I’m trying something a little new here—I’ve just started my third book in the James Pruett Mystery Series that began with Blood Land. The second in the series, Money Land, released just at the end of December.

I have written a few chapters but I thought I would share the first on the blog, I suppose primarily for those who have not read the series yet, to offer up a little taste, but also for those I know are hungry for the third in the series.

Nothing more devious than that—truthfully, I just got the cover back from Ares Jun and he did such an incredible job with the vision I gave him that frankly I just felt like showing off his work.

As I mentioned, this is a first, and it is in 100% first draft form, so please forgive any typos—it’s raw. I am the KING of typos and I usually don’t feel comfortable putting my work out in front of anyone but my brain-trust in the early stages, but I figured I would go ahead, throw it out there, and see how readers responded. If it goes well, perhaps I’ll give you a glimpse into another chapter or two before it’s all finished. 

So I hope you enjoy it.

Honor Land

By

R.S. Guthrie

 

Copyright © 2013 by R.S. Guthrie

Kindle Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author. All rights reserved.

 

 

“You’re the fighter

you’ve got the fire

The spirit of a warrior,

the champion’s heart

You fight for your life

because the fighter never quits

You make the most

of the hand you’re dealt”

Dropkick Murphys, Warrior’s Code

 

  

Chapter 1

 

 

PRUETT STARED at the half-emptied bottle of Heaven Hill bourbon on the table before him. It was as if he were facing down a gladiator from the days of the Caesars, only there were too many problems with that metaphor. First, the gladiators were the ones with honor—dragged into an arena to fight and die for the amusement of the hordes. The booze before him had no honor, but neither did he.

     James Pruett. That’s all he was now. He’d not believed anything—not ANYTHING—could tear his soul in two like the death of his wife had over a decade earlier. But life didn’t follow the same rules as humans. Not life OR God. Being punished once wasn’t enough. Not twice, or three times, or four.

     There was no number, no maximum.

     The debt for being brought to life was limitless and not payable and the worst was no one ever had a choice in the matter. People were here, and they started dying from the very moment they were born.

     Pruett looked at the revolver with the one bullet chambered. His real nemesis. Not the booze. He’d stared down that single bullet a thousand times. Every morning and night for over ten years. When he lost Bethy he wanted to end it. That day. Then after the wake. Then after he buried her. Then every time he thought of the cold covers on the other half of the bed.

     Even when sober he faced down that bullet inside that chamber inside that 1998 Smith and Wesson 64 .38 Special revolver with the .357 caliber load. Because it wasn’t about the alcoholism or the lonely days and nights or the aching hole inside him that nothing could fill—it was about needing a reason to keep on keeping on.

     There had to be a purpose. For him—for everyone. What use was a life lived if nothing was ever accomplished—if being on the planet for so many decades amounted, in the end, to having nothing left to keep you going?

     Being Sheriff James Pruett. That’s what he’d always fallen back on.

     After Bethy was gunned down at her own family’s property, continuing to be the sheriff had been his purpose. It’s what saved him that night; it’s what kept him just strong enough to live through the funeral and the burial and the nagging, never-ending realization that he would be alone inside himself forever.

     He would just keep on being sheriff.

     And he did. Almost another eleven years. Fought off the fucking Mexican drug cartel, by God. Saved the town—his town.

     But now all that was gone. Washed away as quickly as the flash flood of water and mud and deadfall debris roared past, destroying every living and nonliving thing in its path.

     James Pruett. He was just James fucking Pruett.

     He threw back another double fist of Heaven Hill and his eyes become long, horizontal slits in a face that looked like it had been pounded out of dark, aged leather, wrinkles running like spider webs this way and that way across his countenance—a countenance that revealed a man who was finished; a countenance that revealed exactly what it looks like to be beaten down so hard and stomped on so many times that getting up just isn’t any option anymore.

     He then thought of his father, Michael, the preacher. His father had been hard on him in many ways, but as Jimmy Pruett grew into James—as the childlike things were put away—much of the hardness softened and he understood a good amount of what his father had tried to teach him.

     Pruett ignored the glass on the table, taking a long, smooth pull on the bottle and thought back to the day his father taught him one of the hardest lessons.

     During the sermon that particular Sunday, Jimmy Pruett and a few of his friends had been poking each other and giggling quietly in the rear pews while the elder Pruett boomed on about God and his servant Job. Several times Jimmy stole glances at his father and didn’t see anything that would lead him to believe they could be heard.

     After the service, Jimmy was not called by his father, and on the drive home Michael even caught Jimmy’s eye in the rearview and smiled.

     They had been home a good hour, hour and a half, when Jimmy’s father asked him if he wanted to go fishing. There was a slow rolling stream twenty yards wide that snaked through the Pruett property and Michael “Preacher” Pruett was known as the worst fly fisherman God had ever seen fit to put on the earth. Still, they would make ham and mustard sandwiches with some saltine crackers and a thermos of flavored fruit drink and hike down to a spot in the river where the water was so clear you could toss a dime or even a dark penny and see it sitting amongst the rounded stones on the river bottom, two, three feet deep.

     The water was more clear than glass and deep enough that they did not have white water, and Michael would choose a spot where the river bent and he could cast his chosen fly out where a crafty rainbow or brown trout might be hiding away in a shadowed spot too far into the bend to see the man and his pole casting for dinner.

     Sometimes his father would catch a fish and most times he wouldn’t, but Pruett remembered hankering for those ham and mustard sandwiches on wheat bread, cut into perfect wedges for eating, and the sweet, cool, flavored water as it washed down each bite.

     Most of all he remembered enjoying the talks he’d have with his old man—sermons they were, with father speaking mostly and son answering, but they weren’t booming, fire and rapture and horse riders named things like Pestilence and War and Death. They were more like even-spoken lessons, for Jimmy only—private tutoring from a much-respected man who tutored an entire community every Sunday morning.

     That one particular day, however, after the sandwiches and other items were made and placed in the Army-green backpack Jimmy would sling over his shoulder, his father told him to meet him back at the toolshed and they’d walk to the river from there.

     When Pruett’s father arrived he’d already removed his thick, brown, leather belt and he motioned for his son to set the backpack aside and bend over. “You know what to do,” he said, not in a mean way like some times but in a matter-of-fact tone. “And you know why you’re doing it.”

     Those whips that day hurt more than Pruett could remember any hurting him before or after, and he’d been strap whipped across the buttocks more than a few times in his childhood. His father was no abuser as such—he did what parents did then; they delivered lessons sometimes with the switch instead of the breath. But that day, Pruett’s father gave him four lashes that left him even as an adult with one remnant scar.

     After the whipping, Jimmy Pruett picked up the backpack and father and son walked to the river as they had a hundred times before (Jimmy with more of a limp perhaps, but he’d hiked to a fishing hole that way, too).

     When they were eating the delicious sandwiches after an unsuccessful fish, it was silent but for the small breeze trickling through the willows and the tall grass and all Jimmy Pruett could think about was his sore behind.

     “You didn’t think I heard you boys making that ruckus in the rear pews, now did ya?”

     “No, sir.”

     “Felt like you got away with somethin’, not gettin’ called into my office after the services or gettin’ scolded on the drive home, didn’t it?”

     “Yessir.”

     “That’s the way life is—they call it complacency or sometimes taking things for granted.” He chewed on a fresh bite of ham, mustard, and bread. “Doin’ somethin’ bad has nothin’ to do with it, but that feeling you get—that comfortable notion that you’ll just sail through the rest of the day, doin’ normal things like fishin’ and drinkin’ Kool-Aid and nothin’ bein’ any different than it ever is.”

     Pruett had nodded back then, still unsure of the sermon’s message and still feeling the burning sting across his backside.

     “I wanted that whoopin’ to come somewhat outta nowhere; catch you unawares. I’m guessin’ it did.”

     “Yes, sir, it did for sure.”

     “In life, we start feeling like we got away with things—maybe not one particular thing or another, but just like maybe God isn’t watching and if we don’t get caught, well, then we’re doin’ just fine. We’ll wake up the next day, just like every day; our parents will be there to love us, just like every day; we’ll play marbles or buy ice cream or pretend to do our homework.

     “Point being, we get feeling pretty good and normal and full of ourselves and that’s called getting complacent.”

     “Complacent.”

     “Yep, and then BAM,” Preacher said, Jimmy jumping an inch off the ground and almost dropping his sandwich in the stream, “a car smashes into us or a tornado tears a home down like it was made a matchsticks or cancer strikes down the healthiest person you know. It comes outta nowhere, son, just like when you thought you were fine and had made it through another perfect day.”

     And then Pruett had understood. People let their guard down. They let a rosy complexion and a strong gait hide the fact that a dark sickness could still be growing inside. They—HE—let the fact that a wonderful, innocent woman who had nothing to do with a roiling family feud would therefore be safe, each day as the next.

     Pruett put the cap back on the bottle and spun it closed with a thick, scarred thumb.  

     The gladiator wasn’t the booze. And neither was Pruett—though he had been once; had been many times, in fact. But he wasn’t now and no one seemed to care that it was his own constituency that cast him away. Complacent. As if no storm could gather itself up along the prairie horizon and come roaring into town to destroy every man, woman, child, or building standing.

     No, Pruett wasn’t the gladiator anymore.

     But his gun was, inanimate though it might be. An object of molded steel without thought, or will—even  without the ability to act unless it was picked up and brought to bear by a person—someone alive, and breathing, and sweating, and feeling.

     Someone with intent.

     But just because the gun was charged with carrying out the will of an owner who had lost his way, his will, and his purpose didn’t make the thing any less capable of doing what it was made to do, and thus, it was still a gladiator, even were its owner not.

     A man staring into the abyss might find the abyss not looking back into him at all but rather just blackness, the abyss finding nothing in the man worth considering. At such times there was so much damned complacency that the inanimate took over the actions for a being that once thrived with life.

     James Pruett picked up the weapon.

     It was time.