James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“What you did took a special kind of courage,” I said.

“Your thanks is appreciated, but I didn’t have no idea who was in that truck.”

“You know my truck, Wyatt, and you saw my wife through the windshield before the truck went into the drink. Temple and I had a talk last night, and we wanted to tell you we consider the slate wiped clean.”

He rolled a fish-and-game magazine into a telescopic tube and stared through it at Mount Sentinel. “You gonna be my official lawyer?”

“I’ll think about it. Why’d you call me yesterday?” I asked.

“Except for running a little weed and boosting a few cars when I was a kid, I was never a criminal in the reg’lar sense. But I done enough time in enough joints to know everything that goes on in a criminal mind. You and me been going at all this stuff all wrong, Brother Holland.”

“How’s that?”

“From my reconnoitering efforts and hands-on intelligence gathering, I’ve figured out Greta Lundstrum probably has done got a whole shithouse of grief dropped on her by parties known or unknown. She was running the security system for that research lab that got busted into, and the guy who owns it, this fellow Karsten Mabus, wants his goods back. So it was her brought all these magpies into Missoula and got Lester Antelope killed and a shank stuck in my leg. Being that I stuck something in Miss Greta on a couple of occasions, my injury probably give her a special pleasure.”

“For a guy with no badge, you’re not half bad, Wyatt,” I said.

“You ain’t hearing me, counselor. Them people want their goods. They tortured Antelope but didn’t get what they wanted. They’re gonna come after you next, ’cause they think you’re hooked up with the Indians. When that don’t work, they’re gonna have to decide if they’re gonna keep using American Horse’s wife as bait or go after her personally.”

“Amber as bait?”

“Why you think they ain’t grabbed holt of her already? They’re using her to get to American Horse. My bet is them government motherfuckers got their hand in this somewhere, too.”

“The Feds don’t work that way.”

He laughed and studied the mountain through his rolled magazine.

That afternoon, Darrel McComb came into my office, twirling a porkpie hat impatiently on his finger. “You think Dixon is a hero?” he said.

“He saved my wife’s life.”

“Maybe he was behind her accident, too.”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I set down the pen I was writing with. “I don’t have anything else to do. I’ll bite,” I said.

“Our mechanic says somebody punched a hole in your brake line.”

“You’re sure. It wasn’t hit by a rock or-”

“It was a clean cut, about a quarter way through the line. The mechanic says maybe it was done with wire cutters or tin snips.”

My mouth felt dry, my stomach sick. “It wasn’t Dixon,” I said.

“Why not?”

I could feel anger rising in me at his deliberate obtuseness, his 1950s crew cut, his small, downturned mouth, his jockstrap aggressiveness. “The man can’t swim, but he dove in the river and almost got himself killed. On another subject, what’s the nature of your relationship with Greta Lundstrum, anyway?” I said.

“My relationship?”

“You two seem to be an item. Bad timing, if you ask me. You know, conflict of interest, sleeping with the enemy, that sort of thing?”

“You want to repeat that more slowly?”

“I think she hired the guys who attacked Dixon. I think you know it, too.”

“You’re out of line.”

“The same people who killed Lester Antelope probably sabotaged my truck. But for some reason you’ve got a perpetual hard-on about Dixon. Maybe you ought to get your priorities straight.”

“I heard you accidentally shot and killed your partner down on the border. That’s too bad. I guess carrying something like that around could make anybody a full-time asshole,” he said.

It had been pointless and self-defeating to take my anger out on Darrel McComb. I’d come to appreciate the fact that he was a better cop than he was given credit for, and in all probability he would eventually home in on the people who had murdered Lester Antelope. But in the meantime I had no idea how or when the brake-fluid line on my truck had been cut, and I had no investigative authority to depend on except McComb. That evening, I examined the floor of the garage where my truck had been parked. There was a single drip line across the cement where Temple had backed onto the driveway, which indicated that the damage to the truck had been done inside the garage, perhaps during the day, while we were at work.

The intruder had no way of knowing who would drive the truck later or the kind of accident, if any, the perforated brake line would cause. It was meant, in almost arbitrary fashion, as either a warning or a mortal distraction, whichever came first. The intent was obviously to change our behavior.

I believed the network of assassins or mercenaries responsible for Seth Masterson’s and Lester Antelope’s deaths were becoming better at what they did. They wouldn’t repeat their mistakes or misjudge their adversaries as they had Johnny, Wyatt Dixon, and even Lester Antelope, who had put up a ferocious fight before he died. I believed they would soon abduct another victim, take that person to a remote location, allow him or her to consider the possibility that not all of us are descended from the same tree, and this time extract the information they needed.

My guess was their interrogations were not aimed at pliant subjects. They would choose someone whose principles were such that the subject’s surrendering of them under ordeal would leave no doubt as to their validity. The images that swam before my eyes were like those in crude medieval drawings depicting the fate of those who suffered at the king’s pleasure. In terms of evil, I had come to think of Wyatt Dixon as an amateur.

That evening I drove west on Highway 12, along Lolo Creek, through mountains and patches of meadowland that were a dark green from evening shade and the wheel lines spraying creekwater above the alfalfa. It was the same route Meriwether Lewis, William Rogers Clark, and the young Indian woman Sacagawea had taken to Oregon, and Lolo Peak was still blue and massive and snowcapped against the sky, just as it was two centuries ago when a million-acre fire could burn and extinguish itself without one human being ever witnessing the event.

But the fires on the far side of Lolo Pass were eating huge tracts of forest now and incinerating homesteads, and I could see their glow beyond the mountains as I turned off the highway into a manicured ranch set back in domed-shaped hills that reminded me of women’s breasts. The railed fences were painted white, as were the horse barns, which looked more like Kentucky breeding stables than structures on a working Montana ranch. But the main house was even more incongruent with its surroundings than the displaced barns and hot-walker rings. The house was not simply large; its size was far greater than any individual or group of individuals could possibly make use of in a lifetime.

It was built of cedar and river stone, with cathedral ceilings, the windows orange in the sunset, as though the season were fall rather than summer, the galleries strung with baskets of chrysanthemums rather than petunias. But the alpine design was out of kilter. Shaved and lacquered ponderosa had been used as columns on the front porch, in imitation of Jefferson’s architectural experiments, so that the entrance looked like the gaping mouth of a man with wood teeth.

There were other aspects of Karsten Mabus’s home that were even more unusual. A sweathouse constructed of dark stone, dripping with moisture, stood not far from a swimming pool shaped with undulating curves that were obviously meant to suggest the outline of a woman. Bronze dolphins mounted on stanchions ringed the pool, along with palm, bottlebrush, and banana trees that grew in redwood tubs. The pool was sky-blue, coated with steam, and at the far end a white-jacketed waiter with oiled black hair stood behind an array of liquor bottles and colored drink glasses clinking with light.