In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  What he saw on the screen made him tap the heel of his hand against his forehead. The burgled agricultural research lab down in the Bitterroots had used an alarm system operated by Blue Mountain Security, owned by one Greta Lundstrum.

  It was too much for coincidence, Darrel thought. The B amp;E report from Ravalli County had been put on his desk because of a possible tie-in between ecoterrorists, Indians, and Darrel’s arrest of Johnny American Horse. Now Lundstrum’s name had surfaced in the same investigation. He called Blue Mountain Security and asked to speak to her.

  “This is she. Who’s calling, please?” the voice on the other end of the line said.

  “Detective Darrel McComb, with the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department. I’d appreciate your coming into the office for an interview,” he replied.

  “You would appreciate what?”

  “We’ve been investigating a group of Native American environmental activists for some time.” He positioned the B amp;E report by the phone so he could see it more clearly. “We think they may be involved with the burglary of the Global Research facility. Your company handles security for them, doesn’t it?”

  “McComb? You’re the detective who followed me to Senator Finley’s house?”

  “That’s incorrect, ma’am. My concern there was about an ex-convict by the name of Wyatt Dixon, who was watching the Finleys’ home. I believe you have a past relationship with Dixon, don’t you?”

  He could almost hear her heart beating through the phone receiver. “Ma’am?” he said.

  Then she surprised him. “Unfortunately, I did know him. About two years back. A brief and mistaken relationship, if you get my meaning. Now, what the hell is this about?” she said.

  “I’d rather talk to you in person. I’ll drive down there,” he replied.

  “Suit yourself,” she said, and hung up.

  Now, there’s a woman who wrote her own rule book, he thought. The kind, as Rocky used to say, who would read your mind, slap your face, then ask you to stay over for breakfast.

  It took him only a half hour to drive to her security service. In the background the Bitterroot Mountains rose high into the heavens, the dark green of the timber marbled with new snow. He liked being down in the valley, away from university and liberal influences, among people who were of a mind similar to his own. It was going to be a fine day in all respects, he told himself.

  Greta Lundstrum came out of her cubicle as soon as she saw him through the glass partition, her wide-set eyes fixed on his. “So what do you need from me, Detective?” she asked.

  The boldness of her stare was at first disconcerting. Long ago, in his dealings as a police officer, Darrel had concluded that aggressive female business executives fell into one category only: their authority and their successful imposition of it were entirely dependent upon their ability to destroy any male challenge to it.

  “The people who broke into Global Research called in the password after they cut the telephone line,” he said. “Do you-”

  “I’ve pulled the files on all our ex-employees,” she interrupted. “Two of them are people I fired for coming to work with alcohol on their breath. One of them is an Indian. He still lives in Missoula. The other man moved out of state.”

  “The password didn’t necessarily have to come from an ex-employee,” Darrel said.

  “If you mean one of our current employees might have given it out, yes, that could have happened. But it didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they’ve been with me for years and they have no motivation for betraying me or the client. Come into my office and sit down,” she said.

  His eyes slipped down her back, her hips, and rump as he followed her into her cubicle. “You know a woman named Temple Holland?” she said. She sat forward in her swivel chair, her elbows on the desk, her back stiff.

  “She’s a P.I., the wife of a local attorney,” Darrel replied.

  “Why did you tell her you were following me?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then why did she tell me that?”

  “My guess is, she and her husband want to cause trouble. He’s the lawyer for an Indian named Johnny American Horse,” Darrel said. He looked at the hardness in her green eyes and the set in her jaw. He decided to test her affinities. “I arrested American Horse for attempted assault on a law officer. During that arrest I hit him several times with a blackjack. Mr. and Mrs. Holland aren’t fans of mine.”

  Her expression showed no reaction. “You think this man American Horse is involved with the break-in?” she asked.

  “Hard to say. He’s cut out of different cloth,” Darrel replied.

  “In what way?”

  “He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross during Desert Storm. Maybe he just hangs around the wrong kind of people.”

  “Funny attitude for a sheriff’s detective.”

  “Give the devil his due,” Darrel said. “Give me the name of the guy you fired, the one still living in Missoula.”

  She wrote the name and the address down on a piece of paper and handed it to him. Her auburn hair was thick and had a deep part in it, her scalp gray and clean-looking. “Sorry I was a bit rude over the phone,” she said.

  “It was a misunderstanding,” he said.

  She straightened her shoulders, and her breasts seemed larger than he’d noticed earlier. He looked at his watch. “There’s a Mexican joint up on the highway. You ever eat there?” he said.

  That evening, Darrel McComb sat down at his home computer and on the hard drive recorded all the important events and the names of people connected with the investigation of Johnny American Horse. This case went far beyond the boundaries of Missoula County or the Feds wouldn’t have come down on it like flies on pig flop, he told himself. The issues were much larger than the usual reservation problems over water rights, grazing fees, and control of the bison range. And the backgrounds of the two dead hit men out of Detroit were altogether too familiar to Darrel.

  But who was actually turning the dials? From his own experience in clandestine operations, Darrel knew that the grunts on the ground kept it simple, trusted the larger cause they served, and didn’t question the moral authority of their leaders. But the old cause was the war against communism. What was this one about? Whatever it was, Darrel McComb knew he was going to be a player again.

  Chapter 8

  I wanted to believe Johnny American Horse had nothing to do with the break-in at the research lab. I had put up the equity in our home and one hundred twenty acres of land for his bond so he could be released from jail, and I expected thereafter he would have only one goal in mind-to be found not guilty of Charlie Ruggles’s murder. Johnny was an honorable man and would not hang a friend out to dry, I told myself.

  But Johnny was also an idealist, and it’s the idealists who, given the chance, will incinerate half the earth to save the other half. Tuesday morning I found him at work, cleaning and burning brush under an abandoned railroad trestle that spanned a gorge on Evaro Hill, ten miles outside Missoula.

  It was shady and cool inside the gorge, but Johnny was sweating in the heat of the fire, his forearms and yellow gloves smeared with soot.

  “Say all that again,” he said.

  “It’s a simple question. Did you bust into that research lab or not?” I said.

  “No, I did not.”

  “You know who did?”

  “I’ll tell people anything they want to know about me. But that’s as far as it goes.” He piled a rotted ponderosa on the flames and stepped back when it burst alight. Down below were the home and a warehouse owned by a famous antique and vintage arms dealer. A Gatling gun stood in the front yard and a World War II tank and armored personnel carrier in a side lot. The wind shifted and Johnny walked out of the smoke and sat on a rock. “I had a bad dream about a fire last night.”

  I really didn’t want to hear more about Johnny’s dreams or visions or whatever they were. But I suspect, as the
Bible says, that Johnny was one of those who was made different in the womb and he saw no fence between this world and the one that lay behind it. “I saw an animal running in a woods. The woods were burning. The trunks of the trees were like a big cage and the animal couldn’t get out,” he said.

  I sat down next to him and placed my hand on his shoulder. His muscles were as hard as rocks under his shirt. “Listen to me, bud. There’s enough misery in this world without a guy using his dreams to create more of it,” I said.

  “You don’t get it. Somehow I’m responsible for the fate of that animal.”

  “I think you ought to contact the V.A. and talk to someone,” I said.

  He looked into my face and I saw the injury in his eyes. “I better get back to work. See you around,” he said, turning his back to me.

  I walked back down the slope, past the armored vehicles on the property of the dealer in vintage and antique arms. Their steel tracks were spiked with weeds, their turrets and machine-gun slits a haven for birds and deer mice. But rusted and ugly as they were, their true history unknown, these relics would remain objects of fascination for all those who would never be required to journey into foreign deserts or live inside the nocturnal experiences of a man like Johnny American Horse.

  Lester Antelope graduated from high school on the res, tried the Army, and even worked a short time for a security service before he decided he didn’t like uniforms or being bossed around by other people. In fact, Lester took pride in doing grunt work that required nothing of him except his labor and physical presence. He carried hod, stacked sacks of cement as though they were filled with mulch, gathered fieldstones by hand and turned them into rock fences that were artworks.

  He wore braids, a traditional Indian flat-brimmed, high-domed hat, and had a face like a dented pie plate. One night he took on four millworkers outside the Oxford Bar and, with his back against the building so they couldn’t get behind him, put them away one by one as though he were swatting baseballs inside a batting cage.

  Lester Antelope worked hard, spoke seldom, ate his meals in workingmen’s cafes, and kept few close friends. Until he met Johnny American Horse in the drunk tank of the county jail. Lester listened to Johnny talk of a range dotted from horizon to horizon with bison and red ponies, and for the first time in his life felt he was part of a world much larger than himself, one that was not only attainable but perhaps worth dying for.

  Lester knew instinctively that Johnny’s courage was unlike other men’s. Johnny was brave in the way an animal is brave when it fights for its life or protection of its young-without problems of pride or self-pity or desire to vindicate or avenge oneself. Johnny’s soul had the iridescence of the archer’s bow the Everywhere Spirit hung in the sky after a thunderstorm. Johnny’s indomitable courage and resilience gave not only voice but hope to those who had none.

  Lester Antelope lived downtown by the tracks in a rooming house with a bath at the end of the hall. Tuesday evening, after work, he found the business card of a detective named Darrel McComb stuck in his doorjamb. He threw the card in the trash sack under his kitchen sink, bathed and changed into fresh clothes, then strolled down to Stockman’s Bar to eat supper and shoot pool.

  It was early and except for the bartender the pool table area was deserted. Lester was shooting a solitary game of rotation when a man entered the back door, silhouetted against the soft evening light and the river down below. The man was thin and dark-haired, and wore a cheap suit and a white shirt that had gone gray with washing and was frayed on the collar and cuffs. Lester could hear the man dropping a series of coins into the pay phone, then speaking with his back to Lester, as though he wanted to conceal the urgent nature of his conversation.

  “Can you wire a money order? The car battery is dead. Even if I get a jump start I hate to take Ellie and the baby over the pass like that,” the man said.

  There was silence while the man listened, his free hand clenching and unclenching at his side.

  “We just need to get to Spokane. I’ll get paid in two weeks and everything will be fine,” the man said. “I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t a dire situation…No, operator, I don’t have more change. Did you hear me? No, please don’t cut me off.”

  Then the man was staring wanly at the receiver, which had gone dead in his hand. He replaced it in the cradle and pinched his temples between his thumb and forefinger. Lester glanced out the back door of the saloon. A battered car with a Washington State plate was parked down by the river, a blond woman in the passenger seat, an infant wrapped in a blanket on her shoulder. “You want to borrow a buck or two?” Lester said.

  “Oh, no, thanks. But I could sure use a battery jump. I got cables in my trunk,” the dark-haired man said.

  Ten minutes later the battered car with the Washington tag was seen roaring up the entrance ramp to the interstate highway. A tramp living in a hobo jungle on the mountainside close by the ramp walked hurriedly to a filling station and made a 911 call. He swore he had seen a baby thrown from the car’s passenger window.

  The bartender at Stockman’s brought a fried pork chop sandwich, a plate of hash browns, and a cup of coffee to the table where Lester ate his meals. But Lester never returned from the parking lot, and the food grew cold and finally the bartender took it away and tipped it into the garbage can.

  AT 8:14 A.M. Wednesday, Darrel McComb called my office from a cell phone. “Ever know an Indian named Lester Antelope?” he said.

  “Yeah, he does fence work for Johnny American Horse sometimes,” I replied.

  “Describe him.”

  “What for?”

  “I need somebody to do an ID. I’m looking at a guy I think is Antelope but I can’t be sure.”

  “I’m not understanding you.”

  “He’s dead. You know Sleeman Creek Road?”

  “Lester’s dead? Up Sleeman Creek? That’s close to my house.”

  “Good. You know the way,” he said.

  I drove ten miles south of Missoula through Lolo, then west on Highway 12 toward Idaho. I turned up the dirt road that led past my home, then entered a long, deserted valley where the hills were round on the tops and steep-sided, with ponderosa growing hard by the rock outcroppings. A collection of police cruisers and emergency vehicles were parked on a slope at the bottom of an arroyo. The coroner had just arrived.

  Midway up the arroyo, in deep shadow, was a tin shed built on a cement pad, the door hanging half open. Darrel McComb walked down to meet me. He wore a rumpled suit with a blue shirt and dark tie. His face had no expression.

  “Last night a bum called in a 911 on an infant thrown from an automobile. The ‘infant’ turned out to be a plastic doll,” he said. “We have a feeling Antelope got lured out of Stockman’s Bar by some people posing as a hard-up family trying to get to Spokane.”

  “Why would anyone want to kidnap Lester?”

  “He used to work for Blue Mountain Security. I have a feeling he was one of the Indians who broke into the Global Research lab. This morning a hiker got caught in a shower and took shelter in the shed. Take a look inside, then talk to me.”

  “Why me?” I said.

  He wrote in a small spiral notebook and didn’t answer.

  “I asked you a question,” I said.

  “You got a vested interest in this case, Holland. Maybe we’re on the same side,” he replied.

  I walked up the slope and looked inside the shed, which was bolted down on a concrete pad and had probably once been a storage place for logging equipment. The coroner was squatted down by the body of a large Indian man who lay on his side, his face pointed toward me. A uniformed deputy had placed a lit flashlight on the floor. One of the Indian’s pigtails had been cut from his head. I looked at the walls, floor, and ceiling, then backed out of the shed and blew out my breath.

  “Is it Lester Antelope?” Darrel said.

  Before I could speak I had to clear my mouth and spit. “Yeah, it’s Lester Antelope. He didn’t have any identific
ation on him?” I said.

  “Picked clean. Ever see anybody take a beating that bad when you were a cop?”

  “No.”

  He looked back over his shoulder, as though he did not want anyone else to hear our conversation. “How do you read it?” he asked.

  “Someone cuffed him to a U-bolt and used the two-by-four that’s on the floor. Then Lester broke the chain on the cuffs and went after them. That’s when he got shot in the forehead. I think some of the blood on the walls might belong to his kidnappers.”

  “Think Antelope creeped the research lab down in the Bitterroots?”

  “How would I know?”

  “He’s buds with your client, Johnny American Horse, Native America’s answer to Jesus Christ.”

  “I knew Lester. He was a good man. This happened right up the road from my house. I’m not in a light mood about it,” I said.

  “Maybe these guys are sending you a message. You think of that?”

  “Be more specific,” I said.

  “You and I both worked for the G. All this Indian stuff is cosmetic. There’s a much bigger issue at work here. I just don’t know what it is. You still pissed because I got rough with American Horse?”

  “I don’t like cops who blackjack unarmed people.”

  “Maybe I don’t, either,” he said.

  Darrel stuck his notebook in his shirt pocket, the wind flapping his coat, his revolver and holster exposed. Then he scratched his cheek and seemed puzzled. For a moment I thought he could actually be a likable man, except for his abiding insecurity and desire to control others. He was standing slightly higher on the slope than I was, I suspect not by accident. “They didn’t get what they wanted, did they?” he said.

  “I think Lester spit in their faces, then signed off with his hands on their throats. You want anything else, Darrel?” I said.

  “Nope,” he said.

  I turned to go. The valley down below was green and blanketed with sunlight now, and just around the bend in the road was my house, where Temple and I would have supper together that night, safe from all the intrusions of the world.