The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“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 try to get it on with me in front of Valerie’s house?”

“General principles.”