The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,89

at the cars passing on either side of the boulevard. He puffed on his cigarette. I wanted to hit him. Instead I took the cigarette from his fingers and mashed it out with my foot and threw it into the oil barrel that served as our trash can.

“There’s another reason I’m here,” he said. “We stripped the Buick before we passed it on to a guy who’s helping the economy in Juárez. That chain with rope loops in it was in the trunk. Manny wondered what it was.”

“I don’t care about Manny. Why are you telling me this?”

“Manny and Cholo don’t know the Buick belongs to Vick Atlas. See, I’m what they call a spotter. I find the kind of car somebody wants. Then we go to work. The situation might get a little touchy if they find out they boosted a set of wheels owned by somebody in the Atlas family.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

He started to take another cigarette out of his pack, then put it back. “Remember when we went fishing in the surf down at Freeport? You were in waves up to your chest and hooked a devil ray that was probably three feet across. You dragged it up on the sand and went right back in. You were never afraid, Aaron. You thought you were. But you weren’t.”

“Walk away from these guys,” I said. “We’ll start over.”

“I owe them money. I paid off the mortgage on our house.”

“How much?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said. “They’re muling Mexican brown from the border to San Antone and Houston.”

“Heroin?”

“I stepped in a pile of shit.”

His eyes glistened. I tried to put my hand on his shoulder, but he stepped away from me, trying to smile, then got into his heap and fired it up. As he bounced into the street, he gave me a thumbs-up. He went through the Stop sign as though it were not there, then floored the accelerator and disappeared into the shadows of the live oaks that arched over the boulevard.

IN THE DARWINIAN world of American high school culture, I had learned only one lesson: The lights of love and pity often died early, and many friendships were based on necessity and emotional dependency and nothing else. I had the feeling that secretly Vick Atlas and Grady Harrelson despised each other, because each saw in the other his loneliness and the abandonment by his father. In the case of Vick and Grady, however, there was another ingredient: their jealousy over the affections of Valerie Epstein.

The following day neither of my parents was home when I got off work. I bathed and put on fresh clothes and tried to think. I had said that my family didn’t lie. That was true most of the time. But in an imperfect world, I figured, there were instances when a lie served virtue better than the truth. I fed Major and Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy, then pulled up a chair to the phone in the hallway and found Vick Atlas’s name in the directory. He answered on the second ring. “Hello!” he barked.

“Hey, Vick. How’s it hanging?” I replied.

“Who’s this?”

“Aaron Holland Broussard.”

There was a pause. “What do you want, wise guy?”

“You stopped those two phony cops from hurting Valerie. I owe you one.”

“You and I aren’t done by a long shot. If you think you can get on my good side, forget it. You’re going to be a long red scrape on the asphalt, Buster Brown.”

“Maybe your father told you that Valerie and I were in his office a couple of days ago.”

“You’re lucky you’re not on a meat hook.”

“Did somebody boost your wheels two nights ago?”

The line went quiet again.

“Did you hear me?” I said.

“Keep talking.”

“I was afraid you’d think it was me and Saber.”

“The thought occurred to me.”

“I know better.”

“How about Spaceman?”

“Saber? The same with him. Would we boost your car and then call you up to tell you we didn’t do it?”

“Then who did? The Montrose district is not the kind of neighborhood where you get your car hot-wired. You got a comment on that, wise guy?”

He had just set a verbal trap. The ignition had not been jumped. Vick was smarter than I thought.

“I was at Prince’s drive-in last night,” I said. “Some of Grady’s buds were talking loud in the next car. I heard one guy say, ‘Vick Atlas was getting laid when we took the Buick. He’s never going to find it.’ ”

“Rich-boy jocks are hot-wiring cars? That’s interesting to