The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,63
the detective examine my shoes. He said there wasn’t any paint on them. The detective rubbed paint on them at Krauser’s house.”
“It doesn’t matter. If they cain’t get us one way, they’ll get us another. Nothing has changed.” He pulled the envelope from his back pocket and handed it to me. The flap was glued down. “Open it in the house.”
“What’s in it?”
“Eight hundred spendolies.”
“How much?”
“For your bail and for your car getting pissed in and for any legal fees your dad had to pay. If you need more, I got it.”
“Where’d this come from?”
“Midnight auto supply. Houston is lighter one pink Caddy convertible, formerly owned by Grady Harrelson.”
“That’s what Vick Atlas said. I thought he was crazy. You boosted Grady’s car?”
“The Mexican guys from the jail gave me a little help. A police chief in Nuevo León loves his new car.”
“I can’t believe you’ve done this. How much did you get for it?”
“Not a lot. It was a three-way split, and we had to pay off some guys at the border. So we pooled resources and made another business connection. This one was a real score. My cut was twenty-eight hundred.”
“Doing what?” I said, my heart tripping.
“Transporting a little laughing grass and a shitload of yellow jackets and redwings across the Rio Grande.”
I put the envelope back in his hand. “I don’t want to hear this, Saber. Leave the money in a church. Throw it out the window in the Fifth Ward. Don’t bring it here.”
“That’s the way you feel?” he said.
“In spades.”
He took the gum out of his mouth and tossed it into my mother’s hydrangea bed. “What are we supposed to do? Keep squatting down for our daily nose lube?”
“Stay away from those Mexican guys.”
“Manny and Cholo are my friends. They were both in Gatesville. Manny did a one-bit in Huntsville. They don’t take shit off anybody.”
“Listen to yourself,” I said.
“Take the money.”
“Not on your life.”
He got into his car and shut the door, then fired up the engine, revving it, filling the porte cochere with oil smoke. I walked around to his window. His shoulder was pointed into the door, the way teenage hoods drove. He looked up into my face, his T-shirt rolled into his armpits, an unlit cigarette hanging off his lip, the carefree Saber of old.
“Grady Harrelson told me Vick Atlas made a threat about chain-dragging the pair of us,” I said. “When I saw him in Galveston, he hung a chain out of his car window and said, ‘Meet your future, asshole.’ ”
“And I’m the guy whose life is screwed up? That’s a howl.”
He backed into the street and drove away, his stolen loudspeakers blasting out Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.”
I WENT TO POLICE headquarters downtown and asked to speak with Detective Merton Jenks.
The officer at the reception desk didn’t look up. “He’s at lunch.”
“It’s eleven o’clock.”
“He eats five times a day.”
“What time will he be back?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Where does he eat lunch?”
The officer looked up. “Two blocks down the street. It’s the place with the gurney and the stomach pump by the door.”
I thought he was kidding until I got to a poolroom with a lunch counter and saw Jenks through the window. There was also a wood booth where customers could cash welfare checks and process bail bonds. Jenks sat hunched over a meatball sandwich and a bowl of pinto beans he was eating with a spoon. I had to go to the restroom badly. I walked the length of the poolroom through smoke that was as thick and toxic as cotton poison, and used the toilet and washed my hands and dried them on my pants. Then I waited for somebody to push open the door so I wouldn’t have to touch the knob. I went out and sat down next to Jenks without being invited. “Have you seen that washroom?”
“You ought to see the kitchen,” he replied.
“Why do you eat here?”
“The philosophic insight.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “What do you want?”
“You heard about the medical information on Vick Atlas, right?”
“Your old man’s lawyer did a good job on that. So what do you want?”
“My dad found a witness who can prove Saber and I are innocent of the break-in at Mr. Krauser’s house.”
“Correct. You still haven’t told me what you want.”
The last time I had seen him, he had acted in a friendly manner, and I didn’t understand his irritability. I told him that.
“I’m a homicide detective, son,” he said. “I have more on my