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

“He comes in on Thursday nights?” the truncated man said.

The bartender wiped the bar idly, then propped his arms on it, his gaze fixed on nothing. “Wyatt don’t bother anybody. Least not here he don’t. If you got the wrong kind of business with him, you take it somewhere else,” he said.

The man in the fedora put a toothpick in his mouth. “We owe him some money for some rough stock. That’s why we asked if he came in here. Otherwise we wouldn’t be troubling you. Can you relate to that?” he said.

“The two burgers and the coffee are eleven dollars,” the bartender said.

When the two fishermen left, the bartender walked to the front window, studied their license tag, and wrote the number in pencil on the doorjamb. Then he rubbed the number out with the palm of his hand and marked off the whole affair as none of his business.

TEMPLE WAS THE BEST investigator I ever knew. When she could not find information using conventional means, she would spend hours or days on the Internet, in libraries and county clerks’ offices, or on the telephone cajoling information out of various law enforcement agencies. I should have known she would not rest until she found out exactly who Tex Barker and L. W. Peeples were.

The same evening the two fishermen had visited the bar on the Blackfoot, Temple got off the phone in our home office and came into the living room, a clipboard in her hand. She blew her breath upward to remove a strand of hair from her eyes. “Don’t trust computers,” she said.

“What have you got?” I said.

“Wyatt Dixon told you he heard about one of these guys while he was in San Quentin? Something about a guy who’d do a yard job on another inmate for thirty dollars, right? But the computer search at the NCIC didn’t pick up the names ‘Barker’ and ‘Peeples’ as Quentin graduates, at least not during the time frame Dixon was there.

“So I broadened the search through the entirety of the California system. A guy named Jeff Barker was in Soledad and Atascadero during the same period Dixon was at Quentin. So I called up Soledad and talked to a psychologist there who remembered him. Barker’s nickname was Tex. He’s not from Texas, though. He got his nickname because he loves Tex-Mex food and was always smuggling it into his cell and heating it up on a stinger and blowing the circuit breaker on the cell block.

“Same computer problem finding L. W. Peeples. Because there is no L. W. Peeples. But a guy named Lynwood Peeples, from Opa Locka, Florida, was in the computer. As it turned out, Lynwood was a cellmate of Barker in Soledad.”

“You always amaze me,” I said.

“Why?” she said, amused, blowing her breath up into her face again.

She was sitting on the couch, across from me, her hair lit by a floor lamp. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her. Her shoulders felt smooth and firm, her upper arms taut from the daily kick-boxer workouts she did on the heavy bag hanging in the barn. I kissed the back of her neck.

“Better listen to what else I found out about these two,” she said.

“Can it wait?”

“No, these guys are real assholes. Barker was a suspect in the rape of a couple of children. While he was in Soledad, the blacks were using white guys who had a short-eyes jacket for bars of soap, so he did some yard hits with an ice pick for both the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Brotherhood. He’s been out four years now, with no arrests, which is unusual for a guy whose sheet goes back two decades.

“Lynwood Peeples grew up on a horse farm in northern Dade County. He hung a lot of paper and got caught doping a quarter horse at a summer track in California. I called Miami-Dade P.D. and talked to a homicide cop who said Peeples probably jobs out for the Mob, but they’re not sure. Get this. When he was seventeen, he married a fifteen-year-old girl from Georgia. Two years later, what was left of her body showed up in the Everglades.”

“Peeples did it?”

“It’s anybody’s guess. He reported her missing and claimed she was always running off with migrant farmworkers down at Florida City. The body was so decomposed and eaten by crabs the coroner couldn’t even determine the cause of death.”

Outside, the top of the sky was still lit, the valley floor dark, the hillsides streaked with shadows made by the trees. Our windows were open and I could hear our horses blowing in the pasture and smell the odor of wet grass and water coursing through the irrigation ditches.

I wondered how men such as these could come into our midst, here in a verdant world that in some ways was little different from the way Earth must have looked on the sixth day of creation.

“Does either of these guys have a military background?” I asked.

She glanced through her notes and

several fax sheets attached to her clipboard. “None that I could find. Why?”

“The two killers who went after Johnny American Horse were ex-soldiers. But Johnny turned the pair of them into lunch meat. I think whoever is hiring these guys decided to reach down into the bottom of the septic tank for the real article.”

Temple set the clipboard beside her, her eyes straight ahead. I heard her exhale her breath. “You think they’re coming after us?” she asked.

“We’re no threat to them. They’ll figure that out,” I said, my voice tight with my lie.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

She got up and walked toward the dining room. Then I heard her pause in the doorway. “You coming?” she said.