Another Kind of Eden (Holland Family Saga 3)

I opened my car door and started to get in.

Darrel Vickers kicked the door shut. “I’m doing you a favor, queer-bait.”

I brushed the paint where his boot had scratched it. “I thought we were friends.”

“You went someplace inside my father that c

an cost you pain you can’t imagine.”

I dusted off my fingers. “My remark about an incubus? Yeah, I’ve given that some thought. I was mistaken. See, an incubus is a male demon that gets inside a woman. A succubus is a female demon that gets inside a man. Your father has a succubus. Tell him I’m sorry for the mix-up.”

“Listen, shit-for-brains, my father boxed Golden Gloves and turned a kid into a vegetable. He killed a guy on the racetrack doing a hundred and ten miles an hour. He finished the last lap without slowing down. What’s that tell you?”

“You attacked us because we had a union sticker on our bumper?”

“Because I fucking felt like it, toe jam.”

“Does your father knock you around?”

He pointed his finger in my face. “I can hurt you, man. Not me, but people I know, people who do it with pliers.”

“I believe you.”

“You got something going with Jo Anne McDuffy?” He had shaved since I’d seen him at Mr. Lowry’s farm, and had clipped his sideburns. “I asked you a question. You think you can come to town and take any girl you want?”

“Your old man get her fired or did you?”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Somebody did.”

He removed his hat and gazed down the Pass, then replaced it. “Maybe I could get her a job.”

“She might appreciate that.”

“Yeah?”

I shrugged.

“What’s with you, man?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“I don’t get it. The way you stood there while my father cut you up with the quirt. What the fuck is with that?”

“I have to go, Darrel. Regarding that business about the succubus?”

“I don’t like to talk about that kind of stuff.” He shifted his weight, the gravel compressing under his feet.

“Your father and the owner of this restaurant don’t need a succubus,” I said. “They work for the Prince of Darkness. That’s not a shuck, Ace. For real.”

His lips parted. He was still standing there when I drove away.

Chapter Eight

I FELT BAD ABOUT it. That night I took Jo Anne to dinner down the Pass in Ratón. Afterward, we drove out on the hardpan and looked at the sweep of the stars arching over the Great American Desert, disappearing beyond the blackness of the mountains in the north. I told her I had talked to her employer about his dishonesty, and I also told her I had dumped a cup of fishhooks inside Darrel Vickers’s head.

“My boss can’t act any worse than he has,” she said. “That business with Darrel is different. He used to come around.”