Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

When I had visited the Houston Police Department the previous day, hoping to sit down with the chief and explain why Rosita had almost burned the face off one of his detectives, I was told by a captain that I could either bring her in or be charged with aiding and abetting. I didn’t believe him. I had learned long ago from Grandfather that a serious lawman never told you what he might do. He simply did it, and usually with his sidearm or a baton or a blackjack; the target of his wrath seldom knew what hit him.

When I talked with an assistant to the state attorney, I got a much better perspective on the strategy about to be used on my beautiful and brave and loving wife.

“Her case is being turned over to the Department of Public Health, Mr. Holland,” he said.

“It’s being what?”

“You asked me to make an inquiry, sir. I’ve done that. This office no longer has any jurisdiction in the disposition of your wife’s case. Neither does the district attorney’s office in Houston.”

“That sounds like quite a coincidence.”

“Considering the seriousness of the charges against Mrs. Holland, perhaps y’all should show a little gratitude.”

“You bastards,” I said.

After I left Hershel’s house, I used a pay phone to check in with Rosita at the motel in Galveston.

“Are you coming down?” she said.

“After dark,” I replied.

“You sound a little strange.”

“I just left Hershel. He’s not doing too well. Someone sent him that bogus photo of me and Linda Gail.”

“I really don’t want to talk about that,” she said.

“I’m telling you what happened.”

“That doesn’t mean I want to talk about it.”

The air inside the phone booth had become hard to breathe. The sunlight through the scratched and vandalized Plexiglas windows was smudged and ugly, stained with the smell of the diesel trucks and junker cars passing on Wayside Drive. “They want to turn us against each other, Rosita.”

There was a pause. “When are you coming to Galveston?”

“After dark,” I repeated.

In my own country, we were taking on the identity of fugitives, people who thought and behaved in surreptitious fashion and traveled by night. Where had we gone wrong? What were we turning into? I picked up a box of takeout Mexican food for Grandfather and drove to our house in the Heights.

I KNOW I’M REPEATING myself, but it’s hard to explain how much I loved Grandfather. In the darkest times of my life, wading ashore at Omaha Beach or shrinking into an embryonic ball at the bottom of a foxhole while German 88s rained down on us, I thought of Grandfather and said his name over and over in my mind. Even when I rebelled against him as a boy, he was always my model. And what a model he had been: a compulsive gambler and womanizing alcoholic who had knocked John Wesley Hardin out of the saddle and stomped in his face as an afterthought, a man who read the encyclopedia every night of his life, a gunman who feared bloodlust and was the friend of professional killers with badges who considered him a colleague but had no understanding of him.

I set the kitchen table for the two of us and laid out our dinner.

“Did you remember the pralines?” he said.

“Yes, sir, I got you a mess of them.”

“Are you going down to Galveston tonight?”

“I surely am.”

He bit into a taco, the shell cracking between his teeth, his washed-out blue eyes never leaving mine.

“Would you not stare at me, please?” I said.

“What’s fretting you, Satch? It’s not just Rosita’s situation, is it?”

“I talked earlier with Hershel Pine about killing one or two people.”