Illegal

THIRTY-ONE

"I won't sue you, Quinn. But I sure as hell might kill you," Simeon Rutledge said.

One hundred seventy-five miles north of the Burbank studio where Cullen Quinn was shouting into a microphone and three hundred miles from where Payne was driving, Rutledge straddled a sawhorse, sharpening the blade of a ranch implement called an "emasculator." As he listened to an old portable radio perched on the railing of a horse stall, his lips stretched into a slash as angry as a knife wound. "I'll strangle you with my bare hands."

"Did I just hear you threaten Cullen Quinn's life?" Charles Whitehurst asked.

"You gonna testify against me, White bread?" Rutledge laughed, hawked up some phlegm, and spit into a pile of straw.

"As you well know, Simeon, the attorney-client privilege precludes me from ever testifying-"

"Screw the privilege. If you ever turned on me, Charlie, you'd be singing soprano the rest of your life." Rutledge gestured with the two-bladed emasculator, ordinarily used to de-nut stallions, not shysters. "If a man called my granddad the names Quinn calls me, Granddad would have killed him without a second thought."

"Ezekiel Rutledge's ways don't work anymore, Simeon."

"Don't be too sure."

"Jesus, Simeon. When are you going to stop trying to prove you're as tough as your grandfather?"

Rutledge flashed his lawyer a look that stung like a bullwhip. "Ain't too many men I let talk to me like that."

"I thought that's what you paid me for."

Rutledge laughed, the sound of a boar crashing through a tangle of brush. "My granddaddy never would have hired you, Whitehurst. Wouldn't have understood your ways."

A proud and defiant man, Ezekiel Rutledge had lost his Mississippi cotton plantation to the banks and the boll weevils before heading west to make his fortune in the 1930s. He had the foresight to hire Mexicans for his farmwork. Field hands who complained about working conditions were likely to be flogged or sent back home, sometimes sprawled over the back of a horse. Simeon Rutledge could still remember his grandfather explaining the economics of cotton farming.

"We used to own our slaves. Now we just rent them."

No, you didn't amass a quarter million acres of prime farmland by being a gentleman or a limousine liberal. You blew up dams, poisoned neighbors' wells, horsewhipped union organizers, and occasionally shot government agents as trespassers.

Then came Jeremiah Rutledge, Simeon's father, who nearly lost the farm. Jeremiah spent money on whores and booze and dice, and drove a sapphire blue Caddy convertible as if the devil were riding shotgun. Marriage and middle age slowed him from a gallop to a canter, and he eventually cleaned up. Remembering his own father's lessons, Jeremiah pushed competing farmers into foreclosure, paid off politicians, and diverted rivers without regard for the law, his neighbors, or the Ten Commandments.

"I'm not trying to turn back the clock." Rutledge doused the blades of the emasculator with disinfectant. "I'd just like to find a way to shut Quinn up."

"You've got bigger problems, Simeon."

"If it's the migrants, we've dealt with that for years."

"Not like this," Whitehurst insisted. "This time it's different."

The two men were just outside the gelding stall in the main barn of Rutledge Ranch and Farms. Whitehurst had been Simeon Rutledge's lawyer for three decades and had gotten him out of numerous scrapes, from breaches of contract to paternity raps. But in recent years, as Whitehurst moved up in society circles, Rutledge felt his legal advice had gotten prettified and sissified. As if he no longer wanted mud on the Persian carpets of his fancy law office. Lately, Rutledge had been wishing his lawyer had the cojones of his stallion.

Whitehurst had the trim physique of an aging squash player. Back in the Transamerica Building in San Francisco, his office walls proudly displayed parchment from Stanford and Harvard. When Whitehurst had walked into the barn today, he shot discreet glances downward. Checking his English brogues. You never knew when a wad of horseshit might get stuck in the threading of the hand-cut calfskin.

In his dusty cowboy boots, Rutledge harbored no such fears. His appearance was far less refined. Rutledge thought he could pass for a longshoreman. Or a guy who slopped boiling tar on roofs. Or, with his short, bristly gray hair, a retired Marine Corps drill instructor. Wide shoulders, a thick chest that strained against the buttons of a dirty denim work shirt. His skin was the texture of tree bark and sun-baked the color of tea. Hands thickened with calluses. Knuckles like walnut shells from wrestling steers and shoveling shit and punching out big-mouthed bastards in bars from Fresno to the Mexican border.

Whitehurst had dropped in by helicopter, and Rutledge would end up paying for the charter service as well as $800 per hour for his lawyer's gloomy tidings. The call setting up the meeting had been cryptic. They couldn't speak on the phone. One way to jack up the bill, Rutledge knew, was to predict an apocalyptic event of biblical proportions, which could be avoided only by the skills of your London-tailored savior.

Rutledge was barely curious about what ill winds brought Whitehurst to the ranch. He was too old and too rich and too ornery to give a double damn about whatever his lawyer was toting in his green alligator briefcase. If the I.R.S. or D.H.C. or I.C.E. or any other bureaucratic bull slingers were after him, well, let them take their best shot. As for Whitehurst and all his drama, let him cool his heels. Preferably in horseshit.

Rutledge was not clueless as to the goings-on in Washington. He read the newspapers and even watched that twitchy woman Katie Couric on TV once in a while. The failed immigration legislation the year before had brought the weasels out of their holes, screaming hate at illegals. The Department of Homeland Security was under pressure to do something-anything-to close what was essentially an open border with Mexico. Not good news for the man who employed thousands of migrants in the Central Valley, some for just a few weeks during harvest season, some full-time.

Rutledge had seen these waves of nativism come and go. His father had hired Mexicans legally under the braceros program. Even now, Simeon Rutledge employed some documented aliens as guest workers, but the numbers were limited by law, and the paperwork took forever. He didn't see any difference between a Mexican with papers and one without. He paid decent wages and provided the best working conditions he could and still make a profit. He admired the courage of the men and women who risked death to come north and look for honest work. He couldn't understand why Europeans who braved an Atlantic crossing in search of a better life should be held in higher regard than Mexicans who crossed the desert last week, pursuing the same dream.

Big mouths like Quinn and the fear-mongering politicians didn't understand crap. Farmers always faced ruin. The weather was either too hot or too cold. Too much rain or too little. Not enough workers when you needed them, and too many when there was nothing to do. Market prices tumbled without warning. Just now, almond prices were in the crapper, thanks to all those Hollywood health nuts buying acreage and planting trees.

Sure, the government was a threat, but nothing compared to a flooded field or a February frost. So, just because his lawyer showed up with a brow as furrowed as a lettuce field, Rutledge wasn't going to alter the day's schedule, which included castrating a stallion who'd been raising hell in the east pasture.

"So what should I do about Quinn, Counselor? Sue him, shoot him, or debate the damn fool on the radio?" Rutledge scratched at his bushy mustache with a knuckle. The whiskers hid a divot in his upper lip, a reminder of a bar fight and a broken beer bottle forty years earlier.

"Things the way they are, I'd prefer you kept a low profile, Simeon."

"And just how are things?"

"There's a team in the Justice Department working full time on the investigation," Whitehurst said. "It's called 'Operation New River.' But it might as well be called 'Operation Rutledge.' The feds have targeted you for-"

The barn door opened, and both men were blinded an instant by the blazing sunlight.

"Hold on, Whitebread." All Rutledge could see was the silhouette of a huge horse. A frothy-tailed, rambunctious white stallion who'd been terrorizing the mares. It was time to settle him down.

"I'm gonna de-nut White Lightning," Rutledge said, brandishing the shiny steel emasculator. "Then you can tell me why I should crap my pants over some bureaucrats with fat briefcases and skinny ties."