The space on North Capitol had grown too small for the goods they were accumulating, and King did not like the fact that he and his partners lived apart. He trusted Smalls but not Bacalov. Serge was not treacherous but he was impulsive and careless, bordering on stupid.
In their living room, furnished in the manner of a biker/stoner lair, complete with overstuffed furniture and a bong seated on a cable-spool table, they looked at what they had stolen from the old man. The coins were laid out on a dining room table illuminated from above by an old crystal chandelier. None of them had deep knowledge of the coin market, but a child could see that some were in better shape and more significant than others, and that the collection housed in plastic was clearly the prize. Certificates of authenticity, found in the gym bag, identified the coins. King used his personal laptop to discover that, indeed, the coins, if they matched the paperwork, had great value.
“Are we rich?” said Serge, seeing King’s bright eyes.
“I’ll take these to my man and find out what we’ve got,” said King. “I’m guessing we did some good work today.”
Bacalov went to a small table set up as a bar and poured himself a Luksusowa over ice. A decent potato vodka for the price: Polish, but what the hell. He went upstairs to one of the three bedrooms on the second floor, where he kept his cash, a pump-action Ithaca shotgun, and a Glock 17. Bacalov masturbated to some amateur porn he found on the RedTube website, then fell to sleep. He was a man of uncluttered needs.
Smalls had gone out to the porch to smoke a cigarette. He returned, filled the bowl of his bong with some good hydroponic, and fired it up. He let the smoke linger in his lungs before exhaling, then sat back on the couch, fitted the earbuds of his smartphone to his head, and found some Mastodon he liked. He thought of an older man with one droopy eye coming to his bed at night, and he saw the man and smelled Lectric Shave and whiskey. The collision of that awful recollection and the violence of the music pleased him.
King walked into the kitchen past the dining room. It held a back door that opened to a small yard and the woods. He found a green bottle of beer in the fridge, uncapped it, and came back out to the living room. He pulled deeply from the bottle and looked around the room. Three framed paintings, wrapped in brown paper, leaned against one of the walls. One of them, The Double, was very valuable. The others, though of lesser value, were worth significant money as well. Stacks of laptops and other electronic goods, burgled from residences and commercial offices, lay heaped in a corner. The coin collection was on the table. Pistols had been strategically placed under the cushions of sofas and chairs.
They would sell their bounty to various buyers, mostly middlemen in the underworld who then moved the goods to private collectors and investors. King knew that what they’d get was very low compared to the actual value, and that he and his partners had incurred all of the physical risk, but he didn’t care.
They were thrill seekers. Serge knew no other way of life. Louis used the jobs to fight off his demons. Billy King had come to the D.C. area to have fun, steal what he could, and fuck and use as many women as he could. No bosses, no rush hour, no line at Starbucks in the morning, no crowded Metro cars. No responsibilities.
It wasn’t about money. It was about having enough to stay in the game.
Twelve
In the next few days, after the accident in the hotel room, it seemed to Lucas that he had accomplished little. Later he’d know that he had done significant work in this period, but it would not come to him just yet. He was mainly frustrated and confused.
His hand was part of the problem. It bothered him to be a gimp. A man didn’t like to walk down the street without the full ability to defend himself, and this was how it was for him now. He had sustained no significant injuries in Iraq outside of cuts, scrapes, and bruises, and had experienced the usual maladies, like dehydration, diarrhea, ingrown toenails, and athlete’s foot, but he was not used to being hampered like this. He had once thought that Christ had been looking after him in the Middle East, but after witnessing many accidental deaths in the war, he knew he had been spared by virtue of dumb luck. Neither God nor luck had anything to do with this injury. Inattention had caused him to trip. Idiocy had put his hand out to break his fall on a floor of broken glass.
Underneath his bandage, his hand was heavily slathered in Neosporin. The crescent-shaped cut on the heel of his palm was stitched like a baseball. Still, he managed to maintain his exercise regimen. He could use the push-up stands if he didn’t grip the handle too tightly and could ride his bike the same way. That left work.
He found it difficult to concentrate, but that wasn’t because of his injury. It was Charlotte Rivers. His brother would say he was drunk on pussy, and that was part of it, but not all. He wanted her to be his girlfriend. He wanted to walk with her out in the world, as he would with any other woman. See her outside that suite, take her to a movie, hold her hand across the dinner table of a nice restaurant, Mourayo on Connecticut, or Petits Plats, the little French place he liked in Woodley Park. But Charlotte wasn’t answering her phone or returning his texts. Of course she wasn’t. She was married, and she owned a disposable cell for secretive purposes only. She turned on the burner only to contact him when she wanted to. Spero Lucas, her young lover. Her lover boy whom she summoned whenever she had the need.
“Fuck this,” said Lucas, to no one, seated alone at his table, reading the morning Post.
He turned his attention to the Metro section of the newspaper. Among the usual violent deaths of blacks and Hispanics buried inside the section, one story got extra column inches and ink. An elderly coin dealer, Ira Rubin, well known in the area because of his longtime retail operation in Wheaton, had been severely injured and robbed of his goods inside a McDonald’s bathroom in Beltsville. The man was listed in critical but stable condition, which typically meant he was going to recover. Rubin had been hit by a blunt object from behind, and the force of the blow had split his skull. Bad Day at Black Rock, thought Lucas. But at least he’s alive.
Lucas got into shorts and a T, rode his bike up to Silver Spring, and locked it to a pole outside Kefa Cafe on Bonifant Street, his favorite coffee shop in his old neighborhood. Sitting at a table among the laptoppers and City Paper readers was John Starr, a private investigator who had garnered a rep around town in the past twenty years. Starr had been a guitarist and vocalist in one of the premiere bands recording for Dischord in the early nineties and, like many in the original Positive Force movement, had put his ideals to work as he moved along into his middle age. He mainly took cases or incidents when he thought that the defendant was being railroaded or wronged. Lucas had met him down at the federal courthouse one day while both of them were waiting to testify in separate trials. They’d hit it off.
“What’d you do, drop your wallet on your hand?” said Starr.
“Just garden-variety stupidity,” said Lucas.
Starr was drinking coffee; Lucas, iced tea.
“So you want to draw this guy out?” said Starr.
“I think he’s in town,” said Lucas. “Him and another guy I’m looking at for something else. They’re together.”
“Together in what?”
“Criminal shit,” said Lucas. “Scamming and thievery. At least one of them’s a sociopath. There’s a third guy, too, someone I know nothing about.”
“But the one you’re looking for first is the guy who ran the Nigerian four-one-nine thing?”
“I think he’s going to be the easiest to find. The name on his e-mails was Grant Summers, but his real name is Serge Nikolai. If that’s his real name. I really don’t know.”
“After you called me, I contacted a Swiss friend who specializes in this type of fraud. He said that most of these guys are organized and operate out of Internet cafés overseas.”
“I don’t know how organized they are. The other one, Billy Hunter, he left my client a total wreck after he stole something out of her apartment. Used her till there was nothing left of her and then walked away with a valuable piece of art. They’re leaving behind a trail of hurt, man. That makes them sloppy.”
“What’s their motivation? Is it money?”
“In part, I would imagine.”
“So tempt them with more. The Internet scammer first.” Starr sipped from his coffee cup. “I assume the ad for the Mini Cooper has been taken down from Craigslist.”
“Yes.”
“But you still have the Grant Summers e-mail address. So reach out to him. Try to ferret him out. Tell him you want that particular car and will overpay to get it. Let him lick his chops while you dig out pieces of information that you can use to identify him. Basically, bait him. If he’s about money, he’ll surface.”
“You think?”
“He’s a lowlife,” said Starr. “Dangle some dollars in front of his face. He’ll rear his ugly head.”