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

“You busted Dixon, then turned him loose?” Fay said.

“Not exactly.”

“Then explain what exactly you did, please.”

“I drove him to the emergency room at St. Pat’s and left him with the docs. I told him we wanted better cooperation from him, but he was free to go from the hospital. Look, Fay—”

“No, you look, Darrel. I think you need to go on the desk or get some counseling. It wouldn’t hurt if you checked out a Twelve-Step group, either.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Sorry, I forgot that the odor in here is from the rug-cleaning service.”

Only two hours earlier, he had entertained thoughts of killing himself and perhaps others as well. Now he sat hunched in a chair like a chastened schoolboy. His shoes were scuffed, one of them untied, crossed on top of the other. He straightened his spine, took out a handkerchief, and blew his nose. At that moment he would have traded ten years of his life for a Vodka Collins. “A university professor was up at the revival. He said Dixon was speaking in the language Jesus used,” Darrel said.

Fay propped her elbows on her desk blotter and rested her chin on the backs of her hands. When he looked into her eyes, he saw only pity and sadness there, and he felt a balloon of anger bloom in his chest, squeezing his heart. Weevil-like motes seemed to swim through his vision. “I’m telling you what the professor said. I don’t need any skepticism out of your office. I don’t need any Twelve-Step meetings, either. I’m a good cop,” he said.

“Go home, Darrel.”

“This all started with American Horse.”

“It started when you almost beat him to death with a blackjack. You want to get some sleep, or do you want me to call the sheriff?”

“The FBI isn’t in Missoula to help us. They’re here to shut down the investigation. That’s how it works. We’re little people and we’re in somebody’s way. Even Wyatt Dixon has that much figured out. I helped kill hundreds of innocent people. They were all Indians. I know how it works out there.”

His words sounded as though someone else were speaking them, as though he were in a windowless room full of white noise and a mechanical presence inside himself was playing a tape he allowed himself to hear only in his sleep. He looked at the blank stare on Fay Harback’s face, then opened his mouth to clear the popping in his ears.

“Darrel—” she began.

“Leave me alone,” he said, knocking the chair askew as he went out the door.

HE SIGNED OUT of the department, claiming a doctor’s appointment, went to his apartment, ate six aspirin and one hit of white speed, showered for the second time that morning, and put on fresh clothes. He tried to file and categorize his thoughts, put the previous night into perspective, and somehow get a handle on it; but he couldn’t. He had seriously blown out his doors, gotten drunk in a topless bar, and passed out with his face in a puddle of spilled booze.

He remembered a stripper and bouncer putting his coat on for him and helping him into his car, then leaving him alone in the empty parking lot, barely able to start the engine. Greta had taken him in, gotten his gun away from him, then had led him to her bed like a sexual beggar. Knowing full well she was involved with a criminal enterprise and that ultimately she planned to use him, he let her climb on top of him and haul his ashes, even though it was obvious that she could barely abide his breath and the stink of nicotine that rose from his hair and skin.

He took another hit of speed and felt it kick into his system, temporarily giving a brightly lit rectitude to his thoughts and the jittering energies that were beating in his wrists. Before he headed back to the department, he fitted five shells into a cut-down twelve-gauge pump shotgun, wrapped it in a blanket, and placed the shotgun and the box of remaining shells in the trunk of his Honda. If he had been asked to explain why he was carrying his own shotgun in his vehicle, he would not have been able to give a reason, except for the fact that the mountainous horizon circumscribing the valley seemed to tremble with a peculiar malevolence, and on this particular day that bothersome fact needed to be corrected.

He sat in his cubicle at the department and drank coffee, did paperwork, and answered the telephone in routine fashion, his scalp and forehead shiny under the fluorescent lighting. By noon he was sweating, his throat thick, his hands starting to shake. Maybe he should just go to a bar and get drunk again, he thought—but that was too easy. A dramatic event had to happen, something that would change the daily grief that constituted his life, that would make everyone out there understand where this country had gone wrong.

The phone on his desk rang.

The caller was a parolee, a Deer Lodge Pen dimwit and professional snitch by the name of Wilbur Pickett, who lived up the road in Ronan. “There’re two guys here who went to a veterinarian to get patched up. The vet is a junkie and was in Atascadero with these guys. Somebody beat the living shit out of them. Maybe one guy’s face is fried, like on a stove. You looking for anybody like that, Darrel?” Wilbur said.

Ten minutes later Darrel signed out of the office and was on the way to Ronan, up in the Mission Mountains, up in Indian country.

WHILE THESE EVENTS were occurring, I was at my office, convinced I would probably not see or talk with my friend Seth Masterson again, at least not until he had retired to a cabin and trout stream in southern Colorado. But at 11:14 A.M. I heard his mellifluous voice when I answered the phone. “I left American Horse a message on his machine. His wife just called me on my cell and told me to come out,” he said.

“Amber told you to come to their house?”

“That’s right. Why?”

“She doesn’t tend to get along with authority figures.”

“Who’s an authority figure? I quit the Bureau after I talked with you this morning. My leave time will take up the slack in my thirty-day notice. You know the greatest thing about quitting a job?”

“No.”

“You walk out the glass doors and it’s like you never worked there. Then you wonder why you ever did in the first place.”