Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

I picked up Slakely’s ankle pistol and holster and handed it to him. “Out of my house.”

“You need to talk to me, Mr. Holland.”

“I already know what you’re going to say.”

“I don’t think you do.”

Rosita was standing in the doorway, her eyes fixed so intensely on the back of Slakely’s head that he seemed to feel their heat. He turned and looked at her. “We meet again.”

“Say what you have to say,” she said.

“I’ve got your husband by the short hairs. That’s what I was gonna say. I can have the old man arrested for threatening an officer of the law with a firearm. Or I can forget all this and see that the charges against you are lost in the process.”

“Get him out of here, Weldon,” she said.

“You heard her, bub,” I said.

“Suit yourself. I tried. Someday y’all will figure out we’re all little people, even you, the big war hero.”

Slakely walked back through the hallway into the living room. The porch light was on, and candle moths were bumping against the screen. The wind was blowing, and the live oaks and pecan trees in the yard were full of shadows that kept changing shape, the leaves spinning on the lawn and driveway. Slakely was only a few feet from the door. In seconds he would be gone and we would return to our lives, and in the morning I would call our lawyer and see what could be done about Slakely’s invasion of our home. Then he turned around, like a man who can’t leave a dice table or an unfinished drink on a saloon table or a situation in which his paucity as a human being has been exposed.

He was still wearing his Stetson, his hands opening and closing at his sides, the veins knotting like twine under the skin. “The old man says he killed six men. That’s a lie, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“He killed eleven or twelve I know of. He killed some of them while he was blind drunk. He doesn’t count the Mexicans he shot on one of Pancho Villa’s troop trains. If you think he won’t kill you, call up Frank Hamer and ask him about Grandfather’s track record.”

“Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who killed Bonnie and Clyde?”

“That’s the one.”

“My goddamn ass.”

Rosita was silhouetted in the kitchen doorway, wearing an apron, a wooden spatula in her hand. Behind her, strings of steam were rising from Grandfather’s pot of stewed tomatoes and peppers. Next to the stove was a white table lined with glass jars and brassy metal tops, a metal spoon inserted in each jar to keep it from cracking when the preserves were poured into it.

It’s my belief that lust, greed, and violence die hard in all of us, whether we’re Semites or Gentiles or pagans, river-baptized, born again, or redeemed by a blinding light on the road to Damascus. But there’s another group in our midst. I believe some are born with the scales and the tailed spine of the four-footed reptilian creature with which we share a common gene pool. I never bore an animus toward the average German soldier; I did, however, toward the Waffen SS, and I was glad I had killed as many of them as I possibly could. I didn’t think Slakely had twin lightning bolts tattooed under his armpit, but if he had, I’m sure he would have worn them with pride.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.

“Which way?” I said.

“Ten thousand dollars in cash or stocks. That’s all I want. I’m putting myself in danger on your behalf. You haven’t figured that out?”

“I’m going to get you,” I said.

“You’re threatening me?”

“It’s not a threat. I’m telling you what’s going to happen to you. You violated my wife’s person. You invaded my home. You tried to degrade my grandfather. You think you’re going to get away with that because you’re a Houston police officer?”

He huffed air out of his nostrils. “Live in your own shit. You’ll wish you never heard my name.”

“I believe you,” I said.

He went out the screen door and let it slam behind him. I saw Rosita go back into the kitchen and lift the lid off the metal pot on the stove and put on cloth gloves so she could begin filling the jars.

“Grandfather wants to do that,” I said.