Coronado - Dennis Lehane [11]
He could feel the eyes of the whole place on them as they ate.
“See where he hit me?” Jewel tilted her head, tucked her beautiful red hair back behind her ear. The mark on her cheekbone, in the shape of a small rain puddle, was faded yellow now, its edges roped by a sallow beige.
Elgin nodded.
“Still can’t believe the son of a bitch hit me,” she said, but there was no rage in her voice anymore, just a mild sense of drama, as if she’d pushed the words out of her mouth the way she believed she should say them. But the emotion she must have felt when Perkin’s hand hit her face, when she fell to the floor in front of people she’d known all her life—that seemed to have faded with the mark on her cheekbone.
“Perkin Lut,” she said with a snort, then laughed.
Elgin looked at Blue. He’d never seemed so…fluid in all the time Elgin had known him. The way he cut into his pancakes, swept them off his plate with a smooth dip of the fork tines; the swift dab of the napkin against his lips after every bite; the attentive swivel of his head whenever Jewel spoke, usually in tandem with the lifting of his coffee mug to his mouth.
This was not a Blue Elgin recognized. Except when he was handling weapons, Blue moved in jerks and spasms. Tremors rippled through his limbs and caused his fingers to drop things, his elbows and knees to move too fast, crack against solid objects. Blue’s blood seemed to move too quickly through his veins, made his muscles obey his brain after a quarter-second delay and then too rapidly, as if to catch up on lost time.
But now he moved in concert, like an athlete or a jungle cat.
That’s what you do to men, Jewel: You give them a confidence so total it finds their limbs.
“Perkin,” Blue said, and rolled his eyes at Jewel and they both laughed.
She not as hard as he did, though.
Elgin could see the root of doubt in her eyes, could feel her loneliness in the way she fiddled with the menu, touched her cheekbone, spoke too loudly, as if she wasn’t just telling Elgin and Blue how Perkin had mistreated her, but the whole IHOP as well, so people could get it straight that she wasn’t the villain, and if after she returned to Perkin she had to leave him again, they’d know why.
Of course she was going back to Perkin.
Elgin could tell by the glances she gave Blue—unsure, slightly embarrassed, maybe a bit repulsed. What had begun as a nighttime ride into the unknown had turned cold and stale during the hard yellow lurch into morning.
Blue wiped his mouth, said, “Be right back,” and walked to the bathroom with surer strides than Elgin had ever seen on the man.
Elgin looked at Jewel.
She gripped the handle of her coffee cup between the tips of her thumb and index finger and turned the cup in slow revolutions around the saucer, made a soft scraping noise that climbed up Elgin’s spine like a termite trapped under the skin.
“You ain’t sleeping with him, are you?” Elgin said quietly.
Jewel’s head jerked up and she looked over her shoulder, then back at Elgin. “What? God, no. We’re just…He’s my pal. That’s all. Like when we were kids.”
“We ain’t kids.”
“I know. Don’t you think I know?” She fingered the coffee cup again. “I miss you,” she said softly. “I miss you. When you coming back?”
Elgin kept his voice low. “Me and Shelley, we’re getting pretty serious.”
She gave him a small smile that he instantly hated. It seemed to know him; it seemed like everything he was and everything he wasn’t was caught in the curl of her lips. “You miss the lake, Elgin. Don’t lie.”
He shrugged.
“You ain’t ever going to marry Shelley Briggs, have babies, be an upstanding citizen.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because you got too many demons in you, boy. And they need me. They need the lake. They need to cry out every now and then.