In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel (12 page)

The previous night there had been a break-in at an agricultural research lab outside Stevensville. The intruders were not amateurs or vandals. They had used bolt cutters on the gate chain, cut the telephone line on which the alarm system was dependent, and called the alarm service to report the downed wire, using the owner’s password.

Once inside, they had rifled all the hard-copy document files, downloaded computers, rounded up all the floppy disks they could find, and drilled the floor safe under a canvas tarp they spread over themselves to conceal the glow of their flashlights and the noise of the drill.

A man returning from a bar in town around 3
A.M
. reported that he saw four men and a woman exit the back of the building and cross a field to a grove of cottonwoods, then drive away in a van. As he rounded the bend, his headlights swept across the group and he was sure of what he saw: the woman was white but the men were dark-skinned and wore pigtails on their shoulders.

“So you’re saying four Indians and a white woman broke into a research lab? What’s that have to do with Johnny?” I said.

“American Horse is involved in this. If not directly, he knows who did it.”

“You’re calling Johnny an ecoterrorist?”

“Your friend Seth Masterson has already been here. This whole business smells of American Horse’s ongoing war with the federal government. I don’t like being the last person on the telephone tree. I don’t like being used, either.”

“I don’t know anything about the break-in, Fay. I doubt if Johnny does, either.”

“Where was your client last night?” She looked at me expectantly, and I realized she secretly hoped I could provide an alibi for him, perhaps for his sake, perhaps so she would not have to feel deceived.

But I didn’t answer her question. In reality, I was already wondering how the intruders had pulled it off. I was also wondering if some of Johnny’s friends, who had been in the pen, weren’t indeed a likely group of suspects. “How did these guys have the password? It sounds like an inside job to me. Maybe it’s industrial spying,” I said.

“Most security services pay minimum wage to their employees. So their employees come and go and often have little loyalty to their employer. You have no idea who the woman might be?”

“No, I don’t,” I replied.

She walked in a circle, her frustration obvious. “I hate a lie. I hate it worse than anything in the world,” she said.

I fixed my gaze on the trees rustling on the courthouse lawn and a long line of bicyclers moving through the traffic.

“What’s the story on this guy Masterson?” she said.

“He’s like a lot of people who work for the G. He’s a good man who has to take orders from a bunch of political shitheads,” I replied.

She tried to look serious but couldn’t hide a smile. “You see Amber Finley?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Tell her what it’s like to cell with a bull dyke up at the women’s pen.”

DARREL MCCOMB HAD
never belonged to a church, but he did believe in spiritual entities. In his mind there was a Valhalla where slain heroes lived in a giant meadhouse and feasted on roasted boar and watched over the few who fought to protect the many. One of those slain heroes was Rocky Harrigan, Darrel’s mentor in a half-dozen clandestine operations, killed when his cargo plane crashed into a mountain during an airdrop to anti-Russian forces in Afghanistan.

Rocky’s handsome face grinned at Darrel from a framed photograph on top of Darrel’s dresser, Rocky wearing shades, a fatigue cap, and a skinned-up leather jacket, his arm cocked on the open window of an old DC-6.

Why’d Rocky have to go and get himself killed? Darrel thought. And for what? Dropping ordnance and C-rats to Muslim fanatics who one day would fly planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. What a travesty. Who wrote the damn history books, anyway? Names like Rocky’s never got in there. Instead, the whole nation lionized fraternity pissants who had never heard a shot fired in anger in their lives.

Darrel couldn’t shake the funk and depression that had plagued him ever since he had beaten the Indian with the blackjack. His career and his life were unraveling. His rage against Johnny American Horse was just the symptom, not the cause. But what
was
the cause?

He didn’t know.

He’d always been straight up as a cop, true to his own ethos, but now he’d lied and filed a fraudulent report to cover up the fact he was a voyeur, after being caught in the act by Wyatt Dixon, who at some point would undoubtedly try to blackmail him. All because he literally ached with desire whenever he set eyes on Amber Finley.

He went out on the balcony of the apartment where he lived above the Clark Fork River. Three stories below were sharp rocks and a slope that dropped precipitously into the water. All he needed to do was step on a chair, fit one foot on the handrail, and launch himself into space. For just a moment he saw his body being lifted off the rocks onto a gurney by firemen and paramedics, all of them solemn-faced at the passing of one of their own.

Who was he kidding? He didn’t have two friends in the whole town, nor did he want any, at least not here, in Ho Chi Minh City West.

Don’t get mad, get even, he thought.

Why not start with this Greta Lundstrum broad? Who did she think she was, dimeing him with the sheriff, accusing him of bird-dogging her at Romulus Finley’s house, bringing down a shitload of departmental grief on his head? He pictured her in his mind’s eye again. He was sure he’d seen her before. But where?

Good God, he thought. It was on a surveillance two years ago. He and another plainclothes had followed Wyatt Dixon to a motel in Alberton, down the Clark Fork, and when Dixon had tapped on a door, a thick-bodied woman had let him in the room. An hour later, Dixon had driven away. Darrel had run the woman’s car tag but had decided she was simply a casual girlfriend of Dixon’s and of no consequence in the investigation of white supremacists in western Montana.

What an irony, Darrel thought. A connection between Dixon and the Lundstrum woman had suddenly validated his lie and justified his own presence at the Finley house. He looked at the framed photograph of his dead friend on the dresser and felt that somehow Rocky was watching over him, maybe even winking his eye and lifting a tankard of mead from Valhalla in salute.

At the department Monday morning Darrel opened a fresh legal pad, wrote the date and time at the top of the page, then clicked Greta Lundstrum’s name into the departmental computer and hit the search key.

What he saw on the screen made him tap the heel of his hand against his forehead. The burgled agricultural research lab down in the Bitterroots had used an alarm system operated by Blue Mountain Security, owned by one Greta Lundstrum.

It was too much for coincidence, Darrel thought. The B&E report from Ravalli County had been put on his desk because of a possible tie-in between ecoterrorists, Indians, and Darrel’s arrest of Johnny American Horse. Now Lundstrum’s name had surfaced in the same investigation. He called Blue Mountain Security and asked to speak to her.

“This is she. Who’s calling, please?” the voice on the other end of the line said.

“Detective Darrel McComb, with the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department. I’d appreciate your coming into the office for an interview,” he replied.

“You would appreciate
what
?”

“We’ve been investigating a group of Native American environmental activists for some time.” He positioned the B&E report by the phone so he could see it more clearly. “We think they may be involved with the burglary of the Global Research facility. Your company handles security for them, doesn’t it?”

“McComb? You’re the detective who followed me to Senator Finley’s house?”

“That’s incorrect, ma’am. My concern there was about an ex-convict by the name of Wyatt Dixon, who was watching the Finleys’ home. I believe you have a past relationship with Dixon, don’t you?”

He could almost hear her heart beating through the phone receiver. “Ma’am?” he said.

Then she surprised him. “Unfortunately, I did know him. About two years back. A brief and mistaken relationship, if you get my meaning. Now, what the hell is this about?” she said.

“I’d rather talk to you in person. I’ll drive down there,” he replied.

“Suit yourself,” she said, and hung up.

Now, there’s a woman who wrote her own rule book, he thought. The kind, as Rocky used to say, who would read your mind, slap your face, then ask you to stay over for breakfast.

It took him only a half hour to drive to her security service. In the background the Bitterroot Mountains rose high into the heavens, the dark green of the timber marbled with new snow. He liked being down in the valley, away from university and liberal influences, among people who were of a mind similar to his own. It was going to be a fine day in all respects, he told himself.

Greta Lundstrum came out of her cubicle as soon as she saw him through the glass partition, her wide-set eyes fixed on his. “So what do you need from me, Detective?” she asked.

The boldness of her stare was at first disconcerting. Long ago, in his dealings as a police officer, Darrel had concluded that aggressive female business executives fell into one category only: their authority and their successful imposition of it were entirely dependent upon their ability to destroy any male challenge to it.

“The people who broke into Global Research called in the password after they cut the telephone line,” he said. “Do you—”

“I’ve pulled the files on all our ex-employees,” she interrupted. “Two of them are people I fired for coming to work with alcohol on their breath. One of them is an Indian. He still lives in Missoula. The other man moved out of state.”

“The password didn’t necessarily have to come from an ex-employee,” Darrel said.

“If you mean one of our current employees might have given it out, yes, that could have happened. But it didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they’ve been with me for years and they have no motivation for betraying me or the client. Come into my office and sit down,” she said.

His eyes slipped down her back, her hips, and rump as he followed her into her cubicle. “You know a woman named Temple Holland?” she said. She sat forward in her swivel chair, her elbows on the desk, her back stiff.

“She’s a P.I., the wife of a local attorney,” Darrel replied.

“Why did you tell her you were following me?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then why did she tell me that?”

“My guess is, she and her husband want to cause trouble. He’s the lawyer for an Indian named Johnny American Horse,” Darrel said. He looked at the hardness in her green eyes and the set in her jaw. He decided to test her affinities. “I arrested American Horse for attempted assault on a law officer. During that arrest I hit him several times with a blackjack. Mr. and Mrs. Holland aren’t fans of mine.”

Her expression showed no reaction. “You think this man American Horse is involved with the break-in?” she asked.

“Hard to say. He’s cut out of different cloth,” Darrel replied.

“In what way?”

“He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross during Desert Storm. Maybe he just hangs around the wrong kind of people.”

“Funny attitude for a sheriff’s detective.”

“Give the devil his due,” Darrel said. “Give me the name of the guy you fired, the one still living in Missoula.”

She wrote the name and the address down on a piece of paper and handed it to him. Her auburn hair was thick and had a deep part in it, her scalp gray and clean-looking. “Sorry I was a bit rude over the phone,” she said.

“It was a misunderstanding,” he said.

She straightened her shoulders, and her breasts seemed larger than he’d noticed earlier. He looked at his watch. “There’s a Mexican joint up on the highway. You ever eat there?” he said.

That evening, Darrel McComb sat down at his home computer and on the hard drive recorded all the important events and the names of people connected with the investigation of Johnny American Horse. This case went far beyond the boundaries of Missoula County or the Feds wouldn’t have come down on it like flies on pig flop, he told himself. The issues were much larger than the usual reservation problems over water rights, grazing fees, and control of the bison range. And the backgrounds of the two dead hit men out of Detroit were altogether too familiar to Darrel.

But who was actually turning the dials? From his own experience in clandestine operations, Darrel knew that the grunts on the ground kept it simple, trusted the larger cause they served, and didn’t question the moral authority of their leaders. But the old cause was the war against communism. What was this one about? Whatever it was, Darrel McComb knew he was going to be a player again.

Chapter 8

I WANTED TO BELIEVE
Johnny American Horse had nothing to do with the break-in at the research lab. I had put up the equity in our home and one hundred twenty acres of land for his bond so he could be released from jail, and I expected thereafter he would have only one goal in mind—to be found not guilty of Charlie Ruggles’s murder. Johnny was an honorable man and would not hang a friend out to dry, I told myself.

But Johnny was also an idealist, and it’s the idealists who, given the chance, will incinerate half the earth to save the other half. Tuesday morning I found him at work, cleaning and burning brush under an abandoned railroad trestle that spanned a gorge on Evaro Hill, ten miles outside Missoula.

It was shady and cool inside the gorge, but Johnny was sweating in the heat of the fire, his forearms and yellow gloves smeared with soot.

“Say all that again,” he said.

“It’s a simple question. Did you bust into that research lab or not?” I said.

“No, I did not.”

“You know who did?”

“I’ll tell people anything they want to know about me. But that’s as far as it goes.” He piled a rotted ponderosa on the flames and stepped back when it burst alight. Down below were the home and a warehouse owned by a famous antique and vintage arms dealer. A Gatling gun stood in the front yard and a World War II tank and armored personnel carrier in a side lot. The wind shifted and Johnny walked out of the smoke and sat on a rock. “I had a bad dream about a fire last night.”