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

I took the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the pine-knot table where she could read it. Unconsciously, I wiped my fingers on my shirt.

“Mabus? He’s the CEO of a chemical company?” she said.

“He knew about my father’s death on the pipeline.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. There’s something disturbing about this guy.”

“You’re listening to Wyatt Dixon—that stuff about a pentagram. Dixon’s a nutjob, Billy Bob.”

“Maybe.” I got up from the table and leaned against the railing on the gallery. A string of white-tailed deer were working their way down a switchback trail into the pasture, their summer coats gold in the shadows. “What right does this guy Mabus have to mention my father’s death?”

“So tomorrow morning we check him out. Now sit down and eat,” she said.

I thought about Johnny and Amber’s wedding and how much Johnny, in his pinstripe suit and vest, had reminded me of L. Q. Navarro. “You believe in premonitions?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“I don’t, either,” I said.

THE NEXT MORNING, as I was leaving for work, I found a note under the windshield wiper of my Avalon. It read:

Billy Bob,

Go to Sheep Flats up on the Blackfoot at 9:00 A.M. today. I’ll be parked off the dirt track, down in the trees. Drive past my vehicle, then walk back along the riverbank and up the incline to my vehicle. Carry a fishing rod. Do not mention our meeting on either a cell phone or a land line.

I’ll wait for you fifteen minutes. If you’re not there, I’ll assume you’re tied up in court. Thanks,

Seth

I drove up into the Blackfoot drainage, crossed a long cement bridge over the river, then turned up a dusty road that climbed high above the river, so that down below, the water looked like a blue ribbon winding through boulders and sloping hills covered with larch and ponderosa and fir trees. I crossed over a rocky point that jutted into space, then coasted down the road into shade and a wooded, parklike area where the remains of a nineteenth-century logging camp had moldered into dark brown pulp.

I saw a Jeep Cherokee parked in the trees and a tall man in a shapeless felt hat leaning against the grille, smoking a pipe, watching the river course over the rocks down below. I did as Seth had asked and drove past the Jeep, then worked my way back on the riverbank through dry boulders and the willows that grew in the shallows, my fly rod over my shoulder.

“Have I got a tap on my phone?” I said.

“Hard to say. My guess is you probably do,” he replied.

“I don’t care for that, Seth.”

“Join the club.” He knocked his pipe clean on a rock, then pressed the ashes deep into the soil. “Let me lay it out for you. I gave the Bureau thirty days’ notice. This time next month, my wife and I will be on a passenger ship headed up to the Alaskan coast. This fall we’ll be hiking in Silver City, New Mexico. I’ll officially be an old fart. In the meantime I have to play out this American Horse situation here. You with me so far?”

“I’ll try to grab a noun here and there and work with it,” I replied. Then I looked at the cast in his eyes and regretted my flippant attitude.

He unzipped a thin vinyl satchel on the Jeep’s hood and removed a folder that contained a stack of enlarged mug shots. “You know any of these guys?” he said.

I shuffled through the photos one by one. “No, I’ve never seen them,” I said.

“All of them are either professional intelligence operatives or assassins. I didn’t say mobbed-up button men. I said assassins.”

“They work for the government?”

“No, guys like me work for the government. These characters work for people in the government. At least that’s the distinction I’ve always tried to make. I want you to talk with Amber Finley and Johnny American Horse.”

“About what?”

“I believe Amber was with Lester Antelope and the other Indians who creeped that research lab down at Stevensville. The computer files in their possession are going to get each of them killed, in the same way Lester Antelope was killed, in a way nobody even wants to think about. Tell American Horse and the Finley woman to dump whatever they have. Now, not later. They can put it in a paper bag marked ‘FBI’ and drop it in a mailbox or tie a rock on it and throw it through a window glass in the Federal Building.”