Coronado - Dennis Lehane [32]
Rory stole some guy’s Zoom LeBrons one night while everyone was goofing in the hydrant spray. When the guy asked around, one of Rory’s girlfriends, Lorraine, told the guy it was Rory. Lorraine hated Rory because he’d saddled her with a baby who shit and cried all night and kept her from her friends. So the guy kicked Rory’s ass and took his LeBrons back, and one night Rory and his buddy Pearl took Lorraine up to Pope’s Hill and caved in her head with a tree branch. Once she was dead, they did some other things too so the police would think it was some psycho and not a neighborhood thing.
Rory told some friends, though; said it was like fucking a fish on ice. And Sylvester heard about it. Sylvester was Lorraine’s half brother on the father’s side, and one night he and a carload of boys came cruising for Rory.
It was summer and she was sitting on her stoop waiting for KL. Her father was inside snoozing, and her sister, Sonya, was sitting on the big blue mailbox at the head of the alley, saying she was going to tell their father she was seeing KL again, catch her another beating. Sonya was singing it: “I’m a tell Dad-ee / You and KL getting bump-ee.”
Then Rory came out of his house and she saw the car come up the street with the windows rolling down and the muzzles sticking out and she began to step off the stoop when the noise started and Sonya floated for a second, as if the breeze had puckered up and kissed her. She floated up off the mailbox and then she flipped sideways and hit a trash can a few feet back in the alley.
Rory danced against the wall of the Korean deli, parts of him popping, his arms flapping like a stork’s.
When she reached Sonya, her sister was covering her kneecaps with her palms. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes and held her shoulders until her teeth stopped chattering, until the tiny whistle-noise coming from her chest stopped all at once, just whistled back into itself and went to sleep.
KL CALLS THEM mushrooms. It’s like that old Centipedes game, KL says, where you have to shoot the centipede but those mushrooms keep falling, getting in the way.
Sometimes, KL says, you’re aiming for the centipede, but you hit the mushroom.
KL FOUND OUT the Whitehall crew from Franklin Park was looking for Sylvester because he owed them big and hadn’t been making payments. When KL told them he knew firsthand that Sylvester had been borrowing elsewhere, Whitehall agreed to his offer. Just do it out of state, they told him. Too many people hoping to tie us to shit.
So KL waited until October and they ended up driving to Hampton Beach with Sylvester, kept going even after she realized she’d forgotten the bullets. Sylvester, leaning his head against the window, so stupid he doesn’t even know KL’s girlfriend is the sister of the girl on the mailbox. So stupid he thinks KL’s suddenly his best friend, taking him out for a Sunday drive. So stupid.
Period.
ON THE BEACH, she asks KL if he looked into Sylvester’s eyes before he made him kneel in the ocean, if maybe he saw anything there.
“Come on,” KL says, “just, fuck, shut up, you know?”
SHE’S BEEN OUT to the ocean once before. Not long after KL got back from Afghanistan and she met up with him, he scored off this cop who’d been part of the Lafayette Raiders bust. This cop had known someone who’d served over there with KL, someone who hadn’t made it back, and he sold the shit to KL for 40 percent of the street value, called it his “yellow ribbon” price, supporting the troops and shit. KL turned that package over in one night, and the next day they took the ferry to Provincetown.
They walked the dunes and they felt like silk underfoot, large spilling drifts of white silk. They ate lobster and watched the sky darken and become striped with pale pink ribbons. On the ferry back, she could smell the sun in KL’s fingers as they played with her hair. She could smell the dunes