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

“They must have strung a half mile of crime scene tape through them woods. Ain’t that where American Horse got busted last night?”

“What do you want, Wyatt?”

He got out of his truck on his crutches and propped his butt against one fender, then began paring his fingernails with a toothpick. “Them boys that shanked me in the leg? A buddy of mine seen them in Hamilton yesterday. That means they still aim to take me out, or else they’d be to hell and gone down the road by now, know what I mean?”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Ain’t many I can talk to. Ain’t many gonna understand. But you and me share the same kind of upbringing. You growed up in a church where the preacher preached hell so hot you could feel the fire climbing up through the floor. It was a three-ring circus, with folks talking in tongues, drinking poisons, sticking their hands in a boxful of snakes. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong,” I lied.

He kept his eyes on his nails. “The man I killed behind my house with my Sharps had the mark of the devil on his arm.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“I seen it. I touched his skin. I ain’t a drunk or an addict, counselor. I ain’t crazy, either, at least not no more. Them people is acolytes of Satan himself.”

How do you talk to a man for whom the devil is more real than God? But I tried. “Isn’t there enough evil in human beings without looking for the devil as the cause of our problems? You’re a smart man, Wyatt. Why not deal with the world as it is and not get lost in the next one?”

“You’re a naive fellow, Brother Holland.”

“Oh?”

“One child gets the daylights slapped out of him for messing his diapers and grows up picking cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see in a hunnerd-degree heat, but he don’t turn out much worse on a personal basis than a rich kid whose daddy give him everything he wanted.

“But maybe right down the road there’s another kid, with ordinary folks, maybe a little shiftless but ordinary just the same—”

“Wyatt—” I said, holding my hand up for him to discontinue.

“No, you hear me out. That same kid grows up cruel to the bone. He don’t enjoy sex unless he’s hurting someone while he’s doing it, and when he finally gets to the joint, he lets everybody know he’s the huckleberry who’ll bust a shank off in your back for a deck of smokes. Worse, he ain’t got no fear of God ’cause he murdered all the light in his soul. That’s the ones got the mark of the beast on them, counselor. I been jailing with them since I was fifteen years old.”

His description of a sociopath was possibly the most credible I had ever heard, and I wondered if it came from self-knowledge rather than his experience. Then I realized he had read the question in my eyes.

“I ain’t one of them kind. Least I don’t think I am. But you never know, do you?” he said.

He opened the driver’s door to his truck and threw his crutches inside.

“What’s your purpose here, Wyatt? Do you just want to be a source of worry and irritation and grief? Is that why you come here?”

“Maybe you and American Horse both owe me. I got confidence in you. You’ll figure it out directly. Lordy, you got a nice place here,” he said, surveying the house and the deep green of our pasture under the pall of yellow smoke that hung over it.

JUST BEFORE THE SUN slipped in a red orb behind the ridgeline, an FBI agent named Francis Broussard served a search warrant on our property. He was a trim, rosy-cheeked, olive-skinned man, with a fresh haircut, a dimple in his chin, and a Cajun accent. “We’ll be working our way over the top of the mountain and into your backyard. We’ll try to get out of your way as soon as we can,” he said.

“Mind telling me what you’re looking for?” I asked.

“I think you know. Yes indeedy, I surely do,” he said.

“Yes indeedy?”

“Come on up the hill and help us out. I’ll make note of your cooperation in my report. That might give you greater credibility later.”

“I’m glad to know y’all are in a lighthearted mood.”

He held a clipboard in one hand and wore a blue windbreaker with the abbreviation for his agency in bright gold letters on the back. He gazed abstractly at the haze on our pasture and the purple shadows spreading across the valley floor.

“Is there something else you need?” I said.

“Yeah, I hate to ask you this. But could I use your bathroom?” he replied.