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

Finley clapped Darrel on the shoulder and went back out the door, not a strand of sandy hair out of place on his head.

De nada, you hypocritical sonofabitch, Darrel thought.

THAT SAME EVENING we had a sunshower, then the rain quit and the sun was gold on the hills, and I drove up to the north end of our acreage, with a half-dozen poplar trees in the bed of my pickup, and began digging holes for them along the fenceline. A white-tailed doe with a new fawn watched me from the sunlight, and down the meadow, deep in the shade, I could hear our horses blowing in the soggy grass by an irrigation ditch.

I cut the burlap from the root balls of the poplars and began dropping them into the holes I had dug. I looked up from my work when I heard a horse nicker in the arroyo above me. The sun had dipped right into a notch in the mountain, and a hot red glow shone down through the dead and collapsed trees in the arroyo. A rider mounted on an Appaloosa gelding with gray and white spots on its rump moved down through the trees, the Appaloosa’s shoes barely sounding on the soft carpet of humus and rotted deadfall.

The rider was hatless, bare-chested, riding without a saddle, his silky red hair in his eyes, his skin as smooth as tallow, a huge green deerfly perched on his shoulder.

“Howdy doodie, Brother Holland?” Wyatt Dixon said. “Had my horse over to the vet’inary in the next hollow, then thought I’d take him for a ride up your ridge. Also wanted to give you a report on my reconnoitering efforts.” He popped the deerfly off his shoulder with one finger.

“Reconnoitering efforts?”

Wyatt lifted one booted leg over the horse’s withers and slid to the ground as smoothly as water sliding down a rock. His chest had small nipples and his underarms were shaved, his lats wedging out like the base of an inverted stump. He used one hand to pick up a poplar tree by the trunk, one whose root ball must have weighed a hundred pounds. He dropped it into a hole and kicked dirt on top of it. “We got us a client-attorney relationship, counselor?”

“No.”

“How about I give you a one-dollar bill? That makes it legal, don’t it?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Wyatt. Sometimes the more technicalities you get into, the more problems you have.”

“With my record, I guess I cain’t blame you for not trusting me. But I got to say I feel a little let down.” He pulled on his nose, his jaw hooked forward, his colorless eyes fixed on nothing. “Through my research activities, which I ain’t gonna describe, I come up with a couple of names.”

He handed me a piece of folded notebook paper. But I didn’t read it. I folded it again and stuck it inside the band of my hat. He watched me curiously.

“Are these the Indians who broke into a research lab?” I asked.

“They’re both white men. One is a freelance shooter, does five-grand hits out of Miami. The other one is some kind of child-molester pervert from San Fran. I heard about him in Quentin. He’d do a yard job on a man for thirty bucks. I don’t know what either one of them looks like. That’s the problem.”

“Why?”

“They’re already here. At least that’s what my reconnoitering seems to indicate. This plainclothes cop, Darrel McComb? He come to see you?”

“No.”

“He left his business card at my house. Makes me uneasy when a man bird-dogs my house.” Wyatt rubbed his shoulder, found a pimple, and popped it. He seemed to think a long time. But the only color in his eyes was in the pupils, so that his eyes took on no cast, no more than clear glass could. “Brother Holland?”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t try to slicker me on this deal, would you? ’Cause of deeds past? Get me to doing scutwork for you, busting the law, ripping folks’ ass, then when you was finished with me, drive an eighteen-wheeler up my cheeks?”

“If I wanted to get even with you, Wyatt, I’d hit you in the head with this posthole digger and bury you right here.”

He picked up his horse’s reins and flipped them back and forth across his knuckles. The curvature of his shoulders and spine was like a question mark. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“You converted to a papist, but you’re still a river-baptized man. I got the Indian sign on you, counselor.”

“I don’t know if I like your tone.”

“Them people painted acid on my cinch at the rodeo and liked to got me killed. So that gives you and me what’s called a shared agenda.” He stepped on a rock and mounted his horse. “I done changed my ways, Brother Holland, but the man ain’t been born who can use me and walk away from it. Tell Miss Temple I said howdy doodie.”

He kicked his horse in the sides and leaned forward with it as it ascended the arroyo, disappearing through the deadfall into the sun’s last red rays.

BACK AT THE HOUSE I removed the scrap of notebook paper he had given me from my hatband and read the two names penciled on it: L. W. Peeples and Tex Barker. There was a third name, Mabus, written in the corner, at an angle, a notation that I suspected had been made there at another time and was unrelated to the issue of the two hired killers.

“What are you looking at?” Temple said.