame. Big as he was in the chest and shoulders, they paled in contrast to the massive muscle-and-bone structure below his waist.
Lucas studied him as he walked across the yard, suitcase in hand, leaving the lanky, bearded Louis behind, still smoking a cigarette on the porch. There was athleticism in King’s step, and also a jaunty you-can’t-fuck-with-me stride. King was something out of a painting hung in the dark corner of a museum, the kind that gives nightmares to a child. A goatish figure, more Minotaur than man.
Lucas looked at the nylon suitcase that King was dropping into the trunk of his Chevy. Its contents bulked out the bag’s sides.
King had packed for more than one day. This was good.
In his head, Lucas made plans.
NINETEEN
Late that night, Lucas dropped off Dupree at his apartment.
“So we gonna do this thing tomorrow night?” said Dupree.
“While King’s out of town,” said Lucas. “I’ll call you in the morning and we’ll firm it up.”
Lucas had promised Dupree there would be no shooting. The only way to keep his word was to leave Dupree out of it. His friend had been a fierce and reliable brother on the battlefield, but clearly that part of him was done. Upon his return to the States, Lucas had continued to embrace his warrior nature, for reasons he himself didn’t fully understand. Dupree had left his behind in the streets and deserts of Iraq.
Lucas felt that he’d been reckless to put his friend in harm’s way for a money job, in the same way he’d been careless with Marquis. Lucas had made the decision over dinner, looking across the table at Dupree in the restaurant on Route 301. He’d compensate him for the work he’d already done, but Dupree was not going back with him to the house in Croom. Lucas would go in alone.
Dupree phoned him twice the next day. Lucas did not take the calls.
In the morning, he phoned Charlotte to see if they might meet for lunch. He wanted to talk to her in person, tell her how he felt about her before he made his move on the painting, in the event that things went wrong. He realized he’d never told her he loved her. In fact, he’d never said those words to any woman. But now he felt he could and should say it to her.
Outside of their initial meeting in the hotel bar, they’d never been together in public. In his mind he saw them at a nice, quiet restaurant, having a good meal, him looking into her eyes, reaching out, touching her hand. Practically speaking, and morally, he knew it was wrong. Charlotte was married. She’d never once expressed a desire to leave her husband. She wanted to maintain her status quo: successful career, marriage, a house in upper Northwest, and a young lover in her bed when she wanted it. A lunch with him out in the open was a ridiculous, dangerous proposition. It would threaten all that she had.
Still, he phoned her. Got the message box, as he knew he would. Told her that he needed to speak with her and asked her to call him back that day.
He waited around his apartment for an hour or so. His phone didn’t ring.
Lucas changed into shorts and rode his bike down to Hains Point. He did the loop a couple of times, going along the Washington Channel and the Potomac River, passing fishermen at the rails, lovers on benches and blankets, golfers playing the public course, and fellow bikers on the road. The ride cleared his head.
Lucas locked his bike outside Jenny’s on nearby Water Street, then had a hearty late-afternoon Chinese lunch at a table in the bar area, which gave to a view of the channel and marina. He glanced at the couples around him, sitting at two-tops, conversing, laughing. It occurred to him that most of his meals these days were eaten alone.
He pedaled from Jenny’s up into Rock Creek Park, then up the gradual incline of Beach Drive, a good distance back to 16th Street Heights. When he returned to his apartment, he was energized rather than tired. He had been checking his phone, stashed in the small bag mounted beneath his saddle, during his trip. He phoned Charlotte again and left a message.
After a shower, Lucas grabbed Waldron’s ripstop duffel bag from out of his closet, and his own personal bag, and laid his equipment out on the bed: flex-cuffs, a roll of duct tape, bolt cutters, a pair of night vision goggles, his Blackhawk Omega pistol vest, and a looped holster belt that would fit below it. He took out the silencer and the Kevlar vests and put them aside. Lucas then withdrew a Mossberg pump-action twelve-gauge and loaded it with rounds of buckshot. He put this on the bed alongside the NVGs. He took one of the Beretta M-9s and a magazine from out of the bag. He checked the top steel-jacketed round against the spring for tension, palmed the magazine into the grip, and slid the .9 into a Bianchi holster. He slipped a second fifteen-round mag into the pistol vest, then dropped several twelve-gauge shells into another compartment. Next, he found the S&W .38, released its cylinder, and loaded its chambers with hollow points. He snapped the cylinder back in place and put extra rounds into a third pouch. He slid his phone into the shoulder pouch designed for a radio; he was going to need the phone’s compass to navigate the woods.
He mentally inventoried the weapons and gear on the bed, then placed them all back in the bag. He added his own tool, a short hollowed-out piece of hickory, filled with lead and wrapped in electrician’s tape. Lucas felt that a man on a job should always have a sap.
He took a shower, dressed in a black T-shirt, dark-blue Dickies pants, a Timex Expedition digital watch, and lug-soled Nike boots. He picked up the bag, walked it downstairs and out to the street, and placed it in the cargo area of his Jeep.
Dusk had fallen on the streets. By the time Lucas had crossed the line from D.C. into Maryland, it was night.
Louis Smalls sat in his room, Opeth coming from a speaker attached to his phone. The song was “Heir Apparent,” a crushing track that always managed to take him somewhere outside of his tangled head. Mastodon, Opeth, Meshuggah… Smalls was into progressive metal in a big way. He had started with pre–Black Album Metallica, like many kids, but had graduated into the more complex, intense bands that delivered grooves, shifts of tone, growling vocals, laserlike drumming, and guitar fury. Music, drugs, his choice of peers, all of it was tied up in his attempt to run away.
His home life had been shit. He didn’t have any memory of his father, who’d left when he was an infant. His mother worked behind the counter in an auto body shop during the day and was a wine alcoholic by night. Sometimes she never made it to her bed and fell asleep on the couch. Sometimes she peed there. She was unhealthy by anyone’s measure, but she got by on genetic luck, a pretty face and a figure that resisted the damages of her prodigious alcohol consumption. Louis and Sharon Smalls had shared their apartment, a two-bedroom affair in an aged garden complex, with a succession of low-rent men.
One of them, a mattress salesman named Jim Ralston, moved in and stayed awhile when Louis was thirteen years old. His mother adored him. He too was a drinker: he had a thirst for blended whiskey. Ralston had slicked-back hair and one permanently droopy eye, the result of a sucker punch in a bar that had shattered his cheekbone. To a stranger it made him look gentle and somewh
at kind, but to Louis he was anything but. He had no sexual interest in Louis’s mother, though he dutifully climbed on top of her from time to time. He was there for the boy.
Night after night, after Sharon had passed out, he came into Louis’s bedroom, smelling of Seagram’s 7 and Lectric Shave. He’d pull a chair over to Louis’s bed, talk to him softly, and reach into Louis’s pajama bottoms and stroke him until he grew hard. He’d tell Louis to do the same kind of favor for him. By then Ralston had already unzipped his fly and pulled out his long, veined thing. He told Louis to touch it and he told him to put it in his mouth. Louis didn’t like it, but he knew his mother would be mad if he made a fuss and caused her boyfriend to leave. Ralston did leave eventually, after an awful, drunken fight over money with Sharon Smalls. By then the damage had been done.
At fourteen Louis began to notice girls and desire them. He had been worried that he was gay, and his attraction to females proved to him that he was not. He was too young to know the difference between a homosexual and a pedophile. He had almost put Ralston out of his mind when his woodshop teacher kissed him on the mouth while Louis was working alone on a project after school one spring afternoon. Louis didn’t tell on this one, either. He was embarrassed and scared of the potential ridicule and exposure. Why did men think that they could prey on him like this? It had to be his fault.
He began to hang with a crowd of misfits who were rejected by the cool heads, athletes, and scholars of the school. Louis didn’t play sports; he was not particularly bright, and at six-foot-two, one hundred twenty-five pounds, he was scary skinny, a freak. He listened to metal and got piercings and tats. He rejected authority, particularly when it came from older men. He was suspended from school regularly and eventually expelled. He never did get a high school degree.
Years passed and Louis had accomplished exactly nothing. Whatever money he managed to make he spent on vehicles purchased at auctions. He favored big American sedans with V-8s. He moved from weed to crystal meth. He got a girlfriend with a habit, body odor, and brown teeth. Sex was drug-clumsy and quick, but she made him hard, and this told him he was straight. He left his mother’s apartment and moved in with the girl and a bunch of other burnouts in a group house. One night Louis was wired and desperate for money, so he borrowed a .38 with cracked grips and knocked off a convenience store in Laurel. The man behind the counter had slicked-back hair and reminded him of Ralston, and when Louis put the gun in his face, and he showed fear, Louis got excited and swollen. He robbed a couple of other stores the same way, chasing the same sensation. He would have robbed more, but he was only interested in places that were staffed by white men; these were few and far between. He found one in Burtonsville, on 198, but made the mistake of rolling up his sleeves before he went in. He got arrested, convicted by a video camera tape and the tattoo on his arm, and was sent to Hagerstown.
He did his full stretch, got clean of meth, and moved into a halfway house in east-of-16th-Street D.C. He found a job unloading trucks and stocking goods for a discount department store in the Maryland suburbs. It was the best he could do with a felony conviction and no GED. One day he struck up a conversation with a man named Billy King. He’d taken a television set out to the store’s parking lot and put it in the man’s car.
“You like your job?” said King, after he had handed Louis Smalls a five-dollar tip. Smalls, though still thin, had put on weight and grown a beard. His look said School of Hard Knocks, with a touch of shell shock.
“I guess,” said Smalls, eyeing the big, blond-haired man with suspicion.
“Can’t get too far up the ladder, though, after you’ve done time. Isn’t that right?”
“How’d you know?”
“I can spot it,” said King. In fact, he was guessing. What he saw was a damaged young man who seemed utterly lost and alone. “I’m not judging you.”
“What do you want?”
“Why don’t we grab a beer after you get off work?”
“I don’t drink,” said Smalls. He meant, I don’t drink with older men.
“Relax, fella,” said King, picking up on the vibe. “I like women. This is a business proposition.”
“Tell me what it is.”
King and Serge Bacalov had been planning to take off a check-cashing/payroll-advance operation in the District. It would be their first and only retail robbery, but they were missing a key player in the plan.
“Can you…What’s your name, son?”
“Louis Smalls.” He liked that the man had called him son.
“Can you drive a car, Louis?”
“I can drive the hell out of one,” said Smalls.
“I got a partner, little Russian guy. We’re about to embark on an adventure. But Serge never did learn how to drive.”
Since that day, Smalls had been with King. Billy treated him right. Billy never once had anything in his eyes for Smalls except for friendship and respect. Billy was a father. So why had his father left him the night before, the same way his seed-father had left twenty-some years earlier, when Louis was nothing more than a baby? Billy had been carrying a full suitcase with a vague promise to return in a few days’ time. Was he coming back? It seemed to Louis that all the men in his life had either abandoned him or tried to take him off for sex.
Once again, Louis thought: Is it me?
Disturbed and confused, Louis got up out of his chair and disconnected the speaker from his smartphone. He dropped it beside his earbuds on the bed. He wanted a cigarette, but he never smoked in his room, as Serge didn’t like its smell. He decided to have a cigarette out on the porch, then drive to the nearest store for a fresh pack.
He put the phone in the right front pocket of his jeans. Beneath his underwear, in the top drawer of his dresser, he found the envelope of money that Billy had given him from the coin sale. He stuffed the envelope in his left pocket. It contained forty hundred-dollar bills wrapped in a rubber band. He always took his cash with him when he left the place. He didn’t trust Serge.
He slipped his wallet into his back pocket. On his dresser he found his last cigarette. He fitted this behind his ear and threw the empty pack in the wastebasket. He swept his keys and matches off the top of the dresser and switched off the light before walking from the room.
He passed Billy’s bedroom, now dark. As he came to Serge’s room, he looked inside and stopped. Serge was seated on a chair, his feet up on his bed, his open laptop balanced on his thighs. Lying atop the bed was his Glock. Smalls knew that under the bed was an Ithaca pump. Serge liked his guns nearby. It made him feel tall.
The sound from the laptop, synthesized music and a conversation between a man and woman, was loud. From what Smalls could make out, the man in the video was trying to convince a woman that she needed to take off her clothes. “I can’t cast you in the movie until I see what you have,” said the man. “My panties, too?” said the woman, and the man said, “Yes, of course.”
“Where you go?” said Bacalov.
“Out to get cigarettes. You want anything?”
“No. Wait a minute…We need milk.”
“I’ll bring back some milk,” said Smalls.
He left Bacalov, turned the corner of the hall, and went down the stairs, his hand sliding down the wood banister as he descended. He walked through the living room, past the overstuffed couch and the cable-spool table, the chandelier and the dining room table, the stolen computer equipment heaped in a corner, and the paintings, wrapped in brown paper and leaning against the wall. He opened the front door, walked out, then closed it and checked that it was locked.
As he turned from the door, the motion detector triggered its lamp. His car, the white Crown Vic, was parked in the front yard, wholly visible in the pool of light. The remainder of the yard, the woods, and the gravel road that cut through them, was inked in black.
Louis Smalls stood on the porch and lit his cigarette. As he exhaled a stream of smoke, he heard something in the forest to his left. A rabbit or fox skittering th
rough the brush.
To his right, Smalls heard the muted, heavy drum of feet on gravel and earth. He turned his head in that direction, took one step back, and froze.
A man was running toward him. Charging like an animal out of the night.
TWENTY
Lucas had humped the half mile through the woods wearing his night vision goggles while carrying a bag heavy with gear and iron. He was in superior shape, but still, by the time he reached the tree line bordering the house, he needed to rest. He peeled off his goggles, allowed his breathing to slow, and opened the bag that he’d dropped beside him. He then removed the Beretta .9 and S&W .38 from the bag and fitted them in the holster belt looped into the pistol vest. The vest held shotgun shells, an extra mag for the .9, and hollow point rounds. He took the Mossberg from the bag and placed that on the ground beside the NVGs.
Lucas looked at the yard, where a single car, the white Crown Victoria that had rammed Marquis, was parked. One car, one driver: the young man with the beard, the one called Louis. But this didn’t mean there was only one person in the house. Maybe Bacalov didn’t own a car. Maybe he didn’t drive.
Lucas looked up at the house. One window had a light in it; the others were dark. Dark windows had been a primary danger area in Iraq. So were doorways and doors.
The front door of the house opened. Louis closed it behind him, locked it, and stepped onto the porch. As he did, the motion detector came on and sent light out into the yard. Lucas remained still. He watched Louis stand there and light a cigarette.
Carefully, quietly, Lucas got two pairs of double-cuff restraints from the bag. Keeping his eyes on Louis, he put them in a pouch of his vest. He then retrieved the roll of duct tape and slipped that into the pouch holding the loose hollow points. He picked up the shotgun with his left hand; he needed his throwing arm now.
Lucas felt along the earth until he found a stone. He rose from his crouch and stepped out of the woods, into the portion of the yard still in darkness. He planned to use a box tactic; he would avoid the area exposed by light, move in the blackness, and stay inside its line. He got as close to the house as he could without crossing that line, then threw the stone, arcing it high into the woods on the other side of the house. Louis turned his head in that direction as the rock skittered through the branches of trees. Lucas moved the Mossberg to his right hand and broke into a run.
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