The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)
“What is the difference between somebody ‘really’ doing something, as opposed to simply doing it?” she said.
“What people say and what they do aren’t always the same thing,” I replied.
“I know he wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man,” she said.
“That’s it? Armed people are okay?”
“In Yugoslavia he saw the SS hang civilians with wire on the village square while their families were forced to watch.”
Valerie could create images that were like a rubber band snapping inside your head.
“But he was home with you when Mr. Harrelson was killed, right?” I said.
“No, he wasn’t. He was returning from Beaumont. Jenks asked if you were with me when Mr. Harrelson was killed.”
“Why me?”
“He wanted to know if you really had spells.”
Jenks was a master at messing up people’s heads. “So anything you said would indict me? If I didn’t have spells, I was a liar. If I did have them, I could be guilty of anything and everything.”
“Something like that.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That anything you told him was the truth. That he needed to get his fat ass out of my house.”
“You said that to Jenks?”
She smacked her gum and didn’t answer. How much can you love one girl?
JENKS WAS AT my house that afternoon. I knew he was coming, and by this time I knew his mission was no longer about me or my mother and father or Clint Harrelson’s murder or Krauser’s suicide or the death of the Mexican prostitute named Wanda Estevan or Saber’s vandalizing of Krauser’s house or his boosting Grady’s convertible or the torching of Loren Nichols’s customized heap or the terrorizing of Valerie by the two ex-convicts who ended up naked in a ditch with their hands stubbed off at the wrists. Detective Jenks didn’t have an agenda; he was at war on a global scale. He was right out of medieval mythology, the Templar knight who slept in his armor and gave tribute to God while loading the heads of decapitated Saracens into a catapult and flin
ging them back into their own lines.
I sat with him at the redwood table in the backyard with all my pets in attendance. It was strange how they seemed to know when I needed them. Major lay spread out with all fours in the shade, his belly and dong pressed into the grass. Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy sat on the tabletop, which they had crosshatched with seat smears since they were kittens. Jenks was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and kept lifting his forearms from the redwood and wiping them without realizing the source of the gelatinous material on his skin. “Is that a mulberry tree back there?”
“I think it is.”
He wiped at his forearm again, his face a question mark. “When are your folks due home?”
“Hard to say. They’re at the grocery. My mother doesn’t drive, so my father has to take her.”
“Does your father believe in home protection?”
“Yes, sir, that’s fair to say.”
“What kind of firearm does he keep?”
“He’s never been big on firearms.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I thought it was.”
“You should have been a baseball pitcher,” he said. “Did you ever see a pitcher pull on the brim of his cap or fix his belt just before the windup? That’s what you make me think of.”
“I put Vaseline on baseballs?”