The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“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. I called her house three times within ten minutes.

Think, I told myself. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Or at least I hadn’t intended to do anything wrong. I had a right to confront the people who were working out their problems on my back and Saber’s. Suddenly the man who had always seemed a scourge in my life seemed a minor player, someone whose job security demanded he conform to masculine and brutish parameters, a man who was more dolt than villain and not a threat. I’m talking about Mr. Krauser.

He lived by himself in a squat gravel-roofed house that resembled a machine-gun bunker, built of glazed brick that looked like plastic. There were no shrubs or flower beds in the yard; the St. Augustine grass was chemical green and as stiff and unnatural in appearance as the spikes in a rubber mat. The backyard contained an archery target stuffed with straw, a swimming pool made of plastic tarps, and a doghouse where a Doberman stayed unless it was killing the neighbors’ cats or the wild rabbits that lived in the neighborhood. The grass was pocked with yellow depressions from the mounds of dog shit that Krauser shoveled into a garbage can humming with flies.

He answered the door in a sweat-soaked Texas A&M jersey cut off at the armpits and a pair of gym trunks rolled to the crotch. He seemed surprised to see me, even pleased. “Broussard, what’s up, big man?”

“Need to talk to you, Mr. Krauser.”