The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“I hope you enjoy the book.”

“I’m not done,” he said. “Your man Bledsoe is dealing horse for a couple of Mexicans. They’re not piecing it off, either. They’re going down, man. Both Bledsoe and the Mexicans. You don’t deal heroin in Houston or Galveston without permission.”

“I can’t change that.”

“I just tried to join the navy,” he said. “They told me to beat it.”

“You think somebody is going to take you out, too?”

“It’s a possibility,” he said.

I hung Grandfather’s chaps over my shoulder. “Val and I will pick you up at seven.”

“I don’t know how to say this, Aaron. I think they’r

e going to kill you. Atlas’s old man might put a bomb in your family car.”

“My father was at the Somme and Saint-Mihiel.”

“I got no idea what that means. Blown apart is blown apart. Dead is dead.”

“Seven o’clock,” I said.

When I fired up my heap, my stomach felt as though I had poured Drano in it.

I HAD THE NEXT day off. I called the Houston Police Department and asked for Detective Jenks.

“He’s out today,” a sergeant said.

“Is he all right?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Aaron Holland Broussard. I’m a friend of his. Could you give me his home number?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard him speak of you,” the sergeant said. He hung up.

I waited an hour and put a pencil crossways into my mouth and called again. The same cop picked up.

“This is Franklin W. Dixon, features editor at the Houston Press. Our photographer is supposed to do a shoot at Detective Jenks’s home. Evidently he screwed up the address, and the staff writer is out of the office. Can you confirm Detective Jenks’s address for me?”

“Hang on,” the sergeant replied. “I got it in the file.”

THE HOUSE WAS located in an old rural neighborhood off the Galveston highway. It was a place of tin roofs and slash pines and dirt streets and a volunteer fire department and a general store. At night you could see wisps of chemical smoke that hung like wraiths above the electric brilliance of the oil refineries in Texas City. Jenks lived in a decaying biscuit-colored bungalow with ventilated storm shutters on the windows, a tire swing suspended from a pecan tree in the front yard. The pillars on the porch were wound with Fourth of July bunting, the path to the front steps lined with rosebushes.

The inside door was open, the screen unlatched. I tapped on the jamb. Jenks came to the door in his socks, a newspaper in his hand, glasses on his nose. “How’d you know where I live?”

“I think you told me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Can I have a few minutes?”

He pushed the screen open and went back into the living room. There was a flintlock rifle over the mantel, a framed array of medals on another wall, a rack of magazines and paperback books by an upholstered couch. On the coffee table was a bouquet of flowers wrapped with blue and silver foil. I didn’t see or hear anyone else in the house; there was no sign of a woman’s presence.

“You’ve been pretty busy,” he said, indicating the flowers.

“Sir?”