“Yeah,” he told him, “they let me shoot a tommy gun; it was great.” He didn’t tell him about the one he took from Lieutenant Minter when the knee mortar round landed right next to him and blew his legs off. Or that he still had the heavy sonofabitch; it was in the closet of his bedroom at Major Dillon’s house on the beach in Malibu. Eddie and the others wouldn’t have believed that, either.
He ran into Katherine Cohan, too, on the street; and she sort of rubbed against him then…. She wasn’t nearly as pretty as he remembered her. He knew that if he called her up and asked her to go to the movies, she’d probably go. She’d probably also let him a cop a little feel, maybe even a little bare teat; but that would be all she’d let him do. So he didn’t call her up.
And he certainly couldn’t tell anybody about Dawn Morris. Nobody would believe any of that, either how good-looking she was… or that she’d done it with him at least dozen times… or what she’d done to him.
Though it made him feel guilty as shit, the thing he really wanted to do was get the hell away from here and go back to Los Angeles and be alone with Dawn Morris in his bedroom at Major Dillon’s house. He’d even been prepared to lie to his mother and father, to tell them he’d been called back early. That was a really shitty thing to do to your parents, lie to them, when they were so glad to see you. Still, he’d called the airline and asked if he could move his reservation up. But they told him no; the priority he had was for a specific seat on a specific flight; he’d have to get another priority if he wanted to change that.
Even if he wasn’t able to do it, it made him feel shitty that he tried.
Lieutenant Easterbrook looked at his wristwatch. It was time to go home. His father expected to eat ten minutes after he walked in the door, and he’d expect his son to be there, too. If he wasn’t, he’d think he was in jail for drunken driving… after driving the car a hundred miles an hour the wrong way down a one-way street and hitting an ambulance with it.
Easterbrook drained his warm beer.
He picked up the other two empties, left the car, and threw all three as far as he could out in the river. Then he got back in the car, lit a cigarette, and started the engine. He was backing away from the railing when he braked to a stop; he had to fish through his pockets for the package of Sen-Sen. He spilled maybe a third of it into his mouth.
The old man had a nose like a bird dog. If he smelled beer on his breath, there was sure to be a scene about drunken driving when he got home.
[FOUR]
“Edgewater”
Malibu, California
1815 Hours 1 November 1942
With surprising grace, Veronica Wood ran through the sand from the water to the stairs, making Jake wonder again how women did that. Whenever he ran on sand, it was all he could do to keep from falling on his ass.
She came to him and bent over and kissed him. Then she pointed at his scotch. “Get me one of those, will you?” she said.
While he took care of that, she went to the shower on the porch, closed the curtain, and turned the water on. He pushed the button for Alejandro; and when he came, he told him to bring the bottle and some glasses and ice and the siphon bottle.
“No siphon,” Alejandro said.
“You broke it?”
“The things, they are no more,” Alejandro said, holding his thumb and index fingers three inches apart, to mime a CO2 cartridge. “What you call them, ‘cartridges’?”
Do you? Cartridges? Cartridges are something you load in a weapon. I guess you do.
“Don’t we have any bottles of soda?”
“Is same thing?”
“Just about,” Jake said.
“I get,” Alejandro said.
Veronica Wood’s bathing suit came flying over the top of the shower curtain. Jake imagined an entirely pleasant picture of what was behind the curtain.