Cowboy Jihad, Chapter 2

            CHAPTER 2

Sheriff Dan Colter walked into the low-slung building housing the offices of the Crook County Sheriff’s Office.

A hitching rail, a horse trough and a portico above a wooden boardwalk out front gave the building an Old West feel. The emblem of the sheriff’s department – a cowboy on a bucking bronco inside a seven-pointed star – hung above the front door, reinforcing the impression.

In the 1880s, land disputes, gunslingers and vigilantes bloodied Crook County, but no one in Colter’s memory had ever used the hitching rail. Plants were growing in the soil-filled trough, which would surely be a disappointment to any thirsty horse.

Dan gave a cheery good morning to Marge, who ran the front desk and was the Crook County Sheriff’s Office face to the public when they came calling. She had her nose buried in the Bend Bulletin, central Oregon’s main newspaper. Marge had been in the department longer even than Dan and was a good ole gal. She had seen it all – and took it all with equal magnanimity.

“Anything going on?” Dan asked.

Marge looked up from the paper. Her hairdo, shellacked with probably half a can of hair spray, gave her a Margaret Thatcherish look.

“Old man Haggerty’s horses got loose again. A couple of people who managed to avoid hitting them on the road called it in. They was running up Dry Creek Road. He has got to get his fences fixed right. He had some Mexicans fixin’ ‘em but you can see what a good job they did.”

Marge was a good ole gal, Dan reflected, but she could be prejudiced sometimes. He let the comment pass.

“Is animal control on it?”

“Yep. And we reached Haggerty and his son too. They’re roundin’ ‘em up.”

Probably Haggerty’s son had left the gate open last night after another night of carousing, Dan thought. He was a heavy drinker and was lucky not to have ever been tossed in jail for driving under the influence.

Dan stepped into his office and reached into his “in” tray before easing back into his office chair. He looked at the sheaf of papers in his hand. The top sheet had a list of people in his jurisdiction who had outstanding warrants against them. A dozen names, ranging in age from 19 to 53. He knew some of them. Ne’er do wells who had failed to hear the starting gun of life go off. Some had kept under the radar and eluded arrest for months but other names were new to the sheriff. Most of the offenses were fairly minor – burglary, fraud. There were two assault cases. Better get those characters off the streets first. There was one embezzlement case.

Colter dropped the papers onto his desk. He’d see to it that the new names were circulated to his deputies. A quick canvassing of relatives, girlfriends and boyfriends would probably turn up a few of the fugitives.

It didn’t feel like a day to stay inside, and there was no administrative work keeping him here.

“I’ll go up and see if I can help with the horses. It’s too beautiful a morning to miss out on anyway,” Dan told Marge as he breezed out the side door to the parking area.

 Dan had his window all the way down on his sheriff’s department pickup truck, letting in the bracing morning air as he drove on a country road north of Prineville.

The sound of screaming drifted in through the window. He couldn’t tell if it was man or beast but whatever it was, it was in great pain. He rounded a bend in the road and came upon a scene of carnage. The blacktop ahead looked like a broad streak of red paint had been applied with a huge brush, staining the right side of the road and ending at a horse that was down on its side and not moving. Entrails were leaking out of its opened abdomen. Dan pulled over, opened the door and hopped out. Further along was another, younger horse. Its eyes were wide with terror and pain. It was trying to rise on broken legs, its hooves and hocks smacking on the pavement. An old Thunderbird was in a ditch 30 yards further along, off the right-hand side of the road. A new super-sized pickup truck with jumbo tires was parked next to it. Two men were standing on the road, obviously the two drivers. They appeared to be arguing. Why weren’t they doing something about this horse, Dan thought angrily. The horse’s screams shattered the morning stillness.

Dan began walking closer, his right hand on the butt of his holstered Colt pistol. The near horse was clearly dead. The far horse was probably a lost cause too. At least two of its legs were broken, the left front leg a compound fracture with a shaft of jagged bone piercing the skin. He drew the Colt and aimed it at the horse’s head, behind the ear, the muzzle of the pistol almost touching the horse.

Then he thought better of dispatching the animal. What if it could be saved? He walked back to his pickup, reached in through the open door and grabbed the radio mike.

“Marge, put me through to the vet, will you?”

Beyond the gruesome scene, Dan could see that the altercation between the two men threatened to go beyond the talking stage. He recognized one of the men as Billy Haggerty. Born into one of the wealthiest families in Crook County, Billy was obnoxious, a nasty drunk with an ego that outsized his brains. He was jabbing his finger into the other man’s chest as he spoke.

The injured horse had given up on its efforts to rise, too exhausted to do anything but lay its head on the road. It might be going into shock, Dan surmised.

The radio squawked and Marge’s husky voice came on.

“Sheriff, I’ve got Dr. Terwilliger on the line. I’ll patch you through.”

“We’ll need to put it down,” Terwilliger told Dan after he had described the situation. “Unless it’s a thoroughbred racehorse that the owners are willing to spend a ton of money on to keep alive for stud purposes, this animal’s life is unfortunately over. I’ll be there in 20 minutes.”

“OK, make it fast. I don’t want the animal to keep suffering.”

“If it gets real bad you might want to shoot it, but I’ll head there now with my kit.”

As Dan walked up to the two men, Billy was saying, “You fucking Messican. I’m going to make you pay for these horses. They’re worth a lot of money.”

“I’m not from Mexico. I am from Nicaragua. And what were the horses doing on the road? They were standing in the middle of the road when I came around that curve. I tried to avoid them but they ran the way that I turned.”

“It don’t matter what excuse you have. You were driving too fast.”

Dan could smell the sour odor of booze on Billy Haggerty. His eyes were bloodshot. The once chiseled features that had made him the ultimate get for girls in high school now were pouchy and bloated and covered with patchy stubble.

“Settle down, you two. Billy, you go wait in your truck. I’ll talk to you in a minute,” the sheriff said.

Billy stalked off and sat on the edge of the front seat of his truck, his front legs shod in cowboy boots dangling out the door. He scowled at the other driver.

As Dan spoke to the other man he looked into his face, all senses alert, trying to detect any signs of intoxication. He didn’t smell alcohol on his breath. He plucked a pen from his uniform pocket and held it a foot in front of the man’s eyes.

“Don’t move your head and just follow the pen with your eyes,” Dan instructed as he moved the pen across the man’s field of vision. The eyes moved smoothly with no jerkiness, which would have been a sign of alcohol intoxication.

“Sheriff, it’s 10 a.m. I have not drunk alcohol, which is more than what I can say for that guy. I am very sorry I hit those horses but I couldn’t avoid them.”

The surviving horse had gathered its strength. Again, it made an effort to rise on its broken legs, which only made the fractures more severe and caused more pain. The animal let out an unearthly sound that made Dan shiver.

“Oh, God damn it,” shouted Billy Haggerty. He reached across the bench of his vehicle and pulled a rifle from the floor of the passenger side. He emerged from the pickup and levered a round into the chamber as he walked toward the stricken horse.

“Now hold on there, Billy. Put that down,” the sheriff said. He drew his pistol as he came up behind Haggerty. In one fluid motion, Haggerty raised the stock of the rifle to his cheek, aimed at the horse and pulled the trigger. A red fountain bloomed on the head of the horse then vanished. The horse heaved a sigh and then did not move at all, not even a twitch.

“You said to put it down,” Haggerty said, turning to the sheriff with a smirk. “You meant the horse, right?”

With his left hand Dan grabbed the barrel of the rifle and with his right he brought the barrel and trigger guard of his pistol down on Haggerty’s head. The man collapsed onto the road like a sack of potatoes, leaving Dan with the rifle in his hand.

Dan booked Haggerty for obstruction and reckless use of a firearm and ticketed the Nicaraguan driver for reckless driving.

A deputy placed Haggerty in front of a white cinderblock wall and set up a digital camera for a mug shoot.

“How did the horses get out of their pasture anyway,” Dan asked Billy.

“Someone opened the gate.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have time to check it out, because I could see the horses had gotten out and I had to go round them up. If I ever catch the son of a bitch who did it, he’s going to be sorry.

“The gate was open. It’s the kind that’s a continuation of the barbed-wire fence. Nothing fancy. You loop the wire over the top of the wooden gate post to keep it secured. There’s enough tension so the loop stays put. To open the gate you have to squeeze the one post into the other with your hand and then lift the wire loop, so it’s not likely it just came open on its own. Someone opened it, maybe drove through and then didn’t close it properly, or didn’t bother to try to close it at all.”

“Someone maybe who had too much to drink and got careless. Someone who shouldn’t have been driving,” Dan said, looking pointedly at Billy.

Billy’s upper lip curled into a sneer.

“I haven’t used that gate on the northwest side in several days,” he said, then added with less conviction. “And I didn’t drink and drive.”

The deputy, a man by the name of Carmichael, raised his head from the screen of the camera and looked at the sheriff and Haggerty.

“Okay, can you two hold on? I need Billy to stay still for two seconds so I can take his picture,” the deputy said.

 That night, Dan fell into a fitful sleep next to Beth. He dreamed of mangled Viet Cong bodies that remained after an airstrike, the blasted trees and the corpses still smoking as his unit walked through the decimated ground. In his dream, he heard an ungodly screaming. He startled himself awake, his heart racing. He looked over and saw Beth sleeping peacefully next to him. The first gray, watery light of the day was faintly backlighting the curtain to the big bedroom window. Dan knew he would sleep no more this night. He rolled out of bed, taking care not to disturb Beth, and went downstairs to make a pot of coffee. He had spent 365 days in Vietnam. That was a long, long time ago, but they indelibly marked him. It didn’t take much to trigger flashbacks or dreams.