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

bookstore. My food was cold when I got back to the table.
    “What’s the deal on your friend?” Temple said.
    “Remember the story about the FBI agent who wrote a memo warning the head office terrorists were taking flight instruction in Phoenix? The memo that got ignored?”
    “That’s the guy?”
    “He was at Ruby Ridge and Waco, too. Seth gets around.”
    “You want your food reheated?”
    “Why not?” I said. But even after the waitress warmed up my plate, I couldn’t eat. I wasn’t sure why Seth was in Missoula, but there were two things I was certain of: Seth Masterson didn’t take prisoners and I didn’t want him as an adversary.
     
    SATURDAY MORNING I received a call at home from a man who was probably the most effective but lowest-rent attorney in Missoula. If a human being could exude oil through his pores, it was Brendan Merwood. His politics were for sale, his advocacy almost always on the side of power and greed. What he was now telling me seemed to offend reason.
    “You represent Michael Charles Ruggles and he wants to see me?” I said.
    “He likes to be called Charlie.”
    “Why would ‘Charlie’ have any interest in me?”
    “Put it this way—he’s not your ordinary guy.”
    “My wife got that impression when he called her a bitch and expressed his thoughts about her anatomy.”
    “I’m just passing on the message. Do with it as you wish, my friend,” he said, and hung up.
    I drove to St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula and rode the elevator up to Charlie Ruggles’s floor. A sheriff’s deputy stopped me at his door. “You’re supposed to be on an approved visitors list, Billy Bob,” he said.
    “Better check with the man inside,” I said, and grinned.
    The deputy went into the room and came back out. “Go on in,” he said.
    Instead, I stayed outside momentarily and pulled the door closed so Charlie Ruggles could not hear our conversation. “Was Seth by here?” I asked.
    “Who?” the deputy said.
    “Seth Masterson. Tall guy, western clothes, nice-looking?”
    “Oh yeah, you mean that Fed. He was here yesterday afternoon. What about him?”
    “Nothing. We used to work together.”
    I went inside the room and shut the door behind me. Charlie Ruggles watched me out of a face that seemed as dead and empty of emotion as pink rubber.
    “You made remarks about my wife’s breasts and called her a bitch. But since you’re in an impaired condition, I’m not going to wrap that bedpan around your head. That said, would you like to tell me something?”
    “I want one hundred grand. You’ll get everything your client needs. Tell the Indian what I said.”
    I stood at the window and looked out at the treetops and the old brick apartment houses along the streets. “Why would anyone want to pay you a hundred grand?” I said, my back turned to Charlie Ruggles.
    “Considering what’s on the table, that ain’t much to ask,” he replied.
    The personality and mind-set of men and women like Charlie Ruggles never changed, I thought. They believe their own experience and knowledge of events are of indispensable value and importance to others. The fact that their own lives are marked by failure of every kind, that their rodent’s-eye view of the world is repellent to any normal person, is totally lost upon them. “Hey, did you hear me?” he asked.
    “I don’t have one hundred grand. Neither does my client. If we did, we wouldn’t give it to you,” I replied.
    “Your client knows the people he can get it from. They’ll pay him just to go away.”
    “I don’t want to offend you, Ruggles, but are you retarded?”
    His facial expression remained dead, but his eyes were imbued with a mindless, liquid malevolence that I had seen only in condemned sociopaths who no longer had anything to lose. “Step over here and I’ll whisper a secret in your ear. Come on, don’t be afraid. You’re safe with me. I just want to tell you about a couple of liberal lawyers who got in my