Chapter Seventeen
Five years had passed since he had stood in the ranch yard and watched the trail of dust fade away. It had not been a good five years for Sean Proudfoot.
Before he had left the ranch, he went inside and emptied out the gun case. There had been two hunting rifles, two shotguns and a twenty-two. He had seen Matt with a handgun but he must have taken it with him. When he walked out of the house, Molly said, “Those don’t belong to you.”
“So what? They’ve abandoned the place. If I don’t take them someone else will and I can sure as hell use the money.”
“It just don’t seem right, especially after what he did for me.”
“He wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t come out here with a gun. The only reason
they did it then was that they didn’t have the balls to kill me and they knew I’d talk. Ain’t no white man giving an Indian anything for free.”
“I think Mr. Macklin is very nice and this don’t seem to me like the way to repay him. It just don’t seem right.”
“You have a lot to learn about the world Sis, and about white people in particular.”
The next day Sean came back with a buddy and cleaned the place out. They took everything that wasn’t nailed down. Anything that they thought they could sell and would fit in the back of Sean’s pickup. Sean’s buddy, Eugene Redfeather, was more than a little shady and this wasn’t the first time he had stolen goods to unload. Although Eugene had never had this amount of property to fence he knew someone that he was sure could handle it. When Sean found out what they were going to get for the truckload he was extremely disappointed. He said, “ This is bullshit. This stuff is worth ten times what your giving us.”
The fence was not impressed.
“take it or leave it. Bring me something I can peddle easy and you can make more.”
Sean sold him the guns for almost as much as the rest all put together.
“Would you have any use for farm equipment, you know, a tractor, that kinda shit.”
“Hell yes. I can always sell that kinda stuff. What have you got?”
They took him out to the ranch for a look, after assuring him there was no one around the place. By the time they finished there wasn’t a single item of value left on the ranch. Eugene decided to keep Etty’s car and that proved their undoing.
Late one night, in a drunken stupor, Eugene managed to drive the car into one of the very few trees of any size in Guadalupe County. To make things worse the Guadalupe County Sheriff was returning from a late night poker game along the same county road. The sheriff’s name was Randy Post, but everyone that knew him called him “D” although not one of them could have told you why.
D got his nickname in grade school. “D” was pretty much his normal grade and once while a friend and he were comparing report cards, the friend said to him, “Man you get so many dee’s we oughta just call you d.” There were a bunch of other kids around when it was said and he was D from then on.
D had won quite a bit of money at the poker game and was in a good mood. His wife, Ann, was always happy when he came home with money in his pockets and D liked it when his wife was happy. When Ann was happy, she was in the mood for sex. To tell the truth she was in the mood for sex most of the time but money made her really horny. Ann was as good looking as she was greedy. She had been home coming queen in high school and he had been star quarterback of the state champion football team. They made a striking couple. Ann had waited for him to come home from the marines although she didn’t exactly stay celibate. Randy heard the rumors when he got home but it didn’t really bother him all that much, he hadn’t exactly been a saint for the last four years himself. Besides Ann was by far the best-looking girl in the county and her skills in the sack had improved substantially while he was gone. D figured the plusses far out weighed the minuses.
D was an easygoing sort without an ambitious bone in his body, but with Ann’s urging he had run for county sheriff. Having been a local football hero and having served in the marines as an MP, he was a shoo-in. Now Ann was after him to run for County Prosecutor and he expected he probably would. There was very little that Ann asked of him that he did not try to give her. D didn’t figure it would be too hard to be elected. He knew just about everyone in the county, knew where all the bones were buried so to speak, and was owed favors by most of those in power.
He executed the duties of sheriff honestly. He had never taken a bribe nor made a dishonest dollar in all his time as sheriff. He was however lenient in applying the law for miner infractions, especially when it came to folks he knew. Even a lot of people he didn’t know on a personal basis had benefited from his attitude toward law enforcement. For one thing, he tended to look the other way when their teenagers were drinking beer, racing cars, pulling pranks and in general being teenagers. If it got to the point that he felt he had to do something he was more likely to take them home than to throw them in a cell. More over, if he thought the parents were the type to react in a way he considered inappropriate he would probably just talk to the kid himself. Most of the teenagers in the county knew and liked D.
However, it didn’t behoove people to think that because he was easy going that he was soft. There were a few who had made that mistake, but were not likely to make it again. Although there was a great deal that D would tolerate there were others that he would not. He might look the other way if you were having a beer on the drive home from town, but if you didn’t treat your family and critters kind when you got there, you best hope D never found out about it. D did not tolerate drunks, thieves or drug users. The ones he reviled most however, were drug dealers. Since he considered the law overly lenient with them, they would frequently find their selves dumped on the county line with bruises, contusions and on occasion with broken bones.
Eugene was not one of the county residents for which D felt benevolence. D was certain that Eugene regularly helped himself to others’ possessions, although he had never managed to prove it. Eugene was more drunk than hurt so D radioed for a wrecker for the car, took him to the jail and put him in a cell to sleep it off. D considered this a lucky day, on top of having a good night at poker he now had Eugene in a cell where he had hoped to have him for some time.
The next morning after breakfast D ran the plates. When they came back registered to an Ettie Hanson in Cholla he called the Torrance County Sheriff and asked what he knew about an Etty Hanson. The sheriff told D that that was strange story, “Etty lived in Cholla for over ten years, ran a business there the entire time and buried a husband there. The husband turned out not to be a husband but nobody around here cares about that. You couldn’t find a person in the whole county that would say a bad word about Etty. Then one day, around three months ago her son, that wasn’t old enough to drive, drives her over to Albuquerque supposedly to see a doctor and she nor her son are ever heard from again. There never was a clue. I got a few tips, but nothing came of it. I had two suspects but I was never able to prove anything. One was her cook but only because he was a kind of a seedy character. He kept her diner going for a while after she died, but there was no way he did it. I never turned up a single thread of evidence against him. The other was an Indian kid that hung with her son, I kind of liked him for it but I never managed to get anything on him either. Why do you ask?”
D told him about the kid that ran Etty’s car into a tree.
“D, it looks to me like you got yourself a truly bad person there. Maybe you’ll manage to close this case out for me. If I can be of any help let me know.”
D thanked him for his help, hung up the phone and walked back to Eugene’s cell. D leaned on the cell bars and said, “Eugene it looks like you done stepped in a whole pile of shit this time.”
“I want a lawyer D.”
“Only my friends call me D and you don’t fall into that category. You call me sheriff, Mister Boyd or sir.
“I want a lawyer “SIR.”
“People in hell want ice water. What did you do with the lady and kid?”
D saw him hesitate an knew for certain he was guilty of more than a stolen car.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Odd that you’re driving her car and don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I want a lawyer.”
You’re not too bright, are you boy?”
“I’m bright enough to know my rights. I want a lawyer SIR!”
“I want a new Caddy and a large bank account. Where’d you bury them?”
“I didn’t bury anybody. I know my rights. I want a lawyer.”
“What I want is your smelly ass outta my jail, but it doesn’t look like that’s any more likely than you getting a lawyer any time soon.”
He took him out of the cell and handcuffed him to a steel table in a little interrogation room, turned off the air conditioning and left. When D returned in two hours Eugene was soaking wet and in bad need of a drink. There was a large puddle of puke on the table in front of Eugene.
“I think you should give up drinking Eugene, it don’t seem to agree with you.”
“I want a drink.”
“Right after you tell me about how come you’re driving that car.”
After a couple of hours, he gave up Sean. D had the puke cleaned up, turned the air back on and gave him a class of water.
Sean was smart enough not to give them the truth. Molly wanted him to because she thought it would save him from going to prison. Sean, however, decided that the truth wouldn’t help him and would probably make things a lot worse. Instead, Sean told them that his friend John had told him about the ranch. He said John told him that the old man let him fish on his ranch because he was banging John’s mom. He said that when John came up missing he went to the ranch looking for him. He claimed Etty’s car was in the yard with the keys in it and there was no one around. At first, he thought they were just away but there was rotten fruit on the counter and most of the stuff in the fridge was spoiled. He said, “I figured that the old man died, and John and his old lady took his money and car and split.”
The sheriff didn’t buy it and wanted to charge them with murder. Even he could see how good a murder conviction would look on his record when he ran for prosecutor. The prosecutor, however, figured that without proof or even a body the best they could get them for was grand larceny.
Ann later pointed out to D that the prosecutor letting these kids off easy would work in their favor when they were campaigning for his job.
During plea bargaining the boy’s lawyers managed to get the charges lowered to larceny from an unoccupied dwelling. Ann thought that was even better. Part of the plea bargain was that the judge would give them the maximum sentence allowed by law for their charges.
Sean got five years and was out in three for good behavior. His good behavior included killing a fellow inmate with a homemade knife. However, they never managed to pin that murder on him even though it had been witnessed by at least eight people.
The day Sean was checked into La Tuna, the New Mexico Federal Prison, he was gang raped in the showers by five inmates. That night in his cell, he contemplated suicide but just didn’t have the courage to do it. The next day at breakfast a skinny little con of indeterminate lineage sat down beside him at mess. He was staring straight at his plate when he said, “You’ve got to kill one of em.”
Sean looked at him and said, “What?”
“Don’t look at me asshole. Look at your plate.”
Sean looked at his plate and said, “What did you say?”
“I said you got to kill one of them what raped you.”
Sean thought everyone in here must know what happened to him and he was thinking he could not survive five years in this place.
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
“Keep you’re voice down and watch your plate! You gotta get a shank. Make one or buy one and kill one of em.”
“What’s a shank?”
“Saints preserve us. Your red ass aint gonna last a week in here. A shank is a home made knife, they’re easy as hell to make and they’re everywhere in here.”
“Even if I get a shank and decide to kill one of them I wouldn’t have a clue as to how to go about it.”
“Look asshole don’t look down. Put you’re hand on the bench put what you feel in your pocket. You can’t approach them or they’ll kill you sure. Tape the shank to your underarm up close to your pit. Keep your arm down so no one sees what you got. When they bend you over to shove it in your ass, you pull the shank loose and shove it in his neck. Don’t hesitate and don’t swing it easy. You go fast and you go hard or you dead. You don’t wanta do this, you figure on havin someone’s dick up your ass every day till you get out. Don’t talk to me again till one of those is dead. Nother thing. When you done wipe the shank drop it right there and walk away.”