In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  Darrel realized the attrition from last night’s drunk was not over. He had left his handheld radio at the department and the battery in his cell phone was dead.

  Darrel got the cut-down twelve gauge from his car trunk and went over the top of the knoll at a run. He could see Masterson on his side, a semiautomatic in his hand, firing blindly into the trees even while he was being hit. That is one macho G-man, he thought. Darrel jumped across a flattened barbed wire fence, his shotgun at port arms, his face breaking with sweat, his lungs aching from the barroom smoke he had inhaled the previous night.

  For a moment he thought of cutting into the woods and advancing on the shooter from his flank, but the time loss of working through the tree trunks would probably cost Masterson any chance he had of survival. So he poured it on, his big shoes pounding like elephant’s feet across the sod, his sports coat split at the shoulders. He felt more naked than he had ever been in his life as he waited for the redirected fire that could rip through his viscera or explode his brain pan.

  But the firing in the trees stopped, either because Masterson had let off at least a dozen rounds from a nine millimeter or because the sniper was reloading.

  Darrel charged into the yard, fired two shells loaded with double-ought bucks into the trees, and heard the pattern spread and knock ineffectively over a large area. He tried to hold the shotgun with one hand and lift Masterson to his feet with the other, but Masterson was hurt too badly to stand. Darrel laid the shotgun on the steps, caught Masterson around the stomach, and worked him up on his shoulder as he would a side of beef.

  He could hear Masterson’s breath wheezing from a sucking chest wound and feel his blood draining on Darrel’s arms and back. He started toward the lee of the house, then the shooter fired again, blowing white splinters out of the steps, breaking a window, ricocheting a round off a metal surface inside. Darrel got inside the screened porch, with Masterson draped over him, and pushed a water-stained couch against the plywood that framed the bottom of the enclosure. He huddled behind the couch, his body shielding Masterson’s.

  He kicked his foot against the door to the mud room, then kicked it again. But the door was bolted and set solidly in the jamb. He and the agent were trapped, and the shooter could now reposition himself and incrementally cut them apart.

  Masterson’s face was spiderwebbed with blood, his eyes dull with shock, a red froth spraying from his chest wound. Darrel found a piece of cellophane in a garbage sack, tore open Masterson’s shirt, and pressed the cellophane against the hole in the agent’s chest. He heard air catch wetly in Masterson’s throat and go into his lungs. “I’m going to get you home, pal. You hang tough,” he said.

  But he could not tell if his words registered with Masterson or not.

  Darrel’s twelve gauge was still angled butt-down on the steps. The agent’s nine millimeter lay in the dirt, with probably no more than two or three rounds in it. Darrel slipped his own nine millimeter from his clip-on holster and clicked off the butterfly safety. But his handgun brought him little sense of reassurance. He and Masterson were boxed in, with no access to electronic communications. At some point the shooter would flank them, take out Darrel with a head shot, and finish the job on Masterson. What kind of cop had Darrel proved to be? What would Rocky do in these circumstances?

  Never accept the hand your enemy deals you, Rocky used to say. Bring it to the bad guys and make them reconsider their point of view. Everybody takes the same dirt nap, Rocky used to say. What’s the big deal? It’s only rock ’n’ roll.

  A round from the hillside blew stuffing out of the couch and another shattered the glass knob on the door. Darrel breathed hard through his mouth, oxygenating his blood, then crashed through the screen door, gathering the shotgun up from the steps. He saw a man moving up the slope through the trees and realized he’d caught him changing his position. He fired once and saw leaves and small branches topple through a shaft of sunlight. Then Darrel plunged into the treeline, pumping the spent shell out of the chamber, snugging himself against a ponderosa trunk.

  He could hear feet running and peeked quickly around the tree, but he saw nothing except the needle-covered floor of the forest, outcroppings of gray rock, and motes of dust spinning in the columns of sunlight that pierced the canopy.

  The ground was spongy with lichen, the air smelling of fern, stone that never saw sunlight, mushrooms, and burned gunpowder. He followed a deer trail that wound laterally along the hillside, through shade and parklike terrain, but he saw no more sign of the shooter. When he retraced his steps, he saw an AR-15 rifle propped against a boulder, the breech locked open on an empty twenty-round magazine. In the distance he could hear a siren pealing down the dirt road.

  He walked back down the slope and entered the screened porch. Seth Masterson lay as Darrel had left him, one hand resting on the cellophane patch Darrel had placed on his chest wound. Darrel sat down on the floor, pulling his knees up, the adrenaline gone, his energies drained. Masterson’s face seemed to swim in and out of focus. “You were a brave guy, buddy. It was an honor to meet you,” he said.

  He cupped his hand on Seth’s sightless eyes, closing them as he would a doll’s, then hung his head like a man who had not slept in years.

  Chapter 14

  During the next few days the federal and county investigations into the murder of Seth Masterson produced evidence that seemed to aim at only one conclusion: Johnny American Horse’s odyssey into the Garden of Gethsemane was just beginning.

  The AR-15, the civilian equivalent of the military-issue M-16 rifle Darrel McComb had found on the hillside, was stenciled with Johnny American Horse’s fingerprints. In addition, the call made to Seth Masterson’s cell phone, supposedly by Amber, was traced back to Johnny’s house. There was another problem, too-Johnny had no alibi.

  He claimed to have been building a chimney of river stones for a rancher, up the Blackfoot, at the time of Seth’s murder. But he had been working by himself and he could provide no witness to corroborate his story. His explanation about the presence of his fingerprints on the AR-15 presented other complications. Johnny told both the FBI and the investigators from the sheriff’s department of the man who had tried to sell him an AR-15 out of a panel truck. But the two boys who worked for him could not identify the kind of rifle Johnny had been handed by the driver of the truck, and neither of them remembered Johnny picking up an ejected shell from the dirt, which was the only explanation-provided Johnny was innocent-for the fact that a latent on a. 223 cartridge fired from the murder weapon was Johnny’s.

  By Wednesday of the following week he had been questioned at least five times by federal agents. He came into my office just before noon, wearing frayed jeans and a black shirt with silver stripes in it, his coned-up straw hat clenched in his hand, his face pinched with anger.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Two agents just rousted me in front of the courthouse. I told this one guy he puts his hand on me again, he’ll wish he stayed in college.”

  “You told that to an FBI agent?”

  “I don’t know who he was. Just get them away from me.”

  “Make a stop at the watering hole this morning?”

  “So what?”

  “It’s what your enemies want you to do, Johnny. If you want to really tie the ribbon on the box, punch out a federal agent.”

  “I told them the truth. A guy tried to sell me the AR-15. Somebody got in my house and used my phone to set up this guy Masterson. These guys can’t figure that out? Nobody’s that stupid.”

  “You’re not under arrest. That means they haven’t reached any conclusions. Give them a break. Maybe they’ll surprise you.”

  Wrong words. “Why would I kill an FBI agent in my own house? What if Amber had been there? She’d probably be dead too,” he said.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  He started to argue again, his eyes hot, a smell like fermented fruit on his breath. But I cut him off. “All this goes back to that res
earch lab Amber and your friends broke into,” I said. “Seth Masterson went to your house to try to persuade you and Amber to give up the computer files that were stolen from Global Research. It cost him his life.”

  “I can’t help that,” he replied.

  I could feel my own temper rising now. “We’ll talk later,” I said.

  “You ever see photographs of Saddam Hussein’s mustard gas attacks on the Kurds back in eighty-eight? Our government armed that motherfucker.”

  “I’m not making the connections here, but I think you’re charging at windmills, partner,” I said.

  “Tell that to the friends of mine who were killed in Iraq.”

  “Seth was my friend, Johnny. He died trying to help you. But I don’t think you’re hearing that.”

  He wiped at his nose with the backs of his fingers, his eyes narrowing. “Nobody cares,” he said.

  “Cares about what?”

  “What they’re doing to the earth, what they’re doing to the human race, what they’ve done to Indian people for three hundred years. You don’t see it, Billy Bob. In your way you’re part of it.”

  “I think I’ve had about all of this I can take in one day,” I said.

  “I’m letting you off the hook on my bond. A couple of tribal bail bondsmen are taking it over.”

  “That’s the way you want it?” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s the way I want it,” he said.

  “Maybe you should seek other counsel while you’re at it.”

  “Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” he said.

  “ Vaya con Dios, ” I said.

  It had been a bad way to end a conversation with a man whose causes I admired. But Temple and I had put up our ranch as surety for Johnny’s bond, and his cavalier and ungrateful attitude about the risk we had incurred made me wonder about my own sanity. I also wondered if I had become one of those people who needed to hurt both himself and his family in order to convince himself of his own integrity.

  Maybe it was time to make a clean break with Johnny and his ongoing self-immolation. I told that to Temple at lunch. “Giving up on water-walkers?” she said.

  “I didn’t say he was a water-walker.”

  “Yeah, you did. That’s why you won’t let go of him, either.”

  “Watch me,” I said.

  She chewed a piece of salad, raised her eyebrows, and looked innocently out the window.

  But Johnny wasn’t the only person for whom events were going out of control. Darrel McComb had to explain why he was following an FBI agent when supposedly he was pursuing a lead on the two men who had assaulted Wyatt Dixon. He also had to explain how he had gotten involved in a firefight, one that had left the agent dead, without calling for backup. Instead of being cited for bravery, he received a formal letter of reprimand in his jacket. He was also put on the desk until Internal Affairs concluded an investigation into the shooting.

  But oddly enough, his receiving recrimination rather than commendation seemed to lift a burden from him. I saw him in front of the drugstore on West Broadway that afternoon, eating from a bag of lemon drops while he gazed at a pair of hang gliders floating on the windstream above Mount Sentinel.

  “Sorry about your bud,” he said.

  I nodded and didn’t reply.

  “Take a lesson from me, Holland,” he continued. “If you work your heart out for the G, if you hump a sixty-pound pack and an M-60 in a hundred-degree jungle with ants crawling inside your skivvies, if you’re a good cop who has to get by on speed and booze because broken glass is chewing up your guts, you eventually come to a philosophic conclusion about the realities of life out there in Bongo-Bongo Land: We’re not only expendable, we’re the people nobody even wants to hear about.” He smiled and cracked a lemon drop between his molars.

  “You mean nobody cares?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “It’s funny you put it that way, because Johnny American Horse told me the same thing today.”

  “I got news for American Horse. He’s going down for Masterson’s homicide. A done deal, my man.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “They’ve got the weapon, his latents, a phone call to Masterson originating at his house, and his lifetime record of throwing buffalo shit through window fans. You don’t believe the U.S. attorney is going to run a meat hook through both of this guy’s buns? Wow, why would they do a terrible thing like that?” He laughed out loud.

  After the rain and heavy snowmelt in the spring, the weather had turned dry and hot, and fires had started to burn in Idaho. As I drove home from work that evening, the sky was hazy with dust and smelled of smoke, and freshly exposed rocks along Lolo Creek were white and webbed with river trash and the scales of dead insects. When I turned up the road that led to our ranch, locusts flew in clouds from the knapweed in the ditches and the normally beautiful evening seemed as stricken and poisonous as my thoughts.

  I wanted to be gone from Johnny for many reasons-his messianic attitudes and his indictment of me as a white person being only a couple of them. From a legal and professional point of view, I was entirely justified in letting him go. I believed Johnny was knowledgeable about what could be considered an ongoing criminal conspiracy involving his wife and the Indians who had broken into Global Research. In the eyes of the Department of Justice these were ecoterrorists, and, as such, short shrift would be given them by the Office of Homeland Security. As an officer of the court, I had ethical obligations with which Johnny was not concerned.

  Maybe it was a cheap and self-serving way to think, but any attorney who ends up in front of the bar or in jail because of his client probably deserves his fate.

  I cut and watered the grass in the front and back yards, and scattered feed for the wild turkeys that came down from the hills in the evening to drink from the aluminum horse tank by the barn. But I couldn’t free myself from my problems of conscience about Johnny American Horse.

  Then the phone rang inside and Johnny took me out of the box I had thought myself into-at least temporarily. “You’re hiring Brendan Merwood?” I said incredulously.

  “He’s doing it pro bono,” he said.

  “Merwood wasn’t conceived, he was poured out of a bottle of hair oil.”

  “So he wheels and deals. He’s working for free. I’m not knocking it.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to pull you down.”

  “Merwood doesn’t do anything for free, Johnny.”

  “Ever hear this one: What’s the difference between lab rats and lawyers? Lab rats have feelings. Just kidding. See you around.”

  After he hung up I stared out the side window at the gloaming of the day, the horses in our pasture, the dry lightning that flickered above the hills. Temple came through the door with a bag of groceries. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I told her of Johnny’s phone call.

  “Maybe you should respect his decision,” she said.

  “He’s doing it because he doesn’t want to hurt his friends.”

  “Let it go, Billy Bob. For just once, stop protecting people from themselves,” she said. She began pulling heavy cans of peaches out of the sack and setting them down hard on the kitchen table.

  That night I slept without dreaming and woke at first light, rested and empty of thought or concern about the day or all the problems that had beset me the previous evening. Temple had been right, I told myself. It was time to let go of other people’s quixotic struggles and to enjoy the day and the work I did and all the fine gifts a cool morning can bring. A doe and her fawn were drinking at the horse tank. A raccoon was scraping sunflower seeds out of the bird feeder on the deck; the trees behind the house were full of birdsong. Life could be a poem, if you’d only let it, I thought. Why live in conflict and endless self-examination?

  I kept that mood all the way to the office. I was still confident about my new attitude as I crossed the street to the courthouse. Then I heard the unmi
stakable sound of someone’s rubber-stoppered crutches thudding on the sidewalk behind me. “Slow down there, Brother Holland. I’m pounding my vitals to jelly trying to catch up with you,” a voice said.

  “Don’t want to hear it, Wyatt,” I said.

  But he cut me off at the corner, aiming one crutch at me like a pistol. “Got to have your hep. This is serious, counselor. Ain’t many people I can go to on this one,” he said.

  I knew I would have no peace that day unless I heard him out. I sat down with him on a steel bench under a maple tree. He looked in both directions, his jaw hooked, his eyes perplexed. “I got word them two yardbirds that put a shank in me was up holed up with a vet’inary in Ronan. But when I got up there they’d done flown the coop,” he said.

  “I’m not real interested in this anymore, Wyatt. Johnny American Horse is using another attorney now,” I said.

  “Won’t change nothing for him. Won’t change nothing for me or you, either. You was baptized by immersion. Not only baptized the old-time way, you’re an honest-to-God believer. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Wyatt, but I don’t like you talking about my personal life.”

  “They’re gonna come after me with guns and such. With you it’s probably gonna be different. They’re out there, counselor, probably watching us right now.”

  “Who?”

  “The ones working for this man Mabus.”

  I tried to read his eyes. Perhaps he was insane, I thought, or he simply spoke out of the demented cultural mind-set that was characteristic of his class, called white trash in the South, a term that has much more to do with pathology than socioeconomic status. But I had come to learn that Dixon was not a stupid man. His lips were parted slightly, like strips of rubber pasted on his face, his empty eyes waiting for me to speak.

  “Whatever cause you’re trying to enlist me in, I won’t be a part of it. You committed a vicious, unforgivable act against my wife. That’s never going away,” I said.