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

“American Horse is involved in this. If not directly, he knows who did it.”

“You’re calling Johnny an ecoterrorist?”

“Your friend Seth Masterson has already been here. This whole business smells of American Horse’s ongoing war with the federal government. I don’t like being the last person on the t

elephone tree. I don’t like being used, either.”

“I don’t know anything about the break-in, Fay. I doubt if Johnny does, either.”

“Where was your client last night?” She looked at me expectantly, and I realized she secretly hoped I could provide an alibi for him, perhaps for his sake, perhaps so she would not have to feel deceived.

But I didn’t answer her question. In reality, I was already wondering how the intruders had pulled it off. I was also wondering if some of Johnny’s friends, who had been in the pen, weren’t indeed a likely group of suspects. “How did these guys have the password? It sounds like an inside job to me. Maybe it’s industrial spying,” I said.

“Most security services pay minimum wage to their employees. So their employees come and go and often have little loyalty to their employer. You have no idea who the woman might be?”

“No, I don’t,” I replied.

She walked in a circle, her frustration obvious. “I hate a lie. I hate it worse than anything in the world,” she said.

I fixed my gaze on the trees rustling on the courthouse lawn and a long line of bicyclers moving through the traffic.

“What’s the story on this guy Masterson?” she said.

“He’s like a lot of people who work for the G. He’s a good man who has to take orders from a bunch of political shitheads,” I replied.

She tried to look serious but couldn’t hide a smile. “You see Amber Finley?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Tell her what it’s like to cell with a bull dyke up at the women’s pen.”

DARREL MCCOMB HAD never belonged to a church, but he did believe in spiritual entities. In his mind there was a Valhalla where slain heroes lived in a giant meadhouse and feasted on roasted boar and watched over the few who fought to protect the many. One of those slain heroes was Rocky Harrigan, Darrel’s mentor in a half-dozen clandestine operations, killed when his cargo plane crashed into a mountain during an airdrop to anti-Russian forces in Afghanistan.

Rocky’s handsome face grinned at Darrel from a framed photograph on top of Darrel’s dresser, Rocky wearing shades, a fatigue cap, and a skinned-up leather jacket, his arm cocked on the open window of an old DC-6.

Why’d Rocky have to go and get himself killed? Darrel thought. And for what? Dropping ordnance and C-rats to Muslim fanatics who one day would fly planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. What a travesty. Who wrote the damn history books, anyway? Names like Rocky’s never got in there. Instead, the whole nation lionized fraternity pissants who had never heard a shot fired in anger in their lives.

Darrel couldn’t shake the funk and depression that had plagued him ever since he had beaten the Indian with the blackjack. His career and his life were unraveling. His rage against Johnny American Horse was just the symptom, not the cause. But what was the cause?

He didn’t know.

He’d always been straight up as a cop, true to his own ethos, but now he’d lied and filed a fraudulent report to cover up the fact he was a voyeur, after being caught in the act by Wyatt Dixon, who at some point would undoubtedly try to blackmail him. All because he literally ached with desire whenever he set eyes on Amber Finley.

He went out on the balcony of the apartment where he lived above the Clark Fork River. Three stories below were sharp rocks and a slope that dropped precipitously into the water. All he needed to do was step on a chair, fit one foot on the handrail, and launch himself into space. For just a moment he saw his body being lifted off the rocks onto a gurney by firemen and paramedics, all of them solemn-faced at the passing of one of their own.

Who was he kidding? He didn’t have two friends in the whole town, nor did he want any, at least not here, in Ho Chi Minh City West.

Don’t get mad, get even, he thought.

Why not start with this Greta Lundstrum broad? Who did she think she was, dimeing him with the sheriff, accusing him of bird-dogging her at Romulus Finley’s house, bringing down a shitload of departmental grief on his head? He pictured her in his mind’s eye again. He was sure he’d seen her before. But where?

Good God, he thought. It was on a surveillance two years ago. He and another plainclothes had followed Wyatt Dixon to a motel in Alberton, down the Clark Fork, and when Dixon had tapped on a door, a thick-bodied woman had let him in the room. An hour later, Dixon had driven away. Darrel had run the woman’s car tag but had decided she was simply a casual girlfriend of Dixon’s and of no consequence in the investigation of white supremacists in western Montana.

What an irony, Darrel thought. A connection between Dixon and the Lundstrum woman had suddenly validated his lie and justified his own presence at the Finley house. He looked at the framed photograph of his dead friend on the dresser and felt that somehow Rocky was watching over him, maybe even winking his eye and lifting a tankard of mead from Valhalla in salute.

At the department Monday morning Darrel opened a fresh legal pad, wrote the date and time at the top of the page, then clicked Greta Lundstrum’s name into the departmental computer and hit the search key.

What he saw on the screen made him tap the heel of his hand against his forehead. The burgled agricultural research lab down in the Bitterroots had used an alarm system operated by Blue Mountain Security, owned by one Greta Lundstrum.