In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  I cut the burlap from the root balls of the poplars and began dropping them into the holes I had dug. I looked up from my work when I heard a horse nicker in the arroyo above me. The sun had dipped right into a notch in the mountain, and a hot red glow shone down through the dead and collapsed trees in the arroyo. A rider mounted on an Appaloosa gelding with gray and white spots on its rump moved down through the trees, the Appaloosa’s shoes barely sounding on the soft carpet of humus and rotted deadfall.

  The rider was hatless, bare-chested, riding without a saddle, his silky red hair in his eyes, his skin as smooth as tallow, a huge green deerfly perched on his shoulder.

  “Howdy doodie, Brother Holland?” Wyatt Dixon said. “Had my horse over to the vet’inary in the next hollow, then thought I’d take him for a ride up your ridge. Also wanted to give you a report on my reconnoitering efforts.” He popped the deerfly off his shoulder with one finger.

  “Reconnoitering efforts?”

  Wyatt lifted one booted leg over the horse’s withers and slid to the ground as smoothly as water sliding down a rock. His chest had small nipples and his underarms were shaved, his lats wedging out like the base of an inverted stump. He used one hand to pick up a poplar tree by the trunk, one whose root ball must have weighed a hundred pounds. He dropped it into a hole and kicked dirt on top of it. “We got us a client-attorney relationship, counselor?”

  “No.”

  “How about I give you a one-dollar bill? That makes it legal, don’t it?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Wyatt. Sometimes the more technicalities you get into, the more problems you have.”

  “With my record, I guess I cain’t blame you for not trusting me. But I got to say I feel a little let down.” He pulled on his nose, his jaw hooked forward, his colorless eyes fixed on nothing. “Through my research activities, which I ain’t gonna describe, I come up with a couple of names.”

  He handed me a piece of folded notebook paper. But I didn’t read it. I folded it again and stuck it inside the band of my hat. He watched me curiously.

  “Are these the Indians who broke into a research lab?” I asked.

  “They’re both white men. One is a freelance shooter, does five-grand hits out of Miami. The other one is some kind of child-molester pervert from San Fran. I heard about him in Quentin. He’d do a yard job on a man for thirty bucks. I don’t know what either one of them looks like. That’s the problem.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re already here. At least that’s what my reconnoitering seems to indicate. This plainclothes cop, Darrel McComb? He come to see you?”

  “No.”

  “He left his business card at my house. Makes me uneasy when a man bird-dogs my house.” Wyatt rubbed his shoulder, found a pimple, and popped it. He seemed to think a long time. But the only color in his eyes was in the pupils, so that his eyes took on no cast, no more than clear glass could. “Brother Holland?”

  “What?”

  “You wouldn’t try to slicker me on this deal, would you? ’Cause of deeds past? Get me to doing scutwork for you, busting the law, ripping folks’ ass, then when you was finished with me, drive an eighteen-wheeler up my cheeks?”

  “If I wanted to get even with you, Wyatt, I’d hit you in the head with this posthole digger and bury you right here.”

  He picked up his horse’s reins and flipped them back and forth across his knuckles. The curvature of his shoulders and spine was like a question mark. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “You converted to a papist, but you’re still a river-baptized man. I got the Indian sign on you, counselor.”

  “I don’t know if I like your tone.”

  “Them people painted acid on my cinch at the rodeo and liked to got me killed. So that gives you and me what’s called a shared agenda.” He stepped on a rock and mounted his horse. “I done changed my ways, Brother Holland, but the man ain’t been born who can use me and walk away from it. Tell Miss Temple I said howdy doodie.”

  He kicked his horse in the sides and leaned forward with it as it ascended the arroyo, disappearing through the deadfall into the sun’s last red rays.

  Back at the house I removed the scrap of notebook paper he had given me from my hatband and read the two names penciled on it: L. W. Peeples and Tex Barker. There was a third name, Mabus, written in the corner, at an angle, a notation that I suspected had been made there at another time and was unrelated to the issue of the two hired killers.

  “What are you looking at?” Temple said.

  We were in the living room, and outside I could see snow crystals blowing in the light from the gallery. I told her about Wyatt Dixon’s visit.

  “I can’t find words to describe my feelings on this. This man is out of the abyss, Billy Bob,” she said.

  “I’ll get rid of him.”

  “When?”

  “Can you run these two names through NCIC?”

  “You know I can. How are you going to get rid of Dixon?”

  “I’ll figure a way. I give you my word,” I replied, refusing to meet her eyes.

  But by next morning I still had no plan for getting Wyatt Dixon out of our lives, or at least off our property and away from my office. Temple went through her San Antonio contact and ran the two names Wyatt had given me through the computer at the National Crime Information Center. She called me at noon.

  “There’s nothing on these guys,” she said.

  “No arrests at all?”

  “The names don’t correlate with any particular individual. Can you imagine how many offenders have the nickname Tex?”

  “How about the other guy-Peeples?”

  “Yeah, there’re plenty of them. But none with the initials L.W. Billy Bob, do you actually believe a basket case like Wyatt Dixon is a credible source of information?”

  The rest of the afternoon I tried to think of a solution to my situation with Wyatt. Lawyers don’t ask witnesses questions they themselves don’t know the answer to; wise men don’t make deals with the devil; and sane people don’t unscrew the head of a man like Wyatt Dixon and spit in it. Why had I been so foolish?

  By 5 P.M. my head was pounding. There was only one way out of my problem, and the thought of doing what I had to do made sweat run down my sides.

  I drove through the sawmill town of Bonner and on up the Blackfoot, then parked on the roadside across the river from Wyatt’s property. When I crossed the swing bridge, the water down below was roaring with sound, pink and green in the sunset, braiding around rocks that steamed with mist. Wyatt’s truck was parked by the half-destroyed house in which he lived, but I saw no sign of him in the yard or down by the riverbank. No lights burned inside the house.

  I walked under a birch tree and stood in front of the ruined first floor and called out his name. But there was no answer. I threw a rock on the tin roof. A stone barbecue pit was smoking by the side of the house, a steak dripping fat into the coals. I threw another rock on the roof.

  “Why not knock on the door like a white man?” a voice said from above.

  I looked up into the birch tree. Wyatt sat on a thick limb, his back against the trunk, eating from a carton of peach ice cream.

  “I came here to make a confession to you,” I said.

  “I look like a papist minister?”

  “That threatening note you found in your mailbox?” I was looking almost straight up in the tree, my vertebrae and neck tendons starting to stress. But that was not the real cause of my discomfort. I could actually feel my heart hitting against my ribs. “It was a fake. I wrote it. Your cinch breaking at the rodeo was an accident. I was in the stands and saw you get stomped and decided to make use of the situation.”

  He continued to spoon ice cream out of the carton and put it in his mouth, his eyes hooded, his mouth as cold-looking as a slit in a side of frozen meat.

  “I was playing with your head, Wyatt. I showed you a lack of respect, and for that I
’m here to apologize,” I said. “But I’m also asking you not to come around us anymore. We’ve got to have that understanding.”

  The only sound was the wind puffing in the tree and the water coursing along the riverbank, as steady as the sustained hum of a sewing machine. I swallowed as I waited for him to speak, then tried to work the crick out of my neck. I heard him drop the spoon into the empty carton.

  “There’s a heifer herebouts I punched a time or two, and I don’t mean put my brand on, either,” he said. “The house she lives in got tore up pretty bad during my reconnoitering.”

  “Hold on a minute. As an officer of the court, I have to report any crimes I have knowledge of, outside of those confessed to me by a client.”

  “Work out your own goddamn problems, counselor. Right now I’m having thoughts that tell me it’s time for my chemical cocktail or I might do something both of us is gonna regret.” He dropped to the ground suddenly and was standing in front of me, his breath cold in my face, the veins in his neck like purple spiderweb. “That detective, Darrel McComb, has got me figured for the break-in at that woman’s house. That means she’s got me figured for it. That means them two killers got me figured for it. You starting to get the picture?”

  I slipped my hands in my back pockets and stepped back from him. “In the past you did great injury to my wife,” I said. “As a Christian, I’m supposed to forgive you for it. I don’t know if I’ve done that, but I’ve tried to put it aside. I’m asking you to do the same. If you don’t, one of us is going to end up in long-term refrigeration.”

  He wiped ice cream off his mouth with his wrist and looked at it. “Ain’t no man uses me, Brother Holland.”

  “I believe you. Do what you have to do. I can’t change it.”

  I walked all the way to the swing bridge before I looked back at him. He had not moved. He was staring at the ground, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans, his back at a crooked angle. I walked back toward him and he heard my footsteps in the grass. He turned, the colorless, glasslike quality of his eyes tinted with the redness of the sun.

  “Bible says, ‘Don’t tempt the Lord thy God.’ Same warning applies to some men,” he said.

  “The name ‘Mabus’ was written on the notepaper you gave me. What does it mean?”

  “It was wrote down on several places inside the house that got reconnoitered. But let’s stick with the subject at hand. Why’d you run a game on me, counselor? Why’d you go and do that to both of us?”

  For just a moment I thought I saw a genuine look of sadness in his face.

  I hated violence. Or at least I told myself I did. My family history was filled with it. My great-grandfather was Sam Morgan Holland, an ex-Confederate soldier and gunfighter and finally a saddle preacher who shot between five and nine men. My father died in a pipeline blowout while doing a repair weld, and his death may have been deliberately caused by a man who envied and hated him and opened a valve at a pump station to ensure that gas would be inside the pipe when the electric arc struck it.

  As Texas Rangers, L. Q. Navarro and I had waged a private war against drug mules in northern Mexico. We never shot down an unarmed man or refused him quarter when he walked toward us with his hands on his head. But the night ambushes we set up were guaranteed to result in firefights and not negotiations. This particular group of drug transporters, or at least their compatriots, tortured a friend of ours to death, a DEA agent who was one of the finest men I ever knew. We trapped them in adobe huts, mesquite thickets, river-bottoms, and arroyos thick with cactus, and dawn would find us inserting playing cards emblazoned with the shield of the Texas Rangers into the mouths of the dead.

  But no matter what the war advocates of our times tell us, no violent excursion ends well. L. Q. Navarro paid with his life for our grandiose schemes, and I still feared sleep and the images that dwelt in my unconscious. That night I sat by myself in the living room until 3 A.M. The valley was dark, the fir trees on the mountains shaggy in the starlight. I could hear deer or elk clatter against our rail fence, a rock tumble from the hillside, a pinecone ping on the barn’s metal roof. Was Wyatt out there? I doubted it, not tonight.

  But it was only a matter of time, I thought. Men such as Wyatt Dixon were driven by ego and a visceral pride in themselves. In fact, their perception of themselves was actually their only possession. I had just managed to cheapen Wyatt’s image of himself, and I knew one day soon the bill would come due.

  At the time I did not know there were other people in the area who were even more foolish and reckless than I, a bunch who had just embarked on the worst mistake in their lives.

  Chapter 11

  The next morning started off in earnest with Darrel McComb in my office, a martial light in his face. His cheeks were bladed with color, his crew cut stiff as hog bristles, his suit freshly pressed, his shoes spit-shined and gleaming.

  “You look like a man in motion, Darrel,” I said.

  “What were you doing at Wyatt Dixon’s place yesterday?”

  “You’ve got Dixon under surveillance?”

  “Duh,” he answered.

  “It’s none of your business what I was doing there.”

  “Somebody tossed Greta Lundstrum’s house. Somebody who could tear two-by-four joists in half with his hands. Sound like anybody you know?”

  “If you think Dixon is a viable suspect, go talk to him. Right now I’m pretty busy.”

  “What was he looking for?”

  I could tell he didn’t expect an answer, but I surprised him and myself as well. “I think a couple of new shooters are in the area.” I wrote down the names Dixon had given me and shoved them across the desk. “Temple came up empty on these guys. Maybe you’ll do better.”

  “You’re running some type of police investigation on your own?”

  “I didn’t say that. And I don’t know anything about Dixon breaking into a house, either. If I were you, I’d be careful, Darrel.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m not sure what kind of work you used to do for the G, but I suspect it was down in the basement, off the computer, and genuinely nasty. If I know that, other people do, too. My guess is they’re not happy you know their secrets or how they operate.”

  “I’ve known some prissy lawyers in my career, but you’ve got your own zip code, Holland. You got these names from Dixon, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What makes you think you have some kind of privileged status in this case? If I catch you holding back information in a homicide investigation, I’ll do everything in my power to have you disbarred. Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “I can sympathize with your situation, Darrel. You don’t get a lot of help. But you beat up a friend of mine with a blackjack. It was a lousy thing to do. So don’t be pointing your finger in my face.”

  I saw his jawbone tighten. He looked sideways, out the window. “So maybe I’d change that, I mean about American Horse.”

  He waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, he opened the door to let himself out.

  “Darrel?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Does the name ‘Mabus’ mean anything to you?”

  “No.” He looked hard at me. “Why? Who is he?”

  “Probably no one important. Forget I mentioned it,” I replied.

  “Were you really an assistant U.S. attorney?” he said.

  All morning Darrel McComb remained agitated and angry. He was convinced now that Wyatt Dixon had broken into Greta Lundstrum’s bungalow and that Dixon had taken information of some kind from the house and was sharing it with an attorney. Now, through the attorney, Darrel had obtained the names of two men who were possibly hired gunmen recently arrived in the area. He started to go into the sheriff’s office and tell him of everything he had discovered, then realized he would also have to tell the sheriff he was in the sack with a woman he was using as a confidential informant, one who was perhaps involved with criminal activity.

>   Darrel had arranged a supper date with Greta that evening. And once again he knew his interests in her were far from purely professional. His memories of their tryst Saturday night caused sexual stirrings in him that made him wonder if part of him wasn’t still locked in adolescence. He was also starting to experience another problem, one that was like a sixteen-penny nail driven into his skull. He felt he had betrayed Amber by sleeping with Greta. It made no sense at all. Amber treated him as though he were a moral cretin, a bumbling loser she could dress down at a public dance. To get rid of his own guilt feelings, he let himself imagine Amber in bed with Johnny American Horse, her knees spread on top of him, Johnny’s hands cupped on her breasts, her mouth open and her eyes sealed with her passion. Then he felt such rage at the vision in his head he smashed his fist into a locker door while other cops stared at him, bewildered at his behavior.

  He tried to eat lunch in a cafe downtown but couldn’t finish his food. He returned to the department, checked out a cruiser, and headed for Stevensville. At first Greta had been devastated by the damage done to her home, but she had quickly regained control of herself, substituting anger and resolve for loss and helplessness. In fact, Darrel was impressed. She had moved into a motel, put someone else in charge at her office, and hired carpenters, roofers, drywallers, and painters to repair her house. She worked side by side with them, firing a nailgun into studs, rolling paint onto drywall, rope-pulling bales of shingles onto the roof. The workmen showed up at 7 A.M., called her “ma’am,” and did not use profanity within earshot of her.

  When he pulled into the driveway she was on the roof, in white painter’s pants, a cute white cap on her head. She climbed down the ladder, a hammer swinging from a cloth loop on her side. “How you doin’, handsome?” she said.

  “Thought I’d check out how it’s going, maybe update you on a couple of things I found out,” he replied.

  But she seemed uninterested. She tucked a strand of hair in her cap and watched a carpenter running an electric saw through a board. Then she turned back at him and smiled. “Want to have some lunch and maybe a little rest break?” she said.