The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“The Chicago newspapers are on microfilm. Guess what Mr. Harrelson has a degree in. Anthropology. Look what I found on the Atlas family and the Mob’s operations on the Gulf Coast.”

I didn’t want to see it. I had no doubt about the kind of people the Harrelson and Atlas families were. They and others just like them did business with baseball bats while the law and decent people looked the other way. There were brothels and gambling joints along the entire rim of the Gulf of Mexico, even in Mississippi, which was supposedly a dry state, and they operated openly and with sanction by the authorities. Slot and racehorse machines were everywhere, and Louisiana cops in uniform with their badges pinned to their shirts worked behind the bar and served mixed drinks to underage kids. But I didn’t want Valerie to know how I felt about the information she had worked so hard to find. Who wanted to offend Nancy Drew?

I read her notes and looked at the marked pages in the books and feigned as much interest as I could. “I haven’t eaten supper yet. How about we go over to Bill Williams’s for some fried chicken?”

“I have to go home and help my father with the income tax,” she said.

“You have time for a cold drink?”

“I’d better not. I’ll see you tomorrow, Aaron.”

I walked her to her car. It was her father’s, a four-door Chevrolet. Back then most families had only one car; many had none. The Epstein car was parked in a cul-de-sac in the shadows of slash pines silhouetted against the sun. It had just rained, and the windows and roof were showered with pine needles. The lights were on in the dormitories and the offices of a few professors; I wanted to believe they were a reminder that civilization was a constant and evil was not. But I couldn’t shake the trepidation in my chest. It was the way I had felt before I swam out to the third sandbar south of Galveston Island into a school of jellyfish. I didn’t want to let go of her.

“I’ll follow you home,” I said.

“No, you will not.”

“Please.”

She kissed me lightly on the mouth. “See you in the morning, Kemosabe.”

The sun dropped below the campus buildings. I watched her drive away, her taillights winking like rubies in the shadows.

Chapter

18

IT WAS A weeknight, and few vehicles were on the two-lane street she took into the north end of the city. The sky was black, creaking with electricity, like someone crumpling cellophane. Her windows were down. She could smell the clean odor of a storm and the coldness of the dust blowing in the street. Then at a stoplight, at an intersection where there were no other cars, she smelled gasoline. The light changed and she shifted into first gear and drove through the intersection, then looked in the rearview mirror just as heat lightning flared in the clouds. For an instant she thought she saw a drip line on the asphalt that led to her back bumper. She looked at the gas gauge. It was on empty.

There was a weed-grown vacant lot on each side of the road, a deserted house on one corner, a spreading oak on the other, a few lighted houses a block farther on. She was two miles from home, but she remembered a filling station three blocks back that was still open. She made a U-turn and drove slowly toward the stoplight. Then her engine coughed and shook once and died. She shifted into second and popped the clutch, trying to restart it. Her right front tire struck the curb, her headlights dimming as the battery went down. A car going in the same direction passed her. She tried to wave the driver down, but he kept going. The wind began blowing harder, buffeting her car, the first raindrops hitting the windshield as hard as hail.

She rolled up all the windows. A pair of headlights came around the corner and approached the rear of her car. The driver had his high beams on. He pulled to the curb forty feet behind her and cut his engine but left the lights on. The sky was black, the raindrops on the windshield as big as nickels. No one got out of the car.

She pumped the accelerator and pushed the starter, then gave up and pulled the keys from the ignition and bunched them in her right hand, allowing one key to protrude between her index and middle fingers. She stared into the rearview mirror until her eyes watered. The driver turned off his lights. The windows in the car were as dark as slate, impossible to see through; steam was rising off the hood. She opened her door and stepped into the rain.

“Who are you?” she called.

There was no response.

“I have a pistol. I’ll use it,” she said.

The car was a 1949 or ’50 Ford, with an outside spotlight on the driver’s side. When lightning split the sky, she saw a man’s face behind the wheel. He was wearing a dark cap with a lacquered bill. The door made a screeching sound when the driver opened it. He had on a heavy rubber slicker and unshined black shoes and trousers with a stripe down the leg. Another man stepped out on the passenger side. He was also wearing a slicker and a cap with a bill; he carried a flashlight and a one-gallon gasoline can. The two men walked toward her. The driver was tall, blade-faced, in his thirties, his expression calm, reassuring. He was standing four feet away.

“Saw you sputter. Figured it was a fuel problem,” he said. The rain was sliding off his cap and slicker. He felt under the bumper and smelled his hand. “You probably got a hole in your tank.”

“You’re not cops,” she said.

“Why do you think that?”

“Your coats are wrong.”

“We’re not Harris County cops, but we’re cops,” he said. “You’re lucky we came along. This is a bad neighborhood.”

“I live here. There’s nothing bad about this neighborhood,” she said.

A car was coming up the street. The other man waved it by with his flashlight.

“I can walk to my house,” she said.