In the Moon of Red Ponies (Billy Bob Holland 4)

“They’ve been seeing each other. At least that’s what she says.”

“Her old man must love that.”

“You want me to tell her to get lost?”

A few minutes later I walked over to the sheriff’s department and a deputy escorted me to a holding cell, where Amber Finley sat on a metal bench, her legs crossed, looking at the wall. She was around twenty-five and wore beat-up cowboy boots, jeans hitched tightly around her hips, a Harley T-shirt, and long earrings with blue stones in them. Her hair was blond and cut short, her eyes an intense blue. Even though she was hung over, her face still possessed the lovely features and complexion that Hollywood had idealized and turned into a national icon in the Technicolor films of the forties and fifties. But Amber Finley’s mind-set was far removed from that earlier, more innocent time.

She was a biker girl one night, a cowgirl the next. She drank in busthead bars and was probably the wet dream of the men and college boys who hung in them. But the clothes she wore and the life she led were a self-abasing deception. She spoke French and German, had an IQ of 160, a degree in English literature from the University of Virginia, and was the daughter of United States Senator Romulus Finley.

“How do you commit battery with undergarments?” I said.

“It’s easy when a cop kicks open your motel room while you’re dressing,” she replied.

“What were you doing in a dump like that, anyway?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t remember.”

I paused a moment. “Your old man won’t spring you?” I said.

She seemed to think about it. “If I asked him, yeah, he probably would. Yeah, he might,” she said. She looked at me, as though confused by her own words and the sad implication in them. She got up and walked to the bars. I could smell the cigarette smoke in her hair and the mixed drinks that had gone sour on her stomach. “Get me out of here, Billy Bob. I’m really hung over this time.”

AN HOUR LATER we walked out of the jail. “Why was Johnny American Horse carrying a gun around?” I asked.

“It’s those oil companies he’s trying to stop from drilling on sacred lands. He thinks they put a hit on him.”

“A hit? From an oil company? Maybe some of their CEOs are moral imbeciles, but oil companies don’t have people killed,” I said.

“Right, that’s why we’re taking over Third World countries—we don’t care about their oil. See you later, B.B. I’m going to sleep for three days.”

B.B.?

AS THE SUN dropped behind the ridge of mountains on the west side of the Jocko Valley, Johnny American Horse walked the perimeter of his four-acre lot, examined the wire and tin cans he had strung earlier in the day, then continued on up the slope into the trees bordering the back of his property. The sun became a hot red spark between two mountains, and a purple shade fell across the valley floor just as the moon rose over the hills in the south. He sat for a long time among the trees, his arms folded across his knees, studying his land, the dirt road that traversed it, the dark green shine on the river winding out of the cottonwoods.

The men who had driven across the plains to find him were urban people, he thought. They would come for him at night because they were cowards and they killed for hire. They would drive their Firebird as close to his house as possible because they did not like to walk, nor did they feel confident when they were separated from the machines that gave them both power and anonymity.

But their greatest mistake would be their assumption that their prey thought as they did.

He returned to the house and turned off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, leaving the door ajar so that it shone on his bed. He stuffed a rolled sleeping bag under the blanket on the bed and pulled the blanket up onto the pillows. In the kitchen he filled a thermos with black coffee, threaded the sheath of his serrated bowie knife on his belt, and put on his sheep-lined coat and a shapeless cowboy hat.

Make entry as hard as possible for them, he told himself.

He locked all the windows and both the front and back doors, then walked back up the slope with his thermos in his coat pocket and his grandfather’s trade hatchet swinging from his right hand.

He sat on the ground inside the cover of the trees, his back against a boulder. He could smell elk and deer droppings in the pine needles and the tannic odor of horses in the gloaming of the day. The surrounding hills were black now, but the sky was still full of light from the sun’s afterglow. He unscrewed the top from his thermos and drank, then screwed the cap back on. He heard the sound of an automobile coming down the dirt road, rocks pinging inside the fenders.

The car was low-slung, the body weather-scoured almost paintless, the engine far more powerful than the age of the car would indicate. It passed his house in a rooster tail of dust and disappeared around a bend, beyond a grove of cottonwoods. Less than two minutes later it came back up the road, gradually slowing, pulling into the cottonwoods. The driver cut the headlights and in the darkness Johnny heard at least one car door squeak open on an ungreased hinge.

He stood up in the pines and strained his eyes at the road. The air was cold now, smelling of the river and damp stone and timothy grass that was sodden with dew in the fields. When the wind gusted across the valley floor the leaves swirled like water in the cottonwoods, and suddenly Johnny could see two men, standing as stationary as statues, amidst thousands of fluttering green leaves.

The men crossed the road and headed toward his house, stooped in simian fashion, as though somehow their abbreviated posture would make them less visible. One of them stopped and raised his hand in a clenched fist, as a foot soldier would in order to signal a halt. Then the two of them stepped carefully over the trip wire that Johnny had strung with tin cans, each containing a handful of gravel.

The two figures moved around the side of the house, peering in each window. One of them went to the shed and put his hand on the hood of Johnny’s pickup truck, as though to determine if the metal was still warm. He rejoined his companion, and the two of them stepped gingerly onto the back porch and went to work on the door lock.

Johnny followed a deer trail that wound laterally through the pines in the opposite direction from his house, then walked down the slope on the far side of his barn, so he could remain out of view and beyond the angle of vision of the two men picking the lock on his door.

As he came out of the horse lot, he let his heavy coat drop to the ground, moving quickly into the lee of his house. He worked his way toward the back corner, no more than ten feet from the men, wh

o were still on the porch. He held his bowie knife in his left hand, the trade ax in the other, breathing slowly through his mouth, his back flat against the clapboards. Out in the darkness he heard horses nickering, their hooves thudding on packed earth.