James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

He parked his Cherokee and turned off the engine. In the quiet he could hear the humming sound of the Jocko River, the wind in the trees up the slope, classical music from a radio that was propped in an open window. Wash flapped on a clothesline and a calico cat with kittens lay in a cool, scooped-out place in the dirt under the front porch. Seth walked toward the house.

Then he paused. The curtains in the house puffed whitely in the wind and he heard a door slam in the barn. What was it that bothered him? The absence of any movement in the house, although the front door was open and a pickup truck was parked in back? Or was it the hot reflection of the sun on the tin roof, the flicker of a bright object up in the trees, or the sudden flight of birds from the canopy? In the corner of his vision he saw a red pony sprinting through a field of tall grass toward its mother.

In his youth, during a war few cared about anymore, a glimmer of moonlight on a trip wire, a smell of recently eaten fish, a glimpse of a conical-shaped hat in the elephant grass, had made the difference between seeing the sunrise and walking into an ambush that on one occasion was so intense and certain in outcome that Seth had called in a napalm strike on his own position.

Had he survived the war and twenty-seven years as a federal agent only to develop a case of short-timer’s nerves while trying to do a good deed? He fixed his collar, as though it were chafing his neck, then continued toward the front porch. When no one responded to his knock at the open door, he walked up the dirt drive, stooped under the wash on the clothesline, and mounted the back steps. Behind him he thought he heard a dry, metallic klatch, not unlike a sound he had heard on night trails in that forgotten war. He turned and stared at the wooded hillside behind the house, momentarily unsure of where he was in time and place, his hand reaching inside his windbreaker.

Darrel had followed the FBI agent up the state highway through the res, until the agent turned on a dirt road that led to Johnny’s ranch. At that point it was impossible to continue the tail without being seen. Darrel continued up the state highway another half mile, then caught the service road and doubled back. By the time he approached Johnny’s property, Masterson had already arrived.

Darrel turned into a neighbor’s pasture, following the edge of a creek that wound from the river back to a split in the hills. A knoll traversed the pasture, effectively concealing his vehicle from Masterson’s view. Darrel’s hands were damp on the steering wheel, his heart starting to race. He slowed the car so the dust from his wheels would not drift above the knoll. What did he hope to prove by being there? He didn’t know.

Like most county or city law officers, he didn’t like federal agents. He thought of them as lazy, arrogant, and disdainful of semieducated locals like himself. But that wasn’t why he was bird-dogging Masterson. What if Masterson was working with American Horse, using him as a confidential informant? Or what if Masterson was turning dials on American Horse to get at Amber?

Maybe Masterson had a sexual itinerary, Darrel thought. Why not? It wasn’t a coincidence that federal sharpshooters had the muscular physiques of actors in porn films.

But in truth Darrel knew his motivations were not that complex. He simply wanted to step inside a white flame and burn his life clean of all the impurities that plagued his soul.

He parked in a grove of aspens and walked up the knoll with his binoculars. American Horse’s house was no more than seventy yards away. Through the lenses Darrel watched Masterson knock on the open front door, wait a moment, then disappear around the far side of the house. A moment later Masterson appeared in the backyard, ducking under the washline, removing his shades, dropping them into his shirt pocket. Evidently no one was home and Masterson hadn’t figured that out yet. What an idiot, Darrel thought.

Masterson started up the steps, then paused and looked behind him up the wooded slope, as though he had heard a sound that didn’t belong among the trees. Through the binoculars Darrel saw a flock of wild turkeys burst from the hillside and fly into Johnny American Horse’s backyard.

The wind was blowing from behind Darrel, so that sight and sound did not coordinate. He saw Masterson’s hand go toward his belt, then his head lurch back and both hands rise to his throat, as though he had swallowed a large chicken bone. Red flowers seemed to bloom on his tan windbreaker, and it was then that Darrel heard pop, pop, pop and saw the puffs of smoke inside the trees on the hillside.

He couldn’t believe what he was watching. The shooter was using a semiautomatic of some kind, but the firing was sustained and rapid, the magazine obviously one of large capacity. Blood fountained from Masterson’s mouth. He crumpled against the steps and the railing, still fighting to get his weapon free from its holster, his legs peppered with wounds.

Darrel realized the attrition from last night’s drunk was not over. He had left his handheld radio at the department and the battery in his cell phone was dead.

Darrel got the cut-down twelve gauge from his car trunk and went over the top of the knoll at a run. He could see Masterson on his side, a semiautomatic in his hand, firing blindly into the trees even while he was being hit. That is one macho G-man, he thought. Darrel jumped across a flattened barbed wire fence, his shotgun at port arms, his face breaking with sweat, his lungs aching from the barroom smoke he had inhaled the previous night.

For a moment he thought of cutting into the woods and advancing on the shooter from his flank, but the time loss of working through the tree trunks would probably cost Masterson any chance he had of survival. So he poured it on, his big shoes pounding like elephant’s feet across the sod, his sports coat split at the shoulders. He felt more naked than he had ever been in his life as he waited for the redirected fire that could rip through his viscera or explode his brain pan.

But the firing in the trees stopped, either because Masterson had let off at least a dozen rounds from a nine millimeter or because the sniper was reloading.

Darrel charged into the yard, fired two shells loaded with double-ought bucks into the trees, and heard the pattern spread and knock ineffectively over a large area. He tried to hold the shotgun with one hand and lift Masterson to his feet with the other, but Masterson was hurt too badly to stand. Darrel laid the shotgun on the steps, caught Masterson around the stomach, and worked him up on his shoulder as he would a side of beef.

He could hear Masterson’s breath wheezing from a sucking chest wound and feel his blood draining on Darrel’s arms and back. He started toward the lee of the house, then the shooter fired again, blowing white splinters out of the steps, breaking a window, ricocheting a round off a metal surface inside. Darrel got inside the screened porch, with Masterson draped over him, and pushed a water-stained couch against the plywood that framed the bottom of the enclosure. He huddled behind the couch, his body shielding Masterson’s.

He kicked his foot against the door to the mud room, then kicked it again. But the door was bolted and set solidly in the jamb. He and the agent were trapped, and the shooter could now reposition himself and incrementally cut them apart.

Masterson’s face was spiderwebbed with blood, his eyes dull with shock, a red froth spraying from his chest wound. Darrel found a piece of cellophane in a garbage sack, tore open Masterson’s shirt, and pressed the cellophane against the hole in the agent’s chest. He heard air catch wetly in Masterson’s throat and go into his lungs. “I’m going to get you home, pal. You hang tough,” he said.