Tyranny (3 page)

G
. W. Brannock saw the dust cloud rising from the car's tires when the vehicle was still a couple of miles away, as soon as it turned off the state highway onto the private road that led to his house.

The opening in the fence didn't have a gate in it, just a cattle guard to keep stock from straying through it. Red signs with black lettering that stated
NO TRESPASSING
were fastened to the fence on each side of the gap.

The road had enough ruts and rocks in it that nobody could drive very fast on it, no matter how good a vehicle they had. That was the way Brannock liked it. He had plenty of warning when visitors came to call.

Time to make sure the old lever-action .30-30 and both shotguns were loaded, the side-by-side Stoeger and the Mossberg 500 Tactical pump.

The Browning Hi-Power he carried tucked behind his belt at the small of his back had a full magazine in it, too, as he stood on the porch waiting for his visitor to arrive.

Even covered with road dust the way it was by the time it came in sight, the car was familiar to Brannock. It was one of those Japanese compacts, something that annoyed Brannock from time to time since his dad had been a POW in the war against the countrymen of the fellas who'd built that car.

He was willing to overlook the annoyance, though, since the owner was on his side in a war of his own.

The car came to a stop in front of the porch. The driver waited a minute for the dust cloud swirling around it to dissipate before she stepped out.

Miranda Stephens wasn't dressed for court today. She wore jeans, a white tank top, and a lightweight red overshirt. Her shoulder-length blond hair was loose instead of pulled back severely like she wore it when she had to go in front of a judge. With her wholesome good looks, punctuated by a scattering of freckles and a little dimple in her chin, she looked more like a college sorority girl than a lawyer.

“You didn't have to come all the way out here,” Brannock told her. “You could'a just returned my call.”

“No, I want to see this letter you got,” Miranda said as she came up onto the porch.

“Don't know why you would. It's just more o' the same old bull . . . crap.”

“You can say bullshit in front of me, G.W. Some crude language isn't going to offend my ladylike sensibilities so much that I swoon or anything. If you'd heard the way we used to talk in law school—”

Brannock held up a hand to stop her.

“No, thanks,” he said. “I know I'm a dang throwback, but I reckon I'd rather preserve some of my illusions.”

“If being a gentleman means you're a throwback, there should be more like you.” Miranda stuck out her hand. “Now, let me see it.”

Brannock had figured she might drive out from town after she got the message he'd left her, so he had the certified letter sitting on the little table between the two rocking chairs, ready for her to look at.

The rural mail carrier had brought it up earlier and gotten him to sign for it. Brannock picked it up now and extended it toward the lawyer.

She frowned at it like he was trying to hand her a diamondback rattlesnake.

“Yeah, I reckon that's the way most people feel about a letter from the IRS sayin' they're gonna take everything you've got,” he said.

V
ern's weight coming down on top of Kyle drove all the air out of the younger, smaller man's lungs. He gasped for breath, too, like his attacker.

As he landed, his head bounced off the floor, which was thin tile over concrete, so it didn't have any give to it. Red rockets blasted off behind his eyes and blinded him for several seconds.

When his vision cleared, he saw Vern looming over him. The big man's fists sledged into Kyle's ribs as he threw wild punch after wild punch.

Kyle was still half-stunned from the blow to the head, so his arms didn't want to work right now. He tried, but he couldn't block the punches.

He couldn't just lie there and allow Vern to beat him senseless, though. As feeling started to return to his muscles, he kicked high with his right leg and brought it around in front of Vern's neck, then used it to lever the bigger man off him.

Vern sprawled in the aisle and couldn't get up because the soda bottles kept rolling under him. All the caps had stayed on, preventing the drink from spilling. A triumph of modern consumer engineering, Kyle thought fleetingly as he rolled, got his hands under him, and pushed himself up to his knees.

At that same moment, Vern began to recover as well and kicked the plastic bottles aside so he could get to his feet. He grabbed one of the bottles by the neck and swung it at Kyle's head.

Full of drink like that, even a plastic bottle could deliver quite a wallop, and Kyle's skull had suffered enough punishment today. He ducked under the sweeping blow and launched himself at Vern in a diving tackle.

This time it was Kyle who landed on top as he caught Vern around the midsection and drove him over backwards.

Unlike Vern's wild, flailing blows, however, the punches Kyle threw while he had the advantage were short, sharp, and precise. He chopped away at Vern's face with his fists, and blood began to fly from the cuts his knuckles opened.

“Get off of him!” a man's voice shouted from somewhere nearby. “Get off of him now!”

The words barely registered on Kyle's brain, which was filled with the sort of blinding rage that had always been a problem for him. When he got caught up in a fight, he couldn't think straight and everything else in the world seemed to go away except the punishment he was handing out to his opponent.

But then he heard Stella scream, “Steve, no!” and turned his head enough to glance over his shoulder.

He spotted the cop who'd been at the fast food counter a few minutes earlier. The uniformed man stood about ten feet from him now, aiming something at him. It wasn't a service revolver, Kyle thought, but some other sort of weapon....

The small part of his brain that was still rational recognized the thing in the cop's hands as a stun gun. He opened his mouth to tell the officer not to shoot, but it was too late.

The cop pressed the button on the top of the stun gun, and with a
whoosh!
of compressed air the two sharp prongs and the attached electrical wires trailing behind them exploded from the end of the weapon.

Kyle barely had time to feel the twin stings as the prongs penetrated his shirt and lodged in his skin before the surge of current hit him like the proverbial ton of bricks.

He went over backwards as his mouth opened to scream. No sound came from his throat, though, because his vocal cords were locked up like the rest of his muscles from the electrical charge flowing through his body. All he could do was lie there helplessly and twitch.

The shock didn't last all that long, but when it was over, Kyle couldn't move, couldn't put up any sort of fight as the cop rolled him over and jerked plastic restraints around his wrists. His vision was blurry, but he could make out Vern lying on the floor a few feet away, gasping and sobbing.

But Vern wasn't being arrested, Kyle thought. No,
he
was the one who'd been Tased, the one being taken into custody.

That wasn't too surprising, actually. Vern, at least, was a local. Kyle had visited Sierra Lobo many times in the past, but to this cop, at least, he was a total stranger.

No wonder he was going to be blamed for the trouble. No wonder he was going to jail for something that wasn't really his fault.

It wasn't like this would be the first time for that to happen, he thought bitterly as the officer hauled him upright and held him there as his rubbery legs tried to fold up underneath him.

M
iranda quickly scanned the letter that Brannock gave to her. She'd always had the ability to read quickly and comprehend and retain what she'd read, a skill that came in handy when she'd honed it even more during law school. She could wade through the assigned reading and make sense of it in half the time of most of her fellow students.

Now she saw that the old rancher was right. The tone of this letter from the government was definitely threatening.

“I don't understand this,” she said. “Well, I
understand
it, of course, but I don't know why they sent it to you. We've appealed the auditor's decision, and they're supposed to allow time for that appeal to be considered before they take any further action against you.”

Brannock pointed at the letter and said, “Yeah, but that says they're gonna take my ranch if they don't get their dadgum $380,000, doesn't it?”

“That's what it says, all right,” Miranda replied with a sigh. “But it doesn't make any sense. We've demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that you
don't
owe those back taxes. In fact, if anything the IRS probably owes you a small refund. All they have to do is look at all the documentation we assembled and it'll be obvious that they're in the wrong.”

“You know that and I know that, but that auditor fella we talked to in El Paso was bound and determined not to admit it, wasn't he?”

Miranda shrugged and said, “Well, of course he was going to be stubborn about it. That's what they're trained to do: stonewall and deny doing anything wrong. The taxpayer is always presumed to be guilty, and you not only have to prove your innocence, you sometimes have to do it two or three different ways before you explain it to them in a way they're willing to admit might be right. So I fully expected that the audit would go against you. I'm confident you'll win on appeal, though.”

“Not if they don't give me a chance to. And if they go ahead and take this ranch away from me, what do you reckon the chances are they'll ever admit they made a mistake and give it back to me?”

Miranda's face was grim as she said, “Slim to none. And they'd just tie the case up in court for so long that you'd bankrupt yourself trying to prove them wrong.”

“That wouldn't take much.” Brannock's face was equally bleak. “I've never had a lot of cash, just this ranch. Without it . . . well, I won't be able to put up much of a fight. It might take me years to pay off just what I owe you.”

Miranda shook her head and said, “Don't worry about that right now. I'm certainly not going to.” She paused. “There's no way you can come up with, say, ten percent of what they say you owe? That might be enough to put them off for a while, and you can always try to recover it later.”

“Thirty-eight grand is just as impossible for me as the whole shootin' match would be,” Brannock said. “I just don't have it. I might be able to raise it by sellin' off some of the spread. . . .” The pain in his voice made it clear just how much he didn't want to take that drastic step. “But they won't even let me do that. The whole property is frozen, accordin' to the letter.”

“Yes, you wouldn't be allowed to dispose of any holdings. Why should they let you do that when they can just seize everything and have it all?”

“Bunch'a damn pirates, if you ask me.”

“You won't get any argument from me, G.W. This is just about the most blatant thing I've ever seen, though, even from the IRS.” Miranda drew in a deep breath. “Don't give up, though. I've got a few days to try to come up with a strategy to block this—”

Before she could say anything else, Brannock's phone rang inside the old ranch house, its shrill summons easily heard through the screen door.

“Hold on a minute,” Brannock said. He disappeared inside as he waved a hand at the wicker rocking chairs and added, “Have a seat.”

Miranda sat down in one of the rockers. In the shade of the porch, with a little breeze blowing, the temperature was warm but not uncomfortable.

Miranda had grown up in the Florida Panhandle, so she was used to heat. It had taken her a while to become accustomed to the low humidity out here in West Texas, though.

She had never figured she would wind up in a place like Sierra Lobo, but it was a long, long way from the painful breakup that had prompted her to leave Florida in the first place. She had started driving west and, except for sleeping in anonymous motels, had stayed on the road until she gave in to a whim and stopped in the little town.

The first thing she'd seen was a sign on a building that read
OFFICE SPACE FOR RENT,
and she had said to herself, why the hell not?

It had taken a while to get licensed to practice law in Texas, and, of course, any new practice was slow to get started, but she'd advertised in the local newspaper and gradually she had taken on a few clients, including G.W. Brannock.

It wasn't a bad life, and Sierra Lobo was as good a place to hide out from the world as any.

Unfortunately for G.W., there was no hiding from the federal government, especially the IRS.

The screen door banged behind the old rancher as he came out of the house looking upset.

“We'll have to talk about this later,” he told Miranda. “I got to go into town.”

“What's wrong?”

“That call was the police chief. They've got my grandson locked up, and I got to go get him out.”

A
s jails went, the one in Sierra Lobo wasn't too bad, Kyle thought as he sat on the bunk with its thin mattress and single blanket. He had certainly been in worse.

He rolled his shoulders and stretched his arms and massaged his legs. His muscles still ached from the spasming they'd done as a result of the stun gun charge, and he didn't want them to stiffen up.

He looked around the cell and reflected idly that whatever company manufactured the ugly, institutional green paint that covered the cinder block walls, they must be making a fortune, he reflected. Every jail cell he'd ever been in had been painted that same shade.

If that was true, it was probably one of the few companies in the country that was still vibrant and healthy, since the vaunted “economic recovery” a couple of presidential administrations earlier had turned out to be nothing but an apparently endless cycle of recessions that were propped up artificially by the government to give the lapdog pundits in the mainstream media something good to say about their Democrat masters before the inevitable spiral began again.

Each round left the country worse off than it had been to start with, because no matter how hard they tried, no matter how many executive orders the President issued, no matter how many micromanaging regulations came from petty bureaucrats unaccountable to the public or anyone else, and no matter how many borderline unconstitutional laws were passed by the liberal-controlled Congress, the politicians just couldn't make two and two equal more than four.

“Math always wins in the end,” a guy in Kyle's platoon had told him when they talked about the state of the world. “There's a famous science fiction story called ‘The Cold Equations,' because emotions don't enter into math. Numbers add up to what they add up to, and sooner or later if you're taking resources away from a steadily decreasing group in order to give them to a steadily
increasing
group in order to solicit votes, the system is going to crash. It's not a sustainable equation, no matter how much some people think it
should
be.”

“So what happens then?” Kyle had asked.

“Blood in the streets when people who have been dependent on the government for everything they have realize that the free ride has run out. A near-total breakdown of society that our enemies will try to exploit. Why do you think I've been studying Chinese? I want to be useful to our new masters. Maybe that way I can dodge the reeducation camps.”

That whole scenario seemed pretty far-fetched to Kyle, but he couldn't discount the idea completely. Just in the time he had been alive, he had seen conditions in the country steadily worsen as the so-called “progressives” strengthened their stranglehold on government, media, culture, and education.

One reason he'd lasted only a single semester in college before joining the army was that he couldn't stomach all the liberal crap that the professors tried to feed their students.

The only reason he'd lasted less than a year in the army before being booted out was that he was an angry asshole with poor impulse control. Not exactly what you'd call a textbook soldier.

The holding cell where they'd put him was in a hallway with a couple of other similar cells. At least they hadn't thrown him in the tank. He was grateful for that. All he needed to get himself in even more trouble would be to get tossed in with some belligerent drunk who'd force him into a fight.

Footsteps in the corridor broke into his musing and made him lift his head. The cell had a solid door with a small barred window in it. If Kyle had bothered to stand up, he could have looked through that window and seen if whoever was coming this direction stopped at the door. He couldn't find the energy and enthusiasm to go to that much trouble.

Anyway, the lock mechanism buzzed a moment later, and he knew whoever it was had come for him.

The officer who'd arrested him stood there. The ID badge he wore on his shirt identified him as CHAPMAN
.
Stella had called him Steve, Kyle recalled. He wondered if she and the cop had dated. It was certainly possible. Officer Chapman was only about twenty-five. Hell, the two of them might even have something going on now, thought Kyle.

Chapman jerked his head toward the corridor and said, “All right, Brannock, come on out. Your grandfather and your sister are here to get you.”