The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,28
hurricanes. Instead there were purple and crimson and orange clouds in the sky at sunset, and Gulf breezes that smelled of flowers and rain. We ate fried chicken off paper plates at Bill Williams’s drive-in restaurant by Rice University and skated at the roller rink on South Main to organ music under a tent billowing with the cool air blown by huge electric fans. We went swimming once at the Shamrock Hotel, across the street from a cow pasture spiked with oil derricks pumping fortunes into the pockets of men who had eighth-grade educations. Somehow being in love with Valerie made me fall in love with the whole world.
We danced at one of the many nightclubs that served underage kids, and rode the roller coaster on Galveston Beach in spite of the Condemned sign nailed above the ticket window. I felt anointed by Valerie’s presence, and my fear of hoods and greaseballs disappeared, as though the two of us had a passport to go wherever we wanted. A jalopy packed with rough kids drinking quart beer seemed no more than what it was, a car packed with kids who were born less fortunate than I and wanted to pretend for just one night they were happy.
TEN DAYS AFTER I had seen Jenks, I was in the grease pit draining a crank case when I heard a voice I did not ever want to hear again. My ears popped, and I opened and closed my mouth, hoping the wind inside the breezeway had distorted the voice and words I heard.
Walter, the black man who had been wounded and decorated for bravery in Korea, leaned down so he could see me under the car. “A guy here wants to see you, Aaron.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Ask him.”
I climbed out of the pit, wiping my hands on a machinist cloth. A tall kid was framed against the sunlight; he was wearing drapes and suede stomps and a shirt with the collar turned up on the neck, his hair greased and combed in ducktails. He stepped out of the glare into the shade, a toothpick rolling across his teeth. The swelling and discoloration were almost gone from his face, but one eyebrow looked like a broken zipper.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Did you know my cousin Wanda?”
“The girl whose neck was broken? No, why would I know her?”
“You cracking wise?”
“I’ve got a better question for you. You said ‘Go get him, boy’ to Walter?”
“The nigger?”
I threw the machinist rag aside. “He has the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. How would you like to have your face broken again?”
“Just take it easy and hear me out.”
“I’m through with this stuff, Loren.”
“Somebody gave you permission to call me by my first name?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Nichols. I didn’t know you were so important.”
“You better climb down off it, man.”
A skinned-up dirty-vanilla pickup was parked in the shadow of a live oak by the boulevard. The driver was wearing a denim shirt and a baseball cap and looked like a farmworker. He had been among Nichols’s group when they badgered me earlier. For the first time, I noticed the resemblance.
“Is that your brother out there?”
“I’m here about my cousin. The cops aren’t going to lose sleep over a dead Mexican girl. But my brother and me do. I think you know something.”
“You’re asking me about your cousin? I was walking down the street in the Heights on a Sunday morning when you guys decided to mess up my life. I don’t know anything about you or your family, and I don’t want to.”
“You set fire to my car or you didn’t. Which is it?”
“I didn’t do it, and neither did Saber.”
He took the toothpick from his mouth and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “Your family is connected?”
“Connected?”
“I hear your uncle knows people.”
“He’s an oilman and he manages prizefighters. That doesn’t mean he’s a criminal.”
“Yeah, but he knows people. Maybe you know people, too.”
I couldn’t believe his naïveté. In his mind I belonged to a world where the solutions to his troubles were easily available to people who lived in high-income neighborhoods, which I didn’t.
I said, “I don’t think anything I say to you is going to work. I’m sorry I hurt you. You could have snitched me off, but you didn’t. I think that’s stand-up, man.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Grady Harrelson told you to bird-dog me, didn’t he?”
He combed his ducks. “No, motherfucker, he didn’t tell me anything.”
“Then why did you and your brother and hard-guy friends