Illegal

SEVENTY-FOUR

Just after eight A.M. on a day that simmered with a dry, baking heat, Simeon Rutledge swung his right arm over his head, and with a smooth motion snapped the bullwhip. The cr-ack sounded eerily like a gunshot.

Another forward toss, the circus throw of a lion tamer.

Cr-ack.

Standing in his corral with the sun rising over his cornfields, Rutledge kept his arm moving. Three different throws, without stopping. The backward, the overhead, the circus throw.

Cr-ack. Cr-ack. Cr-ack.

The popper at the end of the whip snapping so fast it created a miniature sonic boom.

The solid feel of the whip in his hand calmed him. He breathed in the scent of the soil and the crops, even the sweetness of the manure. This was his land, and he belonged to it, as much as it belonged to him.

The initials "EJR" were engraved into the worn leather handle of the whip, which had been custom-made for Ezekiel Rutledge in the 1920s. In a Tulare bar, Ezekiel had taken out a man's eye, and good thing, as the man was drawing a Colt. 45 at the time. Ezekiel wasn't above snapping the whip at a worker who was "lazing off." Seldom hit one, though. He saved the lashes for the union organizers. "Those goddamn Jews and commies from the city."

Rutledge pictured the whip in Ezekiel's hand, imagined his grandfather listening to the same cr-ack, the sound stretching across decades. At moments like this, handling the whip, or riding his stallion along an old trail, or pruning his grandfather's peach trees, Rutledge felt a bone-deep kinship with family, with the land, and with the past itself.

Within minutes, Rutledge's mind cleared. There were decisions to be made. The government would unseal those damn indictments any day now. It would be all over the news. The banks would go batshit. Lines of credit would be pulled, loans called. In a business with an erratic cash flow, that could mean financial death.

Then there was the lesser, but not insignificant problem of that damn Mexican woman. Rutledge had learned from his father that a ship can sink from the tiniest breach in the hull. Like the old nursery rhyme said, "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost." An accountant gets busted for drugs and strikes a deal to testify against his tax-evading employer. A legislator finds God and spills his guts about bribes. Or a woman yells "rape" and brings down an empire.

Jesus, all they had on Al Capone was rinky-dink tax evasion, and he went to Alcatraz.

The Mexican woman would be no problem if not for the piss ant lawyer from the City of Fucking Angels. Javier had called and told him Payne chickened out last night. Now what was the shyster going to do?

His grandfather wouldn't have worried about it. Not with all the potential grave sites in fields and levees.

Deep, dark places a body would never be found, not even by a pack of coyotes. But then, his grandfather didn't have to deal with Grand Juries, and prosecutors out to make their bones.

God, what a time that must have been!