In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  Greta’s eyes followed Darrel’s line of vision.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

  “The country’s turning into a toilet,” he replied.

  “It’s not that bad, is it?”

  He picked a blade of glass off his shoe and flicked it into the breeze. “I guess not,” he said.

  “You want to go?” she asked.

  “I’ll go get us a couple of snow cones, then we’ll see,” he said.

  He worked his way through the crowd to the concession stands that had been set up under a huge canvas awning. The band had stopped playing and he could see Amber and Johnny by the bandstand, talking to the musicians, Johnny’s arm draped across her shoulder. Darrel felt his jaw tighten, the fingernails of his right hand rake across the heel of his palm.

  Then Amber left the lawn area and walked directly toward him, the black fringe on her dress swishing on her knees, the yellow light in the sky reflecting on her shoulders.

  “Your snow cones, sir,” the kid at the concession stand said.

  “What?” Darrel replied.

  “Your snow cones? You want them?”

  Darrel took one in each hand and found himself standing in Amber’s path, awkward, stupid-looking, like a giant clod just arrived from Nebraska, grains of colored ice sliding down his hands and wrists. Why was she bearing down on him? What had he done wrong this time? “Hi, Amber,” he said.

  She turned, her blue eyes searching for the voice that had called her name. Then he realized she had been completely unaware of his presence in the crowd.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “Checking out the music,” he said, trying to smile.

  “ What is your problem? Are you following me again?”

  “No.”

  “You peek through my windows, you come to my house uninvited, you beat up my boyfriend with a blackjack, and now you trail your BO into the concert I’m attending. Do you see a pattern here?”

  People were turning to stare now. His face was burning, his armpits sweating inside his coat. He tried to find words to speak but couldn’t. He shoved his way through the crowd back toward the grass embankment where Greta waited for him. Behind him he thought he heard people laughing.

  Greta pulled the snow cones out of his hands. “You look terrible. Sit down. What happened over there?” she said.

  “Senator Finley’s daughter holds a grudge. It’s no big deal,” he said.

  “Who cares? She’s a brat who should have had her butt pounded a long time ago,” Greta said. She got up from the grass and threw the snow cones in a trash barrel. “Come on, big fellow. Show me where you live.”

  She walked a few steps toward the parking lot, then turned and waited for him to follow.

  They drove across the bridge and turned into a shady side street that bordered the river. But he couldn’t concentrate. He had started out the evening convinced he was investigating both ecoterrorists and a rogue intelligence operation. Now he’d been made a public fool and he was in the company of a woman whose complexities and motivations he couldn’t begin to guess at. He felt like a man being pushed into a fistfight after his arms had been torn off.

  His apartment was located in a century-old refurbished brick building with a grand view of the river and the city. He walked out on the balcony and looked back toward the bridge and the park on the opposite side of the river where the dance was still in progress. Why care what those people thought? he asked himself. The civilian world was a joke, a giant self-delusion that had little connection to the realities of nations in conflict.

  He remembered a moment of revelation in El Salvador back in the 1980s. A photographer had taken pictures of U.S. advisers carrying weapons in the field and several congressmen had threatened an investigation. The irony was that the El Salvadoran helicopters raking leftist villages with Gatling guns were receiving their coordinates from U.S. AWACS planes high overhead and no media knew anything about it.

  Darrel wondered if Amber and her liberal friends at the dance had any idea what was done for them and in their name on the ragged green edges of the American Empire.

  But moments of reverie like these were not entirely comforting to Darrel. He also remembered seeing a helicopter gunship coming in low over a rain forest, a molten sun behind it, the downdraft whipping the canopy into a frenzy, then the Gatling guns blowing a series of huts into a pinkish-brown cloud laced with dried thatch. There had been children as well as adult civilians in those huts, and sometimes in the middle of the night he heard the sounds they made before they died.

  Greta was making a pitcher of sangria at his bar, although he had not asked her to.

  “Still thinking about that spoiled twat?” she said.

  “You never told me what you were doing over at Senator Finley’s place.”

  “Mine to know,” she said, stirring the ice and red wine with a celery stalk. “But if you insist, I have friends who contribute to his campaign. I suspect you voted for Finley, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t vote. I think politics is a sideshow.”

  She filled two goblets with sangria, fitted orange slices on the rims, and handed him one. “Here’s to all the jerks who take sideshows seriously,” she said, and clinked his goblet.

  “I don’t figure you.”

  “What’s to figure?” she said. She drank from her goblet, then set it down and slipped her arms around his waist. He felt her stomach touch his loins like an electric current.

  Later, after they had made love in his roll-away bed, she put on her panties and walked without her top to the bar and came back to the bed with their drinks. She had few wrinkles in her skin, no stretch marks, and her muscle tone was extraordinary for her age. She drank from her glass, then leaned over him and kissed him wetly on the mouth. “You didn’t say anything,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “How you liked it.”

  “Good. I liked it real good. You’re quite a woman.”

  She tapped him on the lips with a finger and winked. “You’re not bad yourself. Next time, though, give a girl a little compliment. Mind if I use your bathroom?” she said.

  A moment later he heard the toilet flush and the faucet running. The band was still playing across the river, the sound of the music floating thinly above the roar of the current. He put on his boxer shorts and walked to the balcony. Somewhere in the crowd on the clipped lawn Amber Finley was still dancing with Johnny American Horse, the moon rising above the mountains into a turquoise sky, the two of them blessed with youth, the admiration of their peers, the knowledge that the earth and all its gifts had been created especially for them.

  He had never felt so miserable in his life.

  After sunset and another pitcher of sangria, Darrel drove Greta back to her bungalow in the Bitterroot Valley. When she unlocked the front door, neither of them could believe what they saw. Every room was a shambles. The furniture was turned upside down, mattresses and upholstery slashed and gutted, drywall torn off the joists, desk and dresser drawers dumped, even all the canned goods in the pantry and frozen food in the icebox raked on the floor.

  The alarm had never sounded because the home invader or invaders had come through the roof, first chopping a hole in it, then smashing a dead-bolted attic door into kindling. The level of violence done to the bungalow created in Darrel’s mind a perpetrator of immense strength and destructive energies, someone with tendons in his arms and hands like steel cable and with absolutely no sense of mercy or restraint at all.

  Greta Lundstrum sat down in a deep chair and wept.

  “When was the last time you saw Wyatt Dixon?” Darrel asked.

  Chapter 10

  Sunday morning, Amber Finley woke in Johnny’s bed and touched the place where he should have been but felt only the warm, empty space he had occupied. The Jocko Valley was still in shadow, the crest of the hills black-green against the light growing in the sky, the sound of the river loud on the rocks at the fo
ot of the property. She and Johnny had slept with the windows open and the room was cold, and she wished he would come back to bed. In the kitchen she heard pans clanking on the stove and smelled coffee boiling and bacon frying in a skillet.

  She raised herself up on her hands and yawned. “Johnny?” she said.

  But there was no reply. She glanced down at his pillow, and in the indentation where his head had rested was a small blue-felt box. She picked it up and pried the top back on its spring. Inserted in a satin cushion was a gold ring with a tiny diamond mounted on it.

  “I was going to surprise you with some apple flapjacks,” he said from the doorway, an apron tied around his hips, a spatula in his hand.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful, Johnny,” she said.

  “There’s a Methodist minister up at St. Ignatius who says he’ll marry us any day we want to set it up.”

  “Let’s do it this week. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and slipped the ring on her left hand, his eyes lowered so she could not read them. “A couple of things we need to agree on,” he said.

  “What?” she said, her face clouding.

  “Your father has to know about it up front. I need to be there when that happens, too.”

  “He doesn’t control my life. He doesn’t have anything to say about it.”

  “He’s still your old man. He believes in what he does. He deserves to be treated with respect, don’t you think?”

  She found his hand again and pressed it hard, then looked admiringly at her ring. “How’d you pay for it?”

  “It’s called ‘credit.’ One other thing. If I go inside, we agree you can divorce me. In fact, I’d insist on it. I don’t want to create a jailhouse widow out of my best friend.” Johnny had small eyes, and they crinkled at the corners when he grinned.

  “Don’t talk like that. Billy Bob is a good lawyer. We have a lot of friends who will stand up for you,” she said.

  He stroked her hair and kissed her brow, then her mouth.

  “I haven’t brushed my teeth,” she said.

  He pressed her down on the pillow and kissed her mouth again, then the tops of her breasts and the long taper of her stomach and two red moles just below her navel. She curled her knees into him and held him across the back and put her face in his hair and bit his neck. She could feel her breath quicken and a flush spread through her thighs.

  He sat up and took both her wrists in his hands. “I have to tell you something else,” he said.

  The register in his voice had dropped, and she studied his eyes now because they, like his words, never lied to her. What she saw there made her ball her fists. “Say it, say it, say it,” she said.

  “My dreams started again. Some of the stuff in them doesn’t make good sense. My uncle said my dreams would always be distorted, not clear like Crazy Horse’s were, because my mother was Salish and I’m only half Lakota.”

  “You tear me apart when you talk like this.”

  His eyes were still looking at her, yet she knew they were not seeing her but instead a vision inside his head. He swallowed and there was a dry click inside his throat. “Someone else is going to be killed, here, at my house. It’s a man. I think it could be me. Maybe making you my wife would be a selfish thing on my part.”

  She put her arms around his neck and pulled him down close to her face. She started to speak, then simply held him as tightly as she could, gripping the hardness of his back, pulling at his apron and his belt buckle, aching to have him inside her before he spoke again and her heart burst.

  Monday morning, Seth Masterson sauntered into my office and sat down in front of my desk, his long legs, as always, a problem, a tan rain hat perched on his knee. “How you doin’, bud?” he asked.

  “I’m just fine, Seth. But Lester Antelope isn’t. He’s dead. My client Johnny American Horse isn’t doing too well, either. Unless I get some help, the D.A. is going to bury him alive.”

  Seth twisted his head and glanced out the window at the maples puffing in the wind on the courthouse lawn, his expression neutral. “We’ve got a high-tech snitch in this area, a hacker we could have sent up but who we decided to leave on a short leash to help us out once in a while,” he said. “The problem with our snitch is he’s a wiseass and thinks he’s smarter than we are, so he’s not always truthful or forthcoming. You with me?”

  “No.”

  “A couple of Indians came to him with a bunch of floppy disks they couldn’t get into. Our snitch says he couldn’t find a way into them, either. We served search warrants on the Indians, but their houses were clean. You recognize the names of these guys?”

  He slid his notebook across the desktop. I looked at the two names written on the top page and shook my head.

  “They were friends of Lester Antelope,” Seth said. “I think they’re part of the bunch who broke into Global Research.”

  “Why is a federal agency interested in a small research lab in the Bitterroot Valley?”

  He hesitated a moment. “Global has some federal defense contracts,” he said.

  “To do what?”

  “It’s agricultural in nature.”

  “I’ve got a problem with the way you do business, Seth,” I said. “Guys like me are allowed to know parts of things. A conversation with you amounts to other people answering your questions.”

  He pulled on his ear. “I didn’t make myself clear. I think our snitch got into those disks. I think what he saw there scared the shit out of him. Listen, Billy Bob, those two killers American Horse waxed, Ruggles and Bumper? Don’t be deceived. There’s more of them out there. If that sounds funny coming from a federal agent, that’s the way it is.” He wrote a number on the back of his business card and flipped the card on my desk. “That’s my number at the Doubletree.”

  He got up from the chair without saying good-bye and, gentleman that he was, fitted on his rain hat only after he had walked out the front door.

  Agricultural in nature?

  That evening, Darrel McComb got a visitor at his apartment he did not expect. Romulus Finley rang the bell, then began tapping impatiently with one knuckle on the door before Darrel could reach it.

  “You got a few minutes, Detective?” he said.

  “Sure,” Darrel said, stepping back from the open door.

  Finley walked into the center of the room, turning in a circle, nodding approvingly. His cheeks were rosy from the walk up the stairs, his arms and shoulders meaty inside his sports coat. “Nice place. Nice view of the river,” he said.

  “Would you like coffee or a beer, Senator?”

  “A beer would be good. Yeah, that would hit the spot,” Finley replied.

  He didn’t want a glass. He drank out of the can, his big hand covering the design and logo on the aluminum. “I’ll cut to it, partner. I’ve seen your file. You’re a man of great experience, a patriot and a soldier on many levels. We communicating here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Some men serve their country off the computer. They get no recognition for what they do, even when they lose their lives. You’re one of them, just like your friend Rocky Harrigan was.”

  “What do you know about Rocky, Senator?”

  “I know he was brave. Just like you, he didn’t like what was happening to this country.”

  Darrel tried to remain stone-faced, to hide the sense of invasion and manipulation that was churning in his stomach. “Rocky was a good guy. But he and I were regular Army, Senator. Our careers probably wouldn’t be that interesting to most folks,” he said.

  “I respect both your modesty and your privacy, Detective. But I’ve got a personal problem I don’t have any permanent answer for. This Indian man Johnny American Horse belongs in a prison. Instead, he’s out on bond and is planning to marry my daughter, who is just about as naive as people get, and that includes Eve thinking she could pick apples in the Garden and outwit both God and the devil.”

  Finley drank the rest of the beer can e
mpty and crushed it in his hand. “You got any suggestions, son?”

  “You said you didn’t have any permanent answer to your problem. Could you spell that out?” Darrel said.

  “I’m not talking about doing anything illegal. I just want the law enforced and that man out of my daughter’s life. I had to take the red-eye back here last night so I could stand in my own goddamn living room and listen to a murderer tell me he was going to marry my daughter. I was with the First Marine Division at the Punch Bowl in the Korean War, Detective. When it’s time to clean the barn, it’s time to clean the barn. You hearing me on this?”

  “Somebody broke into Greta Lundstrum’s house in the early A.M. Sunday morning,” Darrel said. “I think the break-in at her house is connected to the burglary of a research lab in Stevensville. I think this ex-convict Wyatt Dixon is a player in this, too. Amber might have a lot more serious problems than marrying American Horse.”

  But Finley was already shaking his head before Darrel could finish. “I’m not interested in a lot of bullshit about ex-convicts and burglaries, because none of it has anything to do with my daughter. Johnny American Horse needs to be gone. The operative word is gone, Detective. The man who can make that happen is a man to whom I’ll owe a mighty big debt. I’ll let myself out. Thanks for the beer.”

  Finley clapped Darrel on the shoulder and went back out the door, not a strand of sandy hair out of place on his head.

  De nada, you hypocritical sonofabitch, Darrel thought.

  That same evening we had a sunshower, then the rain quit and the sun was gold on the hills, and I drove up to the north end of our acreage, with a half-dozen poplar trees in the bed of my pickup, and began digging holes for them along the fenceline. A white-tailed doe with a new fawn watched me from the sunlight, and down the meadow, deep in the shade, I could hear our horses blowing in the soggy grass by an irrigation ditch.