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

“Who said it was?”

“Johnny was in a bar down the street from the hospital. He’s a mercurial, unpredictable man. He killed Ruggles. There’s no conspiracy here,” she said.

“Hell there’s not.”

She looked into space, as though my words contained a degree of credibility which, for reasons of her own, she would not acknowledge. “I do my job. I don’t always like it. Don’t ever try to embarrass me in front of people like that again,” she said.

THAT AFTERNOON, I visited Johnny at the lockup. We sat at a wood table in a small room that contained a narrow, vertical slit for a window, through which I could see the old buildings and brick streets down by the train yards. Johnny wore a bright orange jumpsuit with the word JAIL lettered in black across the back.

“How do you explain the Jiffy Lube receipt and the prints of your tennis shoes in Ruggles’s room?” I said.

“Somebody must have taken the shoes out of the house and put them back later. The receipt for the oil change was in my pickup.”

His eyes wandered around the room. I touched him on the wrist to make him look at me. “You get pretty swacked Saturday night?” I said.

“No.”

“No blackouts?”

“Amber was with me all night. We were at the Ox, Charley B’s, and Stockman’s. I went down to Red’s for a few minutes to meet a guy who wants to buy my truck. But he wasn’t there.”

“You went to Red’s by yourself?”

“Like I said.”

“Has a Fed named Masterson been in here?”

“No. Who is he?”

“Johnny, nobody wants to believe in conspiracies anymore. People want to trust the government. They don’t want to believe that corporations run their lives, either. But everything you do and say sends them another message. You hearing me on this?”

“Not really,” he said.

They’re going to burn you at the stake, I thought. I banged on the door for the turnkey to let me out.

“You still my attorney?” Johnny said.

“Nobody else will hire me,” I replied, and winked at him.

DARREL MCCOMB BELONGED to an athletic club downtown, one frequented primarily by middle-class businesspeople during their lunch hour or just before they drove home from work. But Darrel did not go to the club for the tanning services it offered or for the state-of-the-art exercise machines most members used while they read magazines or watched a television program of their selection, the audio filtering through the foam-rubber headsets clamped on their ears. Darrel was there to clank serious iron, benching three hundred pounds, curling forty-pound dumbbells in each hand, the veins in his muscles rippling like nests of purple string.

He also liked to smack the heavy bag, getting high on his own heated smell, diverting an imaginary opponent with a left jab, then ripping a vicious right hook into the place where his opponent’s rib cage would be, under the heart, driving his fist so deep into the leather the bag rattled on its chain.

But on that particular Tuesday evening Darrel was disturbed for reasons he couldn’t adequately explain. As he sat in the steam room by himself, he experienced a sense of depression about his life and about who he was that few people would understand.

Not unless they had grown up abandoned by their parents in a town that was hardly more than a dusty crossroads inside several million acres of Nebraska wheat. Not unless at age fifteen they had blown an orphanage where the kids scrubbed floors with rags tied on their knees. Not unless they had piloted Flying Boxcars through AK-47 ground fire with a guy named Rocky Harrigan.

Rocky was a legend. He had dog-fought the Japanese in the skies over the Pacific, made airdrops to the Tibetan Resistance, and lit up the Pathet Lao with fifty-gallon drums of gasoline mixed with Tide laundry detergent. Then, in the mid-eighties, Rocky had hooked up with a CIA front in Fort Lauderdale, telephoned his young friend Darrel McComb, who was spraying crops and dodging power lines in Kansas, and invited him to join the fun down in Central America.

But planes crashed, names spilled into headlines, and the era of Ronald Reagan came to an end. Darrel McComb always believed he had shared a special moment in history, one whose complexities and dangers few people were aware of. The Iron Curtain had collapsed, hadn’t it? American companies were opening textile mills and creating jobs in Stone Age villages where Indians still lived in grass huts, weren’t they? None of that would have happened if it hadn’t been for men like Rocky and himself, would it?

Let the peace marchers and the bunny huggers light candles and sing their hymns, he thought. They would never be players. This was a great country. Guys like Rocky gave up their lives so the jackoff crowd could revel in their own ignorance. In Cuba they’d be diced pork inside somebody’s taco.

But the splenetic nature of his thoughts brought him little peace. What was really on his mind? he asked himself, sitting on the tile stoop in the steam room, his skin threaded with sweat. For an answer he only had to glance down at the erection under his towel.

Amber Finley.

He thought about her all the time, in ways he had never thought about a woman. In fact, women had never been an issue in his life. He went to bed with them occasionally and had even been married for a few months. An Army psychiatrist had once told him he was probably homoerotic, a categorization that oddly enough didn’t offend him. But the sight of Amber Finley filled his head with images and sounds that beset him like a crown of thorns, leaving him sleepless at night and throbbing in the morning.