The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,31
color and the roughest white kids in town did; and throwing the Houston Chronicle. For anyone else, a paper route was just a paper route. For Saber, it was similar to Charlemagne fighting his way up the canyons of Roncevaux Pass. After he rolled 115 newspapers with string, he packed them like artillery rounds into the passenger and backseat of his heap, and set out on the route, heaving a paper over the roof through a sprinkler onto a porch, when he easily could have dropped it onto a dry spot on the walk; smacking a leashed bulldog that attacked him while he was collecting; nailing a flowerpot of someone who was in arrears; parking just long enough to run through an entire apartment building with his canvas bag on his shoulder, stomping up and down the stairways, dropping papers in front of doorways, crashing out the back door like a deep-sea diver emerging into light.
He drank a cup of coffee on the back steps and watched me fill the bowls of all my animals. “Things all right with you and Valerie?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t they be?”
“Because you always busy yourself with your cats and Major when you got something on your mind.”
“Pets can’t fill their own bowls, so give it a break.”
“Krauser is dogging me,” he said.
“Stop it,” I said.
“I saw him in my rearview mirror last night. I saw him this morning, too.”
“It’s coincidence. He lives a few blocks from your house.”
“More like a half mile. I saw his car at the Pink Elephant.”
“Saber, I don’t want to hear this. What were you doing there, anyway?”
“Surveilling Asshole. Jimmy McDougal was sitting in his car. Then Asshole came out of the club and drove away. Remember Jimmy? Two quarts down the day he was born? Why’s Krauser taking him to a dump like the Pink Elephant?”
“It’s not our business.”
“It is when he’s following us around,” Saber said.
“Are you sure about all this?”
“You think I want to believe somebody is copping that poor kid’s joint?”
“You really know how to say it, Saber.”
He looked at the animals eating from their bowls. “I’m thinking about joining the marines.”
“You’re just seventeen.”
“I can forge the old man’s signature. I’ll be at Parris Island before he can do anything about it.”
“Stop talking crazy.”
“Every day we seem to get deeper in a hole. It’s busting us up.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” he said.
“Don’t talk like that. We’ve always been buds. I won’t ever let you down.”
“You told me to beat it because you wanted to get in the sack with a girl. I don’t hold it against you, but it doesn’t make me feel too good, either.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“Yeah, you were. You thought me right out of the picture,” he said.
“Valerie and I are both sorry.”
“She’s sorry? What the hell does she have to be sorry about?”
“She’s got feelings. She’s got a conscience. You don’t know her.”
“She was Grady Harrelson’s girlfriend. She didn’t know he was a dickhead? Why’d they break up? She just discovered out of nowhere what kind of guy he is? ‘Oh, hey, Grady, a flashbulb just went off in my head. You’re a prick. Here’s your class ring.’ ”
“I never asked her.”
“I bet there’s a lot you didn’t ask her.”
“Say that again?”
“Did she get it on with Harrelson before she got it on with you? Were there other guys before him?”
“You can’t talk about her like that.”
“Why are you letting these people hurt us, Aaron?”
There were tears in his eyes. I tried to catch him in the porte cochere, but he fired up his Chevy and peeled rubber down the street, an acrid black cloud blooming from his pipes.
Chapter
8
NO MATTER WHICH way I turned, I saw only darkness. A Mexican girl was dead, and her death may have been related to me. My girlfriend’s father was threatening to kill a man and telling me about it in advance. Saber believed Mr. Krauser was part of a conspiracy involving homosexuality or pedophilia, and that he was following us around. Worse, Saber had made me doubt the nature of Valerie’s relationship with Grady Harrelson. She was too intelligent not to have realized the kind of guy he was. Why did she let him take her virginity? Or had someone else already done that?
I could not rid myself of the image of Grady and Valerie entwined naked in each other’s arms. I called her house, but no one answered. Didn’t she remember it was my day off? We had talked about cane-pole fishing off the jetties in Galveston.