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

“Where do you get off bracing me on the road, Mr. Mabus?” I said.

“I don’t believe they did that, did they? It was meant to be an invitation. Congratulations on your son’s scholarship,” he said.

“How do you know about my boy’s scholarship?”

“I contribute to a few educational endowments. The paperwork floats across my desk sometimes.”

“You mentioned my father’s accidental death on a previous occasion. Frankly, I resent the hell out of your intrusiveness into my family’s history.”

“Let’s clear this up, Mr. Holland. I own several ranch properties in western Montana. Their worth is somewhere around one hundred million dollars. I plan to subdivide and put the property up for sale over a five-year period. I need a good local attorney to oversee those sales, not someone from New York or Los Angeles—someone like you, a fellow who knows cattle, horses, indigenous grasses, irrigation methods, and land values. These two ladies here looked into your background. That’s how I knew about the circumstances of your father’s death. My purposes were purely business-oriented and professional. I apologize if I gave you any other impression.”

His speech was husky, as though in spite of his wealth he was perhaps a shy man, a bit diffident, but sincere and forthright. “Get in. Please,” he said, opening his hand to me.

It was warm inside the cottonwoods, and insects were worrying my neck and eyes, a shaft of sunlight shining into my eyes. I sat down on the leather seat, inside the coolness and leather comfort of the limo. The perfume of the two young women smelled like flowers in a garden. “Can you handle another client?” he said.

“I’m a one-loop operation. You need a firm,” I replied.

He laughed. “I like the way you talk, Mr. Holland. I’d rather pay you six percent on those ranch sales than a bunch of fraternity fellows in Denver.”

I realized he was offering me a situation worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not eventually millions. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “I’ll tell you a fairly well known secret. Terrorists will attack us again. Every government official and everyone in federal law enforcement knows it. It will be large scale

and aimed at another American city, perhaps several of them. When that happens, half of the West Coast will want to migrate to small towns in Montana, Idaho, and Utah. What do you think the value of this property will be then?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m not a speculator, Mr. Mabus. On that note I’m going to thank you for your offer and say good-bye.”

“What can I say?” he said, lifting his hands in good-natured surrender. “Have a fine day. I admire your principles. My guess is you’re a hell of a guy.”

He shut the car door behind me, then rolled down the window on its electric motor and snapped his fingers several times at the men who had stopped my truck. They climbed wordlessly into their vehicles and drove away, the dust from their wheels floating back into my face.

Chapter 15

I SHOULD HAVE SEEN it coming, or at least given more consideration to Darrel McComb’s prediction about Johnny American Horse’s legal fate; but like most people who believe that humankind is basically good and capable of conducting its affairs in a reasonable way, I daily avoided the inescapable conclusion that collective stupidity has often been the norm in the long and sorry history of human progress, and that perhaps the soundest argument for the existence of God is the fact that the human race has survived in spite of itself.

One week after the Fourth of July, charges were filed on Johnny for the shooting death of a federal agent. But when two dozen government lawmen and sharpshooters in bulletproof vests descended on his house, Johnny was gone, literally out the back door, up the hill and into the Mission Mountains, running with a survival knife, a new trade ax he had bought at the powwow, and one arm looped through a backpack.

Government helicopters buzzed the treetops in the high country for four days and agents on horseback threaded their way up rock-strewn ravines, only to find dead campfires, a hand line and fishing hook by a frozen lake, the cleated tracks of alpine shoes through a griz feeding area, a sweat lodge knocked together from fir boughs and blackened stones.

But it was not a safe bet Johnny was in the Missions. There were sightings of him up in the Swans, in the Bitterroots and the Cabinets, even over the Divide in the Bridgers and the Bear Paws.

Amber denied any knowledge of where he might be. She was held forty-eight hours in an isolation cell as a possible accomplice and questioned repeatedly by both FBI and ATF agents while her and Johnny’s house was torn apart. While she was being questioned and her home destroyed, her father remained in Washington and made no attempt to contact her or me, even though he knew I still represented her.

Six days after Johnny had hauled freight into the high country, I saw his new counsel, Brendan Merwood, at the café across the street from the courthouse. Brendan was eating steak and eggs at a table by himself, cutting his food neatly, spearing small bites into his mouth with the tines of his fork held upside down. He wore a long-sleeved pale blue shirt, with white cuffs and a rolled white collar. His posture was simian, his big head almost bald, except for the close-cropped hair around his ears and the back of his neck. The tan he’d worked on dutifully in Hawaii gleamed under the indirect lighting.

“Join me?” he said.

“Thanks, I’m meeting someone,” I lied, and sat down at the counter. I picked up a menu and began to read it.

“Too bad you got screwed on that bail deal,” he said.

I set the menu down and looked at him in the mirror. He had gone back to eating his food. I turned around on the stool. “Which bail deal?” I said.

“You didn’t know? Those Indian bondsmen Johnny hired didn’t process their paperwork. If you ask me, they chickened out. His bond is still on you. That must be the shits.”

When I got home that afternoon, I could hardly face Temple.

“We’ll owe two hundred thousand dollars?” she said.

“If Johnny doesn’t appear for trial in the murder of Charlie Ruggles.”