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

The two men had been unsuccessful with the lock. One of them stood back and smashed the door out of the jamb with his foot, shattering glass on the floor. Both men burst into the house, crashing into the bedroom, only to discover that Johnny was not there.

“I told you he was onto us. You wouldn’t listen.” It was the voice of the man Johnny had seen shooting pool that morning, a man who wore roses and parrots on his arms to tell him who he was because someone had stolen all expression from his face.

“Turn off the light,” the other man said.

“We got to finish it, Eddy.”

“No.” One of the men clicked off the light in the bathroom. “Another day. We find his cooze, then we whack him.”

“The guy’s an Indian. He’s out there.”

“Tell me about it.”

Johnny heard them move into the front room and unlock the door. A moment later a board squeaked on the porch and the two men walked into the yard, into the moonlight, each of them turning in a 360-degree circle as they did. Johnny picked up a rock and pitched it over the peak of the house to the far side. Both men jerked around, staring into the shadows at the source of the sound.

The man named Eddy, who wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses, held a cut-down double-barrel shotgun in both hands, the shoulder stock wood-rasped into a pistol grip. The man with tattoos carried nothing in his hands but was reaching behind him now to extract the blue-black heavy shape of a semiautomatic stuck down inside the back of his belt.

Johnny closed his eyes briefly, heard the words hokay hey inside his mind, and hit the two men running, just as they were turning toward the sound of his work boots coming hard across the grass.

The man with horn-rimmed glasses seemed the more surprised of the two men, his eyes distorting like a goldfish’s behind the thickness of his lenses. But nonetheless he was able to raise his cut-down shotgun for what should have been a deafening explosion of flame and lead shot into Johnny’s chest. Instead, his angle of fire was obstructed by his friend, the man incapable of expression, whose weapon had caught in his belt.

Johnny whipped the trade hatchet into the neck of the man named Eddy and slashed his knife across the face of the man who did not know how to smile or to be sad. Later, he would not recall with any exactitude the struggle that followed, but he knew the blows he visited upon the intruders from an industrial city on the shores of a great lake were more than enough to ensure they would not present themselves to him again, at least not outside the bright edges of his sleep.

Chapter 3

THE MAN NAMED EDDY was on the surgeon’s table four hours. His full name, according to his driver’s license and a GI dog tag tucked down in his wallet, was Edward T. Bumper of New Baltimore, Michigan, a lakeside community on the shores of Lake Erie. The next day an information check through the National Crime Information Center would indicate that Eddy Bumper had no criminal record whatsoever, not even a traffic citation. In fact, other than the eleven years he had spent in the lower ranks of the United States Army, he seemed to have been hardly more than a cipher in the Detroit area, where apparently he had spent most of his life.

During the ambulance ride to the hospital, he offered no explanation for his presence at the house of Johnny American Horse, nor did he make any entreaty to his attendants, in spite of his obvious pain, or express interest in contacting friends, family, or minister. His only request of any kind was to the surgeon: If possible, he wanted a local rather than general anesthetic.

At 2:43 A.M. Edward T. Bumper opened his eyes wide on the operating table, stared up into the brilliant glare of lights overhead, and said, “I need to get to the airport.”

Then he died.

His fall partner in the home invasion was another matter. Raised in a state-run orphanage, released from juvenile court at age seventeen to the United States Marine Corps, Michael Charles Ruggles served eight years in the Third World, received a general discharge, and began to get into trouble again, as though his time in the Corps was simply a respite from his true career.

But the charges filed against him were those consistent with a run-of-the-mill miscreant rather than a professional killer: solicitation of a prostitute, jackrolling an elderly person, possession of marijuana, failure to pay child support, drunk driving, solicitation and battery of a prostitute, and passing counterfeit currency at a racetrack. In each instance the charges were dismissed without explanation.

But I knew none of these things until the following day, when Johnny American Horse called my office from the jail.

“Have you been charged?” I asked.

“No. They’re just talking to me,” he replied.

“Cops don’t just talk. As of this moment you answer no questions unless I’m present.”

“Amber’s with me,” he said.

“Did you hear me?”

At the courthouse a deputy escorted me to an interview room, where two plainclothes cops were sitting with Johnny at a wood table on which there was a can of Coca-Cola and a Styrofoam cup, a video camera mounted high on the wall. Johnny could not have looked worse. He had washed his skin clean, but blood splatter had dried in his hair and horsetails of it were all over his clothes.

“This ends now, gentlemen,” I said.

One of the detectives was a towering, bull-shouldered man named Darrel McComb, whose clothes always seemed to exude a scent of testosterone. “We were talking about baseball. Think those Cubbies are cursed?” He grinned.

I sent Amber and Johnny across the street to my office and went downstairs to see the district attorney. “Put Darrel McComb back in his kennel,” I said.

“Treated unfairly, are we?” she said, looking up from some papers on her desk.