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

She looked at me strangely. I learned forward in the leather chair in which I was sitting and dropped L.Q.’s revolver in my desk drawer. “Sometimes I still want the old ways back. I want to round up every greedy shit hog who’s feeding off this country and blow them apart,” I said.

She sat down on the arm of my chair and pulled my head against her breast and pressed her cheek down on my hair. I could feel her heart beating against my ear.

I DIDN’T KNOW Wyatt Dixon’s cell phone number and the next morning I had to drive out to his hous

e in order to talk to him. He was sitting on a rock patterned with the scales of dead hellgrammites, wearing neither shirt nor shoes, flipping a wet fly into the current, watching it float downstream.

“Doin’ any good?” I said.

“It’s too hot. They’re holed up in them pools.”

“Why’d you call my wife yesterday?”

“Your office was closed. So I rung you at home. I wasn’t trying to bother your wife, if that’s why your nose is bent out of joint.”

“She doesn’t want to hear from you. What does it take to get that across?”

His mouth was hooked down at the corners, his face as absent of emotion as clay. “There’s a yard bitch by the name of Wilbur Pickett, lives up at Ronan. I knowed him from some of my past activities before the Man on High got my attention. He says them boys who put that frog-sticker in me told him there’s an ex–Texas Ranger herebouts gonna get himself boxed up and shipped to the boneyard. The ex-Ranger and maybe his old woman, too.”

“How about giving me Mr. Pickett’s address?”

“Mr. Pickett has done caught air for other parts. Primarily ’cause he dimed them two boys with Darrel McComb and they found out about it.”

“My wife was mentioned in this threat?”

He retrieved the wet fly out of the riffle and flicked it out again.

“Asked you a question, partner,” I said.

“When you tell a man to repeat himself, you’re accusing him of lying. I don’t care for it, counselor.”

“Who’s paying these two guys?”

“I think you know.” He set his fly rod down on the rock. Perhaps because of the shade his eyes had taken on the pale blue cast of the sky, but nonetheless they looked like marbles placed inside a death mask. “That name ‘Mabus’ wrote down inside a pentacle won’t go out of my head. I ain’t got the education or experience to deal with them kinds of things by myself. The preacher at our congregation ain’t an educated man, either. But you and me? That’s another matter. Brother Holland, we could crank up the band.”

“Deal with what things?”

“Read the Book of John. I made a study of it in Deer Lodge.” His eyes clicked sideways and looked into mine.

“Don’t call my wife again,” I said.

DARREL MCCOMB was in trouble with Fay Harback, but this time he was beginning to enjoy it. In some ways it felt good to be excoriated, to be the one wheel in the machine that didn’t automatically lock into gear when a lever was pulled. In fact, for the first time in his life he felt genuinely free.

Fay Harback removed her glasses and looked up at him after reading the document on her desk, a Xerox of a letter Darrel had written and mailed four days earlier. “Darrel, you cannot write to the United States attorney and say the kind of things you say in this letter,” she said.

Her tone was not unsympathetic. Actually, Darrel had just realized he liked Fay; he also liked her petite features and small face and the way her mahogany-colored hair lay thickly on the back of her neck. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so protective toward her.

“Darrel?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Are you listening?”

“You said I shouldn’t take it on myself to write the United States attorney. But why shouldn’t I? The First Amendment gives me that right.”

“You accused him of misusing his office.”

“Not exactly.”