“You’re not under arrest. That means they haven’t reached any conclusions. Give them a break. Maybe they’ll surprise you.”
Wrong words. “Why would I kill an FBI agent in my own house? What if Amber had been there? She’d probably be dead too,” he said.
“Sit down,” I said.
He started to argue again, his eyes hot, a smell like fermented fruit on his breath. But I cut him off. “All this goes back to that research lab Amber and your friends broke into,” I said. “Seth Masterson went to your house to try to persuade you and Amber to give up the computer files that were stolen from Global Research. It cost him his life.”
“I can’t help that,” he replied.
I could feel my own temper rising now. “We’ll talk later,” I said.
“You ever see photographs of Saddam Hussein’s mustard gas attacks on the Kurds back in eighty-eight? Our government armed that motherfucker.”
“I’m not making the connections here, but I think you’re charging at windmills, partner,” I said.
“Tell that to the friends of mine who were killed in Iraq.”
“Seth was my friend, Johnny. He died trying to help you. But I don’t think you’re hearing that.”
He wiped at his nose with the backs of his fingers, his eyes narrowing. “Nobody cares,” he said.
“Cares about what?”
“What they’re doing to the earth, what they’re doing to the human race, what they’ve done to Indian people for three hundred years. You don’t see it, Billy Bob. In your way you’re part of it.”
“I think I’ve had about all of this I can take in one day,” I said.
“I’m letting you off the hook on my bond. A couple of tribal bail bondsmen are taking it over.”
“That’s the way you want it?” I said.
“Yeah, that’s the way I want it,” he said.
“Maybe you should seek other counsel while you’re at it.”
“Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” he said.
“Vaya con Dios,” I said.
IT HAD BEEN a bad way to end a conversation with a man whose causes I admired. But Temple and I had put up our ranch as surety for Johnny’s bond, and his cavalier and ungrateful attitude about the risk we had incurred made me wonder about my own sanity. I also wondered if I had become one of those people who needed to hurt both himself and his family in order to convince himself of his own integrity.
Maybe it was time to make a clean break with Johnny and his ongoing self-immolation. I told that to Temple at lunch. “Giving up on water-walkers?” she said.
“I didn’t say he was a water-walker.”
“Yeah, you did. That’s why you won’t let go of him, either.”
“Watch me,” I said.
She chewed a piece of salad, raised her eyebrows, and looked innocently out the window.
BUT JOHNNY WASN’T the only person for whom events were going out of control. Darrel McComb had to explain why he was following an FBI agent when supposedly he was pursuing a lead on the two men who had assaulted Wyatt Dixon. He also had to explain how he had gotten involved in a firefight, one that had left the agent dead, without calling for backup. Instead of being cited for bravery, he received a formal letter of reprimand in his jacket. He was also put on the desk until Internal Affairs concluded an investigation into the shooting.
But oddly enough, his receiving recrimination rather than commendation seemed to lift a burden from him. I saw him in front of the drugstore on West Broadway that afternoon, eating from a bag of lemon drops while he gazed at a pair of hang gliders floating on the windstream above Mount Sentinel.
“Sorry about your bud,” he said.
I nodded and didn’t reply.