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  “No, señor,” Roberto replied, “but we were ready if it visited us. Our families are gone, as you asked. They left this morning.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, and I’m sorry you folks have to be separated. I’m glad to know they’ll be safe, though.”

  “Sí, so are we. Señor Kyle, let me give you a hand.”

  “I can make it,” Kyle said stubbornly as he climbed out of the truck. He held on to the door to steady himself.

  “I got a cane inside you can use,” G.W. said. “Juan, go get it.”

  “I don’t—” Kyle stopped because one of the hands was already hurrying into the house to fetch the cane. When the man came back with it, Kyle took it, nodded, and said, “Gracias.”

  He had to admit, walking was a little easier with the cane, too.

  Miranda drove up a minute or so later. By the time she came in, Kyle was sitting on the old leather sofa in the living room, with a good view of the fireplace and the heads of a couple of bucks and a bighorn sheep mounted above the mantel.

  Kyle’s great-grandfather had taken those trophies. G. W. confined his hunting to snakes, coyotes, and the occasional wolf or mountain lion. He had no interest in hunting for sport, but any predator that came after his stock had better watch out.

  The same held true for government weasels who wanted to steal the ranch, Kyle suspected.

  “Miranda, you sit down there with Kyle,” G.W. said. “I’ll get iced tea for everybody.”

  He went out into the kitchen as Miranda sat on the sofa.

  “How do you feel this morning?” she asked.

  “Like I got kicked by a mule,” Kyle said, “but I’m all right. A couple of days and I’ll be good as new.”

  That was probably too optimistic, but it never hurt to think positively. A second after that thought crossed his mind, he told himself that it was another example of how being around G.W. and getting caught up in his grandfather’s struggle was changing him. For years now, he had been mired in pessimism.

  It was sort of nice to get out of that mental swamp.

  “Well, maybe while you’re recuperating, it’ll keep you out of trouble,” Miranda said.

  “Hey, it’s not like I go looking for fights,” he protested. “Well . . . I guess have sometimes, but that was in the past. These days, I’m a peaceable man.”

  He chuckled, knowing Miranda wouldn’t get the joke.

  Evidently she didn’t, because she said, “Grayson can still bring federal charges against you, you know. US Marshals may show up to take you into custody. If they do, I want you to do the same thing as before: cooperate and keep your mouth shut.”

  “I tried that.” Kyle looked down at himself meaningfully. “It didn’t work out too well.”

  “You didn’t get beat up because you did what I said.”

  “Why did I get beat up?” he mused. “Do you think Grayson set the whole thing up somehow?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t really seem likely, but I don’t suppose we can put it past him.”

  “I don’t plan on putting anything past him,” Kyle said. “He struck me as pretty much of a cold-blooded, ruthless son of a . . . gun.”

  “What is it with you Brannock men always watching your language around me?”

  “Just the way we were raised,” G.W. said as he came into the room carrying a tray with three glasses of iced tea on it. He set the tray on the coffee table and handed glasses to Kyle and Miranda. “We’re old-fashioned, and you might as well get used to it. Isn’t that right, Kyle?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said with a smile.

  “All right, fine,” Miranda said. “Let’s move on to the problem at hand. I’ve got a call in to Maria Delgado’s office.”

  Kyle raised his eyebrows.

  “The governor?”

  “That’s right. I don’t know if she’ll return the call or not, and even if she does, I’m not sure if she can help us, but she’s had a number of skirmishes with the federal government already, in the time she’s been in office. Remember that business with the prison and the terrorists a while back?”

  “It was on all the news,” G.W. said dryly. “From what I gather, certain folks in Washington were pretty dang peeved at her for sendin’ in soldiers to rescue those people trapped in that prison.”

  “That’s right. I’m hoping she can give us some advice on how to deal with the BLM.”

  “A private army would be nice,” Kyle said.

  Miranda shook her head and said, “No, we don’t want that sort of bloodshed here. There has to be a peaceful solution.”

  Kyle drank some of his iced tea and glanced over at his grandfather. Their eyes met, and Kyle knew that G.W. was thinking the same thing he was.

  The longer this oppression by the government went on, the less likely it was that a peaceful solution could be found.

  The really frightening thing was that he was no longer sure the other side wanted a peaceful solution. The liberals, the so-called “progressives,” had been trying to solidify their grip on the country for decades now. Academics and members of the mainstream media constantly beat the Democratic drum and preached that conservatism was dead and the Republicans were nothing more than a minor, regional party. They might as well have been Whigs, to hear certain sectors tell it.

  And yet with every national election, a large part of the country voted against the continued growth of government and managed to keep it from being a total runaway to disaster. That had to be frustrating to the statists, the crowd to whom their politics was their religion, although they would never admit that. One of these days, the self-styled Washington elite would get tired of being frustrated and decide to crush the opposition once and for all.

  It had happened again and again, in Russia, in China, in Cuba. Millions had died, all because a small group of people who thought they were smarter and better than everyone else had seized power and set out to do “good,” even if it meant killing or imprisoning anyone who opposed their warped ideas.

  Kyle didn’t know if that would ever happen in the United States, but he knew that what once might have been unthinkable now lurked in the back of many minds on both sides.

  Sooner or later, it might come down to a battle between true freedom and the false freedom of the progressives, which was really nothing more than a dictatorship. No sane person wanted American blood running in the streets of home....

  The question was whether or not there were enough sane people left in Washington to prevent that.

  And Lord help us all, thought Kyle, they might soon find out the answer.

  Maybe it would even be found here in a beautiful valley in West Texas, a veritable paradise....

  With Hell lurking right around the corner.

  Chapter 38

  The next few days provided a lull, a welcome respite from all the trouble. No US Marshals showed up to arrest Kyle, and G.W., Roberto, and the rest of the hands were able to go about the business of running the ranch without anyone bothering them.

  There was no sign of Slade Grayson, Warren Finley, Woodrow Todd, or any other intruders from Washington or elsewhere.

  Since the women and children were gone, all the men took their meals together in the ranch house’s big dining room, with G. W. doing most of the cooking—or rather the grilling, as they ate mostly steaks and hamburgers. One day, Roberto cooked up a big pot of chili so hot Kyle felt like it blistered his insides . . . but that didn’t stop him from having a second bowl.

  He enjoyed these meals. They gave him a chance to get to know all the hands, and his command of Spanish came back to him as he sat there with the musical language flowing swiftly around him. They were good times, and he was convinced the camaraderie helped him recover from the beating he had received. His strength came back as the soreness in his ribs and elsewhere faded.

  It would have been nice to think that this pleasant interval would last—but Kyle knew better than that.

  He had gotten out of the hospital and come back
to the ranch on Tuesday morning. The next Saturday, he and G.W. were sitting at the table in the kitchen having breakfast when Roberto came in with a worried frown on his face. The sun was up and normally G.W. would have been out on the range already, but he had told Kyle he was moving a little slow this morning.

  G. W. had finished his bowl of cornflakes and started on his toast. He set it down and asked his foreman, “What’s wrong, Roberto?”

  “Benito just came in from checking the waterhole at Barranca Blanco,” Roberto reported. “He said there were several dead cows near it.”

  G.W. sat up straighter as his face settled into angry lines.

  “Could he tell what happened to them?” he asked.

  Roberto shook his head and said, “He was not sure. He thought they may have been poisoned.”

  “Damn it!” The flat of G.W.’s hand slammed down on the table, making the dishes and silverware jump. “Did he haze any other stock that were around the place away from it, anyway?”

  “He said there were no other cattle nearby, señor.”

  “That doesn’t mean they won’t drift that direction before we can get back out there.” G.W. scraped his chair back and stood up.

  Kyle got to his feet as well and said, “I’m coming with you.”

  “You’re in no shape to—”

  “I’m fine,” Kyle interrupted his grandfather. “As long as I don’t get into any more of those three-against-one sparring matches.”

  “There won’t be any of that,” G.W. declared. “All right, then, come along if you want to.” He added grimly, “Grab a rifle on your way out.”

  All of them were armed as they headed out to the Barranca Blanco waterhole. Kyle and G. W. were in the pickup, Roberto and Benito in the jeep that served as the ranch’s second vehicle, and the other hands following on horseback.

  G. W. knew where they were going, of course—he knew every foot of the ranch—and handled the pickup expertly as it bounced across country toward the foothills at the edge of the mountains. Most of the ranch’s waterholes were located in those foothills.

  Kyle peered anxiously through the dusty windshield. As soon as he had heard there were dead cattle, he’d thought of Slade Grayson.

  They knew the BLM wasn’t interested in the stock. Grayson had made that abundantly clear.

  Would the man go so far as to kill some of the animals just to continue his campaign of harassment against G. W.? Kyle didn’t really doubt that Grayson was that cruel . . . and that stupid. Striking at G.W. like this would just harden his resolve. Given Grayson’s arrogance, he might not understand that.

  “There’s the waterhole, up yonder in those rocks,” G.W. said, pointing.

  “I remember it,” Kyle said. “Seems like we all rode over here for a picnic, one day when I was a kid.”

  G. W. glanced over at him and nodded.

  “You remember that, do you? You couldn’t have been more’n six years old or so.”

  “I remember it,” Kyle said quietly. It was one of the good memories of his parents and his childhood.

  And the memory made anger burn even more fiercely inside him when he saw the dark shapes of the dead cattle on the ground near the waterhole.

  G. W. brought the pickup to a stop and they climbed out carrying their rifles, as Roberto and Benito pulled up in the jeep. Kyle felt a little sick when he saw that three full-grown cows and two good-sized calves had died here.

  G.W. looked around, then said, “You can tell they all went up to the waterhole, had themselves a drink, and then collapsed and died when they started to wander off. There aren’t any wounds on them, so they weren’t shot. It had to be poison that killed them, and there’s no place they could’ve gotten into it but here.”

  Roberto hunkered on his heels next to the small pool nestled in the rocks.

  “It looks okay,” he said. He reached out with a hand, as if he intended to cup some of the water and taste it.

  “Don’t do that,” G.W. said sharply. “We’ll leave that to the experts. I want to get Doc Bryan out here from town to have a look at those cows and confirm they were poisoned.” His expression was bleak as he went on. “For now, once the other fellas get here on horseback, I want some of ’em to stand guard on this waterhole and turn back any stock that tries to get to it. The cattle may not like it, but there are other waterholes where they can drink. I don’t plan on losin’ any more of ’em.”

  “You know Grayson did this,” Kyle said. “If not him personally, then somebody he hired. But he’s responsible for it.”

  “I don’t know anything yet,” G.W. snapped. Then his tone eased a little as he went on. “But you’re probably right. Let’s take a look around and see if we can find any sign. Chances are, if any of those boys from back East did this, they’ll have left some tracks.”

  Kyle went with his grandfather as G.W. walked a wide circle around the waterhole. About a hundred yards away, they found tire marks that hadn’t been left by the two ranch vehicles.

  “You were right,” Kyle said as G. W. knelt beside the tracks and studied them. “Somebody drove in here last night, and the only reason they’d do that would be to poison the waterhole.”

  “Well, there might’ve been another reason,” G.W. said, “but all the evidence points to you bein’ right.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  G. W. squinted off into the distance and said, “There are other waterholes on the spread. Maybe they’ll try to spread their poison again.” His lips drew back from his teeth in a savage grimace. “I almost hope the sons o’ bitches do . . . because I plan to be waitin’ for ’em.”

  Chapter 39

  Barton Devlin had turned his cell phone off several days earlier when he got tired of ignoring the calls from his supervisor. He knew that by now his government employment had probably been terminated, and that left him with an aching emptiness inside.

  For more than two decades his life had revolved around the Internal Revenue Service. His entire career had been spent punishing those who tried to get by without paying their fair share. He had gone to sleep at night firm in the conviction of his righteousness.

  Now he had to fight off a persistent nausea at the thought that maybe—just maybe—the IRS really was as bad as its critics claimed. That it was nothing more than a bullying, hectoring, strong-arm branch of the administration, intended to punish not tax cheats but political enemies, to weaken conservative organizations and make it more difficult for conservative candidates to win elections. That it was really just a tool of the Democrats in their obsessive need to achieve and maintain power.

  And that, Devlin knew in his heart, was not what he had signed on for.

  Once he’d been forced to admit that possibility, it was like floodgates had opened in his mind. If the IRS, never well-liked but once a bastion of neutrality, had been so corrupted by a series of Democrat administrations, what about all the other government agencies? The Bureau of Land Management, for example?

  On the surface, there was no more innocuous agency in Washington. The BLM was charged with managing land owned by the federal government. Nothing could be simpler.

  But no agency engaged in such innocent activity would have need of a man like Slade Grayson working for them. The man was a piranha . . . no, a shark. Pure, elemental destruction in an expensive suit. If Grayson was trying to seize G.W. Brannock’s ranch on behalf of the BLM, then there had to be something fishy about the deal.

  Devlin was going to find out what it was.

  That was why he was following Grayson’s two cohorts at the moment. Finley and Todd had snuck onto the ranch well before dawn. Devlin had no idea what they were up to, but it had to be no good. The sun was up now, and the two BLM men were on their way back to Sierra Lobo.

  Devlin was a hundred yards behind them in his rental car. All he knew about tailing someone he had learned from watching hundreds of TV shows in hundreds of motel rooms over the past twenty years, but he seemed to be getting better at it.
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  It probably helped that Finley and Todd were amateurs just like he was. None of them had any business carrying out this cloak-and-dagger stuff, especially when they were dealing with a professional like Grayson.

  Sooner or later, thought Devlin, that shark was going to turn around and consume them.

  “It’s done,” Warren Finley reported. “I don’t like it, and neither does Woody, but it’s done.”

  “Maybe you should let Woody speak for himself,” Grayson said. He hadn’t put on his coat and tie, but he was dressed otherwise, and even though the hour wasn’t much past nine o’clock in the morning, the glass in his hand had a couple of fingers of scotch in it.

  Todd frowned and said, “I don’t care much for killing animals, even cows.”

  “Turning vegetarian on me, Woody?” Grayson asked mockingly. “Because all those burgers and steaks and roasts didn’t commit suicide, you know.”

  “I know. But it’s different when there’s not a good reason for it.”

  “Not a good reason?” Grayson tossed back the drink and then glared at the two men he had sent on this errand. “What better reason can there be than furthering the cause of the United States government?”

  “Are we really doing that?” Finley asked. “Or is there some other agenda at work here?”

  Grayson set the empty glass aside and pointed a finger at Finley.

  “I’m going to forget I heard you say that, old buddyroo. That sounded pretty freaking disloyal to the Bureau, if you ask me, and I know that’s not what you want.”

  Finley felt himself go pale. Disloyalty to the Bureau meant disloyalty to the administration, and that could be dangerous. Not just to a guy’s career, but to his very life.

  “No, that’s . . . that’s not what I mean,” Finley said hastily, stumbling over the words.

  “I didn’t think so,” Grayson replied with a superior sneer. His briefcase lay on the dresser. He went to it, opened it, and took out another plastic vial. Negligently, he tossed it to Finley, who turned positively white as a sheet as he caught it. “Empty that in another of Brannock’s waterholes tonight. By the time we go out there Monday to take over, he won’t have any cattle left.”