The Jealous Kind by James Lee Burke Page B

are you doing with your shit machine in front of my house, nice little guy?”
    Saber sniffed at the air. “Y’all got skunks around here?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œSmell it? One of them must have come out of the coulee or the sewer. Maybe you could call in the marines and clean the place up. You know, semper fi, motherfucker, let’s take names and kick ass and exterminate the smelly little varmints before they perfume the whole neighborhood and people stop believing our shit don’t stink.”
    Don’t do this, Saber. Please, please, please don’t.
    â€œYou been getting high on lighter fluid again, turd blossom?” Grady said.
    â€œHeard you were in the Corps for a while. So was my old man. He was at Iwo Jima. Did you make it over to Korea before you got sent home?”
    â€œGo back to that business about the skunks.”
    â€œBefore you know it, they’ll be coming through your mailbox, maybe while you’re muffing the town pump. What do they call that? Climax interruptus?”
    â€œGet out of the car.”
    â€œUp your nose,” Saber said.
    I opened the door and stepped out on the asphalt and looked across the roof at Grady. “This is between you and me. Saber isn’t involved. We shouldn’t have come here. We’ll leave.”
    â€œYou’ll leave whenI tell you to. You haven’t answered the question. Why are you parked in front of my fucking house?”
    â€œI want to know if you sicced Loren Nichols on me,” I said.
    I saw a tic under Grady’s left eye, as though someone had touched the skin with a needle. “Who the fuck is Loren Nichols?”
    â€œThe guy whose car got burned,” Saber said.
    â€œStep out of your heap, you slit-eyed freak,” Grady said.
    The change in his tone was like an elixir to his friends. They tightened the circle around us, their bodies hard and tan, beaded with water. Saber had said Grady’s kind was different, incapable of empathy. He wasn’t wrong. They threw trash out of their cars, were profane around people they believed to be of no value, and were unfazed by the suffering of the poor and infirm. But for me, the open sore on every one of them was unnecessary cruelty. As I looked at them gathered around Saber’s pitiful excuse for a hot rod, I remembered a scene from years before. There was a coulee and a piney-woods pond on the backside of River Oaks Country Club. It contained bream and sun perch, and kids from other neighborhoods came there and fished with bobbers and bamboo poles. One week after Christmas, on a warm, sunny day, a little boy had parked his new Schwinn bicycle at the top of the incline and was fishing among the lily pads when a carful of kids who were country-club members stopped their car. A tall kid got out, picked up the Schwinn, and hurled it end over end down the slope into the water, scratching the paint, denting the fenders. The little boy cried. The kids in the car sped away, laughing.
    I thought about Saber’s mention of the tire iron under the seat, and I thought about it not because of the danger we were in but because of the memory of the Schwinn bicycle.
    â€œAll is fair in love and war,” I said.
    Grady’s gaze shifted sideways into neutral space. “You’re speaking in code?”
    â€œThat means do your worst.”
    â€œI think you and Saber need a dip in the pool.”
    The passenger door was still ajar. I leaned inside and felt under the seat and pulled out the tire iron. I let it hang from my right hand, the end with the socket touching my knee.
    Grady looked at his friends. “Do you believe this asshole?”
    â€œYou dealt it, Grady,” I said. “Want to boogie?”
    â€œWith one phone call, I can make your life miserable,” he said.
    â€œMy life is already miserable.”
    â€œMaybe you need an around-the-world. I’ll call Valerie. She gives the best I ever had.”
    I kept