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

“I need to confess something to you—”

“Let me finish. Dixon cried. I didn’t believe he was capable of feeling anything about anyone. But tears actually ran down his face. It took four cops to get him back outside. The coroner wanted to tranquilize him.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“We didn’t want another homicide. What were you going to say?”

“Karsten Mabus knows Wyatt has the goods from the Global Research robbery. His people probably went after Reverend Sneed when they couldn’t get to Wyatt.”

“That billionaire or whatever out on Highway Twelve again?”

“Right.”

“He’s behind the attacks on Dixon?”

“Right. He owns Global Research. He plans to run for office here in Montana. Global Research is the outfit that sold Saddam Hussein part of his chemical and biological weapons program in the eighties. I told you all this.”

“Were you a fan of Marvel comics as a kid?”

“Don’t make light of this, Fay. He’s an evil man,” I said.

“You said you were going to confess something to me? How does Karsten Mabus know Dixon has the stuff from the Global job?”

“I told him,” I said.

“To get the heat off yourself?”

“Read it any way you want.”

“I knew somehow you were involved in this. I just didn’t know how. I have some crime scene photos. Maybe you should look at them.”

“By assigning indirect responsibility to me, you’re conceding that Mabus sent his men after the preacher.”

“What I’m saying is—” But she had trapped herself and couldn’t finish.

“Where’s Wyatt now?” I asked.

“On the loose. You stop pulling strings on all these people. You stay out of a police investigation, too,” she said, and hung up.

The kitchen lights were off, and I could hear the easy sweep of wind in the trees and the clatter of a pinecone on the roof. But the tranquillity of the night would not ease the pang in my heart. My call to Mabus had brought about the death of Elton Sneed, a gentle, decent man who had honestly served his vision of this world and the next. Also, for the first time, I had begun to seriously wonder about my assessment of Fay Harback.

THE SHOOTER WHO came onto Karsten Mabus’s property that night would prove a mystery in many ways for both Mabus’s security personnel and the investigators from the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department. It was safe to say he did not enter the property from Highway 12, as the front gate was electronically locked at 9 P.M. and a sophisticated alarm system, including sensor lights, that ran the length of the fence line automatically activated at the same hour. Two boys who had been camping up on a mountainside behind the ranch said they had seen a lone horseman come off a ridge and follow a creekbed to the back of the property, then enter the woods and disappear. They said the rider wore a hat and had binoculars strung around his neck and perhaps was carrying a rifle in a saddle scabbard.

Whoever the shooter was, he wore western boots, because sheriff’s deputies found their pointed, deep-heeled indentations in the soft bed of pine needles behind a flat-surfaced boulder that he used as his sniper’s nest.

Just before midnight Karsten Mabus, dressed in an Oriental robe, fixed himself a sandwich and opened a bottle of carbonated grape juice, then rel

axed on an elephant-hide couch and read The New York Times. Through the rear living room window, which rose all the way to the cathedral ceiling, he could see steam rising from his swimming pool, the underwater lights tunneling below the lime-green surface, the arc lamps above his horse barns glowing with humidity, canvas windscreens flapping gently against the red-clay background of his tennis courts.

It was a beautiful night, the stars cold and white in a black sky that occasionally flickered with heat lightning.

Karsten Mabus put away the newspaper, sat up on the couch, and bit into his sandwich. The shooter had worked his way into place now, on a hillside that provided him cover and also a panoramic overview of the grounds, perhaps one hundred yards out and one hundred feet higher in elevation than Karsten Mabus. The first round pocked a neat hole in the window glass and missed Mabus’s head by inches, burrowing deeply into the cushions of a large chair against the far wall with hardly a sound.

Mabus removed the sandwich from his mouth and set it down on the plate, focusing his eyes on the hole in the glass, seemingly unsure of the event that had just occurred.

The second round caught part of the window framing, blowing wood and large shards of glass onto the carpet, the bullet ticking Mabus’s cheek just above the jawbone, flicking a thread of blood across his skin.

He rose from the couch, touching his cheek, looking at the balls of his fingers, then began punching buttons on a keypad by the fireplace. In less than thirty seconds at least five armed men emerged from either the shadowy edges of the ranch or the servants’ quarters over the garage. One security man, who had seen a muzzle flash, pointed toward the flat-surfaced boulder a hundred feet up on the hillside.