James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“What I’m saying to you is men like that, men like me, ain’t no threat to the likes of a Karsten Mabus. A man like you is. If I had your education, I’d own this whole fucking state.”

“You’re mistaken, Wyatt.”

He picked up his canes and stared at the river, the trees bending in the breeze on the hillside, the smoke that mushroomed into the sky as yellow as sulfur. His eyes looked prosthetic, impossible to read, the crow’s-feet at the edges like artistic brushstrokes that were intended to give his face the human dimension it lacked. “When I first come out of the pen, I wanted to hurt you for what you done to me,” he said.

“Let’s stick to the subject,” I said.

“Not hurt you like you think. I wanted to get close to you and bring you down to where I was, make you into the very kind of man you hated. I figured that was about the worst thing I could do to anybody on earth. Anyway, that was then, this is now. It’s gonna take the two of us to shovel Karsten Mabus’s grits in the stove. Get used to the idea.”

“I dimed you with the Feds this morning.”

“You’re too late. They tore my place apart yesterday. They ain’t found squat on a rock, either.”

I gave up. He was impervious to both my questions and insults, even my admission that I had informed on him. But there was still one other question I had to ask him. “Were y’all talking in tongues earlier?”

“Why you want to know?”

“Because I think you’re psychotic. That and the fact you’re injured is the only reason I don’t break your jaw.”

“You done let me down, Brother Holland. I figured you for more sand. Anyway, time for my chemical cocktail,” he said. He fitted on a peaked, slope-brimmed hat and hobbled toward the church on his canes, the pupils in his eyes like broken drops of India ink.

Darrel McComb did not know how he would do it, but one way or another he was going to get even. The Feds had treated him like the best-dressed man of 1951, Greta Lundstrum had played him, his own department had dumped him, Fay Harback had dimed him with I.A., and a jailhouse dickwad like Wyatt Dixon had sucker-dropped him with a replica of an antique rifle.

In addition, he’d almost been killed trying to save Seth Masterson’s life, and the upshot had been an official reprimand and a departmental suspension. The ultimate irony was that he was probably the only cop in Missoula County who knew the score on the Global Research break-in. Or at least he knew most of the score. There was one element about the break-in and its aftermath that he didn’t like to think about, primarily because even consideration of the idea put him in a league with a psycho-ceramic like Dixon.

Greta had set him up the night a hit team had descended on Dixon’s place; she had not only known he would be on the premises, she knew there was a good chance he would be taken out along with Wyatt. But instead, the lowlifes had walked into a firestorm. In fact, Darrel had to give Dixon credit; when it came to inflicting carnage on the enemy, Dixon had no peer. What troubled Darrel was not Dixon’s humiliation of him but instead the possibility that Dixon’s perverse religious views had credibility.

On two occasions Darrel had noticed a red mark underneath Greta’s right arm, one she had tried to dismiss as a horsefly bite, an explanation that in itself was a problem: Greta wasn’t a horsewoman and had no interest in animals or being around them.

Blow it off. Maybe she found a lump she doesn’t want to talk about, he told himself. He wondered if he was starting to lose his sanity or, more specifically, if his own head hadn’t become a dark box where his worst enemies were his own thoughts.

Keep the lines straight, he thought. Dixon was nuts, Greta was a Judas, and the judicial system in this country sucked. That’s all he had to remember: meltdowns were meltdowns, women screwed you in more ways than one, the system copped pud, and good guys like Rocky Harrigan led us away from ourselves.

But the bump under her arm wasn’t put there by a horsefly. The lie wasn’t even close. He had touched the swollen place while they made love; it was hard, configured like a midsized, calcified boil. Why hadn’t she gone to a doctor and had it treated?

He had deliberately not confronted Greta about her betrayal. He still believed she was an amateur, and as such he had known her defenses and denial and explanations would be in place in the immediate aftermath of her treachery. But silence and unpredictability unnerved amateurs far more than confrontation did. You waited and let them think they had skated, then you dropped the whole junkyard on their heads. Usually, they crumpled like a piece of paper thrown on hot coals.

On the evening of the same Monday I had gone to see Wyatt at his church, Darrel dropped in on Greta at her bungalow without notice.

She opened the door, her hair unbrushed, her face stark, without makeup, her big eyes unblinking, her level of discomfort crawling on her skin.

“Where have you been, stranger?” she asked, her smile like a rip in a clay mask.

“Hanging out, watching a lot of baseball, staying out of the smoke. See, I’m suspended without pay, which is the same as being fired, so I got a lot of time on my hands and I thought I’d drive down and check out how things are with you. So how’s it goin’?”

He walked into the living room without being invited.

“I was starting to get a little worried about you,” she said. “I called a couple of times but your message machine must have been off. You been all right?”

He let the lie about his message machine pass. “I’m doing good. Got a beer? Why don’t we play some music and slap some steaks on the grill? You’re not doing anything else, are you, Greta?”

“I’ve got hamburger. I can chop some onions in it, the way you like it. I can fix a salad. Is that okay?” She didn’t know what to do with either her hands or her eyes. She coughed into her palm and waited.

“Wow, that smoke is something else, isn’t it?” he said. “My lungs feel like I’ve been smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. Hey, hamburger would be great.”

He put a CD compilation of 1940s swing music on her stereo and sat in a deep chair and gazed out the side window at the mountains while she began preparing dinner in the kitchen. Greta was a middle-class bumbler who’d strayed into the criminal world, and Darrel knew that by the end of the evening he would have everything from her he wanted. But he had to wonder at his own coldness and the ease and confident sense of calculation he felt as he went about dismantling the life of a woman he had not only slept with but had formed a strange affection for.

But that was the breaks, he told himself. She was about to join that four percent of the criminal population who actually paid for their crimes. Like most amateurs, she probably never believed a day would come when she would have to stand in front of a judge, her life in tatters, her bank accounts emptied by defense lawyers, and listen mutely while the judge told her she had just become a bar of soap.

If they did the crime, they stacked the time, Darrel told himself. Why beat up on himself about it? But he could not deny the rush of satisfaction he felt when he took down perps, any of them, not just Greta, blowing apart their shoddy defenses, exposing their lies, making them see for just a moment their own pathos and inadequacy. Sure, they were scapegoats, surrogates for all the grimebags and degenerates who skated, but that’s what scapegoats were for, he thought. Were it not for the scapegoats, the job would be intolerable.

Darrel could not count the number of unresolved cases in his career. In fact, often the worst of them never got to be “cases,” because they existed in a category of moral failure over which criminal law had little governance or application.