The Double

by George Pelecanos

  “You and me,” said King, to Bacalov. “Let’s go.”

  Smalls kept the motor running and watched King and Bacalov walk toward the fast-food house. King was talking, Bacalov nodding his head.

  “I’ll stand by the door,” said King.

  “Good.”

  “You have to do it fast, fella.”

  “Yes, of course.” Bacalov smiled thinly. “I will give him a goodnight kiss.”

  They entered the side door of the McDonald’s. It was not particularly full, some booths and two-tops occupied, many others empty. Bacalov went straight to the men’s room door, pushed on it, and stepped inside. Billy King stood near the door, took his smartphone from his pocket, and studied its screen as if he were reading messages. From outside the door, he heard a thud, like laundry being dropped to the floor.

  As soon as Bacalov entered the small men’s room and saw the open stall door, he knew that he and Rubin were alone. Rubin had the attaché case and the gym bag wedged between his feet, and he was standing over the sink, splashing water on his face. He stood before a mirror but his eyes were closed, and Serge withdrew the sap he had wedged in his waistband. He raised it, stepped forward, and swung it with great force to the back of Rubin’s head. Rubin said, “Ah,” and his eyes rolled up as his knees buckled. His face hit the sink counter on the way down to the floor.

  There was copious blood, a pool of it widening around the man’s head. Bacalov did not check on him. He picked up the attaché and gym bag and went back toward the door. King had said not to dead the old man and he had not intended to, but there was only one way to get in and get out quickly, and that was to turn off Rubin’s lights. Anyway, Bacalov had the goods.

  Bacalov and King went through the side dining area, passing adults and their children busily eating their fast food. None of them looked up or seemed to notice anything at all.

  “Did you hurt him?” said King, as they moved through the lot.

  “Yes, I think so,” said Bacalov.

  Louis Smalls put the Ford in gear as they settled into their seats. He drove quickly out of the parking lot, careful not to leave rubber or make any significant noise, and soon the three of them were back on 95. There was a stony silence in the car, and Bacalov knew it was meant for him.

  “I fucked up,” said Bacalov, with a careless shrug. “Okay?”

  “Serge hit the old man too hard,” said King.

  “You kill him?” said Smalls.

  “No,” said Bacalov. But he thought maybe he had.

  They drove to a house they were renting in Croom, Maryland. It was not far from D.C., but it was straight country, west on 4, south on 301, in the hilly terrain near the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary of the Patuxent River. King was pleased when he found it. He was most comfortable when he was near water.

  The house was an old two-story colonial with a wraparound porch, clapboard siding, and thick plaster walls. It was reached by a gravel road, set back in the woods. King had seen a FOR RENT sign one day while driving to Chesapeake Beach, where he liked to troll for women, and he had come off the state highway, followed the sign to the house, and called the posted number. He made the deal right away, after he’d had a quick look inside. As always, he overpaid the owner, cash in advance.

  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 wa
s 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.”

  Lucas pedaled back to his apartment and phoned Grace Kinkaid. He had been looking through the notes of their first meeting, and something had come to him.

  “You said you had the painting assessed not long before you met Billy Hunter,” said Lucas.

  “That’s right,” said Grace.

  “Who appraised it?”

  “Charles Lumley.”

  “How did you get his name, originally?”

  “I met him at a get-together here in the building. The Realtor sponsors these rooftop parties, open bar, ostensibly to let the residents mingle and get to know one another. But I think the real motive is to entice people who are thinking of buying and moving in here. There are always a few folks who show up who don’t live in the building. That’s where I met Charles.”

  “He was considering buying a unit?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He said he had a friend who owned a condo on one of the upper floors. Charles buys and sells art. He has a little place, a by-appointment thing, around Dupont Circle. We got to talking, and I told him about my painting, that I was curious about its value. He said he’d be happy to look at it. A couple of nights later he swung by and did the assessment. He was a nice man.”

  “You have his contact information?”

  “Hold on.” Lucas waited for her to find the phone number and address for Charles Lumley. He heard the rustle of a piece of paper as she got back on the line. “Ready?”

  “That’s great,” said Lucas, after typing the data into his iPhone.

  “Are you making any progress?”

  “Yes,” said Lucas, though it didn’t feel that way to him. “I’ll get back up with you soon.”

  After lunch, Lucas opened his laptop and set up a Hotmail account under an assumed name. Using this account, he then typed a message to the Grant Summers e-mail address.

  Hello, my name is Rick Bell. I am very interested in the 2003 Mini Cooper S you advertised months ago on Craigslist. I know you have taken the ad off the site but I’m wondering, is the car sold? I’ve been looking for this particular car for some time. Not to get into a long story, but my wife owned one just like it when we were dating, and it had tremendous sentimental value to her. We had to sell it after we got married for financial reasons, but those concerns are behind us now. I’ve been trying to find this Mini, this model, this year, and this color, to surprise her for our anniversary. Is the car still available? Assuming it is in good shape, I’d like to make you a generous offer.

  Please respond to the e-mail provided.

  Thank you,

  Rick Bell

  Lucas hit Send. He checked his laptop several times over the course of the afternoon but there was no reply to his query. Then he got a call from Charlotte Rivers’s disposable. She was sorry she’d been out of touch, but she’d been very busy. She had a meeting in the dining room of the hotel on 16th Street, and then she had a few hours of free time, but only a few hours, because she had an obligation that night. Was he interested in stopping by the suite around four?

  “Uh…,” said Lucas.

  “Don’t you want to see me?”

  Lucas hesitated, but only for a moment.

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  They began to make love as soon as he entered the suite. She greeted him by the door wearing slacks with a silk blouse and camisole, and he undressed her there, in the entranceway, piece by piece. Soon she was nude, standing before him, curvy and full of breast, her hair about her face, and Lucas kissed her deeply and thought, This is what I fought for, to come back to someone like her. This is what every boy dreams of.

  With the clumsiness of haste he removed his clothing as well, and they found themselves naked in the middle of the plush suite. Charlotte reached down and found his engorged pole and pulled him to her, rubbed his helmet on her lips. They broke apart suddenly and b
oth of them laughed.

  “What’s wrong with us?” said Charlotte. Lucas knew what she meant. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

  “I missed you,” said Lucas.

  “I missed you,” said Charlotte. “How’s your hand?”

  “It won’t affect my performance, if that’s what you mean. I’ve got a backup.”

  “Do what you do.”

  They moved to the bed. She had downloaded more music, Soon Forward by Gregory Isaacs, the perfect lovers’ rock, and the insistent rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare gave Lucas a beat, and he became a machine. As she came he felt himself chuckle, and an image flashed of a smiling Billy Hunter on top of Grace Kinkaid, and Lucas shook that out of his mind and let himself go.

  “What got into you?” said Charlotte, after they had separated and lay beside each other atop the sheets.

  “Why?”

  “I thought I lost you there for a while. You were, I don’t know…a little focused. Workmanlike.”

  “You got there, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t pleased,” she said. “It was different for us, is all.”

  Lucas got up, uncorked the Barolo that was on the dresser, then returned to the bed. “Next time, let me bring a good bottle of wine,” said Lucas.

  “I thought you liked this.”

  “I just want to contribute something,” said Lucas. “You never let me pay for anything.”

  “I can afford it.”

  “So can I.”

  Charlotte brushed his short hair with her fingers. “Relax, honey. Enjoy this.”

  “Because it might not last?”

  “Because it’s good. Most people never get this, not even once in their lives.”

  “I don’t want it to end.”

  “Don’t be greedy.” She kissed him. “Don’t think past today.”

  A little while later, she got up off the bed and dressed. She was going to a neighbor’s house with her husband for dinner, she said, and she had to get home.