Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

I DIDN’T WANT TO have contact with Lloyd Fincher, but I didn’t have a lot to lose. I drove down the boulevard and called him from the pay phone at the Jack Tar restaurant. Through the front window, I could see the waves crashing on the beach, sucking the sand backward in the undertow. “My grandfather says you want to talk to me,” I said.

“Holland? Is that you?” he replied.

Who else would I be? I thought. “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

“I don’t want to talk over the phone. Know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Tell me where you are. I’ll be there.”

“I’m down on the coast.”

“The coast, huh? Ten miles north of Galveston, there’s a Pure filling station on the east side of the highway. Meet me at the diner next door in one hour.”

“What’s this about, Major?”

“I guess I’m trying to undo my sins. Who the hell knows? Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

The Pure station was the one where I thought I’d seen the 1932 Chevrolet Confederate. Was it coincidence? I had no idea.

The station was dark, but the diner was open when I pulled into the shell parking lot. The only automobile out front was a prewar Cadillac; the bottoms of the fenders had rusted into orange lace. The interior of the diner was dour, the menu written in chalk on a blackboard above the stove, the air smelling of grease and disinfectant. Fincher and his girlfriend were at a wood booth in back. She was just as Grandfather had described her—pink-complexioned and rotund and jolly and drenched in perfume. Her hair was dark red and tied with a pink scarf. Fincher introduced her as Norma, no last name. They had white coffee mugs and a plate of French-fried onions in front of them. He saw me glance out the window at the Cadillac.

“I picked that up just recently. I’m restoring it,” he said.

“I see,” I said.

“I heard about your troubles,” he said.

“They’ll pass.”

“That’s what Garth McQueen thought when he built that damn hotel. He went into catastrophic debt so he could erect a monument to himself and leave behind the raggedy little boy who used to tote water in the oil field. Now he’s teetering on ruin.”

“You came down here to tell me about Garth McQueen?”

“Garth shouldn’t be in the hotel business. He should be drilling wells. I thought you might want to partner up with him. Wildcatting may have gone into history, but he’s still the best there is.”

“I have a partner. And I have a couple of other things on my mind right now.”

“Have you been swimming at his pool?” Norma said. “It’s shaped like a big four-leaf clover. We saw a gangster there. What was his name? Frankie something. Lloyd knows him. He was a friend of Bugsy Siegel.”

“Frankie Carbo,” Lloyd said.

“It’s getting late, Major,” I said.

“I made a mistake at Kasserine Pass and got a lot of men killed. I’m trying to do good deeds here and there to make up for it.” He pushed a brass key across the table to me. “I’ve got a duck-hunting camp down by the swamp, southeast of Beaumont. The

place is yours. For whatever purposes you need. You hearing me on this?”

“Can you tell me who’s trying to hurt me and my wife?” I said.

He pinched his eyes. “Hell if I know. It’s like the army. Somebody up top gives an order, and it gets carried out by people they never see.”

I picked up the key and dropped it in my shirt pocket. “Why do they have it in for me?”

Fincher leaned forward. “You really want to know?”

“That’s why I asked you the question.”