Moondogs - Alexander Yates [155]
Three days of that is plenty. Reynato slips out of bed during the midday shift change, careful not to rip the stitches keeping his shoulder closed. He cradles his arm in a pillowcase sling and walks barefoot, duckfooted, out the door. The young police lieutenant posted to his room gawks at his open-backed gown and bare ass before running to catch up. He asks Reynato what he needs, and Reynato thinks for a bit before saying: “Pants.”
The lieutenant’s full dress uniform fits Reynato pretty well, just a little tight in the gut and chest. Even though he’s eager to get out of the hospital, he goes down the hall for a quick check on fast-fading Howard. Seeing that he isn’t dead yet, Reynato chokes up. This goes over well with Howard’s tanned manchild of a son, who looks moved and gives overstudied thanks. Returning to the hall, Reynato avoids the near-nude lieutenant getting ribbed by a superior. He rushes to the elevator and heads down to the basement for a parting visit with Elvis and Lorenzo. They’re laid out on cold metal tables, stacked alongside all the other corpses recovered from Corregidor.
Four days into it and the medical examiner is still pulling bullets out of them. Reynato’s friends lie closest to the door, each bedecked with ribbons, posthumous presidential medals in the nooks between collarbones. Lorenzo came out worse and looks it. His belly unbuttoned, he’d screamed for minutes while his stomach spilled into sand, flowing down toward blue-white waves in red-and-yellow rivulets. His teeth black with ash stains, his jaw locked wide, his chin still scarred from when Efrem hit him with the telephone. Beside him Elvis looks peaceful, more put-together on the table than he’d ever been alive. He must have changed back into a man as he died. The baffled examiner explains that there’s not a scratch on him, but there are two BMG slugs in his neck, beneath the smooth skin. Reynato lingers by their bodies. He clutches their hands, but their hands feel gross, so he stops.
Reynato turns to the six terrorists on the other side of the room, naked and washed out under cool fluorescent light. He examines the faces of those who’ve still got them; the callused palms of those who don’t, hoping there’s been some mistake. Hoping they really did find Efrem’s body, that it’s just been misidentified. He can tell the leader by his white beard and stump, but the others are indistinguishable. One near the wall has some potential. Two holes in the upper back that come out just above the heart—more or less where Reynato remembers shooting Efrem. Height and weight seem about right, but it’s hard to be sure. Seawater has sucked away his color and left the flesh puffy. His face is a mess from where it got propeller chopped during recovery. It could be Efrem or just a similarly built Moro.
“These the only bodies?” Reynato asks. “Should be four more. Or five.”
The examiner does not look up from his scalpel work on Elvis’s neck. “High tide carried most out to sea,” he mumbles. “Ash in the shallows makes them hard to spot. But crews are still out looking today.”
Reynato nods, slowly. “Call me if more come in.”
HE RETURNS TO HIS HOME in Magallanes Village that afternoon, where his wife and daughter give him affectionate but concerned hell. They start together but Lorna is louder. “My Lord. My Jesus. My God. Walking out of the hospital? Just walking out? I’m surprised you dared come back! This will be the good news …” she gestures to his wounded shoulder without touching it. “Did poor Beatrice fly home, did she give up her internship, her sublet, her