Even so, these were just the sort of harassment techniques that an overbearing government used to batter its citizens into submission. An ordinary person, even one in the right, couldn’t stand up forever against an enemy with endless, taxpayer-funded resources.
The irony that law-abiding, taxpaying citizens actually paid to have their government abuse them wasn’t lost on her.
Despite being taxpaying and law-abiding, the Brannocks weren’t exactly ordinary citizens, though. G. W. would fight for what he believed in as long as there was breath in his body, and Miranda was starting to get the sense that Kyle was the same way. He liked to talk about himself as if he were just a shiftless bum, but Miranda’s instincts told her there was a lot more to him than that.
She knew he was interested in her, too. After the breakup that had brought her to Texas, it was a little bit soon for her to be getting romantically involved with anyone else, even now, but Kyle Brannock was intriguing, no doubt about that.
The three of them went around a corner, and there to the left was the large, barred area that served as the county’s drunk tank. Three men stood inside it, clustered around something on the floor, and Miranda’s heart leaped into her throat as she realized the huddled shape was actually Kyle. He looked like he was unconscious—or worse.
“Oh, my God!” Miranda cried as she instinctively lifted a hand to her mouth in shock. “Sheriff, get him out of there!”
“What the hell!” Jacobs rushed forward. “Back off in there! Get away from that man, damn it!”
G. W. hurried up beside the sheriff and grasped the bars. In a tight, angry voice, he said, “If that boy’s hurt bad, Jacobs, you’re gonna be sorry.”
“I didn’t order this.” Jacobs turned his head and shouted, “Phillips! Cranston! Somebody get in here and unlock this damned door!”
One of the deputies appeared in another corridor and ran toward them. As he fumbled with a ring of keys, he said, “Sheriff, what happened?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Jacobs snapped. “This man should’ve been put in a holding cell, not in the tank.”
“Sorry, sheriff,” the deputy muttered. “We didn’t know.”
Jacobs glared at the man, who finally managed to unlock the cell door.
“Don’t touch him,” Miranda said as the three men went into the cell. “He needs medical attention. If he has broken bones or internal injuries, you could make them worse if you move him.”
“The lady’s right,” Jacobs said to the deputy. “Get an ambulance here right away. Move!”
The deputy left the cell on the run.
G.W. dropped to a knee beside his grandson. He studied Kyle intently for a second, then said, “He’s breathin’, thank the Lord. Looks like he got the hell beat out of him, but Kyle’s tough. He’ll pull through this.”
“He had better,” Miranda said grimly. “If he doesn’t, I’ll see to it that this county is bankrupt and nobody in this department ever has a job in law enforcement again.”
Those were bold claims, but at the moment she was angry enough to make them and mean them.
More deputies hurried in from elsewhere in the building and took charge of the three prisoners who had beaten Kyle. They all looked a little sheepish and scared now.
One of the men said, “We didn’t mean to really hurt him. Just wanted to teach him a lesson, that’s all.”
“You have a grudge against this man, Hummel?” the sheriff asked.
G.W. answered the question, saying, “Yeah, he and Kyle tangled a few days ago over in Sierra Lobo. What are these three doin’ in here?”
“I’ll have to check the log, but my guess is they were brought in for drunk and disorderly or disturbing the peace. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“And you expect us to believe that you didn’t know about this?” Miranda said caustically. “That you didn’t have Kyle put in here on purpose so those men would attack him?”
“I give you my word I didn’t,” Jacobs said. He rubbed a hand over his face. “And I swear to you that I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Somewhere outside, a siren wailed as it came closer. That would be the ambulance coming for Kyle, Miranda thought as she looked down at him.
She prayed that he would be all right, and as she did, she thought she might as well admit to herself that her concern wasn’t completely that of an attorney for her client....
Chapter 35
The first thing Kyle was aware of as consciousness seeped back into his brain and body was the feel of crisp, cool sheets against his skin. He was lying in a bed somewhere.
Probably in a hospital, he thought as memories of what had happened in the drunk tank came back to him.
He would have a score to settle with Vern Hummel, Gutierrez, and the apelike man whose name he didn’t know.
That would have to wait, though, until he wasn’t filled with aches and pains from head to toe.
His eyes were still closed, but he opened them when someone took hold of his hand. He looked up and saw Miranda smiling down at him.
“I saw you move and knew you were awake,” she said. Her voice sounded even sweeter to him now than it had earlier.
G.W. moved up on the other side of the bed and rested a hand on Kyle’s shoulder.
“How’re you feelin’, son?” he asked.
“Like I got the sh—the heck kicked out of me,” Kyle replied in a raspy whisper. “How bad . . . is it?”
“Bruised ribs, but nothin’ broken. The doctors want to keep you here overnight, just to make sure there aren’t any internal injuries they don’t know about, but mostly you’re just gonna be stiff and sore and hobblin’ around for a few days.”
“Sorry I . . . let you down, G. W.”
“How in the hell do you figure you let me down?” G. W. asked with a puzzled frown.
“There were only . . . three of those guys. I should’ve . . . taken ’em.”
Miranda said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody would have been able to handle all three of those brutes by himself.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” G.W. said. “Kyle might’ve been holdin’ back a little.”
There was some truth to that, Kyle mused. He hadn’t thought about it at the time, but he’d gotten in the habit of not cutting loose with everything he was capable of when he found himself in scrapes like that.
He had come close—too close—to beating a man to death once, and he didn’t want that on his conscience unless there was no other alternative.
He looked around the hospital room and didn’t see anybody except G.W. and Miranda. He said, “I’m not in jail anymore . . . but I’m guessing there’s a deputy outside the door.”
“Nope, the judge set bail,” G.W. said. “He was pretty upset when he heard about what happened. He set bail at four hundred bucks. I was able to come up with that much cash without any problem.”
“So I’m free again.”
“For now,” Miranda said. “And I’m going to be in the district attorney’s face first thing in the morning, letting him know that he needs to decline to prosecute this case. He’s a reasonable man—most of the time—and I think he’ll see that he doesn’t stand much chance of winning, especially if it goes to a jury.”
Kyle muttered, “Grayson got me beaten up anyway. That’s probably all he wanted.”
G.W. said, “Sheriff Jacobs swears he didn’t order you put in there with Hummel and those other fellas, and the deputies claim it was all just a misunderstandin’. There’s no way to prove they’re lyin’.”
“Grayson had something to do with it,” Kyle said. “I can feel it in my bones.” He winced. “Along with some other things. Where are Hummel and the other two now?”
“Still locked up,” Miranda said. “I’ve filed assault and attempted murder charges against them on your behalf.” She shrugged. “The attempted murder charges may not stick, but the assault will. They’ll be going to Huntsville.”
“Good riddance,”
G.W. said.
Kyle was starting to have trouble keeping his eyes open. He had an IV needle in the back of each hand, and he suspected one of the lines was feeding painkillers into his veins. That would make him drowsy. He murmured, “I’m all right.... Both of you . . . better go on and . . . get some rest.”
“I’m not goin’ anywhere tonight,” G.W. declared. “That chair’s not the most comfortable one in the world, but I can sleep in it. You don’t need to be alone.”
“I’m sure the nurses . . . can take care of me.”
“I’m not worried about your medical condition. I’m worried about how that Grayson fella might not stop at anything to settle the score with you. Hospitals are dangerous places, you know. Folks die in ’em all the time.”
Miranda frowned and said, “Surely Grayson wouldn’t go that far.”
G.W. nodded toward Kyle in the hospital bed.
“Take a good look at the boy, then tell me you really believe that.”
Miranda didn’t say anything. After a moment, though, she squeezed Kyle’s hand.
“I can stay, too, if you’d like.”
He managed to shake his head and said, “No, you go on home. Just be careful.... When you agreed to help us . . . you got on the wrong side of the government, too. . . .”
Chapter 36
Red Mike’s Tavern was on the highway about halfway between Sierra Lobo and the county seat. A long, low frame building behind a gravel parking lot, it had been there under various owners and names for more than fifty years. Every time the door opened, cigarette smoke and honky-tonk music drifted out into the night. It was one of the few places left where people could poison themselves with nicotine in public.
Slade Grayson didn’t like secondhand smoke, but he could put up with it for a while. He sat in one of the booths, on a bench seat covered in red Naugahyde, and nursed a bitter, watery beer. The lonesome strains of George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning” came from the old-fashioned jukebox in the corner.
Damn rednecks, he thought. In his more gloomy moments, he believed the country really would be better off if most of the area between the two coasts was depopulated.
But then who would grow the food and pay most of the taxes? Sometimes realism trumped idealism, which was a truth that his progressive masters often had trouble grasping.
Grayson checked the door every time it opened. Finally, the man he was waiting for came into the tavern. The man was about twenty-five, very clean-cut with his dark hair shaved close on the sides. He wore jeans and a short-sleeved shirt with a buttoned-down collar.
The man spotted Grayson and came across the room toward him. He slid into the booth on the other side and glanced around nervously.
“Try not to look like you’re about to shit in your pants, Deputy Phillips,” Grayson told him.
“I just don’t want anybody to see me who knows me,” Phillips said as he clasped his hands together on the table.
“You come here often, do you?”
“Never. I’ve never even answered a call here. That’s why I picked it.”
“Then you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
A bosomy waitress with hair a shade of red that had never occurred in nature appeared beside the table and asked, “What can I get you, honey?”
Phillips shook his head and said, “I don’t want anything.”
“Oh, now, don’t be like that. I got to eat, too, and my little boy needs braces.”
Grayson said, “My friend will have a beer. And I’ll take a refill on mine.”
“There you go,” the redhead said with a crooked smile that revealed no one had gotten braces for her when she was young. “That wasn’t so hard, now was it?”
When the waitress was gone, Phillips said, “Kyle Brannock is in the hospital.”
“How badly was he hurt?”
“Hummel, Gutierrez, and Johnson gave him a pretty bad beating. Last I heard, though, he was in no real danger.”
“Good, good,” Grayson said as he nodded slowly. “This was really just to get his attention. A wake-up call, you could say. Most of my efforts are going to be focused elsewhere.”
Phillips leaned forward and said between clenched teeth, “Who the hell are you, mister? How . . . how do you know the things you know?”
“You mean how do I know about the fourteen-year-old girl you’ve been seeing?” Grayson asked. “The fourteen-year-old girl you don’t want your wife or your boss or anybody else to know about?”
Finding out about that had been simple. He had gotten a list of all the deputies who worked for the sheriff ’s department in this county and checked the NSA logs of their e-mails and cell phone calls.
Grayson knew the chances were he would find plenty of things he could use to pressure one of the officers into doing what he wanted. Phillips’s affair with an underage girl was just the first thing Grayson had come across—and he couldn’t have asked for better leverage.
“Shut up!” Phillips hissed frantically. “Don’t go talking about that in here.” He passed a trembling hand over his face. “Anyway, if you saw her you’d think she was twenty. I swear you would. I did at first.”
“So all you thought you were doing was cheating on your wife, not committing statutory rape as well. I’m sure no one will have any trouble accepting that excuse.”
For a long moment, Phillips didn’t say anything. Then, “Look, I did what you asked, mister. I told you we had Hummel and those friends of his locked up, and I saw to it that Brannock went into the drunk tank with them. They jumped him just like you thought they would. What more do you want from me?”
Grayson leaned back, smiled, and said, “Not a damned thing, deputy.”
Phillips started to look relieved.
“Not right now, anyway,” Graysonsaid, which caused the younger man’s expression to drop again. “But if I need to call on you again in the future, I’m sure you’ll be more than willing to help.”
“You . . . you’re not going to say anything about . . .”
“No, that stays between the two of us, for the time being.”
“All right, then,” Phillips said hollowly. “Sure. Anything you need, I’ll be glad to help.”
“I thought so.” Grayson nodded toward the bar. “Here comes your beer. Drink up. Enjoy.”
He laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table as he stood up, favoring the leg Kyle Brannock had wrenched that morning. The waitress had just arrived carrying a tray that had two mugs of beer on it.
“Don’t leave now, honey,” she said to Grayson. “I got your refill here.”
“Leave it for my friend,” he told her. “I think he probably needs it more than I do.”
Chapter 37
Kyle was discharged from the hospital the next morning with a prescription for painkillers. He planned not to take any more of them than he had to. He had seen guys get addicted to the things and didn’t want any part of that.
The nurses insisted on putting him in a wheelchair and wheeling him to the hospital’s front door. Several of them gathered around to escort him. G.W. grinned at all the feminine attention his grandson was getting.
Once they were outside and the nurses had reluctantly gone back inside, G. W. said, “You can lean on me if you want. I don’t reckon those gals can see.”
“I don’t care if they can see,” Kyle said. “I don’t need any help. I can make it.”
The steps he took were careful ones, though, as he and G.W. walked out into the parking lot toward G.W.’s old pickup. Kyle didn’t feel too bad, but if he moved wrong, his bruised ribs gave him a pretty sharp twinge.
Other than that, he was just stiff and sore, as he’d expected. That would go away in a day or two.
The anger he felt was liable to hang around for a while, though.
“Have you heard anything from Miranda this morning?” he asked.
“Not yet,” G. W. replied. “I know she was goin’ to see the district attorney. . . . Well, speak of the devil.”
Kyle saw Miranda’s car turning into the parking lot. He smiled and said, “I wouldn’t call her the devil.”
“No, that doesn’t suit her very well, does it? Come on, let’s get you to the pickup so you can sit down.”
Stepping up into the pickup’s cab caused Kyle to grit his teeth, but he made it. He left the door open. Miranda parked, got out of her car, and came over to join them.
“Good news,” she announced. “The DA is dropping all the charges against you, Kyle.”
“That won’t make Grayson happy,” G. W. said.
“I don’t think he really cared whether I was convicted or not,” Kyle said. “He just wanted to flex his muscles a little. Wanted me to see that he can reach out and make my life a living hell any time he wants.” Kyle paused, then continued. “A man like Grayson, the worst thing you can do to him is make him feel like he doesn’t have the absolute power he thinks he does.”
“You’re right,” Miranda said. “He thought he would waltz in here and everybody would bow down to him just because he works for the government. He can’t stand it when that doesn’t happen.”
G. W. said, “He’d better get used to it. Not much bowin’ and scrapin’ to the government’s gonna happen in this part of Texas.” He turned his head and spat. “This isn’t Austin.”
Kyle laughed.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
That was the first time he had used that word in a long time . . . and meant it.
“I’ll follow you out there,” Miranda said. “We need to talk.”
That was good news, thought Kyle. No matter what Miranda had to say, he was glad to have her around.
Roberto Quinones and several of the other hands were waiting for them. The foreman had a rifle in his hands, and a couple of the other men carried shotguns.
“Any trouble while we were gone?” G. W. asked as he got out of the pickup.
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