Tyranny

by William W. Johnstone

  He couldn’t just lie there and allow Vern to beat him senseless, though. As feeling started to return to his muscles, he kicked high with his right leg and brought it around in front of Vern’s neck, then used it to lever the bigger man off him.

  Vern sprawled in the aisle and couldn’t get up because the soda bottles kept rolling under him. All the caps had stayed on, preventing the drink from spilling. A triumph of modern consumer engineering, Kyle thought fleetingly as he rolled, got his hands under him, and pushed himself up to his knees.

  At that same moment, Vern began to recover as well and kicked the plastic bottles aside so he could get to his feet. He grabbed one of the bottles by the neck and swung it at Kyle’s head.

  Full of drink like that, even a plastic bottle could deliver quite a wallop, and Kyle’s skull had suffered enough punishment today. He ducked under the sweeping blow and launched himself at Vern in a diving tackle.

  This time it was Kyle who landed on top as he caught Vern around the midsection and drove him over backwards.

  Unlike Vern’s wild, flailing blows, however, the punches Kyle threw while he had the advantage were short, sharp, and precise. He chopped away at Vern’s face with his fists, and blood began to fly from the cuts his knuckles opened.

  “Get off of him!” a man’s voice shouted from somewhere nearby. “Get off of him now!”

  The words barely registered on Kyle’s brain, which was filled with the sort of blinding rage that had always been a problem for him. When he got caught up in a fight, he couldn’t think straight and everything else in the world seemed to go away except the punishment he was handing out to his opponent.

  But then he heard Stella scream, “Steve, no!” and turned his head enough to glance over his shoulder.

  He spotted the cop who’d been at the fast food counter a few minutes earlier. The uniformed man stood about ten feet from him now, aiming something at him. It wasn’t a service revolver, Kyle thought, but some other sort of weapon....

  The small part of his brain that was still rational recognized the thing in the cop’s hands as a stun gun. He opened his mouth to tell the officer not to shoot, but it was too late.

  The cop pressed the button on the top of the stun gun, and with a whoosh! of compressed air the two sharp prongs and the attached electrical wires trailing behind them exploded from the end of the weapon.

  Kyle barely had time to feel the twin stings as the prongs penetrated his shirt and lodged in his skin before the surge of current hit him like the proverbial ton of bricks.

  He went over backwards as his mouth opened to scream. No sound came from his throat, though, because his vocal cords were locked up like the rest of his muscles from the electrical charge flowing through his body. All he could do was lie there helplessly and twitch.

  The shock didn’t last all that long, but when it was over, Kyle couldn’t move, couldn’t put up any sort of fight as the cop rolled him over and jerked plastic restraints around his wrists. His vision was blurry, but he could make out Vern lying on the floor a few feet away, gasping and sobbing.

  But Vern wasn’t being arrested, Kyle thought. No, he was the one who’d been Tased, the one being taken into custody.

  That wasn’t too surprising, actually. Vern, at least, was a local. Kyle had visited Sierra Lobo many times in the past, but to this cop, at least, he was a total stranger.

  No wonder he was going to be blamed for the trouble. No wonder he was going to jail for something that wasn’t really his fault.

  It wasn’t like this would be the first time for that to happen, he thought bitterly as the officer hauled him upright and held him there as his rubbery legs tried to fold up underneath him.

  Chapter 6

  Miranda quickly scanned the letter that Brannock gave to her. She’d always had the ability to read quickly and comprehend and retain what she’d read, a skill that came in handy when she’d honed it even more during law school. She could wade through the assigned reading and make sense of it in half the time of most of her fellow students.

  Now she saw that the old rancher was right. The tone of this letter from the government was definitely threatening.

  “I don’t understand this,” she said. “Well, I understand it, of course, but I don’t know why they sent it to you. We’ve appealed the auditor’s decision, and they’re supposed to allow time for that appeal to be considered before they take any further action against you.”

  Brannock pointed at the letter and said, “Yeah, but that says they’re gonna take my ranch if they don’t get their dadgum $380,000, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s what it says, all right,” Miranda replied with a sigh. “But it doesn’t make any sense. We’ve demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that you don’t owe those back taxes. In fact, if anything the IRS probably owes you a small refund. All they have to do is look at all the documentation we assembled and it’ll be obvious that they’re in the wrong.”

  “You know that and I know that, but that auditor fella we talked to in El Paso was bound and determined not to admit it, wasn’t he?”

  Miranda shrugged and said, “Well, of course he was going to be stubborn about it. That’s what they’re trained to do: stonewall and deny doing anything wrong. The taxpayer is always presumed to be guilty, and you not only have to prove your innocence, you sometimes have to do it two or three different ways before you explain it to them in a way they’re willing to admit might be right. So I fully expected that the audit would go against you. I’m confident you’ll win on appeal, though.”

  “Not if they don’t give me a chance to. And if they go ahead and take this ranch away from me, what do you reckon the chances are they’ll ever admit they made a mistake and give it back to me?”

  Miranda’s face was grim as she said, “Slim to none. And they’d just tie the case up in court for so long that you’d bankrupt yourself trying to prove them wrong.”

  “That wouldn’t take much.” Brannock’s face was equally bleak. “I’ve never had a lot of cash, just this ranch. Without it . . . well, I won’t be able to put up much of a fight. It might take me years to pay off just what I owe you.”

  Miranda shook her head and said, “Don’t worry about that right now. I’m certainly not going to.” She paused. “There’s no way you can come up with, say, ten percent of what they say you owe? That might be enough to put them off for a while, and you can always try to recover it later.”

  “Thirty-eight grand is just as impossible for me as the whole shootin’ match would be,” Brannock said. “I just don’t have it. I might be able to raise it by sellin’ off some of the spread. . . .” The pain in his voice made it clear just how much he didn’t want to take that drastic step. “But they won’t even let me do that. The whole property is frozen, accordin’ to the letter.”

  “Yes, you wouldn’t be allowed to dispose of any holdings. Why should they let you do that when they can just seize everything and have it all?”

  “Bunch’a damn pirates, if you ask me.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me, G.W. This is just about the most blatant thing I’ve ever seen, though, even from the IRS.” Miranda drew in a deep breath. “Don’t give up, though. I’ve got a few days to try to come up with a strategy to block this—”

  Before she could say anything else, Brannock’s phone rang inside the old ranch house, its shrill summons easily heard through the screen door.

  “Hold on a minute,” Brannock said. He disappeared inside as he waved a hand at the wicker rocking chairs and added, “Have a seat.”

  Miranda sat down in one of the rockers. In the shade of the porch, with a little breeze blowing, the temperature was warm but not uncomfortable.

  Miranda had grown up in the Florida Panhandle, so she was used to heat. It had taken her a while to become accustomed to the low humidity out here in West Texas, though.

  She had never figured she would wind up in a place like Sierra Lobo, but it was a long, long way from the painful
breakup that had prompted her to leave Florida in the first place. She had started driving west and, except for sleeping in anonymous motels, had stayed on the road until she gave in to a whim and stopped in the little town.

  The first thing she’d seen was a sign on a building that read OFFICE SPACE FOR RENT, and she had said to herself, why the hell not?

  It had taken a while to get licensed to practice law in Texas, and, of course, any new practice was slow to get started, but she’d advertised in the local newspaper and gradually she had taken on a few clients, including G.W. Brannock.

  It wasn’t a bad life, and Sierra Lobo was as good a place to hide out from the world as any.

  Unfortunately for G.W., there was no hiding from the federal government, especially the IRS.

  The screen door banged behind the old rancher as he came out of the house looking upset.

  “We’ll have to talk about this later,” he told Miranda. “I got to go into town.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That call was the police chief. They’ve got my grandson locked up, and I got to go get him out.”

  Chapter 7

  As jails went, the one in Sierra Lobo wasn’t too bad, Kyle thought as he sat on the bunk with its thin mattress and single blanket. He had certainly been in worse.

  He rolled his shoulders and stretched his arms and massaged his legs. His muscles still ached from the spasming they’d done as a result of the stun gun charge, and he didn’t want them to stiffen up.

  He looked around the cell and reflected idly that whatever company manufactured the ugly, institutional green paint that covered the cinder block walls, they must be making a fortune, he reflected. Every jail cell he’d ever been in had been painted that same shade.

  If that was true, it was probably one of the few companies in the country that was still vibrant and healthy, since the vaunted “economic recovery” a couple of presidential administrations earlier had turned out to be nothing but an apparently endless cycle of recessions that were propped up artificially by the government to give the lapdog pundits in the mainstream media something good to say about their Democrat masters before the inevitable spiral began again.

  Each round left the country worse off than it had been to start with, because no matter how hard they tried, no matter how many executive orders the President issued, no matter how many micromanaging regulations came from petty bureaucrats unaccountable to the public or anyone else, and no matter how many borderline unconstitutional laws were passed by the liberal-controlled Congress, the politicians just couldn’t make two and two equal more than four.

  “Math always wins in the end,” a guy in Kyle’s platoon had told him when they talked about the state of the world. “There’s a famous science fiction story called ‘The Cold Equations,’ because emotions don’t enter into math. Numbers add up to what they add up to, and sooner or later if you’re taking resources away from a steadily decreasing group in order to give them to a steadily increasing group in order to solicit votes, the system is going to crash. It’s not a sustainable equation, no matter how much some people think it should be.”

  “So what happens then?” Kyle had asked.

  “Blood in the streets when people who have been dependent on the government for everything they have realize that the free ride has run out. A near-total breakdown of society that our enemies will try to exploit. Why do you think I’ve been studying Chinese? I want to be useful to our new masters. Maybe that way I can dodge the reeducation camps.”

  That whole scenario seemed pretty far-fetched to Kyle, but he couldn’t discount the idea completely. Just in the time he had been alive, he had seen conditions in the country steadily worsen as the so-called “progressives” strengthened their stranglehold on government, media, culture, and education.

  One reason he’d lasted only a single semester in college before joining the army was that he couldn’t stomach all the liberal crap that the professors tried to feed their students.

  The only reason he’d lasted less than a year in the army before being booted out was that he was an angry asshole with poor impulse control. Not exactly what you’d call a textbook soldier.

  The holding cell where they’d put him was in a hallway with a couple of other similar cells. At least they hadn’t thrown him in the tank. He was grateful for that. All he needed to get himself in even more trouble would be to get tossed in with some belligerent drunk who’d force him into a fight.

  Footsteps in the corridor broke into his musing and made him lift his head. The cell had a solid door with a small barred window in it. If Kyle had bothered to stand up, he could have looked through that window and seen if whoever was coming this direction stopped at the door. He couldn’t find the energy and enthusiasm to go to that much trouble.

  Anyway, the lock mechanism buzzed a moment later, and he knew whoever it was had come for him.

  The officer who’d arrested him stood there. The ID badge he wore on his shirt identified him as CHAPMAN. Stella had called him Steve, Kyle recalled. He wondered if she and the cop had dated. It was certainly possible. Officer Chapman was only about twenty-five. Hell, the two of them might even have something going on now, thought Kyle.

  Chapman jerked his head toward the corridor and said, “All right, Brannock, come on out. Your grandfather and your sister are here to get you.”

  Chapter 8

  Sister—?

  That would be a neat trick, Kyle thought, since he didn’t have a sister. He was an only child—or rather, an only orphan since his mother and father were both dead.

  Evidently G.W. had some young woman with him, though, and Kyle couldn’t help but wonder who she was. His grandfather, who had been a widower since before Kyle was born, was long past the age when he could attract a hot young girlfriend, even one with serious daddy issues.

  One way to find out, Kyle told himself. He stood up and went to the door in his stocking feet. They had taken his shoes and his belt along with everything else.

  He’d tried to tell them that he didn’t need to be put on suicide watch. He was a stubborn jerk, sure, but he wasn’t crazy. But as usual with cops, they hadn’t listened.

  Chapman pointed along the hall and said, “Back the way we came in.”

  “Gee, thanks, Officer Steve,” Kyle said with exaggerated politeness.

  “Don’t push your luck, Brannock. You already caught enough breaks today.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah. Vern Hummel decided not to press charges, and Ed Charlton told your grandfather that if he’d pay for the damages, he’d let it go, too.”

  Kyle frowned and said, “Damages? What damages? We knocked over some jugs of Coke. Stack ’em back up and they’re good as new.”

  “Don’t ask me, I don’t have anything to do with that part of it. We could have charged you with assault and disturbing the peace whether Hummel and Charlton pressed charges or not, but the chief decided not to. Something about how he was friends with your dad?”

  That was true. Ernie Rodriguez and Ted Brannock were friends from elementary school on and had played ball together in junior high and high school.

  Ted, Kyle’s father, had gone to college at UT in Austin, married a girl he met there, then gotten a job with a tech firm in the suburb of Dallas where Kyle had been born and raised.

  Ernie had stayed in Sierra Lobo and joined the police force, and he was still here, only he had risen through the ranks to be the chief of the department now.

  Several years earlier, Ted and Linda Brannock had been on Interstate 20, on their way to West Texas to visit Ted’s father, when a drunk driver in an SUV had crossed the wide, grassy median and plowed head-on into their car.

  According to the report of the state trooper who’d investigated the accident, tire marks showed that Ted had juked back and forth desperately as he tried to avoid the oncoming vehicle, but every time he’d zigged, the drunk had zagged, and they finally came together as if fate had aimed them squarely at ea
ch other. The drunk in the SUV had died, too, but that was no consolation.

  That had happened during Kyle’s one semester at college and was another reason he hadn’t gone back after the break. There didn’t seem to be any point anymore. G.W. had figured that Kyle would take a semester off and then return to school once the grief had eased some.

  Instead, he’d joined the army, failed at that, too, and after being given a general discharge embarked on what seemed to be his true calling: being a drifting, homeless troublemaker.

  Chapman opened another door that led out into the police station’s small lobby. Kyle’s grandfather stood in front of the counter, looking as stern and morally upright as ever. Behind the counter was the chunky figure of Chief Ernie Rodriguez.

  Next to G. W. was the woman Chapman had mentioned. Kyle stopped short at the sight of her.

  Even in casual clothes, she had the sort of classy beauty he wasn’t used to seeing in Sierra Lobo. She pushed back a strand of blond hair that had fallen in front of her face, and he thought the gesture had plenty of grace and elegance to it.

  “I’m obliged to you for seein’ your way clear to doin’ this, Ernie,” G.W. said to the chief.

  “It’s fine, Mr. Brannock,” Rodriguez said. “Kyle’s just lucky no one else involved in the incident decided to press charges. If they had, I wouldn’t have had any choice but to hold him until bail was set, and the judge wouldn’t have come in for the hearing until Monday morning.”

  G.W. grunted and said, “Spendin’ the weekend in jail might not have been a bad thing for the boy.”

  “It wouldn’t have done any good,” Kyle said. “I’ve spent weekends in jail before, and I’m still me.”

  “Listen,” the chief said. “Keep your nose clean while you’re in Sierra Lobo, kid. If you wind up in trouble again, it won’t go so easy for you next time.”

  “I don’t suppose it would do any good to mention that the loudmouth in the convenience store was the one who actually started it.”