blood land: a james pruett mystery (volume one) by r.s. guthrie

Author:r.s. guthrie
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Blu Pencil Publishing, LLC
Published: 2012-07-06T05:00:00+00:00

“Gonna put the world

away for a minute

Pretend I don’t live in it

Sunshine gonna

wash my blues away.”

Zac Brown,

Knee Deep

Chapter 11

PRUETT HAD once wondered to himself, years ago: where does it come from, this duty good cops feel bound to—this sacred responsibility to speak for the dead?

He knew it was erroneous to say it was inherent in the job; that all law enforcement personnel felt this way. Some cops—patrol officers, detectives, deputies, agents, marshals—they worked the job just as any other professional: they clocked in, did their jobs, and they clocked out.

Survived the day. Made it home. Performed their duty as stated in the job description—no more, no less.

So the feeling did not simply come with the territory. Such noble ideals did not germinate in every man or woman who signed up for the job. For the really good cops, it seemed to Pruett, it was not a matter of applying for a position—the job, well, it found them. As if the duty was a part of their DNA waiting to be discovered.

No cop—good, bad, or otherwise—began their career thinking: I will stand up for the deceased.

The dead man.

Those murdered girls.

A bullet-riddled gang-banger.

A battered wife finally slain.

At some point in the job, however, the sense of duty changed. For many, that moment drove them to retire—to find a different career. For Pruett—and for so many other cops—it was the day they realized the dead had no one left to speak for them. They were victims who no longer had a voice and someone had to stand up on their behalf.

For Pruett, the case that changed him forever was a multiple homicide in the second year of his first term as Sublette County Sheriff.

A panel truck full of dead Mexicans, left in the middle of Wyoming to rot.

Men. Women. Teens.

And younger.

Pruett had listened to the tales of his ancestors—stories that described cruel, sometimes unbelievable acts that occurred in the “winning of the West”.

The prairie, it bled.

But it seemed to Pruett that the bloodletting at the core of those old stories—struggles between the white man and the Indian, the outlaw against the honorable, the harsh elements against anything that crawled or thirsted—scurrilous as bloodletting always is, still represented a kind of progress toward the future. Not always fair; not always judicious. Unavoidable human suffering in the building of a country; sacrifice—both just and unjust—in the construct of a nation.

But the carnage Pruett and his deputy were to discover in the sealed rear cargo bay of the rusted white truck—the wanton disregard for life—did not serve to build anything. Such atrocity had the capacity to destroy the faith of good inside every man and woman.

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