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

“Seth Masterson. Tall guy, western clothes, nice-looking?”

“Oh yeah, you mean that Fed. He was here yesterday afternoon. What about him?”

“Nothing. We used to work together.”

I went inside the room and shut the door behind me. Charlie Ruggles watched me out of a face that seemed as dead and empty of emotion as pink rubber.

“You made remarks about my wife’s breasts and called her a bitch. But since you’re in an impaired condition, I’m not going to wrap that bedpan around your head. That said, would you like to tell me something?”

“I want one hundred grand. You’ll get everything your client needs. Tell the Indian what I said.”

I stood at the window and looked out at the treetops and the old brick apartment houses along the streets. “Why would anyone want to pay you a hundred grand?” I said, my back turned to Charlie Ruggles.

“Considering what’s on the table, that ain’t much to ask,” he replied.

The personality and mind-set of men and women like Charlie Ruggles never changed, I thought. They believe their own experience and knowledge of events are of indispensable value and importance to others. The fact that their own lives are marked by failure of every kind, that their rodent’s-eye view of the world is repellent to any normal person, is totally lost upon them. “Hey, did you hear me?” he asked.

“I don’t have one hundred grand. Neither does my client. If we did, we wouldn’t give it to you,” I replied.

“Your client knows the people he can get it from. They’ll pay him just to go away.”

“I don’t want to offend you, Ruggles, but are you retarded?”

His facial expression remained dead, but his eyes were imbued with a mindless, liquid malevolence that I had seen only in condemned sociopaths who no longer had anything to lose. “Step over here and I’ll whisper a secret in your ear. Come on, don’t be afraid. You’re safe with me. I just want to tell you about a couple of liberal lawyers who got in my face.”

He rubbed his tattoos with the balls of his fingers and waited for me to speak. I walked close to his bed.

“What do you think hell’s going to be like?” I asked.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Say what you said again.”

“I’ll give you something else to think about instead. You and your bud were armed with a semiautomatic and a cut-down double barrel, but an Indian with a knife and tomahawk cleaned your clock and didn’t get a scratch on him. If I were you, I’d stick to beating up old people and hookers.”

I could feel his eyes burrowing into my neck as I left the room.

ON THE WAY to my car I passed the sheriff’s detective, Darrel McComb. I had used the words “racist” and “thug” when talking about McComb to the district attorney, Fay Harback. Like most slurs, the words were simplistic and inadequate and probably revealed more about me than they did about McComb, namely, my inability to think clearly about men of his background.

The truth was he didn’t have a background. He came from the hinterland somewhere, perhaps Nebraska or Kansas, a green-gold place of wheat and cornfields and North European churches we do not associate with the Darrel McCombs of the world. He was big, with farm-boy hands, his head crew-cut, his face full of bone. He had been a crop duster, an M.P. in the Army, and later had worked as an investigator for CID.

But there were rumors about Darrel: He’d been part of the dirty war in Argentina and connected up with intelligence operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador; he’d run cocaine for the Contras into the ghettos of the West Coast; he was an honest-to-God war hero and Air America pilot who had been shot down twice in Laos. And, lastly, he was just a dumb misogynistic flatfoot with delusions of grandeur.

As a sheriff’s detective, he operated on the fine edges of restraint, never quite crossing lines but always leaving others with the impression of where he stood on race, university peace activists, and handling criminals.

Ask Darrel McComb a question about trout fishing while he was sitting in the barber’s chair, he’d talk the calendar off the wall. Ask him where he lived twenty years ago, Darrel McComb would only smile.

“I hear your man is on the street,” he said.

“Which man is that, Darrel?”

“Wyatt Dixon,” he said, feeding a stick of gum into his mouth, his eyes focused down the sidewalk.

“Fact is, he was out at my house. I shot at him a couple of times. Did he check in with you on that?”

McComb’s eyes came back on mine. “Your aim must not be too good. I just saw him eating at Stockman’s.”