In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  “No, you listen to me,” he said, pointing a finger at my face. “Them three ex-fellow travelers of the Lost Highway in the sweat lodge? The Indian took two rounds from a. 357 Mag and crawled a half mile in a hunnerd-degree desert to kill the man done it to him. The tall fellow who looks like a big Q-Tip done hits for the Aryan Brotherhood in Quentin and Folsom. Each one of them teardrops tattooed on his eyes is for a man he done for free, just a favor for the AB. The iron man you seen in there, one with the crazy look in his eyes, has done committed crimes both inside and outside you don’t want to even know about.

  “What I’m saying to you is men like that, men like me, ain’t no threat to the likes of a Karsten Mabus. A man like you is. If I had your education, I’d own this whole fucking state.”

  “You’re mistaken, Wyatt.”

  He picked up his canes and stared at the river, the trees bending in the breeze on the hillside, the smoke that mushroomed into the sky as yellow as sulfur. His eyes looked prosthetic, impossible to read, the crow’s-feet at the edges like artistic brushstrokes that were intended to give his face the human dimension it lacked. “When I first come out of the pen, I wanted to hurt you for what you done to me,” he said.

  “Let’s stick to the subject,” I said.

  “Not hurt you like you think. I wanted to get close to you and bring you down to where I was, make you into the very kind of man you hated. I figured that was about the worst thing I could do to anybody on earth. Anyway, that was then, this is now. It’s gonna take the two of us to shovel Karsten Mabus’s grits in the stove. Get used to the idea.”

  “I dimed you with the Feds this morning.”

  “You’re too late. They tore my place apart yesterday. They ain’t found squat on a rock, either.”

  I gave up. He was impervious to both my questions and insults, even my admission that I had informed on him. But there was still one other question I had to ask him. “Were y’all talking in tongues earlier?”

  “Why you want to know?”

  “Because I think you’re psychotic. That and the fact you’re injured is the only reason I don’t break your jaw.”

  “You done let me down, Brother Holland. I figured you for more sand. Anyway, time for my chemical cocktail,” he said. He fitted on a peaked, slope-brimmed hat and hobbled toward the church on his canes, the pupils in his eyes like broken drops of India ink.

  Chapter 21

  Darrel McComb did not know how he would do it, but one way or another he was going to get even. The Feds had treated him like the best-dressed man of 1951, Greta Lundstrum had played him, his own department had dumped him, Fay Harback had dimed him with I.A., and a jailhouse dickwad like Wyatt Dixon had sucker-dropped him with a replica of an antique rifle.

  In addition, he’d almost been killed trying to save Seth Masterson’s life, and the upshot had been an official reprimand and a departmental suspension. The ultimate irony was that he was probably the only cop in Missoula County who knew the score on the Global Research break-in. Or at least he knew most of the score. There was one element about the break-in and its aftermath that he didn’t like to think about, primarily because even consideration of the idea put him in a league with a psycho-ceramic like Dixon.

  Greta had set him up the night a hit team had descended on Dixon’s place; she had not only known he would be on the premises, she knew there was a good chance he would be taken out along with Wyatt. But instead, the lowlifes had walked into a firestorm. In fact, Darrel had to give Dixon credit; when it came to inflicting carnage on the enemy, Dixon had no peer. What troubled Darrel was not Dixon’s humiliation of him but instead the possibility that Dixon’s perverse religious views had credibility.

  On two occasions Darrel had noticed a red mark underneath Greta’s right arm, one she had tried to dismiss as a horsefly bite, an explanation that in itself was a problem: Greta wasn’t a horsewoman and had no interest in animals or being around them.

  Blow it off. Maybe she found a lump she doesn’t want to talk about, he told himself. He wondered if he was starting to lose his sanity or, more specifically, if his own head hadn’t become a dark box where his worst enemies were his own thoughts.

  Keep the lines straight, he thought. Dixon was nuts, Greta was a Judas, and the judicial system in this country sucked. That’s all he had to remember: meltdowns were meltdowns, women screwed you in more ways than one, the system copped pud, and good guys like Rocky Harrigan led us away from ourselves.

  But the bump under her arm wasn’t put there by a horsefly. The lie wasn’t even close. He had touched the swollen place while they made love; it was hard, configured like a midsized, calcified boil. Why hadn’t she gone to a doctor and had it treated?

  He had deliberately not confronted Greta about her betrayal. He still believed she was an amateur, and as such he had known her defenses and denial and explanations would be in place in the immediate aftermath of her treachery. But silence and unpredictability unnerved amateurs far more than confrontation did. You waited and let them think they had skated, then you dropped the whole junkyard on their heads. Usually, they crumpled like a piece of paper thrown on hot coals.

  On the evening of the same Monday I had gone to see Wyatt at his church, Darrel dropped in on Greta at her bungalow without notice.

  She opened the door, her hair unbrushed, her face stark, without makeup, her big eyes unblinking, her level of discomfort crawling on her skin.

  “Where have you been, stranger?” she asked, her smile like a rip in a clay mask.

  “Hanging out, watching a lot of baseball, staying out of the smoke. See, I’m suspended without pay, which is the same as being fired, so I got a lot of time on my hands and I thought I’d drive down and check out how things are with you. So how’s it goin’?”

  He walked into the living room without being invited.

  “I was starting to get a little worried about you,” she said. “I called a couple of times but your message machine must have been off. You been all right?”

  He let the lie about his message machine pass. “I’m doing good. Got a beer? Why don’t we play some music and slap some steaks on the grill? You’re not doing anything else, are you, Greta?”

  “I’ve got hamburger. I can chop some onions in it, the way you like it. I can fix a salad. Is that okay?” She didn’t know what to do with either her hands or her eyes. She coughed into her palm and waited.

  “Wow, that smoke is something else, isn’t it?” he said. “My lungs feel like I’ve been smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. Hey, hamburger would be great.”

  He put a CD compilation of 1940s swing music on her stereo and sat in a deep chair and gazed out the side window at the mountains while she began preparing dinner in the kitchen. Greta was a middle-class bumbler who’d strayed into the criminal world, and Darrel knew that by the end of the evening he would have everything from her he wanted. But he had to wonder at his own coldness and the ease and confident sense of calculation he felt as he went about dismantling the life of a woman he had not only slept with but had formed a strange affection for.

  But that was the breaks, he told himself. She was about to join that four percent of the criminal population who actually paid for their crimes. Like most amateurs, she probably never believed a day would come when she would have to stand in front of a judge, her life in tatters, her bank accounts emptied by defense lawyers, and listen mutely while the judge told her she had just become a bar of soap.

  If they did the crime, they stacked the time, Darrel told himself. Why beat up on himself about it? But he could not deny the rush of satisfaction he felt when he took down perps, any of them, not just Greta, blowing apart their shoddy defenses, exposing their lies, making them see for just a moment their own pathos and inadequacy. Sure, they were scapegoats, surrogates for all the grimebags and degenerates who skated, but that’s what scapegoats were for, he thought. Were it not for the scapegoats, the job would be intolerable.

  Darrel could not count
the number of unresolved cases in his career. In fact, often the worst of them never got to be “cases,” because they existed in a category of moral failure over which criminal law had little governance or application.

  He remembered seven years back when he had investigated a one-car fatality accident by Alberton Gorge. The driver, a man who worked in a Spokane bookstore, was returning home from a funeral in Minnesota. On an empty highway at dusk, his compact hit a guardrail, gashing open the gas tank. The compact seemed to right itself momentarily, then a flame twisted from under the frame and a ball of light mushroomed out of the windows.

  The weather had been good, the road dry, and the highway patrol concluded that the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. But the driver’s wife would not accept the highway patrol’s explanation. Her husband had a perfect driving record, she said. He was a conservative, abstemious man who never drove when he was tired, never broke traffic regulations, and was always conscious of the safety of others. There could have been no mechanical failure, either; his car was new and the maintenance on it was done by her brother, a mechanic. Darrel believed her.

  Darrel had the widow send him all her husband’s credit card records, and he re-created each step of the husband’s trip from Spokane to the funeral service in St. Paul and back home again. The dead man and his wife were people of humble means, and it was obvious the husband did everything in his power not to spend an excess of money on himself, hence his decision to drive the thousands of miles to attend an uncle’s funeral rather than fly without discount reservations. He bought gas at off-brand filling stations, stayed at the Econo Lodge and Motel 8, and evidently ate at cash-basis fast-food restaurants, since the credit card records showed almost no purchases for food.

  Darrel began calling each motel along the husband’s return route. But no one could offer any personal information about the bookseller from Spokane, other than the computerized record that showed the time and date of his check-in. Then a casual addendum in a conversation with a desk clerk in eastern Montana opened up another scenario and suddenly gave a face, an identity, and a sad kind of history to a man who was about to be written off as the cause of his own death.

  “Yeah, he checked in on a Saturday afternoon two weeks ago. It was colder than hell. Wind must have been blowing forty miles an hour,” the clerk said. “We were packed to the ceiling, hunting season and all.”

  “Was he drinking? Was there anything unusual about his behavior? Did he seem sick?” Darrel said.

  “Actually, he didn’t stay at this motel. When we have an overflow, we register guests at this motel but we send them to the motel across the road. See, we own half of that one with my brother-in-law.”

  Darrel got the number of the brother-in-law and left a message for him. The next day, the brother-in-law returned the call. “Yeah, I remember him,” he said. “He was a nice gentleman, quiet fellow, played with my cat on the counter when he came up to get some soap for the room. He do something wrong?”

  “He was involved in a traffic accident. I was just checking out a couple of details for my paperwork. Did he have booze on his breath or seem to be sick?”

  “No, I saw him early in the morning, just before he left. I’m sure he wasn’t drinking. I felt bad about the room I gave him and offered not to charge him for it, but he said it was no problem.”

  “Would you explain that in a little more detail.”

  “A bunch of loudmouth hunters were in the rooms on each side of him. They came in drunk about eleven o’clock, yelling outside the rooms, throwing ice chests around in their trucks, rattling the Coke machine, stuff like that. He must have asked them to be quiet, ’cause I think they beat on his wall or his door. No, that’s not exactly right. I know they gave him a bad time. These guys were real assholes. They got up at four in the morning and did it again before they left, I mean slamming doors and hollering at each other, racing their truck engines, like nobody else is on the planet, so I don’t think that poor fellow got any sleep at all.”

  “You got names and addresses for these guys?” Darrel asked.

  Over the next few days Darrel called up seven men who had stayed in the rooms close by the bookseller’s. Each denied any responsibility for the dead man’s sleep deprivation. Three of them hung up on him. If any of them felt any guilt over the bookseller’s death, it was not apparent to Darrel. In fact, none of them seemed to even remember the anonymous, faceless man who’d had the bad luck to be sandwiched between their rooms.

  In Darrel’s opinion, the hunters might not have been the direct cause of the bookseller’s death, but they had certainly contributed to it. And that’s the way it would end, Darrel thought. The hunters would go back to their jobs, their families, their venison dinners, and their swinging-dick bravado; they’d get laid, knock back shots in loud saloons, slam poker dice down on hardwood bars, see the sunrise with the warmth of a wife and mother next to them, attend churches that were little more than extensions of civic clubs, watch their children grow up, and one day many years from now, just before all the cares of the world became as dross before their eyes, wonder why a vague memory of a Saturday night outside Glendive, Montana, should hover like a chimerical presence next to their beds.

  Darrel drove over to Spokane and took the dead man’s widow and children to an amusement park in Coeur d’Alene, then at dinner that night told the woman her husband might have swerved his car to avoid hitting a deer, that evidently he was a kind man and instinctively had chosen to cut his wheels toward the shoulder rather than simply slam on the brakes and broadside an animal that had probably frozen in the headlights.

  Darrel could not bear to tell her that a collection of dog-pack bullies had robbed her husband of his sleep, forcing him to make the long drive across the state while he was bone-tired in order to be at work on time Monday morning. Also he could not bear to tell her that a prosecutable case against the dog pack was a legal impossibility.

  The next weekend Darrel drove to the hometown of the hunters, a windblown, godforsaken place close to the Canadian line, and in an hour had the name of the man who was considered to be their leader. At 2 A.M. he used a pay phone to call the man’s house. The wife answered, but at Darrel’s insistence she woke her husband and got him on the phone.

  “Who the hell is this?” the man said.

  “Bang!” Darrel said, and hung up.

  Darrel fired a single. 44 Magnum round through the front window of the man’s auto parts store, listened to the bullet ricochet and break things inside, then drove back to Missoula.

  At Christmas, the leader of the hunters received a greeting card inscribed with a single line: “I’m still out here.”

  “Why so lost in thought tonight?” Greta asked.

  “Thinking about you, Greta. Want to dance?” he said.

  “The food’s almost ready.”

  “It’ll wait. Come on,” he said.

  He put one arm around her waist and lifted her right hand in the air. Bunny Berrigan’s “I Can’t Get Started” was playing on the stereo. Darrel pulled Greta against him, pushing her arms around his neck, as though he were going to hug her. But he let his fingers slide up her side, until he felt a knot about five inches below her armpit. The balls of his fingers traced its outline against her shirt. The knot had not grown in size, but it was harder, the configuration more defined.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “It hurts?”

  “I told you, it’s an insect bite. It got infected.”

  “Let’s take a look at it.”

  “It’s time to eat.”

  “Take off your shirt.”

  “Come into the bedroom and I might do that,” she said, half smiling.

  “The romantic jerk-around is over, Greta. You did me. Know the expression ‘First time shame on you, second time shame on me’? You sicced the lowlifes on me at Dixon’s place. I almost got my kite burned, Greta. Problem is, I was onto you and it didn’t work. You’re in deep shit, girl.”

&nbs
p; Her face was only inches from his, the dance music still playing. She started to speak, her eyes wide with both fear and shock.

  “No, no,” he said, touching her lips with one finger. “You don’t lie anymore, Greta. While you thought I was asleep, I heard you talking to your trained cretins. So I told you the Global Research goods were at Dixon’s place and I was going to take him down. Sure enough, your pals showed up that night, ready to pop both me and the peckerwood. You’re a Judas, Greta. For cops, that’s a category below drug dealers and pimps. Ever hear of the Contras?”

  “Who?” she said, all of it going too fast for her now, her mouth twitching, an ugly smell from the kitchen wrapping itself around her face. “The food’s burning. I left the burner on high.”

  “That’s good, because we’re not going to be eating it. I was with the Contras in northern Nicaragua, Greta, saw some mean shit go down that I don’t like to remember. I was an adviser to Somoza’s Rattlesnake Brigade, badass dudes who wired people up to field generators, got fed by the peasants, or burned the ville. But we had a problem-a turncoat was pipelining intel into the Sandinistas. One day out on the trail the lieutenant stops the column and says to him, ‘You got to dig a hole, then take a rest, man. We’re going give you a good meal, some rum, you want to get laid, there’s time for that, too, man. But then you got to rest.’

  “The turncoat knows what’s about to happen. First he lies, then he lies and he lies and he lies some more, and when that doesn’t work, he begs on his knees. My job was to stay out of it, but I didn’t want to see the guy get whacked. I kept hoping he’d do the right thing, act dignified, not insult people with his lies. But he was a dumb guy and thought he could lie his way out of it, then he thought he could beg and make people feel sorry for him. Know what that did? It made it easy for everybody else. Someone finally shut him up with an AK, splattered his salad all over a ditch, and nobody could have cared less.