The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“Look at the card.”

I picked it up from the pot.

“Read it aloud,” he said.

“?‘Merton, you’re probably a dick on several levels, but I’ve known worse. Call me if you need your battery charged. I’ve always been a sucker for losers.’?” I put the card back on the flowers. “Pretty poetic.”

“You told Cisco I was sick?” he said.

“Yes, sir, I passed on my impressions.”

“I love the way you put things.”

“She said you did her dirty.”

“You came here to tell me that?”

“No, sir, I don’t believe you’d do her dirty.”

He sat in a stuffed chair and put his feet on a cloth-covered stool. “Sit down.”

I sat on the couch. He took a fresh pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and looked through the window at a bird on the porch rail. He seemed to forget I was in the room.

“I got something weighing on my mind,” I said. “I can’t take it to anybody else, at least not anybody who’d understand.”

His eyes refound me in the gloom. “Maybe you should talk to a preacher.”

“Most of them aren’t built for serious problems.”

“I never thought about it like that.” He pulled the red strip off the cellophane on his cigarettes.

“You’re going to smoke those?” I said.

“When you’re on third base, you don’t tend to worry about a cigarette or two.” His face held no emotion, neither fear nor animus nor pity nor regret. After he lit the cigarette, he gazed at me through the smoke.

“I have dreams,” I said. “In one of them I see Mr. Harrelson dying by his swimming pool. In the dream I have a forty-five in my hand. You told me you could smell a killer and I wasn’t one.”

“You think you killed Mr. Harrelson?”

“Not me. Maybe another me, one that I don’t let come out except in my dreams.”

“That crap belongs in motion pictures.”

“That’s the kind of thing ignorant people say. You’re not ignorant.”

I waited for him to get mad. But he didn’t. He drew in on his cigarette, the ash reddening. “What else did you want to know?”

“Loren Nichols says Vick Atlas’s father might put a bomb in our family car.”

“He told you that, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you want to know if Jaime Atlas is that vicious or crazy?” I nodded. He stared into space. “You want something to eat or a cup of coffee?”

“No, sir, I want you to tell me the truth.”

“Jaime Atlas was an enforcer for the Mob in Chicago and New York. He crushed a man’s head in a vise. He used a blowtorch on others. He’d start with the armpits and work down to the genitalia.”