In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  They drove into Missoula, passing the old military fort that resembled Scofield Barracks in Hawaii, where Darrel had once been stationed. They crossed the new bridge over the Clark Fork, one that was lined with carriage lamps mounted on stanchions. Down below, Darrel could see the smooth rush of green water through the pilings, rafters bouncing through the current, and off to the left a sandlot baseball diamond couched between the bridge and the riverbank. This might be a hard place to let go of, he thought. He rolled down the window and let the coolness and smell of the morning blow into his face.

  “You look mighty pleased with yourself,” Greta said.

  “When you add it all up and it comes out to zero, you got to take your kicks where you can,” he said. “That make sense to you, Greta?”

  “I don’t know what I ever saw in you,” she replied.

  He waited until they were at the red light before he stared directly into her face. “Say that again?”

  “We had fun for a while, didn’t we? It wasn’t all bad,” she said. She let her eyes rove over his face. “Maybe there’s still time.”

  The light changed. “You almost had me going,” he said.

  He pulled into the alley behind Brendan Merwood’s law firm and parked between two nineteenth-century brick buildings. Then, with his large Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand, he and Greta entered the back door.

  Merwood had two law partners, but both of their offices were empty and the receptionist and secretary who usually worked behind a curved counter in front were gone as well. “Hello?” Darrel said.

  Merwood stepped out of his office, porcine, solid, wearing a striped shirt with French cuffs, his brown skin shining as though it had been rubbed with tanning lotion. “Sit down. Please,” he said. When he smiled his mouth had the dislocated stiffness of a patient in a dentist’s chair.

  The Venetian blinds were closed, the soft tones of the walls, carpet, and furniture even softer in the muted light, the interior of the office humming with the sound of the air-conditioning vents.

  “Where’s Mabus?” Darrel said.

  Merwood didn’t answer. Instead, three men wearing business suits came out of Merwood’s conference room. Darrel remembered having seen one of them at his health club, a silent, lean-bodied man with silver hair who had smacked the heavy bag with murderous intensity.

  “What’s this?” Darrel said.

  “We need to make sure everybody’s operating in a pristine environment here,” Merwood said.

  “You know the routine,” the man with silver hair said. His accent was East Coast, from the streets, an over-the-hill wiseass who’d moved west after the collapse of the Mob, Darrel thought.

  Darrel set down his coffee container on the counter, then placed his hands on each side of it. He spread his legs slightly, looking back over his shoulder. “I’m carrying, so don’t get excited,” he said.

  He felt the man with silver hair pull the Beretta from the holster clipped onto Darrel’s belt and slide the sap and switchblade out of his side pockets. The silver-haired man’s hands groped Darrel in the scrotum, between the buttocks, between his thighs, and down both legs, retrieving the. 25 hideaway and its Velcro-strap holster from Darrel’s right ankle.

  “This guy’s a walking torture chamber,” the man with silver hair said.

  But Darrel was not paying attention to the man with silver hair. He was watching the other two security men as they searched Greta Lundstrum. They had told her to place her hands up against the wall and spread her feet, but they seemed to avoid touching her body in an invasive way, at least to any greater degree than was necessary. One man gingerly touched the inside of her thigh and stepped back.

  “You want to deliver it up?” he said.

  “Look the other way and I might,” she said.

  With her back to them, she lifted her skirt slightly, bent over, and untaped the recorder Darrel had put on her earlier.

  “We were hoping to have reciprocal trust here, Mr. McComb, but that fact seems to have eluded you,” Brendan Merwood said.

  “That’s a recorder, not a wire. It’s just backup. This isn’t a sting,” Darrel said.

  “And you want to sell Karsten Mabus the whereabouts of Johnny American Horse?”

  “That pretty well sums it up. But right now I need to use the can,” Darrel said, tapping the rim of his Styrofoam coffee with his fingernail.

  “Do you believe this fucking guy?” one of the other security men said.

  “Don’t use that language in here,” Merwood said. He blew out his breath. “Go with him.” He gestured with his thumb toward the office restroom.

  The silver-haired man and the one whom Merwood had corrected for his profanity went inside with Darrel. But Darrel did not go to the urinal. Instead, he began unbuckling his pants as he entered a stall.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the man with silver hair said.

  “I got to take a dump. I had clam linguine and a few brews last night. Want to hang around, be my guest,” Darrel said. He squatted on the toilet and blew a gaseous explosion into the bowl.

  When Darrel and the security men came out of the restroom, Brendan Merwood was talking on the phone. He said something into the receiver Darrel couldn’t hear, then replaced the receiver on the carriage.

  “How much do you want for your information?” he asked.

  “I’ll take that up with Mabus,” Darrel replied.

  “Are you serious?” Merwood said.

  “I told you he was a hardhead,” Greta said.

  “These gentlemen here will take you to see Mr. Mabus,” Merwood said. “Go out the back door, if you would.”

  “I want my twenty-five, my nine-Mike, my blade, and my sap back,” Darrel said.

  “We’ll sack ’em up for you,” the man with silver hair said. “Let me have your keys.”

  “What for?” Darrel said.

  “There’s a guy outside who’ll drive your car. You come in ours,” the man with silver hair said. He eased back the receiver on Darrel’s . 25-caliber automatic and looked at the round that was seated in the chamber. He laid his arm across Darrel’s shoulders, tapping him good-naturedly with the pistol. “This is gonna work out, believe me.”

  Darrel thought he could smell the sweat and deodorant in the man’s armpit. For a second Greta’s eyes settled on his, gleaming with victory.

  After I left Wyatt’s place on the Blackfoot, I went to the office and tried to work. But it was no use. Why did I want to even pretend I was an attorney? My deeds had proved over and over again that I was little different from Wyatt Dixon or Darrel McComb. There was no psychological complexity waiting to be discovered at the center of my life. The truth was, I lusted to kill. It was cleaner, easier, and simpler than the drawn-out processes of the law. Jailhouses and prisons are filled with people who are ugly and stupid and who probably deserve to be there. But rich guys don’t stack mainline time, and men like Karsten Mabus, no matter what they do, never ride the needle. So why not kick it on up to rock ’n’ roll? I told myself.

  I was almost convinced by my own rhetoric when Hildy, my receptionist, buzzed my phone. “I’ve got Amber American Horse on the line. Want to take the call?” she said.

  I hesitated, then said, “Put her on.”

  “Billy Bob?” Amber’s voice said.

  “Are you on a cell?” I said

  “Yes.”

  “My phones are probably tapped. Get off the cell and use a land line. Call me in fifteen minutes at a place where the bindle stiffs smile at you from the walls. You hearing me on this?”

  She paused only a second. “Make it a half hour. I have to drive. It’s dangerous,” she said.

  “Hey, cowgirls never get the blues,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  But I hung up the phone before a trace could be made, then went out the back door of my office and down the alley to Higgins Street. I walked past a newsstand and the Oxford Bar and crossed the street to Charley B’s. The walls in
side were hung with the work of a West Montana legend, Lee Nye, who had been employed there as a part-time bartender in the 1960s and whose photographs of seamed, wind-burned faces were like a pictorial history of the American West and the landless blue-collar men who had built it.

  The phone behind the bar rang five minutes after I arrived. The bartender picked it up, then handed it to me. “Hello?” I said.

  “It’s Amber,” she said.

  “How’s Johnny?”

  “His arm’s better, thanks to Darrel.”

  “To Darrel McComb?”

  “That’s why I called. We’re going to split for Canada. I wanted to thank Darrel for what he did. I’ve treated him unfairly.”

  “I’m just not reading you.”

  “You don’t have to. You see my father?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “If you do, tell him I said good-bye.”

  “Don’t hang up.”

  “This is a great country, Billy Bob. But the bad guys are going to grind you up.”

  “I’m still your attorney, remember? How did McComb help Johnny?”

  But she had broken the connection.

  It was unwinding fast now, but I didn’t know it, either because I was too close to my own problems or perhaps because I still did not appreciate the level of fear that Karsten Mabus could instill in others.

  Just before noon, Romulus Finley came into the office. He looked stricken, as though he had just been informed an incurable disease had spread through all his organs. He stood in my doorway, his lips moving soundlessly, dried mucus at the corners.

  “You want a glass of water, Senator?” I asked.

  He stepped inside the room and closed the door behind him. He sat down in front of my desk, looking about uncertainly. “Have you heard from my daughter?” he said.

  “Yes, I did. This morning,” I replied.

  “She called here?” he asked, his face lifting expectantly.

  I didn’t answer. At that moment I was convinced that not only did I have a tap on my line but Finley knew about it.

  “Where did she call you? I’ve got to get word to her,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Everything. I think she’s in harm’s way,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “She’s mixed up. Her mother was an alcoholic. That’s why all these problems started.”

  “I don’t know where Amber is, sir.”

  I waited for him to speak, to make the admissions that would perhaps change his life and perhaps even save his daughter’s. He looked hard at me, but his vision was focused inward on thoughts that only he was privy to. The moment passed.

  “Well, I’ll just find her, then,” he said, rising from his chair. He glanced around the room like a man who was lost in the middle of a train station. “Her mother wouldn’t stop drinking. I tried everything.”

  “Senator, is there someone I should call?”

  “No,” he said. “There’s no one. No one at all.”

  Chapter 25

  Darrel sat in the backseat of the Chrysler and gazed through the tinted windows as the city of Missoula slipped behind him. The man with silver hair sat on one side of him, a second security man on the other side, Greta up front in the passenger seat. The man with silver hair was named Sidney. He had taken off his coat and folded it neatly across his legs. There were bright stripes in his dress shirt, like thin bands of smoothed tinfoil, and a silver pin in his lavender tie.

  “I know you from somewhere,” Darrel said.

  “The health club,” Sidney said.

  “No, before that. Maybe from Nicaragua or El Sal.”

  “Could be. Lot of guys were looking for a job back then. You?”

  “A little bit. Nothing to write home about.”

  “Three hots and a cot, right?” Sidney said.

  They went through Lolo and turned west on Highway 12, heading toward the Idaho line. Darrel was amazed at how green the hills had become after only one day’s rain. Lolo Creek was boiling, the current filled with driftwood from the banks. Up ahead Darrel could see the blueness of the sky above Lolo Pass and snow on the tip of St. Mary’s Peak.

  Then he looked through the back window for his Honda. It was gone.

  “They stopped for something to eat. They’re gonna join us. Don’t worry about it,” Sidney said.

  “Yeah? That’s my car. I want it back,” Darrel said.

  Sidney didn’t answer. But Greta turned around in the front seat. “You’re in good hands,” she said.

  When Darrel didn’t reply, she said it again. But Darrel was now staring at the side of Sidney’s face. “It was at El Mozote,” he said. “On the Honduran border. December 1981. You were standing by the trench where all those peasants were buried.”

  “You got the wrong dude, Mac,” Sidney said, staring indifferently out the side window.

  The Chrysler’s tires hummed around a slight bend in the road and Darrel saw the entrance to Karsten Mabus’s ranch, the white-railed fences and breeding barns shining in the sun. But the Chrysler kept going, climbing a hill, rounding another curve that was layered with outcroppings of gray and yellow rock.

  “Mabus is the guy I need to talk to,” Darrel said.

  “Sure,” said the man on the other side of Darrel, and plunged a hypodermic needle into his neck.

  For the next three hours Darrel McComb drifted in and out of a red haze that was like the sunrise down on the equator-hot, pervasive, blinding when you looked straight into it. Pain had become geographic, a conduit into past places and events, a tropical garden spiked with bougainvillea, lime trees, crowns of thorns, and rosebushes that bloomed in December. He saw the waxy faces of the dead, the firing-squad victims with their thumbs wired behind them, the sawed-off soldiers in salt-crusted uniforms and oversized steel pots, their M-16s leaking white smoke. And for the first time in more than twenty years he felt these images leaving him forever.

  The pain his tormentors had inflicted upon him hadn’t worked, and neither had the chemicals they had injected into his veins. At some point a cloth bag coated with insecticide had been fitted over his head, but that had not worked, either. In fact, it had even obstructed his interrogators’ agenda.

  “You think people are coming to help you?” Sidney said, bare-chested, squatting down eye-level with Darrel. “Take a look at who’s having drinks by Mabus’s pool.”

  Two of Darrel’s tormentors lifted up the chair he was strapped in and set it by a window in the log house high up on a mountain overlooking the back of Mabus’s ranch. Sidney fitted a pair of binoculars on Darrel’s eyes. “That’s United States Senator Romulus Finley down there, pal. That’s also your friend the district attorney, Fay Harback. They’re on the pad, my man,” he said.

  But Darrel’s eyes were too swollen to see.

  “Light him up again,” Sidney said.

  Someone behind Darrel poured a bucket of water over his head, then an electrical surge struck his genitals and his nipples like a blow from a jackhammer. They hit him again. And again. And again. When he awoke, he was bleeding from the mouth.

  Sidney had pulled up a straight-backed chair in front of him. He leaned forward, his lean stomach ridged, his chest patinaed with gray monkey fur. “Don’t be a hardhead. I don’t want to keep doing this to you,” he said. “Just tell us where American Horse is. You’ll get to live and make yourself a few spendolies at the same time.”

  The sun had gone behind the mountain, and in the shade the trees on the hillside looked cold and dark. But on a flat outcropping that jutted out over the canyon, Darrel thought he saw Rocky Harrigan gazing at the countryside, his heavy physique and the ledge he stood on bathed in sunlight. Rocky was wearing slacks, penny loafers, his aviator glasses, and his favorite goon shirt, a Hawaiian job printed with bluebirds and palm trees, the way he always dressed for an evening out. Been waiting on you, old partner. Come on, we’re going to have a fine time, Rocky said.

  Darrel saw him remove his shades and give the thumbs-up sign,
then beckon Darrel to walk across the air and join him on the lip of a canyon that opened onto green valleys Darrel had never seen before.

  Darrel’s eyes closed, then opened briefly. “Got to tell you something, Sidney,” he whispered hoarsely.

  Sidney leaned down, his eyes close to Darrel’s. “Go ahead, pal. You got the right attitude. Let’s get this behind us,” he said.

  Darrel tried to muster the words but could not get them out. His teeth were red with his blood, his breath fetid, his eyes like slits in tea-colored eggs.

  “Take your time. You can do it. You’re almost home free,” Sidney said.

  Darrel lifted his lips an inch from Sidney’s ear. “I was a good cop,” he whispered, grinning self-effacingly at the effort it took him to speak.

  One week later, a rock climber found Darrel’s Honda and his body inside it at the bottom of a canyon just west of the Idaho line. The car’s roof was crushed from the three-hundred-foot fall it had taken down the mountainside, and Darrel’s body had been degraded by magpies and putrefaction, relegating the particular cause of Darrel’s death to guesswork. But when the paramedics lifted the body into a vinyl bag, one of them felt a hard object behind Darrel’s left calf muscle. The coroner scissored away the fabric, exposing a miniaturized recorder and microphone taped behind Darrel’s knee.

  The next three weeks passed for Johnny and Amber American Horse with little or no contact from the outside world. They stayed holed up in a cabin on the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a woodstove for heat, their water drawn by hand from a rock-dammed creek at the base of a canyon wall that stayed in shadow until late afternoon. The water from the pool was always cold and tasted like stone and fern and snowmelt, and at the bottom of the pool were schools of cutthroat trout pointed into the current, their bodies as sleek as silver and red ribbons. When Amber threw the canvas bucket heavily into the water, both her reflection and the schooled-up trout splintered into the rocks.

  Years before, Johnny had built the cabin in a thickly timbered gulch that gave shade in the summer and protection from cold winds in winter and was hard to see from either the lowlands or the sky. The abandoned log road that led to the cabin had caved along the edges and was considered treacherous and unusable by both hunters and U.S. Forest Service personnel. On the first day of Johnny’s escape from federal custody, he and Amber had parked Amber’s vehicle behind the cabin, pulled a tarp over it, and covered the tarp with pine boughs. They used the woodstove only in the daylight hours and gathered only fuel that was dry and worm-eaten and would burn with maximum heat and little smoke.