Free In the Moon of Red Ponies: A Novel by James Lee Burke Page A

and I felt as though the two of us were dropping down inside a well that swirled with starlight at the bottom.
    She held me tighter, then even tighter than that, and made a sound in my ear that was like the cry of the loon, and I was sure in that moment no evil would ever touch our lives.

Chapter 6
    ON TUESDAY MORNING, when Johnny was about to be transported from the hospital to face the trumped-up attempted assault charges filed against him by Darrel McComb, he was formally placed under arrest for the murder of Charlie Ruggles and taken in handcuffs to a cell at the county jail. I caught Fay Harback at the coffee stand by the back entrance of the courthouse. “No,” she said, raising her hand prohibitively. “I don’t want to see you.”
    “This is bogus, Fay. You’re being a dupe,” I said.
    “How would you like to have this coffee thrown in your face?”
    “My client is the victim, not the perpetrator. You’re helping a collection of assholes gang up on an innocent man.”
    “Did I ever tell you, you make my blood boil? I want to hit you with a large, hard object,” she said. People were starting to stare now. “Come outside.”
    We went through the big glass doors onto the lawn. It was cold in the shade of the building and the grass was stiff with frost. “Which collection of assholes are you talking about?” she asked.
    “I’m not sure.”
    “That’s beautiful. You just slander people in public without knowing why?”
    “The Feds are involved in this stuff. An agent tried to warn me off last night.”
    “Let me make it simple for you. American Horse’s tennis shoes matched a perfectly stenciled impression on the floor right next to Charlie Ruggles’s bed.” She raised a finger when I started to speak.
    “Hear me out. Your client not only left behind a signature with his foot, he dropped a Jiffy Lube receipt on the floor. It has his name on it and his fingerprints. We found a pair of greens in a service elevator. They smelled of booze.”
    “How could Johnny have gotten past the guard at the door? All the deputies know him,” I said
    For just a second, no more than a blink, I saw the confidence weaken in her eyes. “The deputy went to help an elderly man use the bathroom. It’s not his fault,” she replied.
    “Who said it was?”
    “Johnny was in a bar down the street from the hospital. He’s a mercurial, unpredictable man. He killed Ruggles. There’s no conspiracy here,” she said.
    “Hell there’s not.”
    She looked into space, as though my words contained a degree of credibility which, for reasons of her own, she would not acknowledge. “I do my job. I don’t always like it. Don’t ever try to embarrass me in front of people like that again,” she said.
     
    THAT AFTERNOON, I visited Johnny at the lockup. We sat at a wood table in a small room that contained a narrow, vertical slit for a window, through which I could see the old buildings and brick streets down by the train yards. Johnny wore a bright orange jumpsuit with the word JAIL lettered in black across the back.
    “How do you explain the Jiffy Lube receipt and the prints of your tennis shoes in Ruggles’s room?” I said.
    “Somebody must have taken the shoes out of the house and put them back later. The receipt for the oil change was in my pickup.”
    His eyes wandered around the room. I touched him on the wrist to make him look at me. “You get pretty swacked Saturday night?” I said.
    “No.”
    “No blackouts?”
    “Amber was with me all night. We were at the Ox, Charley B’s, and Stockman’s. I went down to Red’s for a few minutes to meet a guy who wants to buy my truck. But he wasn’t there.”
    “You went to Red’s by yourself?”
    “Like I said.”
    “Has a Fed named Masterson been in here?”
    “No. Who is he?”
    “Johnny, nobody wants to believe in conspiracies anymore. People want to trust the government. They don’t want to believe that corporations run their lives, either. But everything