The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“And I’m the guy whose life is screwed up? That’s a howl.”

He backed into the street and drove away, his stolen loudspeakers blasting out Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.”

I WENT TO POLICE headquarters downtown and asked to speak with Detective Merton Jenks.

The officer at the reception desk didn’t look up. “He’s at lunch.”

“It’s eleven o’clock.”

“He eats five times a day.”

“What time will he be back?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Where does he eat lunch?”

The officer looked up. “Two blocks down the street. It’s the place with the gurney and the stomach pump by the door.”

I thought he was kidding until I got to a poolroom with a lunch counter and saw Jenks through the window. There was also a wood booth where customers could cash welfare checks and process bail bonds. Jenks sat hunched over a meatball sandwich and a bowl of pinto beans he was eating with a spoon. I had to go to the restroom badly. I walked the length of the poolroom through smoke that was as thick and toxic as cotton poison, and used the toilet and washed my hands and dried them on my pants. Then I waited for somebody to push open the door so I wouldn’t have to touch the knob. I went out and sat down next to Jenks without being invited. “Have you seen that washroom?”

“You ought to see the kitchen,” he replied.

“Why do you eat here?”

“The philosophic insight.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “What do you want?”

“You heard about the medical information on Vick Atlas, right?”

“Your old man’s lawyer did a good job on that. So what do you want?”

“My dad found a witness who can prove Saber and I are innocent of the break-in at Mr. Krauser’s house.”

“Correct. You still haven’t told me what you want.”

The last time I had seen him, he had acted in a friendly manner, and I didn’t understand his irritability. I told him that.

“I’m a homicide detective, son,” he said. “I have more on my mind than this teenage bullshit.”

“Vick Atlas is threatening to chain-drag me and Saber behind his car. Tell me what we have to do to get clear of all this.”

“What you have to do? You ask me a question like that?”

“Who else can I ask? What’s with this Detective Hopkins, the guy who tried to frame us for the break-in at Mr. Krauser’s house?”

Two loud, unshaven men in unironed clothes stacked their pool cues and sat down beside us. They picked up menus and started to order.

“These seats are taken,” Jenks said.

“By who?” one man said.

“Me,” Jenks said.

They got up, one of them spinning the seat on the stool, looking back at us.

“Hopkins worked vice in Galveston,” Jenks said.

“Yeah?”