House Revenge by Mike Lawson Read Free Book Online Page A

marines. The thing Mahoney remembered from that conversation was that Sims said he’d been injured in his right leg. Well, Mahoney had also been injured in the right leg. His right knee had been shredded by a Vietcong grenade, and on cold days, and on days when he was on his feet too much, his knee ached liked a bastard. Mahoney remembered Sims saying it was the same with him, how, for whatever reason, his leg also bothered him when the temperature dropped. Fourteen years then passed without Mahoney giving much thought at all to Sims’s military record, although one year, when Mahoney went to Alabama to stump for Sims, Mahoney praised Sims for his service to his country—and the blood he’d shed in Lebanon.
    But then, just a week ago, Mahoney and Sims happened to be seated at the same table at a fund-raiser for men and women who’d been severely injured in Afghanistan and Iraq—men and women missing legs and arms and eyes, men and women whose brains had been so badly damaged from the concussion of IEDs that they were but shells of their former selves. Being among these veterans who’d sacrificed so much, John Mahoney’s eyes had welled up with tears more than once.
    At that dinner, one young man—a young man using two high-tech prosthetic hands to hold his knife and fork—asked Congressmen Mahoney and Sims about their military service. Both politicians, being in the company of people who’d suffered so much worse than them, didn’t say much and played down what they’d done. Sims told about being in Beirut when the marine barracks was demolished and said, “I can’t believe to this day how lucky I was, with all the debris flying, that I was only hit in the leg.” Then he slapped his thigh and said, “This baby still aches once in a while, but I’m not about to sit here with a guy like you and whine about it.”
    The problem was, he slapped his left thigh.
    One thing Mahoney knew for sure is that you didn’t forget which leg was injured in a combat-related injury, even thirty-plus years after the fact. And not when the injury was caused by a piece of glass that Sims had described as looking “like a dagger.” Mahoney was appalled at the thought that Sims might be lying about a Purple Heart. He suspected that Sims—when he was just starting out his political career—had felt the need to embellish his military record and gave himself a medal he hadn’t earned.
    But Mahoney had a dilemma. In fact, he had two. First, he didn’t really know if Sims had lied about the Purple Heart. Although it seemed unlikely, maybe Sims had just slapped the wrong leg by mistake. The bigger dilemma was that Mahoney didn’t know what he was going to do if Sims had lied. If Sims had been a Republican and Mahoney knew that he’d lied about a Purple Heart, Mahoney would have pounced like a puma, ripped Sims to shreds, and raised enough hell that Sims would have been forced to resign. But Sims was not only a Democrat; he was the only Democratic congressman from Alabama and holding on to his district by the skin of his teeth. The last thing Mahoney wanted was another Republican in the House. At the same time, he couldn’t bear the idea of serving with a politician who’d lied about a medal he hadn’t earned. John Mahoney had many faults but when it came to the military and veterans, he was above reproach. It was the only area, as far as DeMarco could tell, where he was above reproach.
    So Mahoney had told DeMarco he wanted to know the truth about Sims’s supposed Purple Heart. He didn’t, however, want DeMarco to contact the Pentagon directly or officially. Mahoney was afraid if an official inquiry was made, the media would learn about Sims’s deceit and then Sims’s fate would be out of Mahoney’s hands. If Sims had lied about the Purple Heart, Mahoney would punish the man; he just wasn’t sure what the