The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“He’s doing time?” I said.

“No, he’s a gun bull. You ask too many questions. Is this about your teacher who bailed off a building?”

“It’s about your cousin Wanda Estevan.”

“You put me in mind of a hemorrhoid, Broussard. No matter where I go, there you are.”

“You want Vick Atlas and his old man on your case? He threatened to drag me behind his car. You know who Vick Atlas is, right?”

His attention seemed to wander, linger in space. He flipped the screwdriver in the air and caught it. “Atlas said that to your face?”

“More or less.”

“Talk to me while I work. Don’t lean against the wall. The whole place will fall down.” He went inside the garage to a workbench that had an amplifier and a soldering iron and a cherry-red electric guitar on it. He propped his hands on the bench and stared at the motes floating in a shaft of sunlight. His spine was etched against his skin, both sides of his back crosshatched with scars, some as fine as

a cat’s whiskers. When we’d fought, he had been bare-chested, but I hadn’t seen the injury someone had done to his body.

“I’m going to line it out for you,” he said. “You tell anybody we’re talking to each other, you and me are going to have another go at it. Comprendo? Wanda was hooking out of a couple of clubs in Galveston and sometimes in Big D because a lot of political guys live there. The clubs were a setup to blackmail politicians and big shots in the oil business. That’s where she met Harrelson.”

“He was a customer?”

“No, he hangs with Atlas and pretends he’s a hood and a rich-boy badass. He took Wanda out a couple of times, and he probably got it on with her, since that was her line of work. Except she fell in love with him. Then he dumped her and she went nuts. That’s when you came along.”

“At the drive-in in Galveston?”

“Harrelson knew you’d be coming to Valerie Epstein’s house, and he told us to mess you up.”

“And you did it because he told you?”

He began soldering a wire inside the amplifier. Then he set down the iron. The scars across his back looked like lesions that had healed badly. “Harrelson said if we ran you off, he’d get Wanda cut loose from her job and send her to beautician school. He promised to get my brother a Teamster card.”

“Cut her loose?” I said.

“Where’ve you been? You think you resign from the Mafia and file for unemployment?”

“What happened to your back?”

“Poison ivy.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you look like Chet Baker?”

“Yeah, I hear that all the time. What’s with you, man? You got a black carrot growing on your brain?”

“Can I see your guitar?”

“He’p yourself.”

I picked it up and worked the strap over my shoulder. The cherry finish was chipped, but the neck was straight, all the surfaces clean, the tuning pegs lightly oiled, the strings new and hovering just above the frets.

“It’s a little out of tune. Mind?”

“Do whatever you want,” he said, and went back to working on the amplifier. But he was looking out the side of his eye and was not as disinterested as he pretended.

“Know what a problem of conscience is?” I said, twisting the tuning pegs.

“Lay off that stuff, man.”

“I hear you. I can’t take unctuous people.”