Jackson Shreve, a member of the Fifty-first Star and patriot, would not see the green-tipped and probably illegal round smash into Pangborn’s fifth cervical vertebrae. In a way, he’d done him a favor. Pangborn would never experience the terror of being in a prison’s general population where his life would be at risk daily, hourly. He would, instead, be incarcerated in a moderately pleasant facility where he would share a room with only one other prisoner. The bad news: he would spend the remainder of his days as a quadriplegic, his continued existence dependent on the goodwill offered by people, most of whom despised him.
***
In another part of the country where things were comparatively less complicated, Ruth twisted in the car’s seat and studied Ike. “Tell me something, Sheriff. Before we face the music in Picketsville, why did you call in the State Police back there? The way you were talking, I expected that the minute you had the evidence you needed, you’d storm onto the ranch and splatter Pangborn across the Idaho countryside. What happened?”
“Maybe I heeded your very good advice.”
“Possible, but barely so.”
“Okay, you were right. And recall what I said to Pangborn at the time. You know, it is a funny thing about society in this quarter of the twenty-first century. You can abuse the system to the point where your greed is responsible for the economic collapse of the nation thereby bringing ruination to millions of people or, like Pangborn in his heyday, destroy people’s livelihoods and futures. You can be arrogant and bellicose enough to require the deployment of troops into combat or drone attacks on innocent villagers in parts of the world about which you know little or nothing. You can start a war, torture, maim, and destroy people willy-nilly and then retire with a golden parachute, a Nobel Peace Prize, or maybe even a Presidential Library. You may be vilified, but you will endure, equally praised and despised.”
“Ike…”
“However, if you are caught sexually abusing children, you are branded a monster to the end of your days. Your friends will not acknowledge your existence ever again. Your career, if you have one, will be trashed. You will be tracked, monitored, distrusted, and abused in turn for the rest of your hellish life. If Pangborn goes to jail, as I am now sure he will, he may not last a year. If he manages to avoid it, he will have a target on his back the size of Texas. One year or twenty, free or incarcerated, his end, when it comes, will be painful and mortifying.”
“Wow. So you didn’t shoot him because…?”
“Shooting him would be a mercy killing and mercy killing is only legal in four or five states and Idaho is definitely not one of them.”
“Right, and you are the sheriff, charged with upholding the law.”
“I am.”
“Okay, I get it. Pangborn gets a living hell before he lands there permanently. Wow, I like it. Now Ike, can we put the top down and live dangerously one last time?”
Ike pulled over. When the top had locked down, Ruth sat back and gazed up at the sky.
“Open sky. No more hiding. What a relief. You don’t realize what freedom to move about can be until you lose it.”
Ike’s phone buzzed. “It’s Charlie. What?…Crap…Okay.”
“What did he say?”
“Someone got to Pangborn. One of his own shot him.”
“He’s dead?”
“No, Charlie says he’s tetraplegic. What the hell is tetraplegic?”
“It means he’s paralyzed from the neck down, a quadriplegic. The wordsmiths in charge of important topics like how we classify things and then name them, in this case medical terminology, were uncomfortable with the American habit of mixing Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes. Quadra is Latin for four and tetra is the Greek. Since plegia is Greek, it needed a Greek stem. So, substituting tetra for quadra harmonizes the languages, gives you tetraplegic. See? Simple.”
“Wow, I’m glad we cleared that up. Imagine the potential damage to our youth mixing our classic languages could have.”
“Now, now, no need to be snarky. We have survived near death. Some very bad people have been removed from general circulation, and a potential domestic terrorist organization has been dismantled. Be happy.”
“I am happy. On the one hand our villain has been spared a horrific death in jail, but on the other, he will receive far worse than that—a life in which he will be reminded daily that he is wholly dependent on the willingness of people he loathes to keep him alive.”
“Let’s call it a toss-up Look, there’s a big bird circling up there. Is that a big hawk?”
“It’s a buzzard.”
“Or a vulture. You don’t suppose…?”
“Suppose what?”
“I’m going with vulture.” Ruth twisted in her seat and waved at the bird.
A Brief Author’s Note
This is the second book which has child abuse as a secondary theme. It will be the last. I have persisted this far because one thing bothers me about it. It happens often, and that is bad, but one might argue that it seems integral to the human condition and cite incidents stretching back into ancient history to confirm that sad fact. That doesn’t excuse it, only puts it in perspective. What is most disturbing to me is not the fact it exists, as awful as that is, but that it goes on with the full knowledge of otherwise responsible people and thus, too often, goes unreported and unpunished. Why this should be is a problem to be unraveled by keener minds than mine. Perhaps more dollars spent on childhood protective services would help, or reducing the divide between those who have and those who have not. I don’t know, but in any event, it is clear to me that as long as the political system places economic growth ahead of human welfare, it will endure.
This book is dedicated to all those victims who have thus been robbed of their innocence and discarded by an uncaring society.
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