The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,128

said.

He was wearing jeans and sandals and a golf shirt with an alligator on the pocket. A thick strand of hair hung across one eye. Somehow Grady always struck a pose that seemed to capture our times—petulant, self-indulgent, glamorous in a casual way, and dangerous, with no self-knowledge. “I’ve got a duck camp south of Beaumont. Why don’t y’all get out of town for a while? Let all this stuff blow over.”

“What stuff?” I said.

He turned around and gazed at the sky. “It looks like the clouds are burning, doesn’t it?”

“What’s bothering you, Grady?” I said.

“Things got out of control. It happens. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t want y’all hurt.”

“Then stop acting like an idiot,” Valerie said. “Are you here about those Sicilian murderers?”

The blood drained from his cheeks. “You’ve seen them? They’re here?”

“Did Vick send them or did his old man?” I said.

He stepped backward and didn’t answer.

“Did Vick send them?” I repeated.

“Vick doesn’t confide in me. Talking to y’all is a waste of time. I wish I’d never seen you, Broussard.”

“I never wronged you, Grady,” I said. “I always felt sorry for you.”

“You feel sorry for me?” he said. “Where do you get off with that?”

“Thanks for coming by,” I said.

His face was like a wounded child’s. His gaze shifted to the front of the green building. “I didn’t know you were with him.”

I turned around. Loren was walking toward us.

“Go home, Grady,” Valerie said. “Now.”

“Tell Broussard to go home,” he said. “You were my girl till he messed us up.”

Loren’s stride was eating up the distance between him and us. Grady stepped backward again. Loren pointed his finger at him and said, “You!”

“Go on,” Valerie said to Grady, almost whispering. “I’ll talk to him.”

“No, you won’t,” Grady said. He stepped away from us, his hands hanging at his sides. He swallowed.

“What are you doing here?” Loren asked.

“Talking to my friends,” Grady replied.

“This is our place,” Loren said.

“What do you mean, your place?”

“What I said. You don’t have friends here.”

“It’s a free country,” Grady said.

Those were the exact words I had used to Grady when I’d interfered in the argument he was having with Valerie at the drive-in.

“No, it’s not a free country, Harrelson,” Loren said. “You got my cousin Wanda killed, and you got away with it because nobody cares about a Mexican hooker getting her neck broke. You’re a River Oaks punk who couldn’t cut the Corps, so you came back home to Daddy and pretended you were a hard guy by getting it on with a poor girl who went to the ninth grade.”

“I came out here to do a good deed,” Grady said. “I think that was a mistake.”

“You got that right. Go back to your part of town,” Loren said.

“You people are too much,” Grady said.

“ ‘You people’? You want me to put you in your car and show you up for the yellow-bellied douchebag you are?”

“Bugger off. I’m leaving,” Grady said.

“Do what?”

“Ask Valerie to take you to the library. They’ve got a book there called a dictionary. You’ll dig it.”

I could see the confusion in Loren’s face, his powerlessness over a word he hadn’t heard before.

“My father dumped us when I was a kid,” he said. “But if he was around today, I wouldn’t be afraid to play my music in front of him.”

Grady’s hands closed and then opened at his sides. His face was turned slightly to one side, as though he were trying to avoid a hot wind. “What are you talking about?”

“One of your friends was laughing about your old man not letting you play Gatemouth Brown in your house,” Loren said. “Wanda was too good for you. I think that’s why you hurt her. Every time you look in a mirror, it doesn’t matter where you are, you see a punk looking back at you.”

If I ever saw someone’s soul flinch, it was then. Grady’s mouth seemed to collapse and his eyes to lose focus, as though the earth had shifted under his feet. “Yeah?”

“Just blow,” Loren said. “It’s our part of town. Those are the rules, man. You should know. Y’all made them.”

Then Grady did the strangest thing I had ever seen a young guy do in public. He worked his golf shirt off his shoulders and turned around, arching his tanned back at us. VALERIE was tattooed across his shoulder blades, each letter formed by a chain of red hearts. “She’ll always be with me, and there’s nothing you can do about it, Broussard. As for