Blood Land (25 page)

He avoided town and any of the primary roads. He had the element of surprise and he intended to keep it as long as possible. Clearly whoever opened that lockbox would have died—vaporized along with every shred of evidence that made the truth plausible. Ty would have already been tortured into telling Warren about the explosive trap, his carving of the numbers, and his assumption that Pruett had gotten to the box. Pruett hoped that meant Warren assumed his job had been accomplished for him, as to getting rid of the sheriff.

Pruett had made certain he wasn’t followed to the Whitefeather property. He also kept his wits about him and made certain there wasn’t anyone surveilling the Townsley property (although that required him hiding the Suburban down a secondary cabin driveway and hiking a mile of stealth approach through the trees and hillsides).

Once inside the cabin, Pruett’s cell phone chirped and he froze. He flipped it open and stared at it like he was the first man to discover fire. He silently cursed himself for shunning technology. He brought up the text-messaging screen, where there was an incoming message from J.W. Hanson’s cell number. He frowned when he read the message:

Changing meet. Saw two dark vehicles parked on your road, just sitting around. Lookouts. Can we meet at the Townsley cabin?

Pruett had no idea if text messages could be tapped or not

He replied:

Done. Make sure you’re not FOLLOWED.

Understood. Wendy’s at the hotel, napping. We’re good.

Pruett then dialed a different number on his phone. “Are you organized?” he said to the voice on the other end of the line.

After hearing what he needed, Pruett climbed back into the trees. His gut told him things had gone sour and the preferred vantage point was from above. But he checked his cell phone and had lost all but one lousy signal bar. If he had to give the go-ahead…

A black SUV that looked Government-issued eventually came rolling down the drive toward the Townsley cabin. He couldn’t see through the opaque windows but he now worried who might be inside. The timing was off. If things were off-schedule that meant anything was possible. It meant his gut was right and things had gone fiercely wrong.

Malcolm Whitefeather had given the sheriff a pair of M33 fragmentation grenades and a Claymore, the combination of which was meant to constitute Plan B. Of course there really was no Plan A. Pruett figured on working one out with Hanson, legal-like.

Plan B was one of the first things he learned in the Army. Their drill sergeant would say “Set up a perimeter of C4 and a couple of claymore tripwires for Plan B.”

Some scrotum-head would inevitably ask “what’s Plan A, Sarge?”

The DI’s answer was always the same: “Don’t have one yet, numb nuts. But blowin’ shit up is
always
Plan B. You bring Plan B to weddings, bar mitzvahs, and even the fucking ice cream social when we get in the shit. Got it, son?”

Pruett had no desire for the enacting of Plan B, especially if his daughter was amongst the passenger list of the big Expedition coming to a stop sixty yards away from his concealed position.

Pruett took a breath and willed his nervous system to throttle itself down. If Wendy was in that vehicle there could be no Plan B and that’s all there was to it. He looked down at his cell phone, moved it around for a better signal. He typed in the message, ready, just waiting for him to press ‘send’.

The doors to the vehicle below opened up and two tall, broad-shouldered men who could have been twins except one was dark-haired and the other a redhead stepped out of the driver door and a passenger door, same side. The twins were also clearly Government issue, bulges in their breasts and ankles. No other doors were opened and no one else showed their person.

“Come out, Sheriff,” Carrot-top shouted. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s not going to happen.”

Cocky bastards
, Pruett thought.
I’ll give ‘em that
. The sheriff moved quietly, trying to find a signal. And where was Hanson? In the Expedition? With his daughter?

Wendy was in that truck. Intuition told him it wasn’t Hanson who texted him. Hanson was dead. Or worse. Pruett’s world was unraveling.

For now he waited. Buying minutes only, he knew, but every minute would count from there on in.

Carrot-top motioned to the SUV. The other man opened a door, pulled down the middle seat, and yanked Wendy from the vehicle. Her hands were twist-tied in front of her and she looked terrified.

“You’re right here standing next to me in the next two minutes,” Carrot-top said, “or my partner puts one in the back of your daughter’s skull. I’m not kidding.”

Something in the way the man spoke reminded Pruett of men he’d met in the war. The kind of men who weren’t relieved when the war ended; the kind of men who immediately went looking for other work that suited their unique skills and desire to use them.

Agency men. Didn’t matter which three-letter acronym. The only thing that
did
matter to Pruett was that men like that didn’t know how to bluff.

“Coming down,” Pruett said from the trees. He pressed send and pocketed the phone, never really knowing if the crucial text made it out or not. He placed his hands on top of his head without being asked. It took him a few minutes to pick his way down through the sagebrush, rocks, and ground scrub.

“Good man,” Carrot-top said when Pruett reached him. “See, this whole thing can be done nice and organized. I sense you and I both appreciate organized, Sheriff.”

“Fuck you,” said Pruett.

Carrot-top clearly outranked his partner but he was too young to be the leader of the band. He said to his compatriot: “Zip-tie the sheriff. Nice and loose, no rough stuff. Just make sure he isn’t getting those meaty paws free. And get me his gun.” He kept the nine-millimeter trained on Pruett’s skull. The man knew cops wore standard issue Kevlar, even in the sticks.

The second man patted Pruett down, tossed his revolver to Carrot-top.

“The location is secure,” Carrot-top said loudly to the SUV.

This time Agent Warren slipped out from the middle of the vehicle. Steam-pressed. Gray hair that didn’t look premature but rather fabricated that way. A man who saw age not as a curse but an ally of time and knowledge and experience.

When he stood fully he was taller than Pruett, which Pruett had not noticed at their first meeting. Warren was more fit. The kind of man whose pounds were necessary—every one of them. When he walked toward the gathering his suit pants looked like they should crack with each step but instead were as silent as a cemetery. He stopped directly in front of Pruett, his face close enough for the sheriff to smell the bath soap the man had used that morning and the remnant lilt of a dissolved mint. The man smiled a smile that had cost him at least five figures.

“Sheriff,” he said, looking as if he thought about extending a manicured hand and then didn’t. The expression on his face said that he was a man who rarely touched other men even in the circumstance of polite tradition, much less strangers, or those men he saw as beneath himself. “Seems you were right. Things do indeed change.”

“Imagine my elation. Wendy, you all right?” Pruett said, ignoring the Fed.

Wendy nodded. “But Jay…” she began.

“Smart of you to get bits of the evidence to the lawyer,” Warren said. “Official document numbers; reference IDs, your friend in the Bureau. But we found him. He’s waiting in town for us—alive, but only until we can verify he didn’t have time to send the information elsewhere.”

“Fucking cowards,” Pruett breathed.

“Some don’t think of us—of the BLM—well, they don’t take us as seriously as some of the other government agencies. My predecessor,” Warren continued, “would say things like ‘well, we ain’t the FBI, but we’ll have to do, ma’am.’ Or ‘guess you were expecting the FeeBees. We’ll do our best.’”

“Let my daughter go. She’s got nothin’ to do with this,” Pruett said without confidence.

“She’s got everything to do with it,” Warren said. “Or else I wouldn’t have her here.”

“You’re doing your agency proud at the moment,” Pruett said.

“Things change as we get older, don’t you think?” Warren said.

“Things change, all right,” said Pruett. “But not the rules. Age doesn’t give us a right to disavow our oaths, sir. That much I believe.”

“I know your story,” Warren said. “Happens I liked the fact you turned down that medal. If nothing else it embarrassed the Army something fierce. That’s not why I liked the gesture, though. I had always hoped it was because you were more like me.”

“Come again?”

 “I thought you all should have been given a court-martial and put in prison for your collective treason.”

“Treason?”

“I thought you might be thinking the same thing. That men who didn’t follow orders didn’t deserve medals. But that wasn’t it. I knew the moment I looked in your eyes one afternoon on the television. One station or another was trying to get you to say something about your intentions, refusing such an honor.”

“I never talked to anyone about my reasons,” Pruett said. “Sure as hell ain’t going to bring ‘em up with you, here.”

“I was there. In My Lai. We were fighting against barbarians, Sheriff, no different than the Romans in Carthage and Germania,” Warren said. “Animals. We had our orders. We all did. You, too. Some of us followed them. Others took a different side.”

“
You
were there?”

“First Battalion, Eleventh Brigade, just like you. But I followed my orders as my training prepared me to do. Don’t worry, when this mess is discovered, the pieces put back together, I think most of your townsfolk will understand.”

“Understand?”

“Why you went mad.”

“All this for twenty million dollars,” said Pruett. “All these lives. This community. Are
we
the enemy too, sir? Isn’t this just treason for profit?”

“Twenty million? Is that what Tyree told you? For their properties, perhaps. Wyoming is a huge state. Several hundred million underground and everyone becomes the enemy.”

“Then you are no less a traitor than anyone else,” said Pruett.

“Maybe,” said Warren. He looked at his men. “Get the rest of them out of the truck.”

Cort and Honey climbed out of the vehicle of their own accord, son helping arthritic mother. It was always worse for her until she got moving. Ty was carried out by Carrot-top, manacled.

“So this is the plan,” Pruett said. “Murder and robbing the good people of this state of their money. You make me sick. I was glad to stop your kind in ‘Nam.”

“
My kind
, was embattled, sir. We were killing the enemy.”

“You were murdering then just as you’re murdering now. Women. Children.”

“Once a mind chooses to believe in the cause, age and gender are merely designations.”

“I’m proud of my country,” Pruett said. “Things like the Geneva Convention and rules of engagement. War tribunals. THAT is how we sort out the confusion. Is some eighteen-year-old German boy any more like Hitler than you or I or is
he
simply following orders? The jury and executioners are not humping gear out the jungle. We take prisoners. There are procedures.”

 “Perhaps we really are two different kinds of men,” said Warren.

“I’m nothing like you,” Pruett spat.

“You see women and children as something weaker, less capable of atrocity. I once witnessed a mother and daughter shred a Marine with a shoeshine box so horrifically there was nothing left with which his family could recognize him.” He gestured to Honey as she stepped around the front of the SUV.

“War is Hell,” said Pruett. “Ain’t never been happy with it, not on either side.”

“Your losses in this war are heavy.”

“What?” Pruett said, his eyes narrowed and steady.

“In the way you lost your wife. I would think defending the woman who planned the whole ordeal would be impossible even for a man such as you.”

Pruett looked over at Honey McIntyre, who was still too far away to hear the low voice of Warren.

“Shouldn’t have happened,” Pruett said. “Wrong place, bad timing.”

“Say I could prove to you otherwise?”

“What do you mean?”

“Agent Higgins, give me the sheriff’s revolver,” Warren said to his man.

Higgins wiped the gun clean and handed it to his superior.

“The whole plan—everything—was coming together perfectly,” Warren said. “But some people can’t stop. True evil is like skin—it is the largest organ in the human body and eventually it controls everything, right down to the smallest of actions.”

Special Agent Warren stepped up behind Honey McIntyre, who was looking at the trees, put the muzzle of Sheriff Pruett’s revolver against the back of her skull, and pulled the trigger without a moment’s hesitation.

“MOMMA,” Ty cried out as Carrot-top attempted to subdue him, using the side of the vehicle, but had to call out for his partner and the both of them wrestled Ty all the way to the ground before the shackled man was in their control once again.

The rest of the participants stood still, like a diorama of a scene that had either just finished or was just beginning to play out. Cort McIntyre’s eyes remained dreary and fixed on his boot tops the entire time.