James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“You tear me apart when you talk like this.”

His eyes were still looking at her, yet she knew they were not seeing her but instead a vision inside his head. He swallowed and there was a dry click inside his throat. “Someone else is going to be killed, here, at my house. It’s a man. I think it could be me. Maybe making you my wife would be a selfish thing on my part.”

She put her arms around his neck and pulled him down close to her face. She started to speak, then simply held him as tightly as she could, gripping the hardness of his back, pulling at his apron and his belt buckle, aching to have him inside her before he spoke again and her heart burst.

Monday morning, Seth Masterson sauntered into my office and sat down in front of my desk, his long legs, as always, a problem, a tan rain hat perched on his knee. “How you doin’, bud?” he asked.

“I’m just fine, Seth. But Lester Antelope isn’t. He’s dead. My client Johnny American Horse isn’t doing too well, either. Unless I get some help, the D.A. is going to bury him alive.”

Seth twisted his head and glanced out the window at the maples puffing in the wind on the courthouse lawn, his expression neutral. “We’ve got a high-tech snitch in this area, a hacker we could have sent up but who we decided to leave on a short leash to help us out once in a while,” he said. “The problem with our snitch is he’s a wiseass and thinks he’s smarter than we are, so he’s not always truthful or forthcoming. You with me?”

“No.”

“A couple of Indians came to him with a bunch of floppy disks they couldn’t get into. Our snitch says he couldn’t find a way into them, either. We served search warrants on the Indians, but their houses were clean. You recognize the names of these guys?”

He slid his notebook across the desktop. I looked at the two names written on the top page and shook my head.

“They were friends of Lester Antelope,” Seth said. “I think they’re part of the bunch who broke into Global Research.”

“Why is a federal agency interested in a small research lab in the Bitterroot Valley?”

He hesitated a moment. “Global has some federal defense contracts,” he said.

“To do what?”

“It’s agricultural in nature.”

“I’ve got a problem with the way you do business, Seth,” I said. “Guys like me are allowed to know parts of things. A conversation with you amounts to other people answering your questions.”

He pulled on his ear. “I didn’t make myself clear. I think our snitch got into those disks. I think what he saw there scared the shit out of him. Listen, Billy Bob, those two killers American Horse waxed, Ruggles and Bumper? Don’t be deceived. There’s more of them out there. If that sounds funny coming from a federal agent, that’s the way it is.” He wrote a number on the back of his business card and flipped the card on my desk. “That’s my number at the Doubletree.”

He got up from the chair without saying good-bye and, gentleman that he was, fitted on his rain hat only after he had walked out the front door.

Agricultural in nature?

That evening, Darrel McComb got a visitor at his apartment he did not expect. Romulus Finley rang the bell, then began tapping impatiently with one knuckle on the door before Darrel could reach it.

“You got a few minutes, Detective?” he said.

“Sure,” Darrel said, stepping back from the open door.

Finley walked into the center of the room, turning in a circle, nodding approvingly. His cheeks were rosy from the walk up the stairs, his arms and shoulders meaty inside his sports coat. “Nice place. Nice view of the river,” he said.

“Would you like coffee or a beer, Senator?”

“A beer would be good. Yeah, that would hit the spot,” Finley replied.

He didn’t want a glass. He drank out of the can, his big hand covering the design and logo on the aluminum. “I’ll cut to it, partner. I’ve seen your file. You’re a man of great experience, a patriot and a soldier on many levels. We communicating here?”

“No, sir.”

“Some men serve their country off the computer. They get no recognition for what they do, even when they lose their lives. You’re one of them, just like your friend Rocky Harrigan was.”

“What do you know about Rocky, Senator?”

“I know he was brave. Just like you, he didn’t like what was happening to this country.”

Darrel tried to remain stone-faced, to hide the sense of invasion and manipulation that was churning in his stomach. “Rocky was a good guy. But he and I were regular Army, Senator. Our careers probably wouldn’t be that interesting to most folks,” he said.

“I respect both your modesty and your privacy, Detective. But I’ve got a personal problem I don’t have any permanent answer for. This Indian man Johnny American Horse belongs in a prison. Instead, he’s out on bond and is planning to marry my daughter, who is just about as naive as people get, and that includes Eve thinking she could pick apples in the Garden and outwit both God and the devil.”

Finley drank the rest of the beer can empty and crushed it in his hand. “You got any suggestions, son?”

“You said you didn’t have any permanent answer to your problem. Could you spell that out?” Darrel said.

“I’m not talking about doing anything illegal. I just want the law enforced and that man out of my daughter’s life. I had to take the red-eye back here last night so I could stand in my own goddamn living room and listen to a murderer tell me he was going to marry my daughter. I was with the First Marine Division at the Punch Bowl in the Korean War, Detective. When it’s time to clean the barn, it’s time to clean the barn. You hearing me on this?”

“Somebody broke into Greta Lundstrum’s house in the early A.M. Sunday morning,” Darrel said. “I think the break-in at her house is connected to the burglary of a research lab in Stevensville. I think this ex-convict Wyatt Dixon is a player in this, too. Amber might have a lot more serious problems than marrying American Horse.”

But Finley was already shaking his head before Darrel could finish. “I’m not interested in a lot of bullshit about ex-convicts and burglaries, because none of it has anything to do with my daughter. Johnny American Horse needs to be gone. The operative word is gone, Detective. The man who can make that happen is a man to whom I’ll owe a mighty big debt. I’ll let myself out. Thanks for the beer.”

Finley clapped Darrel on the shoulder and went back out the door, not a strand of sandy hair out of place on his head.

De nada, you hypocritical sonofabitch, Darrel thought.

That same evening we had a sunshower, then the rain quit and the sun was gold on the hills, and I drove up to the north end of our acreage, with a half-dozen poplar trees in the bed of my pickup, and began digging holes for them along the fenceline. A white-tailed doe with a new fawn watched me from the sunlight, and down the meadow, deep in the shade, I could hear our horses blowing in the soggy grass by an irrigation ditch.

I cut the burlap from the root balls of the poplars and began dropping them into the holes I had dug. I looked up from my work when I heard a horse nicker in the arroyo above me. The sun had dipped right into a notch in the mountain, and a hot red glow shone down through the dead and collapsed trees in the arroyo. A rider mounted on an Appaloosa gelding with gray and white spots on its rump moved down through the trees, the Appaloosa’s shoes barely sounding on the soft carpet of humus and rotted deadfall.

The rider was hatless, bare-chested, riding without a saddle, his silky red hair in his eyes, his skin as smooth as tallow, a huge green deerfly perched on his shoulder.