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

The weather had been good, the road dry, and the highway patrol concluded that the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. But the driver’s wife would not accept the highway patrol’s explanation. Her husband had a perfect driving record, she said. He was a conservative, abstemious man who never drove when he was tired, never broke traffic regulations, and was always conscious of the safety of others. There could have been no mechanical failure, either; his car was new and the maintenance on it was done by her brother, a mechanic. Darrel believed her.

Darrel had the widow send him all her husband’s credit card records, and he re-created each step of the husband’s trip from Spokane to the funeral service in St. Paul and back home again. The dead man and his wife were people of humble means, and it was obvious the husband did everything in his power not to spend an excess of money on himself, hence his decision to drive the thousands of miles to attend an uncle’s funeral rather than fly without discount reservations. He bought gas at off-brand filling stations, stayed at the Econo Lodge and Motel 8, and evidently ate at cash-basis fast-food restaurants, since the credit card records showed almost no purchases for food.

Darrel began calling each motel along the husband’s return route. But no one could offer any personal information about the bookseller from Spokane, other than the computerized record that showed the time and date of his check-in. Then a casual addendum in a conversation with a desk clerk in eastern Montana opened up another scenario and suddenly gave a face, an identity, and a sad kind of history to a man who was about to be written off as the cause of his own death.

“Yeah, he checked in on a Saturday afternoon two weeks ago. It was colder than hell. Wind must have been blowing forty miles an hour,” the clerk said. “We were packed to the ceiling, hunting season and all.”

“Was he drinking? Was there anything unusual about his behavior? Did he seem sick?” Darrel said.

“Actually, he didn’t stay at this motel. When we have an overflow, we register guests at this motel but we send them to the motel across the road. See, we own half of that one with my brother-in-law.”

Darrel got the number of the brother-in-law and left a message for him. The next day, the brother-in-law returned the call. “Yeah, I remember him,” he said. “He was a nice gentleman, quiet fellow, played with my cat on the counter when he came up to get some soap for the room. He do something wrong?”

“He was involved in a traffic accident. I was just checking out a couple of details for my paperwork. Did he have booze on his breath or seem to be sick?”

“No, I saw him early in the morning, just before he left. I’m sure he wasn’t drinking. I felt bad about the room I gave him and offered not to charge him for it, but he said it was no problem.”

“Would you explain that in a little more detail.”

“A bunch of loudmouth hunters were in the rooms on each side of him. They came in drunk about eleven o’clock, yelling outside the rooms, throwing ice chests around in their trucks, rattling the Coke machine, stuff like that. He must have asked them to be quiet, ’cause I think they beat on his wall or his door. No, that’s not exactly right. I know they gave him a bad time. These guys were real assholes. They got up at four in the morning and did it again before they left, I mean slamming doors and holleri

ng at each other, racing their truck engines, like nobody else is on the planet, so I don’t think that poor fellow got any sleep at all.”

“You got names and addresses for these guys?” Darrel asked.

Over the next few days Darrel called up seven men who had stayed in the rooms close by the bookseller’s. Each denied any responsibility for the dead man’s sleep deprivation. Three of them hung up on him. If any of them felt any guilt over the bookseller’s death, it was not apparent to Darrel. In fact, none of them seemed to even remember the anonymous, faceless man who’d had the bad luck to be sandwiched between their rooms.

In Darrel’s opinion, the hunters might not have been the direct cause of the bookseller’s death, but they had certainly contributed to it. And that’s the way it would end, Darrel thought. The hunters would go back to their jobs, their families, their venison dinners, and their swinging-dick bravado; they’d get laid, knock back shots in loud saloons, slam poker dice down on hardwood bars, see the sunrise with the warmth of a wife and mother next to them, attend churches that were little more than extensions of civic clubs, watch their children grow up, and one day many years from now, just before all the cares of the world became as dross before their eyes, wonder why a vague memory of a Saturday night outside Glendive, Montana, should hover like a chimerical presence next to their beds.

Darrel drove over to Spokane and took the dead man’s widow and children to an amusement park in Coeur d’Alene, then at dinner that night told the woman her husband might have swerved his car to avoid hitting a deer, that evidently he was a kind man and instinctively had chosen to cut his wheels toward the shoulder rather than simply slam on the brakes and broadside an animal that had probably frozen in the headlights.

Darrel could not bear to tell her that a collection of dog-pack bullies had robbed her husband of his sleep, forcing him to make the long drive across the state while he was bone-tired in order to be at work on time Monday morning. Also he could not bear to tell her that a prosecutable case against the dog pack was a legal impossibility.

The next weekend Darrel drove to the hometown of the hunters, a windblown, godforsaken place close to the Canadian line, and in an hour had the name of the man who was considered to be their leader. At 2 A.M. he used a pay phone to call the man’s house. The wife answered, but at Darrel’s insistence she woke her husband and got him on the phone.

“Who the hell is this?” the man said.

“Bang!” Darrel said, and hung up.

Darrel fired a single .44 Magnum round through the front window of the man’s auto parts store, listened to the bullet ricochet and break things inside, then drove back to Missoula.

At Christmas, the leader of the hunters received a greeting card inscribed with a single line: “I’m still out here.”

“Why so lost in thought tonight?” Greta asked.

“Thinking about you, Greta. Want to dance?” he said.

“The food’s almost ready.”

“It’ll wait. Come on,” he said.

He put one arm around her waist and lifted her right hand in the air. Bunny Berrigan’s “I Can’t Get Started” was playing on the stereo. Darrel pulled Greta against him, pushing her arms around his neck, as though he were going to hug her. But he let his fingers slide up her side, until he felt a knot about five inches below her armpit. The balls of his fingers traced its outline against her shirt. The knot had not grown in size, but it was harder, the configuration more defined.

“Don’t,” she said.

“It hurts?”

“I told you, it’s an insect bite. It got infected.”