The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“I’m on half-time because of a medical condition. I’m also fixing to pull the pin. So I was given a pile of junk to motor around in. Are we starting to communicate here?”

“What’s a button man?” I asked.

“A hit man. He pushes the ‘off’ button on people. I asked if you understood why I was driving this pile of junk.”

“Your superiors have no use for you now, so you’re going out of your way to help me.”

He fiddled with a pack of Lucky Strikes in his shirt pocket, then tossed it onto the dashboard. “I’m going down to Mexico. A place called Lake Chapala. I’ll be training some Cubans who’re planning to invade their homeland. What do you think of that?”

“Mexico doesn’t have very good health care,” I replied.

“You missed your calling. You should have been a funeral director.”

“Miss Cisco told you about the Mob getting stiffed and the button men coming here, didn’t she.”

“She didn’t have to. I was working vice in Vegas when Siegel built the Flamingo. I knew the guy who popped him. I once hung him out a train window by his heels.”

“She told you,” I said.

He took a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard and stuck it into his mouth. “You’ve got a talent for pissing me off.”

“I’m going to let them do it,” I said.

“Do what?”

“It.”

He removed the cigarette from his mouth. “Want me to slap you?”

“Shoot me. I don’t care what you do. Look in my face and tell me I’m lying.”

“Maybe things will get set right. Give it time.”

“Your colleagues are going to help me? You are? The courts are going to put the Atlas family in prison?”

He held his eyes on mine and didn’t reply.

I LEFT WORK EARLY and went home and bathed and put on a clean pair of khakis and my cowboy boots and a short-sleeved white shirt with a spray of small pink roses on the shoulders. I called Valerie, but no one answered. I wrote my father and mother a note that said “I’ll be over at Saber’s. See you later.” Then I put on my cowboy hat, the one I wore the night I rode Original Sin, and went into the backyard. The sun was red and veiled with dust. I picked up Major and Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy one at a time and hugged each of them.

When I arrived at Saber’s, he was on the swale changing the oil under a flatbed loaded with drill pipe. I wondered how his neighbors liked having an industrial service truck parked in their neighborhood. He crawled out barefoot and bare-chested, flakes of dried road grime in his hair and on his face. “What’s shakin’, rodeo man?”

“Need you to back me up.”

“Doing what?” he said.

“I have to end all this stuff with all the people who are out to get me.”

He got to his feet. His narrow chest was white and shiny with sweat, his eyes blinking with moisture. “We fight like the Indians. From behind a tree, right?”

“I need somebody to be

my witness.”

“Witness to what?”

“To whatever is fixing to happen.”

“I’ll get us a couple of RC Colas.”