The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,116

don’t appreciate your tone.”

“Do you plan on talking to Vick Atlas or his father?”

“No.”

“Do you care to explain that?”

“No charges have been filed. There won’t be any, either.”

“Why not?”

“Vick Atlas and his father told me it was an argument and a fair fight. For them, it’s over.”

“Do you believe them?” my father asked.

“What I believe is irrelevant. If you want my opinion, the issue is your son.”

“Aaron is the catalyst?” my father said.

“The what?”

“Corruption has a smell. It’s an infection a man carries in his glands.”

The room seemed pressurized. I could see a pencil drawing of a cock and balls on the back of the metal door. Down the corridor, someone was yelling for a roll of toilet paper through the bars of a holding cell.

“I went out to the apartment building myself,” Hopkins said. “I talked to the desk clerk who called in the incident. He saw your boy go out the back door. He also saw him talking to a nigger woman by the garbage cans. Your son was giving her money. Know why he would be doing that just after he beat the hell out of someone?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Maybe they had a previous relationship. Is that a possibility?”

“Would you clarify that, please?” my father said.

“She used to work in a crib.”

“I have a hard time following your implication,” my father said.

“The situation speaks for itself, doesn’t it?” Hopkins said.

“I gave her two dollars because she had no food,” I said to my father.

He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking at Hopkins in a way I had never seen him look at anyone.

“I say something against the grain?” Hopkins asked. There was a smirk at the corner of his mouth.

My father touched me on the arm. “Let’s go, son.”

Don’t let him get away with it, Daddy, I thought.

But he picked up his fedora from the table, and we walked silently side by side down the corridor. I looked over my shoulder. Hopkins was talking to several cops in uniform, his back to us. They were laughing as though listening to a joke. My eyes were shimmering, my heart a lump of ice.

Then my father said, “Stay here, Aaron.”

He walked back down the corridor. I followed him, disregarding his instruction. The attention of the cops in uniform shifted from Hopkins’s story-in-progress to my father. “Forget something?” Hopkins said. One uniformed cop laughed.

“I’ve known every kind of man,” my father said. “Desperate men in transient shelters, convicts in Angola Penitentiary, psychopaths who enjoyed mowing down German farm boys. But there was an explanation for all of these men. You’re of a different stripe, Detective Hopkins. You flaunt your power and gloat at your misuse of it. You see humor in the suffering of others. You have the tongue and the instincts of both the coward and the bully. One day these men will realize that you dishonor everything they stand for. When that day comes, they’ll turn on you. Don’t you dare come near us, and don’t you dare slander my son.”

We walked away, his arm across my shoulder. There was not a sound in the corridor except the man yelling for toilet paper. Then even he was quiet.

Chapter

29

I HAD THE NEXT day off at the filling station. The police department put a guard on our house. Valerie and I drove down to Freeport and waded into the waves and fished with cane poles and bobbers and shrimp for drum and catfish and speckled trout. The wind was up, the waves yellow and cascading with sand, gulls cawing and wheeling overhead. We caught one gaff-top and one stingray and turned them loose and ate po’boy sandwiches in an open-air beer joint on the beach that had slot machines and a jukebox and a shuffleboard inside. It was wonderful to be away from all the problems that awaited us in Houston.

I didn’t want to think about Vick Atlas and what I had done to him. Nor did I wish to think about possible retaliation. I had started to wonder about all the events that had happened as a result of my argument with Grady Harrelson at the Galveston drive-in. I had thought the issue was jealousy. To an extent, it was. But the larger pattern seemed linked to money or power and not the angst of teenage romance.

How about the shooting death of Clint Harrelson? The more I thought about it, the more I felt there were elements in the story that I hadn’t given adequate scrutiny. For example,