James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

“No, nobody saw anything. But that’s life on the res. Nobody sees anything, nobody knows anything, but that doesn’t stop them from complaining constantly about Whitey dumping on them and not enforcing the law. Look, Wyatt Dixon showed up while I was there and went apeshit. No, that doesn’t quite describe it.”

“I need to confess something to you-”

“Let me finish. Dixon cried. I didn’t believe he was capable of feeling anything about anyone. But tears actually ran down his face. It took four cops to get him back outside. The coroner wanted to tranquilize him.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“We didn’t want another homicide. What were you going to say?”

“Karsten Mabus knows Wyatt has the goods from the Global Research robbery. His people probably went after Reverend Sneed when they couldn’t get to Wyatt.”

“That billionaire or whatever out on Highway Twelve again?”

“Right.”

“He’s behind the attacks on Dixon?”

“Right. He owns Global Research. He plans to run for office here in Montana. Global Research is the outfit that sold Saddam Hussein part of his chemical and biological weapons program in the eighties. I told you all this.”

“Were you a fan of Marvel comics as a kid?”

“Don’t make light of this, Fay. He’s an evil man,” I said.

“You said you were going to confess something to me? How does Karsten Mabus know Dixon has the stuff from the Global job?”

“I told him,” I said.

“To get the heat off yourself?”

“Read it any way you want.”

“I knew somehow you were involved in this. I just didn’t know how. I have some crime scene photos. Maybe you should look at them.”

“By assigning indirect responsibility to me, you’re conceding that Mabus sent his men after the preacher.”

“What I’m saying is-” But she had trapped herself and couldn’t finish.

“Where’s Wyatt now?” I asked.

“On the loose. You stop pulling strings on all these people. You stay out of a police investigation, too,” she said, and hung up.

The kitchen lights were off, and I could hear the easy sweep of wind in the trees and the clatter of a pinecone on the roof. But the tranquillity of the night would not ease the pang in my heart. My call to Mabus had brought about the death of Elton Sneed, a gentle, decent man who had honestly served his vision of this world and the next. Also, for the first time, I had begun to seriously wonder about my assessment of Fay Harback.

The shooter who came onto Karsten Mabus’s property that night would prove a mystery in many ways for both Mabus’s security personnel and the investigators from the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department. It was safe to say he did not enter the property from Highway 12, as the front gate was electronically locked at 9 P.M. and a sophisticated alarm system, including sensor lights, that ran the length of the fence line automatically activated at the same hour. Two boys who had been camping up on a mountainside behind the ranch said they had seen a lone horseman come off a ridge and follow a creekbed to the back of the property, then enter the woods and disappear. They said the rider wore a hat and had binoculars strung around his neck and perhaps was carrying a rifle in a saddle scabbard.

Whoever the shooter was, he wore western boots, because sheriff’s deputies found their pointed, deep-heeled indentations in the soft bed of pine needles behind a flat-surfaced boulder that he used as his sniper’s nest.

Just before midnight Karsten Mabus, dressed in an Oriental robe, fixed himself a sandwich and opened a bottle of carbonated grape juice, then relaxed on an elephant-hide couch and read The New York Times. Through the rear living room window, which rose all the way to the cathedral ceiling, he could see steam rising from his swimming pool, the underwater lights tunneling below the lime-green surface, the arc lamps above his horse barns glowing with humidity, canvas windscreens flapping gently against the red-clay background of his tennis courts.

It was a beautiful night, the stars cold and white in a black sky that occasionally flickered with heat lightning.

Karsten Mabus put away the newspaper, sat up on the couch, and bit into his sandwich. The shooter had worked his way into place now, on a hillside that provided him cover and also a panoramic overview of the grounds, perhaps one hundred yards out and one hundred feet higher in elevation than Karsten Mabus. The first round pocked a neat hole in the window glass and missed Mabus’s head by inches, burrowing deeply into the cushions of a large chair against the far wall with hardly a sound.

Mabus removed the sandwich from his mouth and set it down on the plate, focusing his eyes on the hole in the glass, seemingly unsure of the event that had just occurred.

The second round caught part of the window framing, blowing wood and large shards of glass onto the carpet, the bullet ticking Mabus’s cheek just above the jawbone, flicking a thread of blood across his skin.

He rose from the couch, touching his cheek, looking at the balls of his fingers, then began punching buttons on a keypad by the fireplace. In less than thirty seconds at least five armed men emerged from either the shadowy edges of the ranch or the servants’ quarters over the garage. One security man, who had seen a muzzle flash, pointed toward the flat-surfaced boulder a hundred feet up on the hillside.

Two of the security personnel mounted an all-terrain vehicle and, with the other three security men behind them, roared up the hill toward the sniper’s nest.

The shooter stood erect, firing from a lever-action rifle, and shot the driver of the ATV off the seat. The next shot caught one of the running men below the knee, knocking his leg out from under him as though the bone had been clipped in half with a cold chisel. The ATV caromed off a tree trunk and spun crazily down the side of a gulch.

The two wounded men and their three friends took cover behind rocks and trees, flattening themselves into the bed of pine needles, while the shooter fired four more rounds through the woods, the brass casings tinkling on top of the boulder he stood behind. Moments later the security men could hear the sound of a horse’s shoes clopping on stone, then thudding on hard-packed earth through the timber.

Karsten Mabus watched it all from the terrace by his swimming pool, in full view of the hillside, his plate in one hand, his sandwich in the other. After he finished eating, he wiped his hands, combed his hair, and used his cell phone to request an ambulance for his two employees who had been shot.

But before he went back inside, he saw a horseman silhouetted on a ridgeline. The horseman seemed to stop, framed against the sky, the constellations bursting overhead, and look back at Karsten Mabus, perhaps through binoculars.

Mabus formed a pistol with his thumb and index finger, pointed it at the horseman, and winked.

At 1:15 P.M. Wednesday, I looked out the window of my office and saw two detectives from the sheriff’s department escorting Wyatt Dixon in handcuffs through the rear door of the courthouse. But rather than accept the role of chained culprit and miscreant, Wyatt was the bucolic king in captivity. He was dressed in gray razor-creased western pants, a long-sleeved maroon cotton shirt, a wide silver necktie, and a soft-crowned hat tilted low on his forehead. His upper arms looked like hams inside his shirt, his sideburns etched against his jaws with a fresh haircut. He limped along without his canes, grinning at everyone he saw, his eyes manic, the manacles on his wrists like scrap metal he could snap in half if he chose. Jailhouse riffraff smoking cigarettes on the lawn cheered him as he walked by.

I crossed the street and entered the courthouse just as the elevator closed on Wyatt and the two plainclothes. I walked down the corridor to Fay Harback’s office. She was talking to her receptionist, wearing a black suit, her small hands knotted in fists on her hips.