The Double

Five

Lucas drove over to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The longtime Washington hospital and attendant facilities, close to his apartment, had been recently shuttered, its wooded acreage between Georgia Avenue and 16th Street, just a handful of miles from the White House, too valuable to sit on any longer. It was a hump and inconvenience for Lucas to visit the hospital in the traffic-plagued city, but he continued to make the effort.

He drove through the security post without a hitch. He had been given a pass from his friend Gail Moore, an army public affairs officer who had previously been with AW2 — the Army Wounded Warrior Program — and now worked for the army’s chief of public affairs. Lucas lifted a box of books from the cargo area of his Jeep and took it into the building and down to the library.

Lucas had too many books in his apartment and he liked to pass them on to the wounded soldiers and marines who had little to do beyond their rehab. Some of the books were biography and history, and some were considered literary fiction, whatever that was. But like most people, the recovering veterans enjoyed a good story told with clean, efficient writing, a plot involving a problem to be solved or surmounted, and everyday characters the reader could relate to. Today Lucas had crime novels by Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, and James Crumley, and Westerns by Leonard, Jack Schaefer, Tom Franklin, Ron Hansen, and A. B. Guthrie. He had purchased a complete used Steinbeck paperback collection, all with the penguin on the spine, from Silver Spring Books the previous week, and had brought that along as well.

He slipped one of the paperbacks into his back pocket, left the others, and walked to the building housing Therapy Services. There he found Winston Dupree, here at his scheduled time in a large room crowded with patients, doctors, free weights, weight machines, treadmills, mats, medicine balls, and tennis balls. A golden retriever wandered the room, stopping occasionally to be petted, scratched, and talked to. Wounded veterans were working out or receiving PT, or road testing their recently installed prosthetic limbs. A young man in a harness, bearing new shin poles for legs, was gamely attempting his first steps, steadied by a therapist holding a leash.

Dupree sat on a raised stool, his thick right forearm resting on a padded table. Several adhesive electrodes, their cords attached to a nearby machine, had been stuck to the area around his elbow. Dupree was a tall, wide-shouldered man whose size was somewhat undercut by his wire-rim glasses and soft-spoken nature. He wore his hair in an unfashionable fade. Lucas removed the paperback from his pocket and pulled up a chair beside him.

“Luke,” said Dupree, his pronounced overbite triggered by his smile.

“Got this for you.” Lucas handed him the book. “Thought you’d like it.”

Dupree inspected the cover. “Is this one of those with the white protagonist and his black sidekick?”

“It’s not one of those.”

“’Cause I read that one. The black dude is suspicious of the white dude at first. He’s one of those angry black men who’s been feeling the brunt of racial injustice his whole life.”

“You mean, like a black militant.”

“He’s not wearing a beret or nothin like that. Got an attitude, is all. But the black dude comes around in the end, when he figures out that the white dude’s all right. He’s not like all those other insensitive white dudes that the black dude’s known in the past. And it makes the black dude think: maybe not all white people are bad. There’s hope for humanity, after all.”

“The black guy likes women,” said Lucas, getting into it, “but he doesn’t like them too much. He’s more into helping the white people solve their problems than he is nailing ass.”

“Yeah, we never actually see him in the act. Thereby subverting the stereotype of the oversexed black man with the extra large Johnson.” Dupree grinned. “Me, I’m quite the stereotype.”

“Minus the extra large Johnson.”

“I do like trim, though.”

“You like thinking about it.” Lucas nodded at Dupree’s bum arm. “What happened, were you pulling on your rod so hard that you hurt yourself?”

“No, I was pullin on yours. Don’t you remember?”

“That was you?”

“Actually, I was pulling a suitcase out of the trunk of a car, and I tore some shit around my elbow. Acute tendonitis, the doc says. Now they got me doing this ultrasound. It’s a stubborn injury. I bounced back from my combat wound quicker than I did this.”

Dupree had been an ace SAW gunner serving in the Second Battalion of the First Marine Regiment. He was fierce, dependable, and a key component of Lucas’s unit. Near the Jolan graveyard, in Fallujah, an AK round had passed through his calf and shredded its primary muscle. Dupree would walk with a slight limp for the rest of his life.

“I can’t even type on a laptop with this gimp-ass arm of mine,” said Dupree.

“They’ll fix you up,” said Lucas.

“Hard to find a job if you can’t work on a computer.”

“But you’re still looking, right? Anything going on?”

“With my leg, it’s tough. Wasn’t worth my time to put in an application with the police. Even rent-a-cop work’s pretty much out of the question. Not qualified for an office and I don’t want to be in one. I’m not about to stand up all day in some procurement center or factory. I guess I could apply to Bed, Bath, and motherfuckin Beyond or sumshit, but I doubt they’d want my broke-down self, either.”

The golden retriever appeared and rested his nose on Dupree’s thigh. With his right hand he scratched behind its ear. The frown that had come to Dupree’s face faded. “That’s a girl.”

“Maybe you should work with animals,” said Lucas.

“I do,” said Dupree. “There’s this organization, Paws4Vets, they get wounded soldiers like me to train service dogs for disabled veterans who are worse off than I am. You know, men and women who been blinded or generally can’t get around. I did a program with the Warrior Transition Battalion at Winn Army Hospital. Now I got a pretty chocolate Lab mix I been training, living with me in my crib. I’m gonna have to give her up when they find the right match for her. That’s the hard part, man.”

“So you’re working.”

“Volunteer work,” said Dupree. “Ain’t the same as getting paid. A man only feels like a man when he gets a paycheck.”

“And some pie.”

“No doubt.”

The dog lay down at Dupree’s side and rested his head on one of his feet.

“I need something to do,” said Dupree, looking directly into Lucas’s eyes.

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“I mean it, Luke.”

“I won’t forget.” Lucas stood and bumped Dupree’s fist. “Two-One, partner.”

“Two-One,” said Dupree.

Lucas walked over to Building 8 and took the elevator up to the third floor. There he knocked on the door of Olivia O’Leary, a psychiatric therapist who counseled wounded soldiers and their families. Dr. O’Leary, a pushing-fifty brunette with the bright eyes of an optimist, told him to come in and have a seat.

“I can’t stay long,” said Lucas.

“I have a few minutes,” said O’Leary. “Sit down.”

Lucas took a chair across from her desk, crowded with paperwork, AW2 lapel pins, and American flag memorabilia. The office itself was cramped, bordering on claustrophobic. She had been told that this was her temporary space since the move, but had seen no evidence that a bigger office was in her future.

“I brought some books over for the troops,” said Lucas. “Stopped by and saw Winston Dupree, down in therapy.”

“He’s having issues with his arm,” said O’Leary.

“So you’ve spoken with him.”

“Yes.” Olivia O’Leary said nothing else.

Lucas said, “How did you find him?”

“You mean, what’s his state of mind? Spero, you know I can’t discuss that with you.”

“I’m worried about him.”

“How so?”

“He seems a little, you know, melancholy. I don’t know what the professional term for that is. Depressed? We joked around some, but it was tired on his part, like he was forcing himself to be in a good mood. Winston’s a little lost, you ask me. He hasn’t been able to find any meaningful work. He has no...”

“Purpose.”

“Yeah.”

“A relative few are as fortunate as you’ve been, Spero. You’ve found work that approximates the exhilaration of the experience you had in the Middle East. Most don’t have that. Coming home can be a relief, peaceful even. But after a while, when things stateside don’t turn out like they’ve imagined, soldiers often feel a disappointment, a kind of void. Those feelings turn to bitterness and hurt. I’m not telling you that this is what’s going on with Winston, specifically. I’m speaking in generalities, of course.”

“I understand.”

“Unlike many others, Winston’s not alone. He gets good care here, and he’s got friends like you who look in on him from time to time.”

“Right.”

O’Leary crossed one leg over the other and sat back in her chair. “You still keep in touch with Marquis Rollins?”

“Yeah,” said Lucas, feeling himself smile. “I see Marquis up at the American Legion in Silver Spring every so often. We talk on the phone.”

“Is he getting around okay on that leg of his?”

“It’s part of him now. It hasn’t slowed him down much.” Rollins had a plastic knee and a titanium shin pole for a left leg. It had replaced the leg that had been amputated after an RPG had sent a piece of shrapnel, large as a mobile phone circa 1990, into his thigh, and caused irreparable infection. “Marquis has a business, goes to car auctions up north and brings back luxury automobiles for clients down here in D.C. He also has God and his church. And he chases all kinds of women. With intent. As you would say, he has purpose.”

“What about the other guys in your outfit? What’s become of them?”

Some came back in caskets, thought Lucas. They’re buried in Metairie, Louisiana. In Houston, and in Arlington, Virginia. Solomon King is a top car salesman at a Ford dealership in Overland, Kansas. Greg Evans works in Pennsylvania, filling orders for an Internet retailer. Rick McKenzie is in a federal prison somewhere out West, doing twenty years to life for stabbing a man to death in a Missoula bar. David Hess is unemployed, living in his parents’ basement in Galveston. Last time Lucas talked to him, Lawson Cochrane had married a stripper after a long night of Milwaukee’s Best and an ounce of crystal meth. Ronald Wilson reenlisted and is serving in Afghanistan. Alfred Turner went back to college for a law degree. Joey Fabiano hung himself from the rafters of a log cabin in Colorado.

“I don’t know,” said Lucas. “I guess I haven’t been in touch with them lately. I should try.”

O’Leary looked at him directly. “And how are you?”

“I’m fine. Everything’s going well.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“No worries,” said Lucas.

I killed a man in a church parking lot on Georgia Avenue two years ago. Broke the hyoid bone of his neck as he writhed and struggled beneath me. I shot and killed three others in a Northeast warehouse not long after that. But they all had it coming. They were trying to kill me.

Dr. O’Leary picked up a book that was sitting on her desk and let Lucas see its cover. It was the popular, recently published memoir written by Chris Kyle, a celebrated Navy SEAL sniper who had served in Iraq. “Have you read this?”

Lucas shook his head. “Not yet. I know of it.”

“It was given to me by a client. I saw the author interviewed on Bill O’Reilly’s show.”

“I met Chris Kyle when he was shooting in Fallujah.”

“Apparently he had one hundred and fifty confirmed kills.”

“Those are the confirmed. There were probably more.”

“On O’Reilly he claimed to have no remorse for the lives he took, including women. Do you find that odd?”

“Not particularly. Kyle took out one hundred and fifty enemy combatants who would have killed countless American marines and soldiers if they had the chance. That Texan saved a lot of lives.”

“By taking lives.”

“Yes.” Lucas gripped the arm of his chair.

“Spero, are you all right?”

I’m fine.

“Why?”

“You seem disturbed.”

“Not at all, ma’am.”

Olivia O’Leary cleared her throat. “You should make an appointment and come in.”

“I’m straight. Anyway, I’m not exactly the type who, you know, sits in a room and discusses his feelings.”

“Doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you if you do. It’s always beneficial to talk to someone.”

A brief silence settled between them.

“You’re a good person, Olivia.”

“I think you are, too.”

Lucas pushed himself up from his chair and stood to his height. “Take care, Doc.”

“You take care.”

On the way out of the building, Lucas passed a woman, early in her middle age, seated in a chair outside a room with a closed door. She had a towel wrapped around one bloodless hand and it was pressed against her face. Her eyes were pink and swollen, and there were mascara tracks on her cheeks. He had heard her deep sobs from far down the hall. He guessed she had been crying for some time. He had seen her kind here before. Another war-fucked soldier’s mom.

Walking on, he thought of the woman he was about to meet for drinks. Sex took his mind off the stink of death.