In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4 Page 15

  The two killers, whose names were Tex Barker and Lynwood Peeples, worked their way down the slope through fir trees until they hit the dirt road. They moved quickly through the blueness of the dawn, into the lee of the house, flattening themselves against the side wall so they would not be seen from a window. They could hear the shower running upstairs and see steam floating through a screened window into the wind. They began working their way toward the back door while Wyatt Dixon’s Appaloosa spooked in circles.

  When they entered the kitchen, the firebox in the stove was glowing, the circular iron lids immaculately clean with heat. A plate of flapjacks, eggs, and toast and a full pot of coffee sat on the table. The shorter man, Tex Barker, whose gnarled brow was too long for the rest of his face, snapped on a stun gun, and an electric thread danced between the two prongs on the end. His partner, Lynwood, carried a. 22 Ruger semiautomatic in one hand and in the other a cloth bag framed with wood hasps and a wood handle, one similar in design to a nineteenth-century carpetbag. The two men began walking up the stairs toward the sounds of water drumming on the sides of a tin shower stall.

  At the top of the stairs they could see a T-shirt hanging on the outside knob of a door that was half opened on the bathroom. Tex Barker was in the lead, the stun gun tingling with power in his palm. Then Barker felt his partner grab him by the back of his belt. He turned and stared at him.

  “His food’s getting cold on the table. Something’s wrong,” Lynwood whispered.

  “What did you say?” Tex asked.

  Lynwood was starting to back down the stairs, his cloth bag rubbing heavily against the wall.

  “No. We take him,” Tex said hoarsely.

  But Lynwood wasn’t listening. Force the play, just do it, Barker thought, and charged ahead to the top of the stairs, his stubby thighs knotting like a dwarf’s.

  “Howdy doodie, boys?” Wyatt Dixon said, stepping out from a bedroom doorway and swinging a cast-iron skillet squarely into the center of Tex Barker’s face.

  Barker crashed backwards into his partner, his nose broken and streaming blood. Lynwood Peeples tried to raise the Ruger and fire, but the iron skillet came down on his forearm, snapping something inside, and he felt his fingers straighten like useless sticks and heard the gun clatter to the foot of the stairs. Wyatt swung the skillet into Peeples’s mouth, splitting his lip, then down on the crown of his skull and the back of his neck. Peeples and Barker both rolled to the bottom of the stairwell, but Wyatt followed them down and swung again, this time catching Peeples on the elbow when he tried to protect his face with his arm.

  Each blow snapped off teeth at the gumline, sent bruises all the way into the bone, slung blood on the walls. With one hand Wyatt picked up Peeples by his collar and shoved his face down on a stove lid and held it there. Barker was rolled up into a ball, but while Peeples screamed and fought to get loose from Wyatt’s grasp, Barker managed to pull a stiletto from his jeans and flick it open. He stabbed the blade deep into Wyatt’s thigh, just before the skillet came down again and almost ripped Barker’s ear from his head.

  Barker fell out the door into the backyard, with Peeples tumbling right on top of him, the side of his face blistered and puckered from his chin to his hairline. Wyatt pushed open the screen and stepped down hard onto the grass, the stiletto embedded almost to the handle in his thigh, his pants leg painted with blood all the way to the heel of his boot. But Wyatt no longer had the skillet in his hand. Instead, he held what looked like an antique rifle, one with a big hammer on it and long-distance, elevated sights. When Peeples tried to get to his feet, Wyatt butt-stroked him alongside the head, then drove the butt of the rifle into his kidney.

  And all the while Wyatt’s eyes showed neither pain nor anger, like two pieces of glass with a black insect trapped inside each one. At that moment Barker was sure he was about to die. Then he saw Wyatt waver and lose balance temporarily, his eyes close and his mouth form a cone, as though a wave of nausea had suddenly washed through his vitals.

  Barker rose to his feet, then pulled Peeples up from the grass by one arm. The two of them hobbled down the road like men who had been broken on the wheel, holding each other erect, streaked with blood, looking behind them, their faces twitching with shock and fear. Wyatt fell against the fence railing of his horse lot and pulled back the hammer on the working replica of his Sharps buffalo rifle. But the mountain crests and the fir trees on the slopes and the cottonwoods along the river tilted sideways, and he fell backward on the ground as though someone had severed all the motors that went to his legs.

  He pulled the cell phone from his blue jeans pocket and pushed the redial button, then lay back in the coolness of the grass, the cell phone against his ear, the sky and the clouds whirling above him.

  “Howdy doodie, Brother Holland?” he said after he got me on the line.

  “What is it this time, Wyatt?” I said.

  “I’m up here on the Blackfoot. Beautiful morning, counselor. But I think I might be bleeding to death,” he said, and passed out.

  Chapter 12

  That evening I sat by Wyatt Dixon’s bed at St. Pat’s Hospital and tried to figure out the strange processes that must have governed his thinking. Had he called me rather than 911 only because my number was automatically activated by the redial button? Or had he factored me into his life as some kind of symbiotic brother-in-arms? And, more essentially, how could a man who was so brave be capable of so much evil? He had perhaps come within fifteen minutes of dying, had been in surgery four hours, and now lay in traction, his thigh encased in plaster, refusing painkillers, because, he explained, “Dope puts un-Christian-like thoughts in my brain cells.”

  He stonewalled the cops, stating he had no idea who had attacked him or where the attackers had gone. “What I have told you officers is just a picture from the other side of life in this land of the free and home of the brave,” he said. “It is like many a sad situation in the world of dim lights, thick smoke, and loud, loud music, where honky-tonk angels and men with broken hearts play. Sirs, I have came often upon these scenes of destruction, and I heard the groans of the dying but I didn’t hear nobody pray.”

  The cops put away their notebooks in disgust and left the room.

  Except for Darrel McComb, who stood at the foot of the bed, snapping a piece of gum between his molars. “You a fan of Vern Gosdin and Hank Williams? Don’t bother answering that. I just wanted you to be aware I know where all that cornpone crap comes from,” Darrel said.

  “In my correspondence with President Bush, I have asked him to put aside extra money for lawmen such as yourself. While the rest of us is sleeping safe in our beds, you are out there fighting the criminals that is turning our great country into a dungheap. Even when I was standing dirty and hungry on the punishment barrel in Huntsville Pen, I knowed it was men like you that was protecting the nation from the likes of me. You have kept the Stars and Stripes popping smartly atop every institution in our fine nation, including the jails where this lonely cowboy slept in shackles and chains. I say God bless you, noble sir.”

  “You listen, you hillbilly moron,” Darrel said. “I know you broke into Greta Lundstrum’s house. You think you’re some kind of one-man intelligence operation? Here’s a big flash for you. Meltdowns and ignorant peckerwoods don’t get to be intelligence operatives. You got the names of Tex Barker and Lynwood Peeples out of her house. Those are the guys who buried that shank in your thigh. They were carrying a bagful of tools to torture you with. Is it starting to add up for you now? You’ve stuck your dork in the wall socket, Gomer. That means you start cooperating with us or we’re going to let them recycle you into fish chum.”

  Wyatt stared at Darrel McComb, his mouth twisting with each word Darrel spoke, his eyes blinking with feigned awe. “You have done convinced me of the fact you are not an ordinary policeman. I am contacting President Bush immediately to see if he can find federal employment for you. I have never seen such a shameful waste of mental talents.”


  “Who’s Mabus?” Darrel asked.

  Wyatt started to speak, then was silent. A strange transformation seemed to take place in his face. He looked straight ahead, his eyes thoughtful, his mouth compressed. He raised his right hand off the sheet and ticked a callus with his thumbnail, his eyes uplifted at Darrel now. “I ain’t sure who he is. But I got a notion he’s a whole lot bigger than any little shithouse operation you got around here. I seen that name wrote inside a-”

  “Inside what?” Darrel said.

  “I need my chemical cocktail. I’m done talking with you,” Wyatt said, his sardonic attitude gone now, his expression sullen.

  After Darrel McComb left the room, a nurse brought in a glass containing the orange medicine that smelled as if it had been dipped out of a settling pond at a sewage works. Wyatt drank the glass empty and continued to stare into space.

  “You saw the name ‘Mabus’ written inside what, Wyatt?” I said.

  “A pentagram. The woman who wrote it there knows what a pentagram means, too. Her daddy was a preacher.”

  “The sign of the devil?”

  “I ain’t got no more to say on it. God, my leg hurts. Them boys who visited me was a pair of mean motor scooters, wasn’t they?”

  The next afternoon, Saturday, I was Johnny American Horse’s best man at his and Amber Finley’s wedding on the lawn of a small white woodframe church with a tiny belfry, set against the backdrop of the Mission Mountains, rising like ancient glaciers straight out of the green earth into the clouds. The ceremony was conducted by both a Methodist minister and an Indian shaman who was the great-grandson of the Lakota mystic Black Elk. Amber wore a white dress with frills on it and purple suede cowboy boots, and looked radiant and happy and beautiful in the sunshine. Johnny, conservative as always, wore what was evidently his only suit, one that brought back memories I did not want to entertain on such a fine afternoon. The suit and vest were narrow-cut, dark pinstripe, just like the suit worn by L. Q. Navarro on the night he died.

  Johnny and Amber had sent out no formal invitations, but the churchyard was crowded with their friends-wranglers, feed growers from the Jocko Valley, musicians, log haulers, university professors, hard-core drunks, organic farmers, writers and artists, Indians from the Salish, Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and Blackfeet reservations, and weirded-out, mind-altered people who still believed the year was 1968.

  The reception was in a saloon, the dinner a pig and half of a buffalo barbecued over a pit of flaming wood dug in a grove of cottonwoods. The orchestra was a western string band put together by my son, Lucas, and the dance was held on a cement pad under a lilac sky, the snow on the Missions red in the sunset, the music of Bob Wills and Rose Maddox floating out over a countryside knee-deep in alfalfa and pooled with duck ponds.

  Everyone important in Amber’s life was there. Except for her father, United States Senator Romulus Finley.

  Senator Finley was at my office by 8 A.M. Monday. When he didn’t find me there, he went to the courthouse, where I was involved in a trial, and caught me in the corridor outside the courtroom. “What in the goddamn hell do you think you’re doing, son?” he said, his grip biting into my arm.

  “I’d appreciate your taking your hand off my person,” I said.

  “A murderer just married my daughter, and you helped him do it.”

  “I’m not going to ask you again,” I said.

  He released me and took a step back. “I won’t put up with this bullshit, Mr. Holland.”

  “I think you embarrass yourself, sir,” I said.

  “Say that again?”

  “Your daughter is a good person. Why don’t you show her a little respect?”

  “Son, I’m just about a half inch from busting you between the lights.”

  “My father was a stringer-bead welder on gaslines all over the Southwest. He was a fine man and called me ‘son.’ Other men don’t.”

  “Have it your way. As far as I’m concerned, Johnny American Horse is a subversive and a traitor. He’s taken advantage of my daughter’s naivete and you, an educated man and officer of the court, have helped him do it. I won’t put up with it.”

  He walked back down the corridor toward the courthouse entrance, his leather soles loud, his meaty shoulders and neck framed against the light outside.

  I should have dismissed the insult, even the implied threat, as the expression of wounded pride in a childish man. But there was something about Finley that was hard to abide, a prototypical personality any southerner recognizes-one characterized by a combination of self-satisfaction, stupidity, and a suggestion of imminent violence, all of it glossed over with a veneer of moral and patriotic respectability.

  I followed him down the sidewalk through the maples on the courthouse lawn to a steel-gray limousine with charcoal-tinted windows that was parked by the curb. He opened the back door to get in, and on the far side of the leather seat I saw a man in his fifties who had a good-natured face, blond hair that was white on the tips, a smile that was both familiar and likable. His eyes were friendly and warm, his teeth almost perfect. There were gin roses in his face, but they gave his countenance a vulnerability and consequently a greater humanity. I was sure I knew him and at the same time equally sure we had never met.

  Romulus Finley started to raise a remonstrative finger at me, but his companion leaned over so he could look at both of us and said, “Now, now, let’s don’t have this. Mr. Holland, take a ride with us. We’ll have coffee at a dandy place on the river.”

  “Thank you just the same, but I have an issue here with Senator Finley,” I replied.

  “Whatever it is, we can work it out,” Finley’s companion replied. He stretched out his arm and handed me a business card that was inserted between two of his fingers. “My home phone is on the back. I’m impressed with your legal reputation. Your father died in a natural gas blowout down in Texas, didn’t he? I bet he’d be mighty proud of you today.”

  “What did you say about my father?”

  “Call me,” he said. “I’d like to help you cut through some of the problems you’re encountering.”

  He was still smiling at me when Finley got in the limo and closed the door. I stared dumbly at the tinted back window of the limo as it drove away, then looked at the business card in my hand. The name on it was Karsten Mabus.

  That evening, Temple and I fixed sliced chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches and iced tea and fruit salad for dinner and took it out on the side gallery to eat. The sky was blue above the valley, the sunlight a pale yellow on the hillsides, and hawks floated above the trees up in the saddles. But I couldn’t concentrate on either our conversation or the loveliness of the evening. I wiped my mouth with a napkin and pushed away my plate.

  “Want to tell me what happened today?” Temple said.

  “I had a run-in with Senator Finley. He seems to think I’m responsible for his daughter marrying Johnny American Horse.”

  “Tell him to grow up.”

  “I think I did, but I don’t remember. I was pretty angry.”

  “So that’s what’s been on your mind all day?”

  “Finley was with another man. I’d swear I know him but I don’t know from where. He gave me his business card.”

  I took the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the pine-knot table where she could read it. Unconsciously, I wiped my fingers on my shirt.

  “Mabus? He’s the CEO of a chemical company?” she said.

  “He knew about my father’s death on the pipeline.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something disturbing about this guy.”

  “You’re listening to Wyatt Dixon-that stuff about a pentagram. Dixon’s a nutjob, Billy Bob.”

  “Maybe.” I got up from the table and leaned against the railing on the gallery. A string of white-tailed deer were working their way down a switchback trail into the pasture, their summer coats gold in the shadows. “What right does this guy Mabus have to mention my father’s death?�
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  “So tomorrow morning we check him out. Now sit down and eat,” she said.

  I thought about Johnny and Amber’s wedding and how much Johnny, in his pinstripe suit and vest, had reminded me of L. Q. Navarro. “You believe in premonitions?” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “I don’t, either,” I said.

  The next morning, as I was leaving for work, I found a note under the windshield wiper of my Avalon. It read:

  Billy Bob,

  Go to Sheep Flats up on the Blackfoot at 9:00 A.M. today. I’ll be parked off the dirt track, down in the trees. Drive past my vehicle, then walk back along the riverbank and up the incline to my vehicle. Carry a fishing rod. Do not mention our meeting on either a cell phone or a land line.

  I’ll wait for you fifteen minutes. If you’re not there, I’ll assume you’re tied up in court. Thanks,

  Seth

  I drove up into the Blackfoot drainage, crossed a long cement bridge over the river, then turned up a dusty road that climbed high above the river, so that down below, the water looked like a blue ribbon winding through boulders and sloping hills covered with larch and ponderosa and fir trees. I crossed over a rocky point that jutted into space, then coasted down the road into shade and a wooded, parklike area where the remains of a nineteenth-century logging camp had moldered into dark brown pulp.

  I saw a Jeep Cherokee parked in the trees and a tall man in a shapeless felt hat leaning against the grille, smoking a pipe, watching the river course over the rocks down below. I did as Seth had asked and drove past the Jeep, then worked my way back on the riverbank through dry boulders and the willows that grew in the shallows, my fly rod over my shoulder.

  “Have I got a tap on my phone?” I said.

  “Hard to say. My guess is you probably do,” he replied.

  “I don’t care for that, Seth.”