“We’re stayin together, right?”
“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.