James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“There’s a heifer herebouts I punched a time or two, and I don’t mean put my brand on, either,” he said. “The house she lives in got tore up pretty bad during my reconnoitering.”

“Hold on a minute. As an officer of the court, I have to report any crimes I have knowledge of, outside of those confessed to me by a client.”

“Work out your own goddamn problems, counselor. Right now I’m having thoughts that tell me it’s time for my chemical cocktail or I might do something both of us is gonna regret.” He dropped to the ground suddenly and was standing in front of me, his breath cold in my face, the veins in his neck like purple spiderweb. “That detective, Darrel McComb, has got me figured for the break-in at that woman’s house. That means she’s got me figured for it. That means them two killers got me figured for it. You starting to get the picture?”

I slipped my hands in my back pockets and stepped back from him. “In the past you did great injury to my wife,” I said. “As a Christian, I’m supposed to forgive you for it. I don’t know if I’ve done that, but I’ve tried to put it aside. I’m asking you to do the same. If you don’t, one of us is going to end up in long-term refrigeration.”

He wiped ice cream off his mouth with his wrist and looked at it. “Ain’t no man uses me, Brother Holland.”

“I believe you. Do what you have to do. I can’t change it.”

I walked all the way to the swing bridge before I looked back at him. He had not moved. He was staring at the ground, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans, his back at a crooked angle. I walked back toward him and he heard my footsteps in the grass. He turned, the colorless, glasslike quality of his eyes tinted with the redness of the sun.

“Bible says, ‘Don’t tempt the Lord thy God.’ Same warning applies to some men,” he said.

“The name ‘Mabus’ was written on the notepaper you gave me. What does it mean?”

“It was wrote down on several places inside the house that got reconnoitered. But let’s stick with the subject at hand. Why’d you run a game on me, counselor? Why’d you go and do that to both of us?”

For just a moment I thought I saw a genuine look of sadness in his face.

I hated violence. Or at least I told myself I did. My family history was filled with it. My great-grandfather was Sam Morgan Holland, an ex-Confederate soldier and gunfighter and finally a saddle preacher who shot between five and nine men. My father died in a pipeline blowout while doing a repair weld, and his death may have been deliberately caused by a man who envied and hated him and opened a valve at a pump station to ensure that gas would be inside the pipe when the electric arc struck it.

As Texas Rangers, L. Q. Navarro and I had waged a private war against drug mules in northern Mexico. We never shot down an unarmed man or refused him quarter when he walked toward us with his hands on his head. But the night ambushes we set up were guaranteed to result in firefights and not negotiations. This particular group of drug transporters, or at least their compatriots, tortured a friend of ours to death, a DEA agent who was one of the finest men I ever knew. We trapped them in adobe huts, mesquite thickets, river-bottoms, and arroyos thick with cactus, and dawn would find us inserting playing cards emblazoned with the shield of the Texas Rangers into the mouths of the dead.

But no matter what the war advocates of our times tell us, no violent excursion ends well. L. Q. Navarro paid with his life for our grandiose schemes, and I still feared sleep and the images that dwelt in my unconscious. That night I sat by myself in the living room until 3 A.M. The valley was dark, the fir trees on the mountains shaggy in the starlight. I could hear deer or elk clatter against our rail fence, a rock tumble from the hillside, a pinecone ping on the barn’s metal roof. Was Wyatt out there? I doubted it, not tonight.

But it was only a matter of time, I thought. Men such as Wyatt Dixon were driven by ego and a visceral pride in themselves. In fact, their perception of themselves was actually their only possession. I had just managed to cheapen Wyatt’s image of himself, and I knew one day soon the bill would come due.

At the time I did not know there were other people in the area who were even more foolish and reckless than I, a bunch who had just embarked on the worst mistake in their lives.

The next morning started off in earnest with Darrel McComb in my office, a martial light in his face. His cheeks were bladed with color, his crew cut stiff as hog bristles, his suit freshly pressed, his shoes spit-shined and gleaming.

“You look like a man in motion, Darrel,” I said.

“What were you doing at Wyatt Dixon’s place yesterday?”

“You’ve got Dixon under surveillance?”

“Duh,” he answered.

“It’s none of your business what I was doing there.”

“Somebody tossed Greta Lundstrum’s house. Somebody who could tear two-by-four joists in half with his hands. Sound like anybody you know?”

“If you think Dixon is a viable suspect, go talk to him. Right now I’m pretty busy.”

“What was he looking for?”

I could tell he didn’t expect an answer, but I surprised him and myself as well. “I think a couple of new shooters are in the area.” I wrote down the names Dixon had given me and shoved them across the desk. “Temple came up empty on these guys. Maybe you’ll do better.”

“You’re running some type of police investigation on your own?”

“I didn’t say that. And I don’t know anything about Dixon breaking into a house, either. If I were you, I’d be careful, Darrel.”

“About what?”

“I’m not sure what kind of work you used to do for the G, but I suspect it was down in the basement, off the computer, and genuinely nasty. If I know that, other people do, too. My guess is they’re not happy you know their secrets or how they operate.”

“I’ve known some prissy lawyers in my career, but you’ve got your own zip code, Holland. You got these names from Dixon, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“What makes you think you have some kind of privileged status in this case? If I catch you holding back information in a homicide investigation, I’ll do everything in my power to have you disbarred. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I can sympathize with your situation, Darrel. You don’t get a lot of help. But you beat up a friend of mine with a blackjack. It was a lousy thing to do. So don’t be pointing your finger in my face.”

I saw his jawbone tighten. He looked sideways, out the window. “So maybe I’d change that, I mean about American Horse.”

He waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, he opened the door to let himself out.

“Darrel?” I said.

“What?”

“Does the name ‘Mabus’ mean anything to you?”

“No.” He looked hard at me. “Why? Who is he?”

“Probably no one important. Forget I mentioned it,” I replied.

“Were you really an assistant U.S. attorney?” he said.

All morning Darrel McComb remained agitated and angry. He was convinced now that Wyatt Dixon had broken into Greta Lundstrum’s bungalow and that Dixon had taken information of some kind from the house and was sharing it with an attorney. Now, through the attorney, Darrel had obtained the names of two men who were possibly hired gunmen recently arrived in the area. He started to go into the sheriff’s office and tell him of everything he had discovered, then realized he would also have to tell the sheriff he was in the sack with a woman he was using as a confidential informant, one who was perhaps involved with criminal activity.