James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“You deny you were in the woods above Romulus Finley’s house while Lundstrum was there?”

“I was following Wyatt Dixon. I filed a report on that,” he said.

“I bet you did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There were circles under his eyes and a raw odor in his clothes. His coat was open, and I could see the small leather clip-on holster he wore on his belt. I walked past him and opened the door. “I can respect your problems, Darrel. But you beat up Johnny American Horse with a sap and we both know why you did it,” I said. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

His scalp glistened inside his crew cut. “I’ve seen Lundstrum before. I don’t know where,” he said, his brow knitting.

Then I realized he was somewhere out on the frayed edges of his life. “I’ve got appointments all morning. How about we have a talk after lunch?” I said.

“That’s out. I shouldn’t have come here. Tell your wife, no matter what you people think, I got a good record as a police officer and I don’t need a P.I. dragging my name in the dirt,” he said.

Who “you people” referred to was anybody’s guess.

But Darrel McComb’s quest for personal vindication was not over. That afternoon he went to the home of Amber Finley. She was working in the garden, barefoot, wearing only a halter and shorts. There were sun freckles on her back, and when she sat up from her work to talk to him, her stomach creased above her exposed navel, causing him to fix his eyes intently on her face so as not to reveal the weakness he felt in his loins.

“I just wanted to clear up why I was watching your house. This lady Ms. Lundstrum has gotten hold of a crazy idea and I thought maybe you had some false notions, too,” he said.

“I know exactly why you were watching us,” she replied.

He looked away in desperation, then knelt down so he could talk to her at eye level.

“You’re making me uncomfortable,” she said.

“Listen, the evidence against Johnny bothers me. The tennis shoes that matched the prints at the crime scene were under a bunch of other shoes and boots. But if Johnny had just worn them, why would they be under other shoes, unless someone wanted to disguise the fact they were placed there to be discovered? The Jiffy Lube receipt on the floor of the hospital room doesn’t flush, either. The killer was wearing hospital greens. So where was he carrying the receipt-in his underwear?”

“The prosecution will say he had jeans on under his greens. Why are you doing this?” she said.

“I want to let all that bad blood go. I’m sorry for what I did to Johnny.”

“So tell it to Johnny and Billy Bob.”

He got up and tried to brush the grass stain off the knee of his slacks. “If I acted disrespectfully to you, I apologize. I don’t mean to be a bad guy, but sometimes-” He didn’t finish.

No, you’re just a geek, she thought, then felt oddly uncharitable as she watched him try to tuck his shirt in with his thumb and disguise his pot stomach.

The next morning I drove up to Johnny American Horse’s small spread on the res. Amber’s Dakota was parked in the yard and she was sweeping a cloud of dust off the front porch. Johnny had just finished shoeing a sorrel mare inside the barn, a leather apron that was almost yellow with wear tied around his waist. He slapped the mare on the rump and watched her trot into the pasture, where she joined a sorrel stud. I leaned on the railed fence Johnny had made from shaved lodgepole.

“Ever see a pair with that much red in them?” he said.

“Not really,” I said.

“Gonna breed a whole herd of them.”

I looked at him to see if he was serious. “Sounds like a lifetime job,” I said.

He grinned and took off his apron and hung it over the fence. “You eat breakfast yet?” he said.

“A sixteen-year-old boy from the res was killed a while back by a white man whose truck he broke into,” I said, ignoring his invitation.

Johnny nodded, his eyes on the two sorrels in the pasture.

“That kid was your nephew?” I said.

“What about it?” he asked.

“The court released the guy who did it. It’s reason for a family member to bear a lot of anger toward the system. It’s the kind of stuff the prosecution is going to use against us. Why didn’t you mention you were the boy’s uncle?”

“I remember when a white rancher ran over an Indian kid hitchhiking outside Missoula and got a twenty-dollar traffic fine. The kid died. The only cost to that rancher was his twenty bucks. That’s the way it is.”

He opened the gate to the lot and came outside, then looped the gate secure. He propped his arms across the top rail on the fence. The wind was up, balmy and smelling of distant rain, denting the alfalfa and timothy in the fields, puffing pine needles out of the trees on the slopes. The two sorrels were running in tandem across the pasture, their necks extended, their muscles rippling. In the distance I could hear thunder echoing in the hills.

“You think all this is worth fighting for?” he said.

“Damn straight it is,” I replied.

“I think one day the bison will run free again,” he said.

I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t reply.

“Let’s go see Amber and drink some coffee,” he said.

The next morning, Fay Harback said she wanted to see me in her office.

“I’m a little busy. Why don’t you come over here?” I said.

“Let me define the situation a bit more clearly. How would you like to have American Horse’s bail revoked?” she replied.

The previous night there had been a break-in at an agricultural research lab outside Stevensville. The intruders were not amateurs or vandals. They had used bolt cutters on the gate chain, cut the telephone line on which the alarm system was dependent, and called the alarm service to report the downed wire, using the owner’s password.

Once inside, they had rifled all the hard-copy document files, downloaded computers, rounded up all the floppy disks they could find, and drilled the floor safe under a canvas tarp they spread over themselves to conceal the glow of their flashlights and the noise of the drill.

A man returning from a bar in town around 3 A.M. reported that he saw four men and a woman exit the back of the building and cross a field to a grove of cottonwoods, then drive away in a van. As he rounded the bend, his headlights swept across the group and he was sure of what he saw: the woman was white but the men were dark-skinned and wore pigtails on their shoulders.

“So you’re saying four Indians and a white woman broke into a research lab? What’s that have to do with Johnny?” I said.

“American Horse is involved in this. If not directly, he knows who did it.”

“You’re calling Johnny an ecoterrorist?”

“Your friend Seth Masterson has already been here. This whole business smells of American Horse’s ongoing war with the federal government. I don’t like being the last person on the telephone tree. I don’t like being used, either.”

“I don’t know anything about the break-in, Fay. I doubt if Johnny does, either.”

“Where was your client last night?” She looked at me expectantly, and I realized she secretly hoped I could provide an alibi for him, perhaps for his sake, perhaps so she would not have to feel deceived.

But I didn’t answer her question. In reality, I was already wondering how the intruders had pulled it off. I was also wondering if some of Johnny’s friends, who had been in the pen, weren’t indeed a likely group of suspects. “How did these guys have the password? It sounds like an inside job to me. Maybe it’s industrial spying,” I said.

“Most security services pay minimum wage to their employees. So their employees come and go and often have little loyalty to their employer. You have no idea who the woman might be?”