In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  “Say what you said again.”

  “I’ll give you something else to think about instead. You and your bud were armed with a semiautomatic and a cut-down double barrel, but an Indian with a knife and tomahawk cleaned your clock and didn’t get a scratch on him. If I were you, I’d stick to beating up old people and hookers.”

  I could feel his eyes burrowing into my neck as I left the room.

  On the way to my car I passed the sheriff’s detective, Darrel McComb. I had used the words “racist” and “thug” when talking about McComb to the district attorney, Fay Harback. Like most slurs, the words were simplistic and inadequate and probably revealed more about me than they did about McComb, namely, my inability to think clearly about men of his background.

  The truth was he didn’t have a background. He came from the hinterland somewhere, perhaps Nebraska or Kansas, a green-gold place of wheat and cornfields and North European churches we do not associate with the Darrel McCombs of the world. He was big, with farm-boy hands, his head crew-cut, his face full of bone. He had been a crop duster, an M.P. in the Army, and later had worked as an investigator for CID.

  But there were rumors about Darrel: He’d been part of the dirty war in Argentina and connected up with intelligence operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador; he’d run cocaine for the Contras into the ghettos of the West Coast; he was an honest-to-God war hero and Air America pilot who had been shot down twice in Laos. And, lastly, he was just a dumb misogynistic flatfoot with delusions of grandeur.

  As a sheriff’s detective, he operated on the fine edges of restraint, never quite crossing lines but always leaving others with the impression of where he stood on race, university peace activists, and handling criminals.

  Ask Darrel McComb a question about trout fishing while he was sitting in the barber’s chair, he’d talk the calendar off the wall. Ask him where he lived twenty years ago, Darrel McComb would only smile.

  “I hear your man is on the street,” he said.

  “Which man is that, Darrel?”

  “Wyatt Dixon,” he said, feeding a stick of gum into his mouth, his eyes focused down the sidewalk.

  “Fact is, he was out at my house. I shot at him a couple of times. Did he check in with you on that?”

  McComb’s eyes came back on mine. “Your aim must not be too good. I just saw him eating at Stockman’s.”

  “Nice seeing you, Darrel. You try to jump Johnny American Horse over the hurdles again, I’ll be seeing a lot more of you.”

  I heard him laugh to himself as I walked away.

  Temple and I and my son, Lucas, had moved to western Montana from Texas only two years before. But moving to Montana marked more than a geographic change in a person’s life. The mountains and rivers of the northern Rockies are the last of an unspoiled America. To live inside a stretch of country that still bears similarities to the way the earth looked before the Industrial Age humbles a person in a fashion that is hard to convey to outsiders. The summer light rises high into the sky and stays there until after 10 P.M.; the stones in a river quake with sound in the darkness, giving the lie to the notion that matter does not possess a soul; the sunset on the mountains becomes like electrified blood, so intense in its burning on the earth’s rim even an unbeliever is tempted to think of it as a metaphysical testimony to the passion of Christ.

  But I did not need the grandeur of the Northwest to make me dwell upon spiritual presences. The friend I’d slain, L. Q. Navarro, was never far from my sight, regardless of where I happened to be. Sometimes he stood behind me while I groomed our horses in the barn, or perhaps he walked past a window in the starlight, still wearing the ash-gray Stetson, pin-striped suit, and boots and spurs he had died in.

  L.Q. had an opinion on everything. Usually I didn’t listen to him. Most of the time I wished I had.

  Don’t stick a burr in that McComb fellow’s shoe, he said to me that night as I was loading a wheelbarrow in the barn and hauling it out to our compost pile.

  He started it, I replied.

  That’s what we’d always tell ourselves before we scrambled somebody’s eggs.

  I don’t need this, L.Q.

  You should have parked one between Wyatt Dixon’s eyes and put a throw-down on him. No serial numbers, no prints but his own.

  Would you give it a rest? I said.

  He climbed up on the stall and sat on the top slat. He had a black mustache and his hair grew in black locks on the back of his neck; his shirt glowed as brightly as snow in moonlight. This American Horse business is starting to develop a federal odor, he said.

  You were always a closet states’-righter, L.Q. You just never accepted it. Now shut up.

  When I looked up, the stall was empty. From up the slope I could hear an owl screeching in the trees.

  I dumped the wheelbarrow on the compost pile just as the phone rang in the house. The message machine didn’t click on and the phone was still ringing when I entered the kitchen. For some reason I thought it might be L.Q. It wasn’t.

  “What do you want, Johnny?” I asked.

  He was clearly drunk. In the background I could hear country music and loud voices. “Come have a drink with me and Amber,” he said.

  “Don’t make me get you out of jail,” I replied.

  I heard someone pull the phone from his hand. “Drag your butt down here, you wet blanket,” Amber’s voice said.

  “Thanks for the call,” I said, and hung up.

  Later, in the early hours of Sunday morning, a diminutive man, one for whom joy was an emotion he experienced only in stealing it from others, lay in the semidarkness of his hospital room, the maples outside alive with wind, the mountains to the east rounded softly like a woman’s breasts, the clouds veined with lightning.

  The Demerol flowing out of the IV into his finger was the best dope he’d ever had. It made him neither high nor low but instead created a neutral space inside him that was like warm water in a stone pool or the fleeting sense of tranquillity he experienced after sexual intercourse. He paid little attention to the deputy who looked in on him occasionally or the nurses who came and went or a solitary figure in greens who gazed benignly at him out of the shadows, then reached down to puff up his pillow.

  In fact, the Demerol made Charlie Ruggles feel so good about his situation he was sure the right people would once again show up in his life, as they always did, and set matters straight. It had started to rain, a warm, beautiful, steady rain that pattered on the tops of the maple trees. He could not remember a night that had been as perfect in its combination of colors and sensations. When he turned his head toward the figure in greens, the coolness of the pillow being placed across his face made him think of a woman’s kiss, perhaps from years ago, although in truth he did not recall any woman whose touch had been this cool and gentle.

  Then a terrible weight crushed down on him, sealing his eyes, pressing his skin back from his teeth, as though he were trying to smile for the first time in his life.

  Chapter 5

  Darrel McComb and another detective served the search warrant at Johnny’s house on Monday morning. What happened as a result became a matter of perspective. Amber Finley told one story, Darrel McComb and his partner another. I tended to believe Amber.

  “What do you expect to find in his closet?” she said to McComb.

  “A set of greens, the kind hospital personnel wear?” McComb said.

  “You’re an idiot,” she said.

  While Johnny sat on the porch, McComb tore the closet apart, throwing all Johnny’s hangered shirts and trousers out on the floor. Then he reached down and picked up a pair of tennis shoes and placed them in an evidence bag. He was resting on one knee now, his stomach hanging over his belt, his broad shoulders about to split his suit coat. He squinted up at Amber’s silhouette framed against the window, the tautness of her shirt against her breasts. His eyes drifted to the bed, where the sheets and covers had slid off the mattress onto the floor.

  “It’s true I
ndians do it dog-style?” he said.

  “Ask your wife,” she replied.

  McComb threw the bagged shoes to his partner and laughed. “Keep your eye on American Horse,” he said.

  McComb ripped a sheet loose from the bed, then dumped the contents of Johnny’s chest of drawers on the mattress, poking through socks and underwear. “I’m not married,” he said.

  “I’m shocked,” she replied.

  “If he’s dirty, you’re probably going down with him. Your old man will be hard put to bail you out of this one.”

  “Why is it I think you’re full of shit?” she asked.

  He surveyed the room and pulled his collar off his neck, as though it chafed him. “I’d like to help you with any troubles that might come out of this,” he said.

  He was positioned between her and the door, massive, the bulk of his shoulders like small sacks of cement. She could hear him breathing through his nose, smell his hair oil and the body heat and odor of testosterone in his clothes. He took a business card from his shirt pocket and lifted her hand and slipped the card between her fingers. She could feel the sharp edges of his calluses against her palm. “You get jammed up, just call me,” he said. “I grew up in a midwestern farm town, just like your old man did. We’re the same kind of people.”

  He tried to keep his eyes respectful, his expression neutral. But she saw his tongue touch his bottom lip, the slackness in his jaw, the flush in his throat, the way his stare dipped momentarily.

  She crumpled the card, letting it drop into a trash basket as she brushed past him into the front of the house. Behind her, she heard him make a sound like he had bitten a word in half.

  “What did you say?” she asked, turning toward him.

  “Maybe one day you’ll learn who the good guys are.”

  “I can’t wait. In the meantime, kiss my ass,” she said.

  Outside, the air was clear and bright, the mountains a deep blue-green against the sky. Johnny American Horse was still sitting on the edge of his porch, his legs crossed, his coned straw hat slanted forward. “You really think I snuffed that guy at the hospital?” he said to McComb.

  “I think you’ll do anything you can goddamn get away with,” McComb said. He picked up the evidence bag containing Johnny’s tennis shoes from the hood of his cruiser. He shook the bag and grinned. “Size ten and a half. I think we might have a match.”

  Johnny stared into space, his hands pressed between his thighs, his face in shadow. He pushed himself off the porch and approached McComb, his hands pushed flatly into his back pockets. “I want a property receipt for the shit you took out of my house,” he said.

  “It’s on your table,” McComb said.

  “I didn’t sign it.”

  “You don’t need to, asshole.”

  “I think I do,” Johnny said, his face averted.

  McComb stepped closer to him, covering Johnny with his shadow. The men were now so close together they looked almost romantically intimate. “You don’t deserve to live in this country,” McComb said.

  “Could be. You gonna write out another receipt?” Johnny scratched an insect bite on his forearm.

  Maybe his boot brushed against McComb’s shoe, or his coned hat touched McComb’s face. Or maybe McComb, staring at Amber over Johnny’s shoulder, simply could not deal any longer with his own rage and sense of sexual rejection. He swung his fist into the middle of Johnny’s face, then pulled his blackjack from his back pocket and whipped it down on Johnny’s head, neck, and shoulders, slashing with all his strength, as though attacking a slab of meat on a butcher block.

  That afternoon I went into Fay Harback’s office without knocking. “I just left St. Pat’s. Go down there and look at what your trained goon did to Johnny American Horse,” I said.

  “I know all about it,” she replied.

  “No, you don’t. McComb used a blackjack on him, for God’s sake. Without provocation.”

  “That’s what you say. Both detectives tell a different story.”

  “McComb came on to Amber Finley. She told him to take a walk, so he tore Johnny up. That’s what happened.”

  “American Horse is a violent man. Quit pretending he’s not.”

  “You ran on a platform of personal integrity. You’re a big disappointment, Fay.”

  “At least I’m not an ex-prosecutor who became a hump for any criminal with a checkbook.”

  She was standing now, her nostrils white-rimmed, her throat streaked with color.

  “ Adios,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said at my back.

  I walked across the grass, through the shade trees on the courthouse lawn, toward my office at the intersection, my blood singing in my ears. Parked by the curb was a dented, paint-skinned pickup truck with slat sides bolted onto the sides of the bed. Wyatt Dixon lay on the hood, wearing aviator shades, his shoulders propped against the windshield, his fingers knitted behind his head. The muscles in his upper arms were as big and hard-looking as cantaloupes. He wore dark Wranglers brand new from the box and an elastic-ribbed, form-fitting T-shirt stamped with the words SEX, DRUGS, FLATT’N’ SCRUGGS. He pulled a matchstick from his mouth. “I hear that Indian boy got his ass kicked,” he said.

  “Get a job,” I said.

  “Want to stick it to Darrel McComb? Got some information might hep you do that, counselor.”

  “I doubt it.”

  He sat up on the hood, hooking his arms around his knees. “Before I seen the light and changed my ways, I was in the Aryan Brotherhood. The only trouble with the A.B. is it’s infiltrated. Know how come that is, Brother Holland?”

  Don’t let him set the hook, I told myself. But there was no doubt about Wyatt Dixon’s knowledge of criminality and his insight into evil. He was a genuine sociopath, totally without conscience or remorse; but unlike his psychological compatriots, Wyatt enjoyed sharing the secrets of the inner sanctum.

  “Spit it out,” I said.

  “Sometimes the G likes to employ folks that ain’t on the computer.”

  “Such as yourself.”

  “Not me, counselor. I wouldn’t get near them government motherfuckers with a manure fork. I’m just saying Brother McComb was not unknown to the fallen angels of backstreet bars. Also had a way of spreading money around when some work needed doin’.”

  “When you can clean the collard greens out of your mouth, we might have ourselves a conversation.”

  He unhooked his aviator sunglasses from his ears and rubbed a place next to his nose with his thumbnail. Perhaps because of the sky overhead, his eyes had taken on a degree of color, a grayish-blue, with pupils like burnt matchheads. He picked up a battered work hat, one with dents in its domed crown, and fitted it on his head. “About ten years ago Darrel McComb offered me five thousand dollars to do a job on a man-the tools could be of my choosing. Believe that?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Don’t blame you. If you seen what I seen of the world, you wouldn’t be no different from me. Study on that the next time you and Miss Temple are at the church house,” he said.

  “There’s a parking ticket under your windshield wiper.”

  “I declare, this life is sure fraught with trouble, ain’t it?” he said. He wadded up the ticket and tossed it on the sidewalk.

  You didn’t get the last word with Wyatt Dixon.

  I was tired of feeling like the odd man out, somehow allowed to know only the edges of a situation that even a morally insane person like Dixon seemed privy to. I called the Phoenix office of the FBI and told an agent there who I was. He did not seem impressed. I asked if he would call Seth Masterson in Missoula and tell him I’d appreciate his contacting me immediately.

  “I’m not real sure where he is. But I’ll see if I can get a message to him,” the agent said.

  “That’s really good of you. Keep up the fine work,” I said.

  Fifteen minutes later Seth called my office. “Trying to light up my colleague’s pinball machine down
in Arizona?” he said.

  “Why do federal agents always sound arrogant over the phone?” I said.

  “Search me.”

  Seth was notorious for his laconic speech and his reticence about his job. In fact, a joke about him in the Phoenix office went as follows: There were three words in Seth’s vocabulary-“Yep,” “Nope,” and, when he was in a talkative mood, “Maybe.” But Seth also had a weakness.

  “Want to meet a rainbow trout I know up Rock Creek?” I asked.

  “That’s a possibility,” he replied.

  An hour later he met me outside my office, dressed in khakis, a fly vest, and a bill cap with a green visor on it. We drove east up the Clark Fork in my Tacoma, through Hellgate Canyon, past the confluence with the Blackfoot River and into alluvial floodplain dotted with cottonwoods and bordered by thickly wooded mountains whose slopes were already dropping into shadow.

  We turned off the four-lane at the juncture of Rock Creek and the Clark Fork and entered a long, steep-sided valley where the afternoon light had turned gold on the hilltops and the meadows were full of grazing deer and the creek was steaming in the cooling of the day.

  Seth rode with the glass down, the wind in his face, as we passed beaver dams, flooded cottonwoods, and dalles where the creek coursed over boulders that were larger than my truck. I almost felt guilty at the pastoral deceit I had perpetrated on him.

  “Gonna ask me a question or two?” he said, looking straight ahead, his eyes twinkling.

  “You working the home invasion at Johnny American Horse’s place?”

  “Yep.”

  “But his spread isn’t on res land. He’s an independent ranch owner.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The perps were crossing and recrossing a federal reservation during the commission of a felony,” he replied.

  “So the Phoenix office is now investigating reservation crimes in the Northwest?” I said.

  He grinned at me. “Think a wooly worm might bring those big ones up?” he asked.

  Trout season had not opened yet, so we released the half-dozen rainbows and the one bull trout we caught, and walked back up through fir trees toward the truck. The sun had dipped down through a crack in the mountains, and the water and the rocks in the creek were bathed with a red glow. Upstream, a moose clattered across the stream and chugged huffing uphill into woods that were now black with shadow.