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

“You want to lock up an assault and battery victim?”

“Got any better solutions for dealing with this guy?”

“Wyatt isn’t a guy you squeeze, Darrel.”

“Wyatt?” he said.

“He’s neither a snitch nor a rat, so forget it,” she said.

“Whose side are you on?”

“You should try to relax,” she replied.

He disconnected the transmission. Had everyone in the courthouse lost their minds? He left the stalls in the cement building and went back outside into the twilight. Wyatt Dixon was laboring across the rough ground, a soft cowboy hat the color of chewing tobacco low on his forehead, a festive group of men and women on each side of him. They were the homeliest people Darrel had ever seen, their faces c

reased and work-worn, their teeth decayed, their eyesight diminished by injuries and diseases that were never treated. What did they have to be happy about?

But the faces here at the revival were not new ones to him. He had seen them in El Salvador, Guatemala, and northern Nicaragua. He had seen them staring at him out of windows in government jails, shantytowns, and miserable huts on the fringes of large pepper plantations. He had also seen them at the bottom of excavations just before a bulldozer shoved a mountain of dirt down on them.

His depression was coming back. Get rid of morbid thoughts. He remembered George Patton’s famous admonition: You don’t win wars by giving your life for your country; you win by making the other sonofabitch give his. For Darrel, that meant taking it to them with red-hot tongs. He waited until Wyatt Dixon was inside the entrance of the men’s room, then braced him.

“Think you can just walk out of the hospital and say, ‘Screw you,’ to the sheriff’s department?” he said.

“Why, howdy doodie, Detective McComb?” Dixon said, straightening himself on his crutches. “We’re fixing to have a potluck dinner. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush. Want to join us?”

The men who had entered the restroom with Dixon were staring at Darrel as though he were a Martian. He held up his badge so all of them could see it. “This is police business. Get out of here,” he said.

But they didn’t move. Not until Dixon turned to them and said, “Y’all go ’head on. I’ll be there directly.”

“Why don’t you leave him alone?” somebody in the back of the room said.

“Who said that?” Darrel asked.

But no one answered. Instead, one by one they left the room, their faces filled with hostility, their eyes lingering on his.

“You fool ignorant people, Dixon, but you don’t fool me,” Darrel said.

“I got twenty-seven thousand dollars in the bank, own my own truck, personal gear, and a prize Appaloosa cutting horse. I’m on the square with the state and the Man on High, and you ain’t got bean dip on me, Detective. Seems to me you’re flirting with a civil suit. I’ve already talked to my friend Brother Holland about taking over some of my legal issues.”

“Holland is actually your attorney?”

Wyatt didn’t reply. His shoulders were hunched atop his crutches, his head tilted at an odd angle. His eyes seemed to be peeling away the skin on Darrel’s face now, burrowing into his mind, prying secrets from him Darrel shared with no one. Then Darrel knew why it was he hated Dixon so much. Wyatt knew his past and looked upon him as a fraud. “You think you know everything about me, don’t you?” Darrel said.

“You hire men of my kind to hurt folks who get in your way. That’s why I don’t have no truck with the government. The whole bunch of you are hypocrites,” Dixon replied.

“Hear me real good on this, asswipe. People like you have no right to live in this country. You belong in a cage on an ice floe in Antarctica. You’re one of those guys who’s still dirty after he takes a shower. Both of us know you’re up to something. I just haven’t figured out what it is.”

“Least I ain’t up to somebody’s windowsill, looking at some young girl’s boobs. Now, if you’ll step aside, I’m fixing to take a drain that’s gonna blow the porcelain off the bowl.”

Dixon creaked forward on his crutches toward a stall, his shoulder brushing against Darrel’s. Then Darrel had thoughts of a kind that had probably been working in his unconscious all day, like yellow jackets trapped under a glass jar. Strapped to his ankle was a small holster with a hideaway .25 auto in it, all serial numbers acid-burned and ground off on an emery wheel. All he needed to do was say Dixon’s name, wait for him to turn around, and use his nine-Mike to pop one into the center of his forehead. It would be a simple matter to fold Dixon’s dead hand around the .25 auto.

“Dixon?” he said.

Wyatt stopped and turned slightly, the eagle on his shirt bunching with the twisted motion he made against the armrests of his crutches. “Spit it out. I’m tired of this game playing,” he said.

“You’re a piece of shit,” Darrel said.

“I’ve answered to worse. If that’s all you got to say, I got to urinate,” Dixon said.