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

“In other words, both guys are genuine scum. Now do you want to tell me why you’re so interested in these characters?”

“I guess you’re right, they’re not important.”

“Where’d you go last night, Billy Bob?” she said.

AT 5 P.M. I LOCKED UP the office and crossed the street to a workingmen’s bar. I sat in back, near a brick wall with a painted-over window in it that gave onto an alleyway, and ordered a beer and a double shot. It was a cool, dark place, with a lighted jukebox and neon ads for western beers on the wall. The people who drank at the bar were from the neighborhood and talked about sports and the opening of the streams that had been closed because of the forest fires, or they made jokes about their tabs and their jobs. I wanted to buy them a round, be among them, and have no cares other than the traffic I would have to negotiate before I was home, enjoying a fine supper.

But the images of two bullet-wounded men would not go out of my head

.

I went back to the bar twice more for doubles, with a beer back. When I was on my fourth round, a huge shape stepped between my table and the glare of light through the front door.

“Didn’t know you were a drinking man,” Darrel McComb said.

“I’m just about to leave,” I replied.

He sat down at the table anyway, with a longneck and an empty glass. His jaws were gritty with stubble, his clothes rumpled. “Tell American Horse he gave me the key,” he said.

“The key?” I said.

“It’ll make sense down the road.” He poured beer into his glass and salted it. “One day I’m going to write the history of what happened down in Central America. Hitler said the victors write the history books. But sometimes the victors leave big blanks in the story, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said, realizing he was either drunk or entering a new and perhaps terminal stage in his career. “Say that again about Johnny American Horse?”

“You bet, kemosabe,” he said. He drank from his glass, then smelled himself and smiled bleary-eyed into my face. But he forgot whatever it was he intended to say.

I patted him on the shoulder as I left the bar, perhaps glad to have the problems I did and not someone else’s.

I BOUGHT A HOT DOG and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee on the corner and ate the hot dog on a bench before I tried to drive home. After I pulled into the driveway I went straight into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, rinsed my mouth with Listerine, and showered the smell of booze and cigarette smoke off my skin and out of my hair. But I didn’t fool Temple. Not about anything.

“Make a stop on the way home?” she said.

“I ran into Darrel McComb. He said something about Johnny American Horse providing a key for him. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about.”

But Temple was not interested in the problems of Darrel McComb. “The thirty-thirty is gone from the rack,” she said.

“Yeah, I took it to Sportsmen’s Surplus. I think the sight is bent,” I replied.

I was sitting at the kitchen table. Through the side window I could see our horses drinking at the tank and shadows spreading across the valley floor. I felt her fingers stroking the back of my neck. “You’re the best man I’ve ever known, Billy Bob,” she said. “You’re incapable of evil or meanness. If you’ve broken any laws, it was on behalf of the people you love.”

I had to swallow at her words. I started to speak, but she didn’t let me. She put her arms around me and hugged my head against her, her mouth pressed into my hair.

Chapter 24

DARREL LEFT THE BAR and drove to his apartment on the river. He took a hit of white speed and washed it down with beer, then walked out on the balcony and looked out over the town. The rain had killed the fires and restored the glories of summer to western Montana. What a grand evening it was. He looked at the water coursing under the pilings on the Higgins Street Bridge, the glow of lights on the old Wilma Theater building, the red brilliance of the sunset among hills at the bottom of an azure sky, and he wondered how his life could have gone so wrong.

The answer was easy: He genuinely loved the place where he lived, but the place where he lived did not love him. And that’s the way it had always been. He had loved causes that didn’t love him. On all levels he had served people who had found him either odious or expendable, and the notion of being loved had long ago disappeared from his life.

Well, that was why hookers were invented, he thought bitterly, then felt both embarrassed and demeaned at the content of his own thoughts.

Get out of this funk, he told himself. He had never sought either pity or understanding for the life he had led. Years back, whenever he was asked why he kept re-upping in the Army, he had always replied, “It’s three hots and a cot, Jack.” You didn’t share your feelings with people who don’t pay dues. Let the fruits and tree huggers frolic in Golden Gate Park, he had always told himself. The men and women who protected them and would one day live in Valhalla required no recompense other than their own self-respect.

But for just a moment Darrel wondered what it would have been like if he’d had a wife or even a girlfriend like Amber Finley.

He went back inside, closed the glass door on his balcony, and forced himself to empty his mind of thoughts about Amber Finley. He opened another beer, bit down on another hit of white speed, and blew out his breath when he felt the rush take him. That was more like it.

He opened his computer file and began recording all the recent events concerning Karsten Mabus, Greta Lundstrum, Elton T. Sneed, and Johnny American Horse.