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

with I.A. I didn’t believe him. But I’ve downgraded my opinion.”

“Well, I’m not really interested in your—”

“You’ve been working against me from the jump, Fay. In one way or another, you’ve tried to thwart every initiative I’ve taken on Johnny American Horse’s behalf. I think Johnny would be dead or in the joint if it wasn’t for Darrel McComb. Some joke, huh? A right-wing redneck became the loose cannon in the script and screwed up the frame that somebody was trying to hang around Johnny’s neck.”

Her cheeks were glowing, her mouth a tight seam, her diminutive figure shrunken somehow inside her clothes, the skin below her mouth puckering. She clenched the top of her left arm, and for a second I seriously thought she might be having the beginnings of a heart attack.

She slapped me in the mouth, hard, her fingernails cutting my skin.

Then she walked to the door of the interview room, where the two detectives stared at us open-mouthed. “Kick him,” she said.

I WALKED OUT the front door of the courthouse with Wyatt Dixon. The sun was out, the sky freckled with white clouds, the mountains green from the rain. Even though it was a business day, the streets were festive, filled with bicyclists and joggers, and a string band was playing under the trees on the courthouse lawn.

“Buy you a hot dog?” Wyatt said.

“Another time,” I replied.

I could feel his eyes on the side of my face. “You just gonna let that woman pop you in the mouth like that?” he said.

“I’m used to it.”

“No, something’s crawling around in the woodpile. How you know it wasn’t me dropped them men at Mabus’s ranch?” he said.

“You would have used that fifty-caliber Sharps of yours. You probably wouldn’t have missed Mabus, either.”

“Maybe you give me too much credit.”

I waited for the traffic light to change, then started across the street, hoping Wyatt would stay behind. He didn’t. “You figure American Horse for it?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, my eyes straight ahead.

“A man who’ll use a knife on another man will do anything,” he said.

“You have any more trouble with the D.A.’s office, you tell me about it. In the meantime, you make no statement to anybody from the D.A.’s office or the sheriff’s department about anything,” I said.

But Wyatt was not easily distracted from the subject at hand. “If it ain’t me or American Horse, who’s that leave, Brother Holland?”

“You got me. Have a good one,” I replied.

He stopped at a hot dog cart where a man in an apron was selling dogs and ice cream under a striped umbrella. I walked on down the street toward my office, believing I was rid of Wyatt Dixon for a while.

Wrong.

“Your knowledge about all this don’t add up to me,” he said.

“The morning paper said the shooter fired several shots in quick succession,” I replied. “That means he didn’t use a Sharps. I also have the feeling the shooter picked up his brass or he wiped it clean before he loaded it into the magazine. Otherwise, the D.A.’s office would have latents that would have either implicated or cleared you. So what’s that tell us? You’re an innocent man.”

But I could see his interest fading and a wan expression taking hold in his eyes. He took a bite of his hot dog, started to chew, then choked as though cardboard had caught in his throat. He spit his half-chewed food into a trash can and threw the rest of the dog in on top of it. His mouth was close to my face when he spoke again, his breath rife with the smell of meat and mustard. “Know why it wasn’t me up on that hill? It’s ’cause I wouldn’t even try. Mabus cain’t be killed with a gun. Cain’t be killed by no normal means,” he said.

“He’s just a man, Wyatt.”

“They held Elton Sneed underwater till his heart give out. His death’s on me. I ain’t never gonna get over this. I ain’t never had no feelings like this before,” he said.

He crossed against the light, swaying like a drunk man through cars that braked to a halt or swerved around him, their horns blowing.

A HALF HOUR later I drove to Community Hospital, located in the middle of the old federal reservation that was once Fort Missoula. In the 1870s Negro bicycle troops had been stationed there, ostensibly to help remove the Flathead Indians from the Bitterroot Valley and to control the Nez Percé, who, under Chief Joseph, almost defeated the United States Army. But today the old two-story, whitewashed stucco barracks, with their red-tile roofs, were administrative offices for the U.S. Forest Service, the parade grounds a golf course, and the Negro troopers who had ridden bikes with iron wheels rested under the maples inside a piked fence.

The names of the two shooting victims had been published in the morning paper. A receptionist gave me their room numbers.