Chapter 14

DURING THE NEXT few days the federal and county investigations into the murder of Seth Masterson produced evidence that seemed to aim at only one conclusion: Johnny American Horse’s odyssey into the Garden of Gethsemane was just beginning.

The AR-15, the civilian equivalent of the military-issue M-16 rifle Darrel McComb had found on the hillside, was stenciled with Johnny American Horse’s fingerprints. In addition, the call made to Seth Masterson’s cell phone, supposedly by Amber, was traced back to Johnny’s house. There was another problem, too-Johnny had no alibi.

He claimed to have been building a chimney of river stones for a rancher, up the Blackfoot, at the time of Seth’s murder. But he had been working by himself and he could provide no witness to corroborate his story. His explanation about the presence of his fingerprints on the AR-15 presented other complications. Johnny told both the FBI and the investigators from the sheriff’s department of the man who had tried to sell him an AR-15 out of a panel truck. But the two boys who worked for him could not identify the kind of rifle Johnny had been handed by the driver of the truck, and neither of them remembered Johnny picking up an ejected shell from the dirt, which was the only explanation-provided Johnny was innocent-for the fact that a latent on a.223 cartridge fired from the murder weapon was Johnny’s.

By Wednesday of the following week he had been questioned at least five times by federal agents. He came into my office just before noon, wearing frayed jeans and a black shirt with silver stripes in it, his coned-up straw hat clenched in his hand, his face pinched with anger.

“You okay?” I said.

“Two agents just rousted me in front of the courthouse. I told this one guy he puts his hand on me again, he’ll wish he stayed in college.”

“You told that to an FBI agent?”

“I don’t know who he was. Just get them away from me.”

“Make a stop at the watering hole this morning?”

“So what?”

“It’s what your enemies want you to do, Johnny. If you want to really tie the ribbon on the box, punch out a federal agent.”

“I told them the truth. A guy tried to sell me the AR-15. Somebody got in my house and used my phone to set up this guy Masterson. These guys can’t figure that out? Nobody’s that stupid.”

“You’re not under arrest. That means they haven’t reached any conclusions. Give them a break. Maybe they’ll surprise you.”

Wrong words. “Why would I kill an FBI agent in my own house? What if Amber had been there? She’d probably be dead too,” he said.

“Sit down,” I said.

He started to argue again, his eyes hot, a smell like fermented fruit on his breath. But I cut him off. “All this goes back to that research lab Amber and your friends broke into,” I said. “Seth Masterson went to your house to try to persuade you and Amber to give up the computer files that were stolen from Global Research. It cost him his life.”

“I can’t help that,” he replied.

I could feel my own temper rising now. “We’ll talk later,” I said.

“You ever see photographs of Saddam Hussein’s mustard gas attacks on the Kurds back in eighty-eight? Our government armed that motherfucker.”

“I’m not making the connections here, but I think you’re charging at windmills, partner,” I said.

“Tell that to the friends of mine who were killed in Iraq.”

“Seth was my friend, Johnny. He died trying to help you. But I don’t think you’re hearing that.”

He wiped at his nose with the backs of his fingers, his eyes narrowing. “Nobody cares,” he said.

“Cares about what?”

“What they’re doing to the earth, what they’re doing to the human race, what they’ve done to Indian people for three hundred years. You don’t see it, Billy Bob. In your way you’re part of it.”

“I think I’ve had about all of this I can take in one day,” I said.

“I’m letting you off the hook on my bond. A couple of tribal bail bondsmen are taking it over.”

“That’s the way you want it?” I said.

“Yeah, that’s the way I want it,” he said.

“Maybe you should seek other counsel while you’re at it.”

“Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” he said.

“Vaya con Dios,” I said.

IT HAD BEEN a bad way to end a conversation with a man whose causes I admired. But Temple and I had put up our ranch as surety for Johnny’s bond, and his cavalier and ungrateful attitude about the risk we had incurred made me wonder about my own sanity. I also wondered if I had become one of those people who needed to hurt both himself and his family in order to convince himself of his own integrity.

Maybe it was time to make a clean break with Johnny and his ongoing self-immolation. I told that to Temple at lunch. “Giving up on water-walkers?” she said.

“I didn’t say he was a water-walker.”

“Yeah, you did. That’s why you won’t let go of him, either.”

“Watch me,” I said.

She chewed a piece of salad, raised her eyebrows, and looked innocently out the window.

BUT JOHNNY WASN’T the only person for whom events were going out of control. Darrel McComb had to explain why he was following an FBI agent when supposedly he was pursuing a lead on the two men who had assaulted Wyatt Dixon. He also had to explain how he had gotten involved in a firefight, one that had left the agent dead, without calling for backup. Instead of being cited for bravery, he received a formal letter of reprimand in his jacket. He was also put on the desk until Internal Affairs concluded an investigation into the shooting.

But oddly enough, his receiving recrimination rather than commendation seemed to lift a burden from him. I saw him in front of the drugstore on West Broadway that afternoon, eating from a bag of lemon drops while he gazed at a pair of hang gliders floating on the windstream above Mount Sentinel.

“Sorry about your bud,” he said.

I nodded and didn’t reply.

“Take a lesson from me, Holland,” he continued. “If you work your heart out for the G, if you hump a sixty-pound pack and an M-60 in a hundred-degree jungle with ants crawling inside your skivvies, if you’re a good cop who has to get by on speed and booze because broken glass is chewing up your guts, you eventually come to a philosophic conclusion about the realities of life out there in Bongo-Bongo Land: We’re not only expendable, we’re the people nobody even wants to hear about.” He smiled and cracked a lemon drop between his molars.

“You mean nobody cares?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“It’s funny you put it that way, because Johnny American Horse told me the same thing today.”

“I got news for American Horse. He’s going down for Masterson’s homicide. A done deal, my man.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“They’ve got the weapon, his latents, a phone call to Masterson originating at his house, and his lifetime record of throwing buffalo shit through window fans. You don’t believe the U.S. attorney is going to run a meat hook through both of this guy’s buns? Wow, why would they do a terrible thing like that?” He laughed out loud.

AFTER THE RAIN and heavy snowmelt in the spring, the weather had turned dry and hot, and fires had started to burn in Idaho. As I drove home from work that evening, the sky was hazy with dust and smelled of smoke, and freshly exposed rocks along Lolo Creek were white and webbed with river trash and the scales of dead insects. When I turned up the road that led to our ranch, locusts flew in clouds from the knapweed in the ditches and the normally beautiful evening seemed as stricken and poisonous as my thoughts.

I wanted to be gone from Johnny for many reasons-his messianic attitudes and his indictment of me as a white person being only a couple of them. From a legal and professional point of view, I was entirely justified in letting him go. I believed Johnny was knowledgeable about what could be considered an ongoing criminal conspiracy involving his wife and the Indians who had broken into Global Research. In the eyes of the Department of Justice these were ecoterrorists, and, as such, short shrift would be given them by the Office of Homeland Security. As an officer of the court, I had ethical obligations with which Johnny was not concerned.