“Hello,” I said.
“This is the only call of this kind I’m making,” the voice said. “Make the smart move or it hits the fan in the next twelve hours. You think I’m manic? You don’t know manic. You think you can handle shit, I’ll show you shit. You think you’re some kind of rodeo cowboy can steal our money and tell us to fuck off? You’ll learn what getting fucked is all about.”
“Vick?”
“What? You deaf? You got wax? Want me to come over there and unplug your ears?”
“Is this about Grady’s car?”
“Is this about the car, he says. I asked my father to let me have a run at this. That’s the only reason nobody is holding a hot cigar to your eyelid right now. Think I’m kidding? You got a dog and three cats. I saw them in your front yard. How about we put on a warm-up? I don’t like cats. I don’t like funny little bird dogs, either. Are you listening to this? Don’t pretend you’re not listening. Hey, answer me!”
“You’d better not come near my house or my animals or my family, Vick.”
“He says ‘don’t come near my house.’ That takes some nerve. The guy who can’t keep his nose out of other people’s business, he doesn’t like me around his house. The guy who’s taking food out of my family’s mouth.”
“I’m eating dinner now.”
“His lordship is eating dinner now. That’s going to get Little Lord Fauntleroy off the hook. You deliver that car. You deliver it by this time tomorrow. I’ll light you up, man. I’ll pull your insides out with a pair of pliers.”
“Stay away from us, you sick bastard.”
I hung up, then stared at the phone as though it were alive. I took the receiver off the hook and put a pillow over it so I wouldn’t have to listen to the buzzing sound filling the house.
I KNEW WHERE MY father would go when he returned from Walgreens with my mother. I asked if I could go with him.
“I never thought you were keen on the icehouse,” he said. “Thirsty for a Grapette?”
“Yes, sir. I’d like to talk with you about a concern of mine also.”
“What would that be?”
“Sleepwalking and such.”
“Your mother said you had a snootful last night.”
“Better wait till we’re at the icehouse, Daddy.”
We walked the three blocks to his hangout and sat at an outdoor plank table under a striped canopy riffling in the breeze. It was dusk. The sky was speckled with birds slowly descending into the trees that shaded most of the neighborhood.
“Three guys threatened me in an alley up in the Heights,” I said. “One wanted to cut me with a razor. Loren Nichols bailed me out.”
His face never changed expression, but his eyes did. “Who was going to cut you with a razor?”
“I don’t know his name. Bud Winslow was with them. He was a linebacker who used to run interference for Grady Harrelson.”
The waiter brought my father a Jax and a glass and a salt shaker on a tray and set them down one by one in front of him. Then he served me a Grapette and went away. My father’s eyes never left my face. “Go on,” he said.
“I think I might have gone to Winslow’s house in Bellaire last night.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Winslow came to the station today with Cisco Napolitano
and said he saw me get out of my heap in front of his house.”
“You have no memory of that?”
“No, sir.” I paused. “I had a shank.”