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

“Tonight he gets his ticket punched. No transfers. Next stop, a long cylinder where he gets turned into a shoe box full of ashes.” Darrel laughed, watching her.

“That sounds mean,” she said.

He studied her face, the expression in her eyes, the pulse in her throat. “It doesn’t have to be that way. I thought it was what you wanted,” he said, his heart regaining a sense of hope he had all but abandoned.

There was a long silence. She turned from him and gazed out the window, biting down on the corner of her lip. She cleared her throat. “I don’t tell other people what they should do,” she said.

So much for pangs of conscience, he thought.

Then he pulled the string on her.

“The stuff from Global Research will have to go into an evidence locker for a while. But eventually it’ll get back to the owners,” he said.

Her expression clouded. She took his empty beer bottle from his hand and went to the kitchen to get him a fresh one. When she returned, her eyes were flat. “You don’t want to do something before you work?” she said.

“The highway is clogged with fire trucks. I’d better go.”

“You said, ‘I’m going to take him down.’ Don’t you have to use backup?” she said.

“Did I tell you I was an M.P. in the Army?”

“No.”

“Know what an instructor told me off the record in M.P. school?”

“No,” she said, one hand on her hip, looking down at him curiously.

“When you escort a prisoner and a situation goes south, you bring back only one story. Isn’t that a howl?”

WYATT DIXON DID NOT dream in color, nor upon waking did he remember stories from his sleep or events that fell into any narrative sequence. His dreams were stark, in black and white, composed of indistinct shards, disembodied faces carved out of wood, voices that had no source, perhaps a bull exploding like a piece of black lightning from a bucking chute, or sometimes a razor strop hanging like a punctuation mark in the back of a closet.

In his dreams he both saw and smelled his father, an unshaved, jug-headed man whose overalls hung like rags on his body. The father did not speak in the dream; he simply stared, one eye squinting with an unrelieved anger that seemed to have no cause. But his hands were remarkably fast, a blur of light capable of delivering blows before Wyatt ever saw them coming.

When Wyatt woke from dreams about his father, he would sit for a long time on the side of the bed, his skin insentient, a sound in his ears like wind blowing in a cave. On this particular night he woke to his father’s presence in the room, as palpable as the smell of field sweat and smoke from a stump fire and fresh dirt peeled back over the point of a plowshare. His father stood in silhouette against the window, a revolver hanging from his hand.

“You wasn’t worth the busted rubber that got you born,” the father said.

Wyatt sat on the side of the bed. He wore no shirt and the cold from the river had invaded the room. “What are you doing here, Pap?” he said.

The figure stepped out of the moonlight, the revolver still pointed at the floor. “There are men coming to kill you. I suspect they’ll try to take me out at the same time. Do I have to hook you up again?”

Wyatt focused on the face looming above him and saw his father’s image disappear and another take its place. “How’d you get in, McComb?”

“It was pretty hard. I had to slip the lock with a credit card. Why don’t you invest three bucks in a dead bolt?”

“You said some men is coming here to kill me.”

“Old friends of yours.” McComb touched Wyatt’s cast with the barrel of his revolver.

“Take this dogshit of yours somewheres else.”

“What makes you think you got a vote in this?” Darrel asked.

Wyatt picked up a jelly glass partially filled with his chemical cocktail. He upended the glass, gargled, and swallowed. He licked the dirty residue from the inside of the glass, then set the glass back on the nightstand. “You ain’t no different from me, McComb. Anything I done, you done it twicet over. Except you hid behind the government and done it against a bunch of pitiful Indians down in Central America.”

Even in the dark Wyatt could see Darrel’s hand tighten on the grips of his revolver. “You’re a stupid, ignorant man. Question is, what do I do with you?” Darrel said. “Reason doesn’t work and neither do threats. Know why? Because guys like you wait all their lives for somebody else to snuff their wick. Every one of you knows your parents hated you from the first day your mother didn’t have the monthlies.”

Wyatt sat very still in the gloom, his hands flat on his thighs. Darrel waited for him to reply, but he didn’t. Wyatt’s eyes stared into space, the pupils like drops of black ink. A train whistle echoed along the canyon walls.