“Yeah, do you have a thing for her?”
“Not at all,” I lied, unwilling to admit my fascination with her and my hope that she was a better person than others thought.
“Yes, you do. You think she’s good. She’s not. She’s evil. She’ll try to destroy us.”
“I don’t think that’s true at all.”
She took her hand from mine and stared out the window. When I asked her if she still wanted to swim at the far end of the island, she didn’t reply. She did not speak again until we were on the highway and headed back to Houston.
THE NEXT DAY Saber showed up at the filling station wearing drapes instead of jeans, shined patent-leather stomps rather than his half-top boots with chains on the sides, his crew cut tonicked and combed back on the sides. He lit a cigarette with a Japanese lighter I had never seen, one with an image of Mount Fuji carved on the leather case.
“Where’d you get the new threads?” I said.
“At a store on Congress Street,” he said, looking sideways at the street. “They’ve got Mr. C shirts, too, the ones with the big upturned collars.”
“Why not wear a sign that says Arrest Me?” I asked.
There were circles under his eyes. He kept blinking, like a caffeine addict. He released his cigarette smoke a mouthful at a time. I wondered when he’d had his last full night’s sleep.
“I squared a beef for us,” he said.
We were standing under the rain shed that covered the fuel pumps. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was within earshot. “I don’t know if I want to hear this.”
“I think you’ll enjoy it. We boosted Vick Atlas’s Buick. He had a security box around the ignition, so Manny’s uncle let us use his tow truck and we lifted it out of the driveway.” He grinned with self-satisfaction, waiting for me to react.
I folded my arms on my chest. I couldn’t look at him. “When?”
“Last night. A broad in a garage apartment off Montrose hauls his ashes. I wrote ‘Blow me, Fudd’ in chalk on the driveway.”
“Put it back. Or dump it somewhere he can find it,” I said.
He nodded. “Makes sense. Steal the car of the guy who tried to send us to Gatesville, then return it. Should I leave an apology?”
“Valerie and I ’fronted his old man in Galveston yesterday. They’re going to think we did it.”
He looked down the street at the cars passing on either side of the boulevard. He puffed on his cigarette. I wanted to hit him.
Instead I took the cigarette from his fingers and mashed it out with my foot and threw it into the oil barrel that served as our trash can.
“There’s another reason I’m here,” he said. “We stripped the Buick before we passed it on to a guy who’s helping the economy in Juárez. That chain with rope loops in it was in the trunk. Manny wondered what it was.”
“I don’t care about Manny. Why are you telling me this?”
“Manny and Cholo don’t know the Buick belongs to Vick Atlas. See, I’m what they call a spotter. I find the kind of car somebody wants. Then we go to work. The situation might get a little touchy if they find out they boosted a set of wheels owned by somebody in the Atlas family.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
He started to take another cigarette out of his pack, then put it back. “Remember when we went fishing in the surf down at Freeport? You were in waves up to your chest and hooked a devil ray that was probably three feet across. You dragged it up on the sand and went right back in. You were never afraid, Aaron. You thought you were. But you weren’t.”
“Walk away from these guys,” I said. “We’ll start over.”
“I owe them money. I paid off the mortgage on our house.”
“How much?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said. “They’re muling Mexican brown from the border to San Antone and Houston.”
“Heroin?”