In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “Hey, come back here. Why you here?” he said at my back.

  I drove back down a long street lined with maples flickering in the wind, past the golf course and several upscale retirement homes, then turned into the traffic that would take me back downtown. I clicked on the radio, the volume louder than normal, my hands tighter on the steering wheel than they should have been. I wanted to be around noise, stopped at the red light next to a car filled with high school kids or family people. I wanted to be in a crowded restaurant, at a rodeo, a state fair, a baseball game. I wanted to be anywhere except inside my head with my own thoughts.

  Back at my office, I called Temple and gave her the names of the two shooting victims and asked her if she could run them.

  “Sure. But what’s the point?” she said.

  “I just want to know who’s working for Karsten Mabus.”

  She waited a beat before she spoke. “Where’d you go last night, Billy Bob?”

  “For a carton of ice cream.”

  “I’ll call you back later,” she said.

  It was almost quitting time when my phone buzzed. “It took me a while,” she said. “These guys have lived all over the place, at least until they went to work for Mabus. That’s the funny thing about them. They floated around the country, getting in trouble wherever they were, then they found a home with Karsten Mabus and changed their ways. Which guys like them don’t do.”

  “Start with Jared Green,” I said.

  “He was a trainer at health clubs in Miami and Los Angeles. He was also a prostitute for an escort service in Naples, Florida. He was in a reformatory at Tracy, California, and spent eight months in the Broward County Stockade for breaking his girlfriend’s jaw. He should have gone to Raiford, but the D.A. couldn’t get her to testify. He’s the one who got kneecapped?”

  “He’s the one.”

  “Same guy who stopped you on Rock Creek Road?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Because you seem to have a personal interest in him.”

  “Can’t you just give me the information, Temple?”

  She paused, then ignored my irritability and went on. “His friend, Albert Burgette, has a bad-conduct discharge from the Navy and used to be a long-haul truck driver. He and some others guys also ran a home-repair scam. Each spring they’d roam around the West, knocking on the doors of elderly people, telling them their roofs had ice damage. Burgette was also charged with the hit-and-run death of an eleven-year-old girl, but it didn’t stick. The cops in Fresno think his friends threatened a witness.

  “In other words, both guys are genuine scum. Now do you want to tell me why you’re so interested in these characters?”

  “I guess you’re right, they’re not important.”

  “Where’d you go last night, Billy Bob?” she said.

  At 5 P.M. I locked up the office and crossed the street to a workingmen’s bar. I sat in back, near a brick wall with a painted-over window in it that gave onto an alleyway, and ordered a beer and a double shot. It was a cool, dark place, with a lighted jukebox and neon ads for western beers on the wall. The people who drank at the bar were from the neighborhood and talked about sports and the opening of the streams that had been closed because of the forest fires, or they made jokes about their tabs and their jobs. I wanted to buy them a round, be among them, and have no cares other than the traffic I would have to negotiate before I was home, enjoying a fine supper.

  But the images of two bullet-wounded men would not go out of my head.

  I went back to the bar twice more for doubles, with a beer back. When I was on my fourth round, a huge shape stepped between my table and the glare of light through the front door.

  “Didn’t know you were a drinking man,” Darrel McComb said.

  “I’m just about to leave,” I replied.

  He sat down at the table anyway, with a longneck and an empty glass. His jaws were gritty with stubble, his clothes rumpled. “Tell American Horse he gave me the key,” he said.

  “The key?” I said.

  “It’ll make sense down the road.” He poured beer into his glass and salted it. “One day I’m going to write the history of what happened down in Central America. Hitler said the victors write the history books. But sometimes the victors leave big blanks in the story, know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said, realizing he was either drunk or entering a new and perhaps terminal stage in his career. “Say that again about Johnny American Horse?”

  “You bet, kemosabe,” he said. He drank from his glass, then smelled himself and smiled bleary-eyed into my face. But he forgot whatever it was he intended to say.

  I patted him on the shoulder as I left the bar, perhaps glad to have the problems I did and not someone else’s.

  I bought a hot dog and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee on the corner and ate the hot dog on a bench before I tried to drive home. After I pulled into the driveway I went straight into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, rinsed my mouth with Listerine, and showered the smell of booze and cigarette smoke off my skin and out of my hair. But I didn’t fool Temple. Not about anything.

  “Make a stop on the way home?” she said.

  “I ran into Darrel McComb. He said something about Johnny American Horse providing a key for him. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about.”

  But Temple was not interested in the problems of Darrel McComb. “The thirty-thirty is gone from the rack,” she said.

  “Yeah, I took it to Sportsmen’s Surplus. I think the sight is bent,” I replied.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table. Through the side window I could see our horses drinking at the tank and shadows spreading across the valley floor. I felt her fingers stroking the back of my neck. “You’re the best man I’ve ever known, Billy Bob,” she said. “You’re incapable of evil or meanness. If you’ve broken any laws, it was on behalf of the people you love.”

  I had to swallow at her words. I started to speak, but she didn’t let me. She put her arms around me and hugged my head against her, her mouth pressed into my hair.

  Chapter 24

  Darrel left the bar and drove to his apartment on the river. He took a hit of white speed and washed it down with beer, then walked out on the balcony and looked out over the town. The rain had killed the fires and restored the glories of summer to western Montana. What a grand evening it was. He looked at the water coursing under the pilings on the Higgins Street Bridge, the glow of lights on the old Wilma Theater building, the red brilliance of the sunset among hills at the bottom of an azure sky, and he wondered how his life could have gone so wrong.

  The answer was easy: He genuinely loved the place where he lived, but the place where he lived did not love him. And that’s the way it had always been. He had loved causes that didn’t love him. On all levels he had served people who had found him either odious or expendable, and the notion of being loved had long ago disappeared from his life.

  Well, that was why hookers were invented, he thought bitterly, then felt both embarrassed and demeaned at the content of his own thoughts.

  Get out of this funk, he told himself. He had never sought either pity or understanding for the life he had led. Years back, whenever he was asked why he kept re-upping in the Army, he had always replied, “It’s three hots and a cot, Jack.” You didn’t share your feelings with people who don’t pay dues. Let the fruits and tree huggers frolic in Golden Gate Park, he had always told himself. The men and women who protected them and would one day live in Valhalla required no recompense other than their own self-respect.

  But for just a moment Darrel wondered what it would have been like if he’d had a wife or even a girlfriend like Amber Finley.

  He went back inside, closed the glass door on his balcony, and forced himself to empty his mind of thoughts about Amber Finley. He opened another beer, bit down on another hit of white speed, and blew out his breath when he felt the rush take him. That was
more like it.

  He opened his computer file and began recording all the recent events concerning Karsten Mabus, Greta Lundstrum, Elton T. Sneed, and Johnny American Horse.

  For a college guy, Holland didn’t seem too smart, Darrel thought to himself. The key to taking down Karsten Mabus was getting inside his compound. But even though Darrel had made Greta his personal snitch, he had not figured a way to put her inside Mabus’s place with a wire. Then American Horse had escaped from federal custody, which made him a likely candidate for the sniper shootings at Mabus’s ranch.

  The only other viable candidate was Wyatt Dixon. But Darrel didn’t believe Dixon had the brains to get inside the property, shoot two men, and safely escape. It had to be American Horse. Or at least that was the case Darrel was going to make.

  The shooting couldn’t have happened at a more perfect time. Now Darrel had the leverage he had lacked earlier. It was just a matter of convincing Karsten Mabus that Greta and her boyfriend, one Darrel McComb, a disgraced police officer with no moral bottom, had information that could prevent another assassination attempt on Mabus’s life.

  He glanced at his breakfast table, where the tools of his trade rested like an ugly testimony to everything that he was: his Beretta, the sap he had beaten American Horse with, his cuffs, a switchblade knife, two miniaturized recorders with tiny microphones, a. 25 hideaway and holster with a Velcro ankle strap, and a throw-down that had the serial numbers burned off.

  Darrel finished recording the events of the last few days that were connected in any way to the homicides committed on the property of Johnny American Horse. He used the spell-check mechanism to correct any misspellings in the file, reviewed his prose for its accuracy and specificity, then decided to add another paragraph.

  It read: “Please consider the following statement as my summation of my time on earth- Hey, I never had to sell shoes at Thom McAn.”

  He exchanged the fourteen rounds out of the old magazine on his Beretta, inserting them into a new magazine with a taut spring, examined the surveillance equipment he had bought off an alcoholic P.I., and finished his beer out on the balcony. The sunset that had flamed at the bottom of the sky was almost gone, and a cool wind was blowing off the river. The evening shade had spread across the valley, the gold light on the eastern hills dying before his eyes, and he thought he smelled the autumnal odor of gas and dead leaves inside the wind. But surely fall had not already come, had it? Wasn’t there another summer concert and dance on the river tomorrow night?

  AT 1:00 A.M.Thursday, someone reported a fire burning inside Brendan Merwood’s downtown law office. Two fire trucks were dispatched, but when firemen and the security service searched the building, they found nothing out of the ordinary. By the time Brendan Merwood arrived at the scene, wearing his pajamas and bathrobe, the firemen were packing up to leave. Across the street, at the entrance to an alley, several homeless men had evidently started a fire in a trash barrel, and the firemen told Merwood the flames from the barrel had probably been reflected in the windows of the law office.

  I’ve heard recovering drunks and addicts say they treat their own minds like dangerous neighborhoods they don’t enter by themselves. All night I kept seeing the face of Elton T. Sneed and imagining the level of pain and fear he must have experienced before he died. How could I have been so foolish not to realize Mabus’s people would target someone close to Wyatt rather than Wyatt himself, considering the fact he had already shot or torn several of them apart?

  Wyatt had told me Sneed’s death was on him. But it wasn’t. It was on me.

  Whether I liked it or not, my guilt had joined me at the hip with a man I had once considered the most repellent human being I had ever known.

  I woke in the false dawn, and without waking Temple I took a croissant and a carton of chocolate milk from the icebox and drove up the Blackfoot to Wyatt’s place.

  It was cold in the canyon, the rocks up on the hillside pink inside the mist, a sliver of moon hanging above the fir trees. My boots clanged on the steel swing bridge, while down below the river roared like rainwater flooding through a stone pipe. I could smell the odor of woodsmoke from Wyatt’s kitchen and steak frying in a skillet, and I wondered briefly, considering the nature of my mission, if I would leave Wyatt’s property alive.

  He met me at his back door, shirtless, barefoot, a blue-and-white-freckled coffeepot in his hand. He stared at me blankly, his face marked from a lack of sleep. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. “You wear a hat in your house?” I said.

  “If it suits me,” he replied.

  “Can I come in?”

  “I don’t give a damn,” he said, turning his back, flipping over the steak in his skillet.

  “I told Karsten Mabus you had the goods from the Global job. I wasn’t going to let my family take your fall, Wyatt,” I said, standing no more than two feet behind him. I felt my mouth go dry, my hands open and close at my sides.

  He forked the steak onto a plate and began browning three pieces of white bread in the skillet grease, his face bloodless, without expression, like a severed head upon a platter.

  “Wyatt?”

  “I heard you.” He sat down at the table and started eating, cutting his meat with his right hand, forking it upside down into his mouth with his left.

  “We can go after Mabus on environmental issues. Maybe he’s violated federal laws in dealing with Saddam Hussein.”

  “I done give up on your thinking skills, counselor.”

  “I see.”

  “All them government people belong to the same club. Play golf together, let each other in on stock market deals, diddle the same women. Think you’re gonna change that with some pissant civil suit?”

  “I’m sorry about the reverend.”

  “You didn’t have nothing to do with it. My farrier seen Mabus’s people up on that ridge where I found the lockbox. They seen them unshoed hoofprints and put it together just like you and that FBI agent, what’s-his-name, Broussard, done.”

  “Where’s the lockbox?”

  “Everything in it went FedEx last night for Dallas. It’s going to some people got a newspaper down there, one I can trust.”

  “Which newspaper?”

  He told me the name. I had to think a moment, then I remembered the publication. To call it right-wing was simplistic. At various times it had been an outlet for Birchers, members of the Paul Revere Society, and people who had used armed force to take over a county courthouse on the Mexican border. But that was not why I remembered the newspaper’s name. To my knowledge, it had been the first news outlet in the country to publish the fact that a United States senator from Texas was involved in a huge swindle of the USDA and perhaps even the murder of a state agricultural official. This same senator would become President of the United States. But even though there might have been substance to the story, it was ignored by mainstream media because of the fanatical reputation of the publisher.

  “I think you just gave away the ranch,” I said.

  He drank from his coffee cup and gazed out the window. “You was the shooter at Mabus’s place, wasn’t you?” he said.

  “You never know.”

  “I talked with some folks on the res. They seen two guys looked just like the ones shanked me headed up the road to Reverend Sneed’s house. I know where them yardbirds is at, Brother Holland. They’re fixing to have a bad day.”

  “If I have knowledge you’re about to commit a crime, I’m required to report it,” I said.

  He laughed to himself. “This from the man who capped them two security people on Mabus’s ranch?”

  “See you around, Wyatt.”

  “Hey?”

  “What?” I said, looking back from the doorway.

  “The trout start rising soon as the sun gets over the ridge. Sit down and have a cup,” he said.

  At 8:15 A.M. that same Thursday morning, Darrel pulled into a convenience store down in the Bitterroots, left Greta Lundstrum in the car, and
called the office of Brendan Merwood on his cell phone. At first Merwood pretended not to recognize Darrel’s name, but Darrel knew that to be Merwood’s way of dealing with people whom he considered unimportant.

  “I’m the sheriff’s detective with the big ears and buzz cut you called a liar on the stand a couple of times,” Darrel said. “I’m also the detective the department sacked as a drunk and general screwup.”

  “How good of you to call. What can I-”

  “I found out where Johnny American Horse is holed up. I can put him out of commission myself or-”

  “Stop right there, my friend. You’ve contacted the wrong party.”

  “American Horse used a thirty-thirty without a scope. Next time out, he’ll have a better weapon and blow hair on your client’s walls. You get on the phone and tell Karsten Mabus what I said. My number is on your caller ID. You have fifteen minutes.”

  Darrel clicked off his cell phone and got back in his Honda. Greta looked seasick, her makeup on too thick, a dirt ring around her throat.

  “You going to stand up, Greta. Get all other options out of your head,” he said.

  “One day I’m going to fix you for this, Darrel.”

  “You already did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  You betrayed me, he thought. But he let it go. “How’s the recorder riding?” he asked.

  “Like a tumor, if that answers your question,” she said.

  Five minutes later, his cell rang. “Where are you? We’ll send a car to pick you up,” Merwood said.

  “Are you kidding?” Darrel said.

  “You call it, then.”

  “Your office. Tell Mabus to bring his checkbook, too.”

  There was a pause. “When?”

  “Twenty-five minutes,” Darrel replied. He clicked off his cell phone and dropped it on the floor of the Honda. “Piece of cake.”

  “You really think Karsten Mabus is going to come downtown and write you a check?” she said.

  “If he wants to stay alive. Wait here just a minute.” He went inside the convenience store and returned with a large container of black coffee. “Nothing like it to get the day started,” he said.