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When Lucas opened his eyes, he was almost pain-free, though there was an ache in his right shoulder. He was lying on his own bed, in St. Paul. He was warm, safe.
Sweating. He could feel the sweat on his forehead and cheekbones without touching it. He groaned, “Jesus Christ.”
He’d never quite pooh-poohed the idea of post-traumatic stress disorder and the flashbacks that came with it, but somewhere in the back of his hockey defenseman brain, he really thought PTSD mostly applied to guys who weren’t quite tough enough.
He no longer thought that.
—
He lay inbed for a while, angry at himself for the flashback. He should, he believed, be able to get past them, if only he had the willpower. He also knew he was wrong about that, but couldn’t help believing it anyway.
His wife, Weather Karkinnen, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, had gone to work before dawn, as she usually did, leaving behind a stack of pillows that smelled lightly of her overnight lotion, a floral scent, maybe wild roses.
He sighed, rolled over, winced as his weight pressed on his injured shoulder, patted Weather’s pillow for reassurance that everything was okay. With his feet on the floor, he sat checking for chest pain—almost gone, unless he put pressure on his rib cage—and leg pain. A series of X-rays the previous month confirmed that the leg bone had healed, with a slight deformity that the docs said wasn’t important. Lucas wasn’t sure he agreed: it still hurt when he jogged.
In the bathroom, he showered, shaved, and inspected himself in the mirror. He was a tall, square-shouldered man, two inches over six feet, with crystalline blue eyes and dark hair now threaded with gray. The gray was gaining but was not yet dominant.
He could see a fresh puckered scar from a bullet wound outside his right nipple, and another bullet scar in the muscle of his right arm, and a pink, six-inch-long surgical scar up the ball of his right shoulder. He had exit wounds on the back of his arm and on his right shoulder blade, another two bullet scars and a surgical scar on his lower right leg, but couldn’t see those, only feel them.
He looked too thin. Lucas had two basic body styles: the square, two-hundred-pound light heavyweight boxer style, and the thinner, hundred-and-ninety-pound iron-man style. Usually, when he looked thin, he also looked tough, leathery, because he was training hard. Nothing like a fast, hard five miles before breakfast, his thinner self believed.
Now, at a hundred and eighty-five pounds, he looked too thin, and yet, puffy. Too much time on a couch, watching CNN or clicking through the streaming videos, eating Wheat Thins. He enjoyed working out, running hard, sweating hard, and had, all of his life. He hadn’t been able to do either for almost nine months. In late July, with approval from the docs, he’d joined a local gym, started doing some lifting and treadmill work.
It helped, and it hurt.
—
This morning, afterhe’d cleaned up, he dressed in jeans, a University of Minnesota sweatshirt, and cross-training shoes. He ate a bowl of microwave oatmeal with a shot of whey protein, spent an hour reading five online newspapers and checking his stock portfolio on Morningstar. When he finished the last of the papers, he went for a walk to a Target store, as much for human contact as forthe shopping. He carried an old-fashioned wooden-crook cane that he’d bought at a drugstore, just in case.
—
A deputy U.S. Marshal,Lucas had been shot the previous winter, during a chase through a fashionable suburb on Long Island. He couldn’t believe his luck—both the good and the bad.
The shooter had been using solid core military ammunition, probably because his target would be standing behind triple-pane glass, and he’d worried that the instant expansion of hunting or defensive ammunition might deflect after the initial impact on the windows. Whether he was right or wrong about that, he’d efficiently killed the man standing behind the glass.
In the subsequent chase, he’d shot Lucas three times, using an AR-15 equipped with a bump stock, which effectively made it into a fully automatic weapon—a machine gun.
The first shot had hit Lucas’s right arm and gone cleanly through, knocking him down in the process. The docs at the Long Island hospital had told him that when he was hit, he’d probably windmilled his arm backwards to break the fall and protect his head, and the impact with the frozen ground, not the bullet itself, had caused the bone to snap below his shoulder. That break was fixed in an operation that fitted a titanium collar around the bone, the collar held in place with eleven titanium screws.
So, three bullet wounds and a broken arm. Bad luck that he’d been shot at all; good luck that the slugs were solid, and the wounds hadn’t been more serious. If he’d been hit with expanding hunting or defensive rounds, he most likely would have been killed or crippled.
Bad luck again that all three wounds were on the same side of his body. He hadn’t been able to comfortably use crutches on that side, where he most needed the support, and he’d spent three weeks in a wheelchair.
The shooter himself was dead, having been shot by both Lucas and by Lucas’s partner, Virgil Flowers. Virgil had been shot as well, hit in the thigh, but hadn’t been hurt as badly as Lucas.
Good luck again, for them, anyway.
The shooter had killed a right-wing radio talk-show host, and two FBI agents. He’d wounded a third agent, a woman who’d been hit in the stomach, and who’d retired with a permanent disability. That’s what a machine gun will do, when you don’t know it’s coming, and you get too close. Lucas and Virgil had gotten off easy, compared to the others.
Now, in early October, Lucas still hurt, especially at night. He’d had three months of physical therapy following the shooting, but didn’t yet have full range of motion in his right arm, and he’d lost muscle from lack of exercise. The broken arm bone itself was largely healed, though he had continuous, nagging shoulder pain where the surgeons had cut through muscle to fix the bone. He’d played senior hockey for years, but now he couldn’t skate, he had no slap shot.
He had additional significant pain in his upper right rib cage, especially when he lay down and his rib cage flexed. In the days after the gunfight, it had hurt simply to breathe; his breathing was now mostly pain-free, but sleeping wasn’t, nor was anything but the most careful sex.
His lower leg was healed, but still complained when he tried tojog more than a few blocks. He was pushing that, both on the gym’s treadmills and on the street.
Because he couldn’t help himself.
—
