“I ain’t done nothing wrong!”
It’s here he makes his first move, a quick step on the ball of his right foot while raising his left hand. Jay is quicker, hooking him right up under his chin, a clean blow that catches Hollis by surprise. He stumbles back a few paces before doubling over, resting his hands on the front of his dirty jeans. “I’ll kill you,” he says, spitting blood, standing suddenly and charging Jay again. He wraps his arms around Jay’s waist and thrusts him to the ground. Jay can hear the pop of his head against the concrete before he feels it, before the bass note of agony echoes in the tight confines of his skull. He rolls over to his side, his stomach lurching with nausea. Hollis gets in another blow to his head before Jay manages to push him off, knocking him to the ground. Hollis, drunk, trips on the toes of his cowboy boots as he tries to stand, falling back to the street. Jay has a straight shot to the man’s head if he wants to take it, a single kick that would shut him up for good. But Hollis is already spent, hunched on his hands and knees, struggling to catch his breath. “I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”
“Like you killed Alicia Nowell?”
“You not putting no shit on me just to save your boy’s ass.”
Hollis stands slowly, cautiously reaching his arms out behind him to catch a potential fall, as if he expects the street to rise up and snatch him back.
He’s even drunker than Jay thought.
“There was an eyewitness who saw you.”
Hollis nearly laughs. “Saw me kill a girl? Bullshit.”
“There was an eyewitness, several of ’em, actually,” Jay says, “who saw you and your van loitering in the neighborhood. There was somebody who saw you outside the truck stop on Market Street, struggling with a teenage girl.”
“Wasn’t that the same thing the newspaper said about your boy?”
He’s right, of course. The D.A.’s office had said the same thing about Neal.
Hollis stands to his full height. “Anybody can say they saw anything, don’t make it true. I never touched no young girls, at least not out there, and I certainly never killed anybody. Worst I ever did in Pleasantville was catch a smoke on the boss man’s clock, park my van, and nap awhile. You the only one still can’t get that straight. That story about me and some girl outside the truck stop, it never happened. The date it supposedly went down, I wasn’t even in the state. I had a special run up to Tulsa for Sterling. They vouched for me, not to mention the shipping company in Oklahoma who received a big shitload of pipe fitters from yours truly. The district attorney’s office, the cops, they knew all this years ago, that’s why I was never arrested in the first place.”
Jay falls silent, momentarily stumped.
In the dim light, he searches Hollis’s bloodshot eyes.
Why hasn’t he heard this before?
And how did this never come up in Lon’s talks with Detective Resner?
“It’s not me,” Hollis says, cracking his knuckles, as if this late show of menace might still put Jay on notice. “I see you around me again, I hear you throwing my name around a murder case, and it’s gonna come down a lot worse than this,” he says, before pivoting on his boots and walking back to the Chevy.
It’s warm in the house, too warm. Jay can smell Evelyn’s cooking on the stove, spaghetti for the kids, hot links and sweet onions for her. He peels off his suit jacket, the cotton shirt underneath sticking to the hairs on his forearms. He stretches out the muscles in his right hand, where a bruise is developing across his knuckles. The back of his skull throbs. He wipes his damp forehead as he starts for the kitchen, looking for Rolly and the kids, Evelyn too, feeling a strange stillness in every corner of the house. From the great room, the den past the kitchen, Jay hears the low murmur of a male voice, young and slightly gruff, can actually smell the man’s cologne, sweetly overdone, covering god knows what. The pain in his head swells, as panic vibrates through his body. He immediately thinks of the guy in the Nissan Z. He doesn’t think anybody could get past Rolly, but how else to explain why his buddy didn’t answer his phone? He’s about to start for his bedroom, for the .38 revolver, when he finally recognizes the voice in the living room. He turns toward it, inching past the kitchen and into the den, where Pastor Keith Morehead is seated on Jay’s L-shaped sectional.
Evelyn has brought him a glass of iced tea. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, batting her big brown eyes at the pretty pastor, regaling him with stories of her dad’s tenure at First Love Antioch Baptist Church in Fifth Ward, as if his religiosity were her own, when Jay happens to know for a fact that Evelyn quit her regular churchgoing as far back as the eleventh grade, preacher daddy or no preacher daddy. She swears like a longshoreman and drinks like one too. He’d be surprised if she didn’t have a little squeeze of gin or rum in that glass of iced tea she’s so demurely sipping. Rolly, who once tried to date Bernie’s older sister only to be shot down halfway through a first meal at a Ninfa’s cantina off the Gulf Freeway, is eyeing Morehead with thinly veiled disdain. An ex-con with a perennial line of dirt under his nails, Rolly can’t stomach a fussy man, let alone an overly religious one. The cologne, the pressed jeans, the white, white teeth–Morehead is a type that Rolly doesn’t understand, and certainly doesn’t trust. “You have a visitor,” he says coldly, before turning to look at Jay and seeing the damage done to his face. He curses under his breath.
Keith Morehead turns and stands.
“Mr. Porter. Sorry to drop in on you like this.”