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

She ducked under the surface again and saw Dixon fighting to free his cast from where it had snagged on the edge of a beaver dam. But his situation made no sense: Why had he floated into the dam, rather than rising straight to the surface as she had? She dove down to the dam, but before she reached him he cracked the cast loose from his thigh and pushed himself toward the bank, where he was able to get one foot on the bottom and break the surface with his chin.

He crawled up on shore twenty yards down from her, vomiting water on the rocks, trembling like a dog trying to pass broken glass. She walked up beside him and sat down on a boulder, exhausted, out of breath, prickling with cold in the wind.

His face lifted up at hers, blood and water networking down his thigh, his back and side half-mooned by an old scar. “Tell you what, Miss Temple, next time you come calling, how about using the goddamn swing bridge?” he said.

“Why didn’t you swim up with me?” she said.

“Ain’t never learned how. My cell is up at the house. Can you put in a 911 for me? I think I done tore my stitches again.”

TEMPLE WENT TO the hospital for an examination, but she had no water in the her lungs and came home with me that night. Wyatt Dixon had to go back into surgery. When I visited him the next morning, his leg was in traction, a fresh white cast on his thigh.

“What you did took a special kind of courage,” I said.

“Your thanks is appreciated, but I didn’t have no idea who was in that truck.”

“You know my truck, Wyatt, and you saw my wife through the windshield before the truck went into the drink. Temple and I had a talk last night, and we wanted to tell you we consider the slate wiped clean.”

He rolled a fish-and-game magazine into a telescopic tube and stared through it at Mount Sentinel. “You gonna be my official lawyer?”

“I’ll think about it. Why’d you call me yesterday?” I asked.

“Except for running a little weed and boosting a few cars when I was a kid, I was never a criminal in the reg’lar sense. But I done enough time in enough joints to know everything that goes on in a criminal mind. You and me been going at all this stuff all wrong, Brother Holland.”

“How’s that?”

“From my reconnoitering efforts and hands-on intelligence gathering, I’ve figured out Greta Lundstrum probably has done got a whole shithouse of grief dropped on her by parties known or unknown. She was running the security system for that research lab that got busted into, and the guy who owns it, this fellow Karsten Mabus, wants his goods back. So it was her brought all these magpies into Missoula and got Lester Antelope killed and a shank stuck in my leg. Being that I stuck something in Miss Greta on a couple of occasions, my injury probably give her a special pleasure.”

“For a guy with no badge, you’re not half bad, Wyatt,” I said.

“You ain’t hearing me, counselor. Them people want their goods. They tortured Antelope but didn’t get what they wanted. They’re gonna come after you next, ’cause they think you’re hooked up with the Indians. When that don’t work, they’re gonna have to decide if they’re gonna keep using American Horse’s wife as bait or go after her personally.”

“Amber as bait?”

“Why you think they ain’t grabbed holt of her already? They’re using her to get to American Horse. My bet is them government motherfuckers got their hand in this somewhere, too.”

“The Feds don’t work that way.”

He laughed and studied the mountain through his rolled magazine.

THAT AFTERNOON, Darrel McComb came into my office, twirling a porkpie hat impatiently on his finger. “You think Dixon is a hero?” he said.

“He saved my wife’s life.”

“Maybe he was behind her accident, too.”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I set down the pen I was writing with. “I don’t have anything else to do. I’ll bite,” I said.

“Our mechanic says somebody punched a hole in your brake line.”

“You’re sure. It wasn’t hit by a rock or—”

“It was a clean cut, about a quarter way through the line. The mechanic says maybe it was done with wire cutters or tin snips.”

My mouth felt dry, my stomach sick. “It wasn’t Dixon,” I said.

“Why not?”

I could feel anger rising in me at his deliberate obtuseness, his 1950s crew cut, his small, downturned mouth, his jockstrap aggressiveness. “The man can’t swim, but he dove in the river and almost got himself killed. On another subject, what’s the nature of your relationship with Greta Lundstrum, anyway?” I said.