Blood Land (18 page)

He grabbed the keys to the county Suburban and drove toward the northeast of town and Green River Mesa Road, where Dirk McIntyre owned a small piece of property that backed up to Pine Creek.

The driveway down into the front yard had been swallowed up by willow branches over the years and they whipped the side of Pruett’s truck as he wobbled down the half-washed-out road onto the property.

Dirk’s yellow and white Chevy pickup was parked out front. The yard was scattered with junk—an old, rusted riding lawnmower that looked as if it hadn’t been ridden in a dozen summers; at least two cases’ worth of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans; also every kind of tire known to mankind.

The shades were pulled and the front door locked. Pruett knocked. Several times. Banged on the door with the heel of his hand, even. There was no answer.

Pruett went around back. He could hardly hear himself think with the creek roaring by just ten or twenty yards away. The back door was locked, too. Pruett thought of Shelly Delgado, lying dead twelve hours in the sticky slop of her own blood.

Shelly Delgado hadn’t been a suspect in his wife’s murder, though. If Pruett broke in and found something useful, it wouldn’t be admissible. Even in the tiny town of Wind River, Wyoming, the days of kangaroo courts and vigilante justice were long gone. The county sheriff couldn’t kick down a door any more legally than the next man or woman.

Pruett walked down toward Pine Creek, thinking maybe he could find a branch and put it through the window in Dirk’s back door. There had been some hellacious windstorms the night before. If Dirk was not home, or even if he was sleeping the sleep of the inebriated, Pruett could leave the branch and no one would be the wiser. If he found something he’d just have to figure a way to get a search warrant. Pruett couldn’t afford to leave now and wait. Things were moving too fast.

Rummaging through the willow branches near the water’s edge, he saw the cowboy boot sticking partway out of the water. Pruett knelt down and then saw the frayed end of a pair of jeans and the white, fish-colored leg inside one. Nine tenths of the body was submerged. It looked as if someone had tied off the body like a string of fish—staked the heavy chain real deep in the ground, secured it around the leg, and then just let the current keep the line taut and the body submerged by whitewater. The icy river would stave off decomposition and the smell that went with it for weeks, maybe even months. In fact, Pruett guessed, the flesh would wash off the leg and release the body first—someone would find the corpse long before anyone smelled it.

Clearly Rory, Rance, or Cort—or some combination of those greedy players—had killed Dirk.

Occam’s razor.

Simplest theory first.

Pruett pulled his cell phone and called his team.

“Billy Mack

is a detective down in Texas.

You know he knows just exactly

what the facts is.

He ain't gonna let those two

escape justice.

He makes his livin' off of the

people's taxes.”

Steve Miller Band,

Take the Money and Run

THE BODY they fished out of the river was Dirk McIntyre’s. He had suffered mightily before the killer—or killers—finished him off. There were lacerations crisscrossing the ex-cowpoke’s wide, muscular back as if he’d been whipped over and again.

“Someone was trying awful hard to get information out of that boy,” Pruett said. He had invited J.W. Hanson to meet him at the Wooden Boot.

“And you think you know what information that is?” said Hanson.

“Not exactly. But I have an idea where to start.”

“Ty didn’t react at all to the news. My client has piss in his veins.”

“Not surprising,” the sheriff said. “You’ve known him a few weeks. No one in this town would be hoping for a Hallmark moment with Ty McIntyre.”

“Fair enough.”

“My guess? Ty’s been punishing himself enough on the inside. More than we can know.”

“And if you believe in Heaven and Hell, then there just might be a further reckoning,” J.W. Hanson said.

Sheriff Pruett sipped on his bourbon while Waylon Jennings warbled from the dilapidated jukebox at the Wooden Boot’s door. “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe in ‘em. I think all the reckoning we get is right here in front of us, every day.”

“I thought you quit the drink,” Hanson said.

“I did. Then I started it again.”

“Never begrudge a man the pleasures of the flesh.”

“You sure are a mouthy one.”

“It’s the lawyer in me. You know what a pack of shitbags we are.”

“That I do.”

Hanson smiled and called for another round. “My client tells me you came to see him—that it was
you
that wanted to tell him personally about Dirk.”

“What I wanted,” Pruett said, “is for him to come clean now that his accomplice is dead.”

“Like I said, he’s not talking. Not even to me.”

“I asked you here for a favor,” Pruett said.

“Let’s hear it.”

“I want you to ask my daughter to speak with him.”

Hanson sipped his own drink, weighing the request. “Why wouldn’t you ask her yourself?”

“Our relationship just started back on the mend. I don’t want her thinking I’m interfering.”

“But asking me to do it, that doesn’t qualify?”

“Not if she doesn’t know I asked.”

“Message received. And I’ll say yes, but for one reason only: it is in the best interest of my client to tell the whole story. If you think Wendy can convince him, then it’s worth a try.”

“Thanks,” Pruett said as the new drinks arrived. “Put this round on me.”

Deputy Baptiste walked Wendy back to the jail.

“Been a while since I seen you around here,” Baptiste said.

“I’ve sort of kept away.”

“My family is still on the reservation. All but a brother, and he died. I don’t visit home all that much.”

“Some of your family worked on our property once.”

“Many, many years ago.”

“I don’t remember them,” Wendy said. “My father told me.”

“We’re even then. I don’t remember ‘em either.”

Wendy’s uncle was sitting up on the tussled blanket of the cot, reading a Louis L’Amour paperback, an author who he stated on several occasions he did not cater to. Sheriff Pruett kept an old stack of them for the prisoners.

“Hi, Uncle Ty.”

“Darlin’,” Ty said and stood slowly, rubbing his corded back muscles. “Sorry for the mess. The accommodations leave a bundle to be desired.”

He met her at the bars and put his arms out to hug her. “Not exactly tickled for you to see me like this,” he said.

“I’ve seen you like this before.”

“Yeah. Growin’ up all those years, your father bein’ sheriff, I guess you have. Damn good to see you, girl. I owe ya a debt of thanks for findin’ me a lawyer, too.”

“You don’t owe me anything. He’s really good. And…”

“You don’t have to say more, young ‘un. I knowed the first time he talked about you that the two of you was in love.”

“What makes you think
that
,” Wendy said, red flushing her cheekbones as a balloon fills with air.

“Fellas git this funny look on their face when they talk about their own gal. I seen it on the professor. More’n once.”

“I’m not sure it’s love,” Wendy said.

“Don’t matter.”

“So you know, he took the case because he wants to help you; because he believes in you.”

“Don’t matter neither.”

“I’m sorry about Dirk,” Wendy said.

“Me, too. We weren’t brothers much anymore—wasn’t no secret how I felt about him. But that don’t mean I appreciate it when family turns on its own.”

“Did someone turn on him?”

“Clearly.”

“Family, I mean.”

“Don’t have a say on that,” Ty said.

“I came here because I think it’s important that you tell your attorney what really happened that night when Mom died.”

“Then you wasted a trip, baby girl. I’ve said all I’m gonna.”

“Sheriff Pruett will be going after the people that killed Dirk. You could help him by giving him the whole truth, Uncle Ty.”

“Dirk got his own self killed.”

“Did Pruett tell you what the killers did to him?” Wendy said.

“Found him in the river, the sheriff said. Guessin’ he drowned.”

“It was worse than that. Whoever killed him was looking for answers.”

“What did they do?”

Wendy told Ty what his brother’s body looked like when it was pulled from the river. She shared with him the gruesome specifics of Scoot’s autopsy. Ty sat back on his cot, drained of all tenaciousness.

“They whipped him,” Ty said. “Like a fucking
animal
those bastards
whipped him
.”

Wendy nodded solemnly.

“I guess there’s a reckoning due.”

“Was it Rory?” Wendy said.

“Weren’t Rory,” Ty said. “It was mother. Whatever those bastards did to Dirk, Honey McIntyre ordered it done.”

“I'm a child, I'm a mother

I'm a sinner, I'm a saint

I do not feel ashamed

I'm your hell, I'm your dream

I'm nothing in between”

Alanis Morissette,
I’m a Bitch

PRUETT SAT in thundering silence. They’d known Ty was protecting someone. In his mind the sheriff could see Honey holding Bethy in her lap, stroking her hair as she had a hundred times before. Her baby. Her little girl.

“Why would he say that?” Hanson said.

“Because he meant it,” said Wendy. “What I mean is, he’d never make up something like that.”

Pruett still said nothing. Even if Honey McIntyre was conspiring whatever was happening in his town, she wasn’t the murderer. There was no way she held the whip.

“Is Ty ready to talk about who did the killing?” Pruett finally said.

“He said he would only talk to you,” Wendy told him.

“Only to me…”

“Says he owes it to you.”

“I need to talk to you first, Wendy,” Pruett said.

“You’ve never called me that.”

“It’s your name, ain’t it? Can we walk to the park?” Pruett said.

“Let’s go.”

Pruett and his daughter sat on the bench; the same bench where he’d sat not long ago and held her close to him, remembering when she was a little baby, how perfect he believed their love would always be.

“Things are getting dangerous around here,” he said. “I’ve never been afraid of my duty, or shirked it, and I never will, but I
do
fear there are things going on that we hadn’t thought of; things that might be more than a small county sheriff’s department can handle.”

“Things you can share with me?” Wendy said.

“Things I’d rather not. For your own safety.”

“I get it,” she said, and put her hand in his.

“Before this goes any further—before anything happens—I wanted to have this talk with you,” the sheriff said. “And I want to do it sober. You deserve
at least
that much from me.”

“I don’t like the way you’re talking.”

“I don’t like what’s happening in this town. I know who I
can
rely on. Problem is, I am not exactly sure who I
can’t.
”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Pruett looked skyward. He was avoiding what he really wanted to say to her.

“Things are going to get worse around here,” he said. “Not what you’d call normal small town worse. If anything should happen, there’re things we’ve still left unsaid.”

“Sheriff…”

“Wendy, I know why you hated me all those years.”

“I never hated you.”

“Fair enough. Then I know why you stayed away.”

“I don’t think you do,” she said. “I’m not sure I know those answers anymore. You know how things build up inside a person? It gets to the point where you can’t blame only one side or the other. The silence—not giving you a chance to know what I was feeling inside. I played my part.”

Pruett squeezed her hand tighter. “For a long time I thought the deck was so stacked against us we’d never find solid ground again,” he said. “Vietnam, that damned medal I didn’t deserve, the affair. And the election…”

Wendy looked up into his eyes.

“Yeah, girl, I know. At least I know now. Back then, I guess I looked at it in a different way. As if I could pretend I was something—some
one
—different than who I was.”

“That’s just it,” Wendy said. “There is nothing about you—least of all the color of your skin—that makes you less a man than anyone in this town.”

“I never felt less of a man. Never. Growing up black in a town like Wind River, well, there are going to be challenges. And you figure out that you deal with those challenges by either fighting them every chance you get or by not giving them any heed. I just chose to make it go away by ignoring it—by letting the people of this town voice their acknowledgement of me as a man—not a man of color, but as
their sheriff
—by the vote.”

“I know that now,” she said softly.

 Pruett turned to her but he was looking at a place far from where they sat. “I know you needed me to defend myself. And not just you. Bethy. My lineage. Not just for what it meant to me, Sheriff James Pruett. I know now that was selfish.”

“You want to hear something that will surprise you?” Wendy said.

Pruett nodded his head.

“It was the first time in my life that I ever felt we were different.”

Pruett was reelected his first three additional terms. In fact, he was unopposed in all but the first election, when he won his Sheriff’s badge. In the fourth reelection, however, a rancher named Percy Villines announced his candidacy.

The campaign, it got heated. And dirty.

James Pruett knew his family—young and old—went against everything most small western towns considered “normal”. But there, in his town—his
ancestors’
town—he’d never really felt out of place. There were times. Times when families like the McIntyres, in fact, made it known in somewhat covert terms that they didn’t ever really accept, deep down, that a black family could be pioneers and landowners in a western town.

But the Pruetts had been in Wind River before it even had a name. When it was nothing but prairies, mountains, and people with the courage and determination to stay alive. They’d stuck it out. Made a life for themselves just like any other family.

And generations later, when James Pruett—only a child—fell in love with Bethy McIntyre, even one of the meanest, most racist families in the township could not stop them from being together.

That wasn’t enough for James Pruett, though. He had wanted to prove to the McIntyres and to any other family that harbored secret, deep-rooted, unacceptable beliefs that a black man
could
be elected sheriff in a Wyoming town, that they were wrong.

And he had won his first election by a landslide. Wind River loved James Pruett and it had nothing to do with the color of his skin. Even the McIntyres had eventually accepted his presence in their lives, if only for the merit of his heart and the quality of man he was.

Then, in the fourth term of Sheriff James Pruett’s office, Percy Villines took it upon himself to try and rally those old school men and women in the county—families like the McIntyres, and the Holcombs, and at least a few others.

Villines called out Pruett’s record, which he defended.

The candidate said it was time for a change, and Pruett told the town it wasn’t; told them he’d serve them as he had
always
served them.

Percy Villines then used his platform to get people to speak up. He said a black man had no place being the Sheriff of Sublette County; that the good people of Wind River could not place their
trust
in a man like James Pruett. Villines said the fact that the Pruett family was even allowed to stake claim to land in the territory had always been an injustice, and a permanent blight on their community. He commented, too, on Pruett’s mixed marriage, making deep innuendos that the sheriff’s family was a disgrace and Villines was taking it upon himself to be the one to say so; the one to try and make things right.

James Pruett refused to comment on the accusations. In truth, he never had to. The residents of the county spoke their minds in the vote. Never before had any elected official in the state (or maybe anywhere else in the country) won an election by the margin Sheriff James Pruett defeated Percy Villines. The challenger received exactly three votes. Presumably himself, his wife, and his eldest son. Whether the McIntyres or the Holcombs ever voted would never be known, but they did not vote
against
Pruett, and that made a statement, too.

A week after the election—after more than a few death threats—the Villines ranch house and every building on the property were burned to the ground while the family watched in horror. They left town the next morning and Pruett went on being sheriff. The debris of the Villines ranch was cleared away, the land auctioned to the highest bidder.

“Baby,” Pruett said, holding his daughter tight in his grip. “I never meant to hurt you. I always believed the burden was mine. My ancestors. But I know now I let you and your mother down. I refused to lower myself, to even acknowledge that there was anything to talk about when it came to such accusations. But I owed it to you and Bethy to defend what was
ours
. I needed to defend our
family
; I needed to defend you, dear girl.”

Wendy continued to cry.

Pruett held her, his own eyes swelled and tired. So tired. “I didn’t defend our honor. And for that, I will never forgive myself. I never have,” he said.

Wendy pulled away. She stared him in the eyes.

“
You
were the one who was right. I’m the one who needs forgiveness. And I’ll never get it, not from my mother, maybe not from you…”

“I think we forgave each other, don’t you?” Pruett said, and smiled wide for the first time since Bethy died. “We’ve got each other now. And your mother forgave you the moment you walked out the door. It was me kept the feud alive. My pride kept us apart.”

“The same God-awful pride I inherited from you,” Wendy said, and laughed softly.

The two of them held each other again, and the warmth that enveloped Pruett made him wonder if God really had forgiven him his sins.

Ty faced Pruett down through the bars of his cell. Pruett thought back to the night he’d tried to kill the prisoner. What if he had succeeded? It just proved to him that things were never, ever what they seemed.