In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4 Read online

  A middle-aged Indian man, with a stomach that hung over his belt like a sack of birdseed, came through the front door, hesitating a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dark interior. He wore a peaked, battered hat, and the sunlight from outside shone through the holes in the felt. He could have been either the Indian girl’s father or her husband, or an uncle or an older brother. Or perhaps he was none of these. But he slapped the girl full in the face, so hard her eyes crossed.

  It took her a moment to recognize who had struck her. Then she said in a subdued, wan voice, “Oh, hi, Joe, you want a drink?”

  The middle-aged man ripped off his hat and whipped her head and face with it. The boy with the Indian girl did nothing, watching her humiliation in the mirror behind the bar as though it had nothing to do with his life.

  The cowboy at the end of the bar unhooked his boots from the stool, went to the front door, and threw his cigar outside. Then walked toward the middle-aged man. The cowboy wore a heavy white long-sleeved shirt and a silver buckle that reflected light like a heliograph.

  “Whoa there, bud,” the cowboy said, grabbing the Indian man’s wrist. “You done hit your last woman for today. Least while I’m around.”

  “Stay out of-” the Indian man began.

  The cowboy grabbed the man’s arm and shook him with such power the man’s teeth rattled. “I’ll walk you to your truck. Don’t be hurting that young woman again, either. I hear about it, I’ll be back and you’ll be walking on sticks,” he said.

  He took the Indian man outside and watched him climb into the driver’s seat of an old pickup. “Hold on a minute,” he said. The cowboy went back inside the club and returned with the man’s hat, then dropped it inside the truck window. “That means you ain’t got no reason to come back.”

  He reentered the club, picked up his coffeepot and cup, and walked to the back, where Lucas still sat at a table by the bandstand, his Martin across his thighs.

  “Know who I am?” the cowboy said.

  “I do now. I ain’t got anything to say to you either,” Lucas replied.

  “I come out of the pen a different man.”

  “Tell it to somebody else, Wyatt.”

  “Me and you got a lot in common. I was a woods colt, too. My daddy knowed it and that’s why he made every day of my young life what you might call a learning experience.”

  “Got nothing to say to you.”

  “Want a beer or a soda pop?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you at the rodeo, then.”

  Lucas continued to tune his Martin and didn’t answer. Wyatt Dixon was framed against the light like a scorched tin cutout.

  “Johnny American Horse has got your old man jumping through hoops,” Wyatt said.

  Don’t bite, Lucas told himself, his heart tripping. “How?” he asked.

  “American Horse ain’t no shrinking violet. He’s a stone killer. Ask them two men he cut up with an ax and a knife. You get an Indian mad, run his pride down, make fun of his woman, he’ll either come at your throat or turn into a pitiful drunk like that ’un I just kicked out of here.”

  Lucas looked into space, this time determined not to speak again.

  “Here’s what it is,” Wyatt said. “American Horse’s sixteen-year-old nephew got executed by a white man. The word is executed. Boy was breaking into the white man’s truck and the white man come up behind him and put a bullet in his brain from three feet. That white man was turned loose with just an ankle bracelet on him. American Horse ain’t no mystic holy man. On the sauce he’s a mean machine out to put zippers all over white people. Take care of yourself, kid.”

  Wyatt set his coffeepot and cup on the bar and walked out the front door, his boots loud on the plank floor.

  “Dixon just didn’t seem like the same fellow,” Lucas said that night at the house.

  “Believe it, bud, he’s the same fellow,” I replied.

  We were eating dinner at the kitchen table; the moon was yellow on the side of the hill behind the house and up high snow was drifting on the fir trees.

  “People change. That’s what your church teaches, don’t it?” Lucas said, his eyes playful now.

  “The Bible doesn’t have a chapter on the likes of Wyatt Dixon,” I said.

  Later, the three of us washed and put away the dishes, then Lucas went out on the front gallery and watched the deer grazing in the meadow. He looked pale and handsome in the moonglow, his body lean and angular, his jeans high on his hips, his flannel shirt rolled above his elbows.

  Before he was born, his mother had run away from her husband, a hapless and violent man, and had moved in with me when I was a patrolman with the Houston Police Department, living in the Heights. After Lucas was born, his mother was electrocuted trying to fix a well pump her husband had previously repaired with adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet.

  Lucas’s early life should have embittered him against the world. Instead, he became a loving and brave and decent kid, with an enormous musical talent. As I watched him leaning against a post on the gallery, his hat cocked on his head, serene inside his youthful thoughts, I wished I’d killed Wyatt Dixon years ago, when I had the chance.

  The next morning, Wednesday, I saw Darrel McComb coming hard from the courthouse, crossing between cars to get to my office. I saw him glance behind him, almost getting hit by a truck in the bargain, then I heard him talking loudly in the reception area.

  I went up front to meet him. “What’s the problem?” I said.

  His face looked heated, the skin under his nose nicked by his razor.

  “Sorry, Billy Bob,” Hildy said.

  “It’s all right. Come on in, Darrel,” I said.

  He followed me into my office and closed the door.

  “Leave it open,” I said.

  “Screw you.”

  “What?”

  “You sent your wife down to Stevensville to question this woman Greta Lundstrum. Your wife told her I was following Lundstrum around. Lundstrum just called the sheriff and gave him hell over the phone.”

  “You deny you were in the woods above Romulus Finley’s house while Lundstrum was there?”

  “I was following Wyatt Dixon. I filed a report on that,” he said.

  “I bet you did.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  There were circles under his eyes and a raw odor in his clothes. His coat was open, and I could see the small leather clip-on holster he wore on his belt. I walked past him and opened the door. “I can respect your problems, Darrel. But you beat up Johnny American Horse with a sap and we both know why you did it,” I said. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  His scalp glistened inside his crew cut. “I’ve seen Lundstrum before. I don’t know where,” he said, his brow knitting.

  Then I realized he was somewhere out on the frayed edges of his life. “I’ve got appointments all morning. How about we have a talk after lunch?” I said.

  “That’s out. I shouldn’t have come here. Tell your wife, no matter what you people think, I got a good record as a police officer and I don’t need a P.I. dragging my name in the dirt,” he said.

  Who “you people” referred to was anybody’s guess.

  But Darrel McComb’s quest for personal vindication was not over. That afternoon he went to the home of Amber Finley. She was working in the garden, barefoot, wearing only a halter and shorts. There were sun freckles on her back, and when she sat up from her work to talk to him, her stomach creased above her exposed navel, causing him to fix his eyes intently on her face so as not to reveal the weakness he felt in his loins.

  “I just wanted to clear up why I was watching your house. This lady Ms. Lundstrum has gotten hold of a crazy idea and I thought maybe you had some false notions, too,” he said.

  “I know exactly why you were watching us,” she replied.

  He looked away in desperation, then knelt down so he could talk to her at eye level.

  “You’re makin
g me uncomfortable,” she said.

  “Listen, the evidence against Johnny bothers me. The tennis shoes that matched the prints at the crime scene were under a bunch of other shoes and boots. But if Johnny had just worn them, why would they be under other shoes, unless someone wanted to disguise the fact they were placed there to be discovered? The Jiffy Lube receipt on the floor of the hospital room doesn’t flush, either. The killer was wearing hospital greens. So where was he carrying the receipt-in his underwear?”

  “The prosecution will say he had jeans on under his greens. Why are you doing this?” she said.

  “I want to let all that bad blood go. I’m sorry for what I did to Johnny.”

  “So tell it to Johnny and Billy Bob.”

  He got up and tried to brush the grass stain off the knee of his slacks. “If I acted disrespectfully to you, I apologize. I don’t mean to be a bad guy, but sometimes-” He didn’t finish.

  No, you’re just a geek, she thought, then felt oddly uncharitable as she watched him try to tuck his shirt in with his thumb and disguise his pot stomach.

  The next morning I drove up to Johnny American Horse’s small spread on the res. Amber’s Dakota was parked in the yard and she was sweeping a cloud of dust off the front porch. Johnny had just finished shoeing a sorrel mare inside the barn, a leather apron that was almost yellow with wear tied around his waist. He slapped the mare on the rump and watched her trot into the pasture, where she joined a sorrel stud. I leaned on the railed fence Johnny had made from shaved lodgepole.

  “Ever see a pair with that much red in them?” he said.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Gonna breed a whole herd of them.”

  I looked at him to see if he was serious. “Sounds like a lifetime job,” I said.

  He grinned and took off his apron and hung it over the fence. “You eat breakfast yet?” he said.

  “A sixteen-year-old boy from the res was killed a while back by a white man whose truck he broke into,” I said, ignoring his invitation.

  Johnny nodded, his eyes on the two sorrels in the pasture.

  “That kid was your nephew?” I said.

  “What about it?” he asked.

  “The court released the guy who did it. It’s reason for a family member to bear a lot of anger toward the system. It’s the kind of stuff the prosecution is going to use against us. Why didn’t you mention you were the boy’s uncle?”

  “I remember when a white rancher ran over an Indian kid hitchhiking outside Missoula and got a twenty-dollar traffic fine. The kid died. The only cost to that rancher was his twenty bucks. That’s the way it is.”

  He opened the gate to the lot and came outside, then looped the gate secure. He propped his arms across the top rail on the fence. The wind was up, balmy and smelling of distant rain, denting the alfalfa and timothy in the fields, puffing pine needles out of the trees on the slopes. The two sorrels were running in tandem across the pasture, their necks extended, their muscles rippling. In the distance I could hear thunder echoing in the hills.

  “You think all this is worth fighting for?” he said.

  “Damn straight it is,” I replied.

  “I think one day the bison will run free again,” he said.

  I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t reply.

  “Let’s go see Amber and drink some coffee,” he said.

  The next morning, Fay Harback said she wanted to see me in her office.

  “I’m a little busy. Why don’t you come over here?” I said.

  “Let me define the situation a bit more clearly. How would you like to have American Horse’s bail revoked?” she replied.

  The previous night there had been a break-in at an agricultural research lab outside Stevensville. The intruders were not amateurs or vandals. They had used bolt cutters on the gate chain, cut the telephone line on which the alarm system was dependent, and called the alarm service to report the downed wire, using the owner’s password.

  Once inside, they had rifled all the hard-copy document files, downloaded computers, rounded up all the floppy disks they could find, and drilled the floor safe under a canvas tarp they spread over themselves to conceal the glow of their flashlights and the noise of the drill.

  A man returning from a bar in town around 3 A.M. reported that he saw four men and a woman exit the back of the building and cross a field to a grove of cottonwoods, then drive away in a van. As he rounded the bend, his headlights swept across the group and he was sure of what he saw: the woman was white but the men were dark-skinned and wore pigtails on their shoulders.

  “So you’re saying four Indians and a white woman broke into a research lab? What’s that have to do with Johnny?” I said.

  “American Horse is involved in this. If not directly, he knows who did it.”

  “You’re calling Johnny an ecoterrorist?”

  “Your friend Seth Masterson has already been here. This whole business smells of American Horse’s ongoing war with the federal government. I don’t like being the last person on the telephone tree. I don’t like being used, either.”

  “I don’t know anything about the break-in, Fay. I doubt if Johnny does, either.”

  “Where was your client last night?” She looked at me expectantly, and I realized she secretly hoped I could provide an alibi for him, perhaps for his sake, perhaps so she would not have to feel deceived.

  But I didn’t answer her question. In reality, I was already wondering how the intruders had pulled it off. I was also wondering if some of Johnny’s friends, who had been in the pen, weren’t indeed a likely group of suspects. “How did these guys have the password? It sounds like an inside job to me. Maybe it’s industrial spying,” I said.

  “Most security services pay minimum wage to their employees. So their employees come and go and often have little loyalty to their employer. You have no idea who the woman might be?”

  “No, I don’t,” I replied.

  She walked in a circle, her frustration obvious. “I hate a lie. I hate it worse than anything in the world,” she said.

  I fixed my gaze on the trees rustling on the courthouse lawn and a long line of bicyclers moving through the traffic.

  “What’s the story on this guy Masterson?” she said.

  “He’s like a lot of people who work for the G. He’s a good man who has to take orders from a bunch of political shitheads,” I replied.

  She tried to look serious but couldn’t hide a smile. “You see Amber Finley?” she asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Tell her what it’s like to cell with a bull dyke up at the women’s pen.”

  Darrel McComb had never belonged to a church, but he did believe in spiritual entities. In his mind there was a Valhalla where slain heroes lived in a giant meadhouse and feasted on roasted boar and watched over the few who fought to protect the many. One of those slain heroes was Rocky Harrigan, Darrel’s mentor in a half-dozen clandestine operations, killed when his cargo plane crashed into a mountain during an airdrop to anti-Russian forces in Afghanistan.

  Rocky’s handsome face grinned at Darrel from a framed photograph on top of Darrel’s dresser, Rocky wearing shades, a fatigue cap, and a skinned-up leather jacket, his arm cocked on the open

  window of an old DC-6.

  Why’d Rocky have to go and get himself killed? Darrel thought. And for what? Dropping ordnance and C-rats to Muslim fanatics who one day would fly planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. What a travesty. Who wrote the damn history books, anyway? Names like Rocky’s never got in there. Instead, the whole nation lionized fraternity pissants who had never heard a shot fired in anger in their lives.

  Darrel couldn’t shake the funk and depression that had plagued him ever since he had beaten the Indian with the blackjack. His career and his life were unraveling. His rage against Johnny American Horse was just the symptom, not the cause. But what was the cause?

  He didn’t know.

  He’d always been straight
up as a cop, true to his own ethos, but now he’d lied and filed a fraudulent report to cover up the fact he was a voyeur, after being caught in the act by Wyatt Dixon, who at some point would undoubtedly try to blackmail him. All because he literally ached with desire whenever he set eyes on Amber Finley.

  He went out on the balcony of the apartment where he lived above the Clark Fork River. Three stories below were sharp rocks and a slope that dropped precipitously into the water. All he needed to do was step on a chair, fit one foot on the handrail, and launch himself into space. For just a moment he saw his body being lifted off the rocks onto a gurney by firemen and paramedics, all of them solemn-faced at the passing of one of their own.

  Who was he kidding? He didn’t have two friends in the whole town, nor did he want any, at least not here, in Ho Chi Minh City West.

  Don’t get mad, get even, he thought.

  Why not start with this Greta Lundstrum broad? Who did she think she was, dimeing him with the sheriff, accusing him of bird-dogging her at Romulus Finley’s house, bringing down a shitload of departmental grief on his head? He pictured her in his mind’s eye again. He was sure he’d seen her before. But where?

  Good God, he thought. It was on a surveillance two years ago. He and another plainclothes had followed Wyatt Dixon to a motel in Alberton, down the Clark Fork, and when Dixon had tapped on a door, a thick-bodied woman had let him in the room. An hour later, Dixon had driven away. Darrel had run the woman’s car tag but had decided she was simply a casual girlfriend of Dixon’s and of no consequence in the investigation of white supremacists in western Montana.

  What an irony, Darrel thought. A connection between Dixon and the Lundstrum woman had suddenly validated his lie and justified his own presence at the Finley house. He looked at the framed photograph of his dead friend on the dresser and felt that somehow Rocky was watching over him, maybe even winking his eye and lifting a tankard of mead from Valhalla in salute.

  At the department Monday morning Darrel opened a fresh legal pad, wrote the date and time at the top of the page, then clicked Greta Lundstrum’s name into the departmental computer and hit the search key.