Blood Land (10 page)

“Ain’t Sheriff tonight,” Pruett said, pining hard for a shot of anything. He’d known he couldn’t afford for them to find alcohol in his system, whichever way this went. The twelve-hour lack of booze welled up inside him like a dry-heaving geyser and he put a boot into Ty’s ribs.

“AHHH, shit,” Ty shouted, curling into a fetal ball and grabbing his side.

“Came here to break a promise,” said James Pruett. “Sometimes a man’s got to, Ty, if he’s going to make things right.”

 “The fuck happen to yer skull,” Ty asked, looking up, squinting at the dried blood around Pruett’s wound.

“You attacked me when I was taking your food out.”

“Hell if I did,” said McIntyre.

“Oh, you did, Ty. Sure as you murdered my Bethy, you shoved me into the cell wall, stole the keys, and drove your sorry ass up here to beat trail into the wilderness.”

“Fuck that. Never stick, Sheriff. You had to drive my carcass up here. Cain’t explain that, I imagine.”

“Nope. Not unless your truck got here before me.”

Ty looked up, the puzzlement on his face evident in the moonlight.

Pruett continued. “Down in the parking lot. Seems after you worked me over, you broke into the locker and got your keys. The rest ain’t hard at all to figure.”

“You call the others?” Ty said.

“Funny thing,” Pruett said, standing now, gun pointed at Ty McIntyre’s head for the second time in as many months. “Radio in my Suburban got itself sabotaged. Seems you thought of everything before you broke yourself free.”

“Might as well get the thing over with,” Ty said.

“Need you on your feet,” Pruett said. “Can’t have any bullet trajectory theories chasin’ after me. Caught you on the run, as you probably guessed. I don’t suppose you’d mind getting to your feet. I’ll give you a little head start and…”

Ty rolled quick, three times, barreling into Pruett’s shins and toppling him so hard it reopened the cut on the big man’s forehead. Pruett hit the hard forest ground with a loud thud of dust and a pinecone struck him in the kidney. His hand was suddenly empty, pistol flying through space into the perimeter of night.

The old cowpoke kept bull rushing him, digging his boots into the ground, never giving Pruett the opportunity of space to get his bearings or an advantage. Soon the sheriff was flat on his back, Ty on top of him with iron legs holding Pruett’s ribs like he was a bronco. Then Ty’s fists went into a terrible windmill of punches, most connecting with the body as the sheriff turned his head away and down. One of Pruett’s arms was pinned, but when Ty slowed the barrage, the other reached for a thick branch and brought it straight into the side of Ty McIntyre’s head.

The force of the blow would have finished the fight in most men, but Ty McIntyre was a tough-as-turpentine, bull-riding cowboy. The branch did move his position off balance a little, though—Pruett could feel it—so the sheriff rolled
with
Ty’s body instead of against it. The sheriff felt the balance of power shift in his favor. He put his arm around Ty’s neck and tried to get him in a chokehold—Pruett’s only chance now against the younger, tougher opponent, but before he could lock up, Ty grabbed him by the shirt lapels, and used the force of gravity on the downhill portion of the forest floor to go into a backward somersault.

Pruett saw his world flip over and suddenly his opponent had those vise-like legs wrapped around his shoulders and neck. Ty then began squeezing the life out of Pruett. The sheriff struggled, swinging haymakers impotently through the cold night air, but as the velvety blackness washed in around the borders of his vision, Pruett stopped.

Kill or be killed.

Of the two outcomes, this one was the more honorable.

“It's dark and it's dreary

I ponder in vain

I'm weakened, I'm weary

My repentance is plain.”

Bob Dylan,

Beyond the Horizon

SHERIFF PRUETT awoke, not knowing where he was or quite remembering how he came to be lying on his side. Pain assaulted him from several angles, mostly bunched into his spine and twisting like a funnel cloud. He did not move right away—he was not sure he could or should. And as he lay there, the sharp cold of the night chewed through his uniform and jumpstarted his senses.

Disorientation drained from him slowly, replaced by a sick realization:

Ty had not killed him. The prisoner was now a fugitive—one with God knew how many hours head start. With a little luck, the trail of evidence Pruett left behind on McIntyre’s behalf might just keep the sheriff out of jail.

As Pruett tried to roll from his side on to his stomach, the pain seared him, racing up his back, spreading like tendrils through sinew and bone. When he finally got to his stomach, he did a pushup and tried to get his boots under him, but he only got one before the dizziness put him back down.

“Might want to stay down a bit,” Ty said, cracking the silence. He took a drag on a cigarette and blew the smoke into the black forest. “Hope you don’t mind, I snatched these from your truck up yonder.”

“Shit,” the sheriff said. “How long I been out?”

“An hour,” Ty said. “Maybe two.”

“You didn’t run?”

“No place to run from it, Sheriff. ‘Sides, I’ve had time to think—time with a thousand square miles of empty wilderness starin’ me in the face. Fightin’ you, that was all instinct. I ain’t never done nothin’
but
fight people and things my whole life. Other kids. Honey, my ma. Bulls. Don’t matter; they all had me fight ‘em at one time or another.

Not now. Not after what I done. This time I’m paying the piper outright. No more debts owed to the house.”

The two sat in silence for a while.

“I’d have killed you,” Pruett said. “If I was able, I mean.”

“I should’ve let you,” Ty said. Then a mean laugh leaked from his lungs. “Jesus, Pruett, you couldn’t ever have handled me. Not in your best days.”

Pruett said nothing. Everything hurt—his conscience most of all.

 “Didn’t know you smoked,” Ty said.

“I don’t,” Pruett said. “Melody, she can’t keep ‘em in her squad car, ‘case her boyfriend catches her in town for surprise lunches. She hides ‘em in my Suburban so she can sneak back to the courthouse every few hours.”

“Sounds like the lady has trust issues,” Ty said.

“We all have trust issues.”

“How we going to work this out, Sheriff?”

Pruett thought about it. Funny thing, the anger that consumed him before was gone. He felt stupid. Bethy would have hated what he’d done this night. “I guess that’s up to you, Ty.”

“Yeah, suppose so. Guessin’ if my lawyer got a bite of this he’d turn it into a pretty good mouthful.”

“Yep,” the sheriff said.

“Wouldn’t look too proper for you, though.”

“What I did was wrong. I’ll take my lumps,” Pruett said.

“Nah,” Ty said, standing up and offering the sheriff a hand. “It’s done. I told you, I ain’t runnin’ from this. Pretty much gave up that notion when I decided to stop off at the Willow Saloon. Knew you’d catch me there, Pruett.”

Back at the parking lot, Ty lit another.

“Guess I better drive my truck back down. We can play it all out the way you had it. ‘Cept you caught me ‘stead a killin’ me, that is.”

Pruett stood quietly in the darkness. “You could run, Ty. You know this wilderness as well as anyone around here, except for maybe Dirk.”

“Not runnin’,” Ty said.

“Well, if you are staying, I’ll see to it there aren’t any additional escape charges filed,” Pruett said.

“That’ll work.”

“We’ll leave your truck here. I can have Canter and Baptiste pick it up tomorrow. Be kind of hard to explain how it was I let you drive it back down.”

They climbed aboard the Suburban. Pruett didn’t use the handcuffs. On the way down, Ty spoke.

“I told you I wouldn’t say ‘sorry’ again, but that don’t mean I can stop feelin’ it, Pruett. Sis, she was the only person ever saw much good in me. Pretty sure she was wrong, but damn if it didn’t feel good to know you had someone like that in your corner.”

“She was a decent woman,” Pruett said. It still hurt him to refer to her in the past tense.

“We off the record?” Ty said.

“We left the record a few miles back, I’d say,” Pruett said.

“I meant to kill ‘em all that night,” Ty said. “Ma. Rance. Cort. It’s just what a man’s supposed to do when persons of low character try to rob him of his birthright.

That’s McIntyre land. All of it. Weren’t to be played like a goddamned hand of
poker
. Luck of the draw? Nossir. Got to be more honor in it than that. Ma shoulda knowed that much.”

“Pa, you mean.”

“Yep, pa…what’d I say?”

“So this about those gas rights, then?” the sheriff said.

“About more than that, Sheriff. It’s about family. Don’t have to love each other, just gotta believe in one for all. That kind of thing.”

“You try reasoning with them? Sober, I mean,” Pruett said.

“Oh, hell yes. Wouldn’t hear a word of it. My fucking old man. He’s worse’n me, tell you that right now. And my brothers? Better part a Rance and Cort ran down my momma’s leg.”

Pruett nodded in the blackness.

“You kill anyone in the war, Pruett?”

The sheriff thought about his answer. “Yeah, I killed some.”

“It more right, you shooting some poor Charlie a hundred thousand miles away in some God-forsaken jungle? More right’n me shooting someone who’s
blood
, considerin’ they stole my family inheritance?”

“It was the wrong blood that got spilled, Ty.”

“Goddamn it, Pruett, I never meant to harm a hair on little Bethy’s head.”

“I believe you,” the sheriff said. “I know you never meant to hurt her. Look, your issue isn’t with me anymore, Ty. What you did is murder in the first. The law doesn’t care what you intended, or your reasons for doing it. It doesn’t matter that I killed some gooks halfway around the world and it doesn’t matter you didn’t mean for it to be Bethy.”

“Don’t matter,” said Ty. “I’m tellin’ my lawyer to plead me guilty in the morning.”

After putting Ty back in his cell, Pruett tried to clean himself up. He decided not to call anyone in. Were the situation to have played out as the evidence suggested, Pruett would have handled it alone anyway. He wiped up the blood and tried to disguise the extent of his injuries. Make it look like Ty got the worst of it. Jorgensen would want to tack on the assault and attempted escape charges, so Pruett needed to make sure he kept the drama to a minimum.

He didn’t feel tough anymore, nor was there courage seething in his veins. He felt foolish, and it wasn’t a feeling cared for.

Revenge. It’s a word most have thought about at least once in their lives. But when Sheriff James Pruett swore his oath he was supposed to have risen above things like revenge and drama and savageness; he was supposed to uphold justice and honor and dignity—and most of all he was supposed to follow due process.

He’d done none of those things since Bethy was shot and killed. Oh he didn’t always fail on the external, like tonight, taking a prisoner north into the wilderness to murder him for what he was
alleged
to have done to the sheriff’s wife. Many of his failures were on the inside where no one could see them.

Pruett knew that’s how most people lived, though few would admit it.

He pulled the bottle of whiskey from the lower desk drawer—an old bottle of Rebel Yell he’d gotten as a gift for one holiday or another, before he sobered up those dozen years. It was still half-full. He’d always left it in there, figuring his refusal to reach for it meant something back in the day. It probably did. Then. Now he just needed a drink. Nothing more complicated than that.

He wiped clean the inside of a coffee cup with a paper towel and poured it half full of the cheap booze. Price or quality meant nothing to a drunk. All he cared was that it was proofed enough to chisel the edges of the shame he felt, born of the foolishness of a lawman that lost his way.

As he drank the warm medicine for his soul he realized in all the years, sober or drunk, booze never made him feel ashamed. It was Wyoming. People drank. Since before the prairies were won—ripped away from those who owned them first—alcohol was always at hand.

Many felt that was still the way the government kept Native Americans in line on the reservations, by keeping them stocked with cheap liquor and nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Pruett could attest to the feral waste such a combination could wage across a man’s will. Words like nowhere and nothing ate away at a person; ate away at him until he wasn’t the same in the mirror in the mornings; gnawed at every part of him until all he wanted to do was drown himself in the misery and the booze.

He finished off the cup and put the bottle away. He suddenly felt like being at home; the home he and his wife had built together with their own hands, just as in the days of the old land—just as generations had done before them.

He wanted to be where the memory of his dead wife waited to cocoon him in a false sense that he could finally kick the habit for good, that everything would work out, justice would be served, and the world would then, for him anyway, stop spinning.