Free Blood Land by R. S. Guthrie

furnace.
    Words.
    Fucking words.
    Ideology.
    The drunker he got, the more he felt like a fool for building his principles on ideas so vaporous. Great words felt invincible in the strong man’s heart but when confronted by the hardness and unfairness of life became as weak as rice paper cast into the fire of Hell.
     

    The sheriff’s plan was not impenetrable, but it was solid. Two possible outcomes and either assured that Ty McIntyre paid his debt. The planning came natural to Pruett. The will to act, however, came only from the booze. The oath James Pruett swore when he took office was very real to him; a resonance of the honor in which Pruett’s old man so strongly believed. He spent the past four decades dedicating his life to the honor of upholding laws that stood against the very kinds of selfish acts occupying his mind since his wife’s murder.
    Two men struggled to control Pruett—one, the honorable sheriff; a man dedicated to law and to justice. The other man—the devil inside him—claimed that justice was not only blind, she was a deaf mute, shackled by an overworked court and trussed so thoroughly in red tape she would likely never come close to completing her tasks.
    Pruett’s hardened heart—the heart hardened by anger and a vengeful hatred of the perpetual loneliness under which he now woke and ate and worked—wallowed in the muddy slop of hatred and revenge. The sheriff was not young. He’d long ago accepted the reality that every man owes a death. No one knew the where, when, or in what fashion. But one could choose . One could decide whether a death meant something to the living; whether or not it cleared a column in the balance sheet. Pruett did not fear dying. Death introduced itself to him in the villages and hamlets of Vietnam—exposed its true nature; the nature of the cowardly jackal, waiting patiently to steal scraps from the lion—from life , the true predator.
    Pruett learned that it was life that was incapable of mercy; a beast that brought forth not an ending, as would death, but rather a continuance of anguish. Life drew out his pain, the grand horror show in his mind, eyes permanently seared open to watch. Now with Bethy gone and the devil in his veins, Pruett decided that rectifying his mistakes meant doing something his conscience and his creed decried.
    Nothing in the world worth owning comes to a person without a price , he reminded himself when his conscience made its protestations. And James Pruett knew the price of peace. He’d seen much more selfish acts; acts that bore no ends and whose entire nature lived in their means.
    Pruett intended to reach an end; an end, he hoped, to the pain. And somewhere deep, in a place he could ignore for only so long, he realized what he needed the moment he saw Bethy curled in a pool of her own lifeblood. The means —the creation of the perfect opportunity—took some figuring.
     

    It was a Saturday when Sheriff James Pruett made an intentional oversight in the assignment of Sunday patrol. Wind River bars did not open on Sundays, so the department’s rotating schedule had only one cruiser on duty throughout that day and night. The deputy scheduled to handle the second of two twelve-hour patrol shifts that Sunday, Melody Munney, received a call from the sheriff Saturday afternoon:
    “Hey, Mel, how’s the weekend so far?” Pruett asked. He reached her on her cell, at the lake.
    “Not bad, Sheriff,” Munney said. “Something wrong?”
    “No, no. I need to know if you can switch shifts with Zach. Give him your Sunday night shift, take his on Monday.”
    “No sweat. Just means I get a full day of skiing in.”
    “Thanks, Mel.”
    Pruett knew Deputy Munney would stay at the lake; her parents owned a cabin there and Melody and her friends spent every off-shift day up there in the summer, particularly on the weekends. He never made a second call to Zach Canter, who told the sheriff he and his wife planned to spend all day Sunday in