Coronado - Dennis Lehane [35]
You say, “Where we going?”
“Take a drive,” your father says with a small shrug, flicks past a cartoon.
“Last time you said that, I got shot twice.”
Your father looks back over his shoulder at you, eyes big and soft like a six-year-old’s. “Wasn’t the car that shot you, was it?”
YOU GO OUT to Gwen’s place, but she isn’t there anymore, a couple of black kids playing in the front yard, black mother coming out on the porch to look at the strange car idling in front of her house.
“You didn’t leave it here?” your father says.
“Not that I recall.”
“Think.”
“I’m thinking.”
“So you didn’t?”
“I told you—not that I recall.”
“So you’re sure.”
“Pretty much.”
“You had a bullet in your head.”
“Two.”
“I thought one glanced off.”
You say, “Two bullets hit your fucking head, old man, you don’t get hung up on the particulars.”
“That how it works?” Your father pulls away from the curb as the woman comes down the steps.
THE FIRST SHOT came through the back window, and Gentleman Pete flinched big-time, jammed the wheel to the right and drove the car straight into the highway exit barrier, air bags exploding, water barrels exploding, something in the back of your head exploding, glass pebbles filling your shirt, Gwen going, “What happened? Jesus. What happened?”
You pulled her with you out the back door—Gwen, your Gwen—and you crossed the exit ramp and ran into the woods and the second shot hit you there but you kept going, not sure how, not sure why, the blood pouring down your face, your head on fire, burning so bright and so hard that not even the rain could cool it off.
“AND YOU DON’T remember nothing else?” your father says. You’ve driven all over town, every street, every dirt road, every hollow there is to stumble across in Stuckley, West Virginia.
“Not till she dropped me off at the hospital.”
“Dumb fucking move if ever there was one.”
“I seem to remember I was puking blood by that point, talking all funny.”
“Oh, you remember that. Sure.”
“You’re telling me, in all this time, you never talked to Gwen?”
“Like I told you three years back, that girl got gone.”
You know Gwen. You love Gwen. This part of it is hard to take. There was Gwen in your car and Gwen in the cornstalks and Gwen in her mother’s bed in the hour just before noon, naked and soft with tremors, and you watched a drop of sweat appear from her hairline and slide down the side of her neck as she snored against your shoulder blade and the top of her foot was pressed under the arch of yours and you watched her sleep, and you were so awake.
“So it’s with her,” you say.
“No,” the old man says, a bit of anger creeping into his puppy-fur voice. “You called me. That night.”
“I did?”
“Shit, boy. You called me from the pay phone outside the hospital.”
“What’d I say?”
“You said, ‘I hid it. It’s safe. No one knows where but me.’”
“Wow,” you say. “I said all that? Then what’d I say?”
The old man shakes his head. “Cops were pulling up by then, calling you motherfucker, telling you to drop the phone. You hung up.”
The old man pulls up outside a low, redbrick building behind a tire dealership on Oak Street. He kills the engine and gets out of the car and you follow. The building is two stories. The businesses facing the street are a bail bondsman, a hardware store, a Chinese take-out place with greasy walls the color of an old dog’s teeth, a hair salon called Girlfriend Hooked Me Up that’s filled with black women. Around the back, past the whitewashed windows of what was once a dry cleaner, is a small black door with the words TRUE-LINE EFFICIENCY EXPERTS CORP. stenciled into the frosted glass.
The old man unlocks the door and leads you into a ten-by-ten room that smells of roast chicken and varnish. He pulls the string of a bare lightbulb and you look around at a floor strewn with envelopes and paper, the only piece of furniture a broken-down desk probably left behind by the previous tenant.
Your father crab-walks across the floor, picking up the envelopes that have come through the mail slot, kicking his way through the paper. You pick