The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,113
family, Vick.”
“He says ‘don’t come near my house.’ That takes some nerve. The guy who can’t keep his nose out of other people’s business, he doesn’t like me around his house. The guy who’s taking food out of my family’s mouth.”
“I’m eating dinner now.”
“His lordship is eating dinner now. That’s going to get Little Lord Fauntleroy off the hook. You deliver that car. You deliver it by this time tomorrow. I’ll light you up, man. I’ll pull your insides out with a pair of pliers.”
“Stay away from us, you sick bastard.”
I hung up, then stared at the phone as though it were alive. I took the receiver off the hook and put a pillow over it so I wouldn’t have to listen to the buzzing sound filling the house.
I KNEW WHERE MY father would go when he returned from Walgreens with my mother. I asked if I could go with him.
“I never thought you were keen on the icehouse,” he said. “Thirsty for a Grapette?”
“Yes, sir. I’d like to talk with you about a concern of mine also.”
“What would that be?”
“Sleepwalking and such.”
“Your mother said you had a snootful last night.”
“Better wait till we’re at the icehouse, Daddy.”
We walked the three blocks to his hangout and sat at an outdoor plank table under a striped canopy riffling in the breeze. It was dusk. The sky was speckled with birds slowly descending into the trees that shaded most of the neighborhood.
“Three guys threatened me in an alley up in the Heights,” I said. “One wanted to cut me with a razor. Loren Nichols bailed me out.”
His face never changed expression, but his eyes did. “Who was going to cut you with a razor?”
“I don’t know his name. Bud Winslow was with them. He was a linebacker who used to run interference for Grady Harrelson.”
The waiter brought my father a Jax and a glass and a salt shaker on a tray and set them down one by one in front of him. Then he served me a Grapette and went away. My father’s eyes never left my face. “Go on,” he said.
“I think I might have gone to Winslow’s house in Bellaire last night.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Winslow came to the station today with Cisco Napolitano and said he saw me get out of my heap in front of his house.”
“You have no memory of that?”
“No, sir.” I paused. “I had a shank.”
“A what?”
“A stiletto.”
He was still, not a hair moving on his head, even though the canopy was flapping. “I think a predictable phenomenon is occurring in your life, Aaron. It’s the nature of evil.”
“The knife?”
“No. Evil is like a flame that has no substance of its own on which to feed. It needs to take up residence within us. You imagine yourself committing acts that are in reality the deeds of others.”
“But what if I harmed someone?”
“You didn’t. You never have. And you won’t, at least not deliberately.”
“Vick Atlas called.”
“I don’t want to hear about it. These people don’t exist. If they come around, we’ll have to make a choice.”
“Sir?” I said.
“Maybe it won’t come to that. You know what we need? A slice of that Hempstead watermelon at the stand on Westheimer.”
He put seventy-five cents on the table to cover the beer and the soft drink and the tip for the waiter. I had never seen my father walk away from a glass or bottle that contained alcohol.
Chapter
28
THE NEXT MORNING Saber moved back into his house. I was surprised. I had thought Mr. Bledsoe was an unforgiving and angry man. He was probably like most people, better than we think they are. It probably took a lot of courage for him to humble himself and go to work as a Jolly Jack ice cream cart driver, on a route in his own neighborhood, where people concluded he had been fired from his job at the rendering plant for drinking, which wasn’t true. Anyway, the Sabe motored into my driveway and parked under the porte cochere and announced he was through with Manny and Cholo and boosting cars and dropping goofballs and smoking Mexican laughing grass. I wasn’t quite sure Manny and Cholo were through with him, and I knew Grady Harrelson and Vick Atlas weren’t.
Saber’s return home presented another problem, too. Our enemies knew where he was.
“Where’d you get the mouse?” I asked.
The bruise was dark blue and purple, in the corner of his eye. “I had to straighten out Cholo.” He grinned, knowing how absurd he sounded.