The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,104

a volunteer fire department and a general store. At night you could see wisps of chemical smoke that hung like wraiths above the electric brilliance of the oil refineries in Texas City. Jenks lived in a decaying biscuit-colored bungalow with ventilated storm shutters on the windows, a tire swing suspended from a pecan tree in the front yard. The pillars on the porch were wound with Fourth of July bunting, the path to the front steps lined with rosebushes.

The inside door was open, the screen unlatched. I tapped on the jamb. Jenks came to the door in his socks, a newspaper in his hand, glasses on his nose. “How’d you know where I live?”

“I think you told me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Can I have a few minutes?”

He pushed the screen open and went back into the living room. There was a flintlock rifle over the mantel, a framed array of medals on another wall, a rack of magazines and paperback books by an upholstered couch. On the coffee table was a bouquet of flowers wrapped with blue and silver foil. I didn’t see or hear anyone else in the house; there was no sign of a woman’s presence.

“You’ve been pretty busy,” he said, indicating the flowers.

“Sir?”

“Look at the card.”

I picked it up from the pot.

“Read it aloud,” he said.

“ ‘Merton, you’re probably a dick on several levels, but I’ve known worse. Call me if you need your battery charged. I’ve always been a sucker for losers.’ ” I put the card back on the flowers. “Pretty poetic.”

“You told Cisco I was sick?” he said.

“Yes, sir, I passed on my impressions.”

“I love the way you put things.”

“She said you did her dirty.”

“You came here to tell me that?”

“No, sir, I don’t believe you’d do her dirty.”

He sat in a stuffed chair and put his feet on a cloth-covered stool. “Sit down.”

I sat on the couch. He took a fresh pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and looked through the window at a bird on the porch rail. He seemed to forget I was in the room.

“I got something weighing on my mind,” I said. “I can’t take it to anybody else, at least not anybody who’d understand.”

His eyes refound me in the gloom. “Maybe you should talk to a preacher.”

“Most of them aren’t built for serious problems.”

“I never thought about it like that.” He pulled the red strip off the cellophane on his cigarettes.

“You’re going to smoke those?” I said.

“When you’re on third base, you don’t tend to worry about a cigarette or two.” His face held no emotion, neither fear nor animus nor pity nor regret. After he lit the cigarette, he gazed at me through the smoke.

“I have dreams,” I said. “In one of them I see Mr. Harrelson dying by his swimming pool. In the dream I have a forty-five in my hand. You told me you could smell a killer and I wasn’t one.”

“You think you killed Mr. Harrelson?”

“Not me. Maybe another me, one that I don’t let come out except in my dreams.”

“That crap belongs in motion pictures.”

“That’s the kind of thing ignorant people say. You’re not ignorant.”

I waited for him to get mad. But he didn’t. He drew in on his cigarette, the ash reddening. “What else did you want to know?”

“Loren Nichols says Vick Atlas’s father might put a bomb in our family car.”

“He told you that, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you want to know if Jaime Atlas is that vicious or crazy?” I nodded. He stared into space. “You want something to eat or a cup of coffee?”

“No, sir, I want you to tell me the truth.”

“Jaime Atlas was an enforcer for the Mob in Chicago and New York. He crushed a man’s head in a vise. He used a blowtorch on others. He’d start with the armpits and work down to the genitalia.”

I could feel my eyes shining, the room going out of shape.

“You okay?” Detective Jenks said.

“Yes, sir, I think so.”

“No, you’re not. Pure evil has come into your life through no fault of your own. That’s how people are destroyed. They blame themselves as though somehow they deserve what’s happening to them.”

“What can I do?”

“Not a thing. You wanted the truth. That’s the truth.”

He coughed into his hand as though a piece of glass were caught in his lungs. He put out his cigarette in an ashtray and rubbed his hand on his knee. I felt helpless, floating away. Supposedly the courts, the police and sheriff’s departments, the prosecutors, the FBI, the parole system,