Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set Read Free Page B

her toughness in particular, even though she was sometimes ambitious, but I could never guess which way her wind vane was about to blow.
    â€œLet’s see if I understand. I sent Wyatt Dixon up the road, but I’m responsible for the fact he’s on the street?” she said.
    â€œI didn’t say that,” I replied.
    â€œLook—” she began. She pinched her temples and got up from her chair and stood at the window. I heard her take a breath. “I screwed it up.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œFailure to disclose exculpatory evidence. A jailhouse gum ball claimed Dixon was shooting pool with him when the biker was killed. His only problem was he drooled when he was off his medication.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you give his statement to the defense?”
    â€œAn A.D.A. we later fired said he’d taken care of it. I forgot all about it. It was worthless information, anyway. But I got sandbagged on appeal,” she said.
    â€œGet Dixon for the burial of my wife.”
    â€œWe can’t prove he did it.”
    â€œYou’ve got his fall partner’s testimony.”
    â€œTerry Witherspoon’s? He died from AIDS in the prison infirmary last week.” She looked at the frustration in my face. Her expression softened. “You were a Texas Ranger?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHave days you miss it?” she asked.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œMontana isn’t the O.K. Corral anymore. If I were you, I wouldn’t listen to the wrong voices inside my head.”
    â€œBox up the psychobabble and ship it back to Marin County, Fay,” I said.
    â€œI grew up in Weed. So run your redneck shuck on somebody else, Billy Bob.”
    Lesson? Don’t mess with short women who have law degrees from Stanford.
    Â 
    THAT NIGHT THE SKY was black and bursting with stars above the valley where we lived, then clouds quaking with thunder moved across the moon and snow began to fall on the mountaintops, sticking on the ponderosa and fir trees that grew high up on the slopes. In my sleep I dreamed of small-arms fire in the dark, the running of booted feet, the smell of wet mesquite, scrub oak, burned gunpowder, and ponded water that had gone stagnant. In the dream I raised my revolver and fired at a man silhouetted against the sky, saw his arms reach out horizontally, then clutch the wound that burst like a rose from the top buttonhole on his shirt.
    Fay Harback had asked if I missed my career as a Texas Ranger. The truth was I had never left it. It returned to me at least every third night, in the form of my best friend’s accidental death down in Old Mexico.
    L. Q. Navarro had long ago forgiven me, as the priests at my church had. But absolution by both the living and the dead did not reach into my nocturnal hours. I woke at 3 A.M . and sat alone in the coldness of the living room, looking out at the moonlight that had broken through the clouds and at the caked snow steaming on the backs of my horses in the pasture.
    Just before dawn I fell asleep in the chair and did not wake until I heard Temple making breakfast in the kitchen.

Chapter 2
    JOHNNY AMERICAN HORSE’S dreams did not involve past events from his own life, guilt, erotic need, or even people or places he knew. His dreams were filled with birds and wild animals on alluvial moonscape, rivers and pink mesas he had never seen, herds of mustangs racing across a darkening plain forked by lightning. Sometimes the people in his dreams carried obsolete flintlocks, drove bison over cliffs, and sat by meat fires among cottonwoods whose leaves flickered like thousands of green butterflies.
    He told a bartender in Lonepine and one in Big Arm he’d dreamed where the grave of Crazy Horse was located, although no historian had ever been able to find it. He built a sweat lodge in the Swan Mountains and fasted and prayed on the banks of a creek that had been melted snow only the day before, and inserted himself at dawn, hot and