“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.
Lucas sat in a rickety chair in the offices at 5th and D. Petersen was in non-court attire, a mix of jeans, cowboy boots, and a flowery shirt imported from the U.K. His feet, and the boots, were up on his desk.
“Calvin Bates got twenty-five years,” said Petersen. “The jury convicted him of second-degree murder.”