Coronado - Dennis Lehane [7]
Elgin handed the briefs to Blue as he joined them at the folding table. For a while, none of them said anything. They picked clothes from the large pile and folded, and the only sound was Jewel whistling.
Then Jewel laughed.
“What?” Blue said.
“Aw, nothing.” She shook her head. “Seems like we’re just one happy family here, though, don’t it?”
Blue looked stunned. He looked at Elgin. He looked at Jewel. He looked at the pair of small, light-blue socks he held in his hands, the monogram JL stitched in the cotton. He looked at Jewel again.
“Yeah,” he said eventually, and Elgin heard a tremor in his voice he’d never heard before. “Yeah, it does.”
Elgin looked up at one of the upper dryer doors. It had swung out at eye level when the dryer had been emptied. The center of the door was a circle of glass, and Elgin could see Main Street reflected in it, the white posts that supported the wood awning over the Five & Dime, Perkin Lut walking in circles, his head down, the heat shimmering in waves up and down Main.
THE DOG WAS green.
Blue had used some of the money Big Bobby’d paid him over the past few weeks to upgrade his target scope. The new scope was huge, twice the width of the rifle barrel, and because the days were getting shorter, it was outfitted with a light-amplification device. Elgin had used similar scopes in the jungle, and he’d never liked them, even when they’d saved his life and those of his platoon, picked up Charlie coming through the dense flora like icy gray ghosts. Night scopes—or LADs as they’d called them over there—were just plain unnatural, and Elgin always felt like he was looking through a telescope from the bottom of a lake. He had no idea where Blue would have gotten one, but hunters in Eden had been showing up with all sorts of weird marine or army surplus shit these last few years; Elgin had even heard of a hunting party using grenades to scare up fish—blowing ’em up into the boat already half cooked, all you had to do was scale ’em.
The dog was green, the highway was beige, the top of the tree line was yellow, and the trunks were the color of army fatigues.
Blue said, “What you think?”
They were up in the tree house Blue’d built. Nice wood, two lawn chairs, a tarp hanging from the branch overhead, a cooler filled with Coors. Blue’d built a railing across the front, perfect for resting your elbows when you took aim. Along the tree trunk, he’d mounted a huge klieg light plugged to a portable generator, because while it was illegal to “shine” deer, nobody’d ever said anything about shining wild dogs. Blue was definitely home.
Elgin shrugged. Just like in the jungle, he wasn’t sure he was meant to see the world this way—faded to the shades and textures of old photographs. The dog too seemed to sense that it had stepped out of time somehow, into this seaweed circle punched through the landscape. It sniffed the air with a misshapen snout, but the rest of its body was tensed into one tight muscle, leaning forward as if it smelled prey.
Blue said, “You wanna do it?”
The stock felt hard against Elgin’s shoulder. The trigger, curled under his index finger, was cold and thick, something about it that itched his finger and the back of his head simultaneously, a voice back there with the itch in his head saying, “Fire.”
What you could never talk about down at the bar to people who hadn’t been there, to people who wanted to know, was what it had been like firing on human beings, on those icy gray ghosts in the dark jungle. Elgin had been in fourteen battles over the course of his twelve-month tour, and he couldn’t say with certainty that he’d ever killed anyone. He’d shot some of those shapes, seen them go down, but never the blood, never their eyes when the bullets hit. It had all been a cluster-fuck of swift and sudden noise and color, an explosion of white lights and