The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,17

the front of Grady’s house and a party taking place by the swimming pool in the side yard. Saber took a pair of binoculars from the glove box. I could feel my heart thudding against my ribs. He read my mind. “They cain’t see us,” he said. “I’m going to read off these license plate numbers. You write them down.”

“This is nuts.”

“Take off the blinders, Aaron. How do you think these people got their money? Hard work? I bet this place is full of gangsters. How did Grady get discharged from the Marine Corps?”

“Grady Harrelson was in the marines?”

“He enlisted after he graduated. Except, when he was about to be shipped to Korea, he discovered he had asthma. His old man pulled strings. The guy’s not just a tumblebug, he’s yellow.”

“He might be a bad guy, but I don’t think he’s yellow.”

Saber began reading off license numbers, then stopped and took the binoculars from his eyes and wiped the lenses and looked through them again. “I don’t need this.”

“Need what?”

He squeezed his scrotum. “My big boy just woke up with a vengeance. Check it out. You ever see a pair of cantaloupes like that? Those bongos were made in heaven.”

I took the binoculars from him and focused them on the pool. Nine or ten guys Grady’s age were swimming or barbecuing or springing off the board. The obvious center of attention was a black-haired, dark-skinned woman who must have been in her late twenties. She was lying on a recliner, her white swimsuit like wet Kleenex.

“Who is she?” I said.

“Mexico’s answer to Esther Williams.” He pulled the binoculars from my hands and looked through again. “Didn’t I tell you the Harrelsons had ties to Galveston?”

“She’s a pro?”

“No, she’s the kindergarten teacher at St. Anne’s Elementary. Say a prayer of thanks you have me to escort you through these situations. Oh, man, I’m about to shoot my wad. Look at that broad. It’s criminal that a woman can be that beautiful.”

“You know those guys?” I asked.

“It’s his regular crowd. Guys who went to military school because their parents don’t want them. Know what makes them different from us?”

“They’re rich?”

“They don’t have feelings. After we do our recon, I’ll drive you over to Valerie’s. That’s what’s really on your mind, isn’t it?”

“I want to tell her we didn’t have anything to do with burning Loren Nichols’s car.”

“Right, otherwise she’d be heartbroken.”

“Lay off it, Saber.”

But his attention had shifted to a kid who’d climbed up to the high board and was looking straight at us.

“Start the car,” I said.

Saber shook a cigarette out of his pack. “Bad form. There’s a tire iron under your seat. I’d love to bash one of these guys. Maybe sling brains all over the bushes.”

“Are you serious? What’s the matter with you? Start the car.”

“Too late. Don’t rattle. You got to brass it out. Look upon this as an opportunity.”

A sea-green Cadillac with fins bounced out of the entrance to the driveway, and a Buick with a grille like a chromium mouth came up behind us, sealing off the street. We were shark meat. Grady’s friends piled out of the cars. Grady, with the woman behind him, walked through the camellia bushes in his yard and opened the door to a piked fence and stepped out on the swale in his swim trunks and a pair of sandals. He tied a towel around his hair, like a turban, exposing his armpits. He was probably the most handsome young guy I’d ever seen. I could not understand how a kid who had so much could be the bastard he was. He leaned down to see who was in the car. “Bledsoe?”

“The chosen one himself,” Saber said. “How’s it hangin’, Harrelson? Love your pad. I hear you bonked the maid in your atom bomb shelter.”

“I dig your pipes.”

“I always knew you had taste.”

“But why is your shit machine parked in front of my house?”

“We got a situation we thought you could help us with,” Saber replied. “Aaron didn’t mean to cause you any trouble at the drive-in restaurant, but you blamed your breakup with your girlfriend on him because he happened to say hello at the wrong time. That’s definitely uncool. In the meantime, somebody has been trying to kick a telephone pole up our asses.”

“A telephone pole? Man, that’s a sad story.”

“Framing us for a car arson, stoking up some hoods in the Heights, that sort of thing.”

Grady propped his hands on the Chevy’s roof and seemed to reflect