Read Online Above the Law by J. F. Freedman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: J. F. Freedman
Tags: Suspense
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to the rear and pried opened the doors to the trailer.
The seals on the trailer were good. My new prize possession was sitting there all perky, barely a speck of sand on it. I jumped inside, ran my hand along the smooth gas tank, the worn leather seat.
“We’re going to have fun,” I told it. “We’ve earned it. By the way, your name is Marilyn, from you know who, and I am going to ride you hard.”
I closed the trailer up tight, got into the cab of the truck, and pulled out. Deedee, Wally, and Ray were standing in front, waving good-bye. I waved back. For a few moments I could see them in my side-view mirror, receding in the distance. Then I followed the curve of the road, and they were gone.
A MBUSH
T HE OLD MAN STOOD apart from the others in a grove of old-growth California live oaks, smoking a hand-rolled. The only things here more ancient than me, he thought as he looked at them, their twisted limbs skeletal-like, black against the not-as-black sky of the night still two hours away from the beginnings of a crisp early autumn dawn. He squinted against the smoke as it curled up from the cigarette that was tucked into the corner of his mouth. His eyes, a startling desert-sky pale blue, were narrow anyway. He had been looking at things critically for over fifty years.
The location that he and the others in this raiding party had come to was a heavily wooded area of Muir County, the least-populated and poorest county in the state, situated in the far north, bordering Oregon, Nevada, and nowhere. Over thirty million people live in California, but less than twenty thousand of them live in Muir County, and that’s a generous census. It’s a vast place and difficult to get to. There are no interstate or federal highways running through it, and the county and state roads are poorly maintained; in winter, when there are storms every week, or during spring floods that originate from the rivers that flow down from the Sierras, access in and out can border on the impossible, except by private airplane—the nearest commercial airfield is in Reno, hours away. At any time during the year, you can be driving on one of the county roads and not encounter another car, or see another person, for several miles.
This is the unglamorous underside of rural America, as one finds in pockets of Mississippi or Arkansas and other benighted places; an overall feeling more like Appalachia than California. If you went up to some family sitting on their front porch, took their picture on black-and-white film, and then compared it, side by side, with a photo taken by Dorothea Lange in the 1930s, you’d see strong similarities.
Because of the inbredness of the area, there is a tremendous suspicion of outsiders. Still, it is America at the beginning of the new millennium, with cable television systems and satellite dishes and Internet providers.
A sizable segment of the population is Native American, scattered among four reservations. In recent years, particularly since the passage, in 1998, of Proposition Five, which legalized a myriad of types of gambling on Indian land with virtually no government control or oversight, the tribes have become militant regarding land-use issues, particularly gambling. There have been discussions amongst the various tribal heavies in the county about building a huge, multimillion-dollar resort to attract some of the money that flows into Tahoe, two hundred miles to the south, even though this is a remote area. If you build it, the feeling is, they will come. The gamblers.
There are no other minorities here to speak of. The last census did not list one African-American, and hardly any Latinos or Asians.
Over thirty percent of the permanent residents are on some form of welfare or government assistance. Despite the overall poverty, though, there are pockets of considerable money, based around mining, logging, and ranching operations. That’s the legal stuff. Then there are the illegal
The seals on the trailer were good. My new prize possession was sitting there all perky, barely a speck of sand on it. I jumped inside, ran my hand along the smooth gas tank, the worn leather seat.
“We’re going to have fun,” I told it. “We’ve earned it. By the way, your name is Marilyn, from you know who, and I am going to ride you hard.”
I closed the trailer up tight, got into the cab of the truck, and pulled out. Deedee, Wally, and Ray were standing in front, waving good-bye. I waved back. For a few moments I could see them in my side-view mirror, receding in the distance. Then I followed the curve of the road, and they were gone.
A MBUSH
T HE OLD MAN STOOD apart from the others in a grove of old-growth California live oaks, smoking a hand-rolled. The only things here more ancient than me, he thought as he looked at them, their twisted limbs skeletal-like, black against the not-as-black sky of the night still two hours away from the beginnings of a crisp early autumn dawn. He squinted against the smoke as it curled up from the cigarette that was tucked into the corner of his mouth. His eyes, a startling desert-sky pale blue, were narrow anyway. He had been looking at things critically for over fifty years.
The location that he and the others in this raiding party had come to was a heavily wooded area of Muir County, the least-populated and poorest county in the state, situated in the far north, bordering Oregon, Nevada, and nowhere. Over thirty million people live in California, but less than twenty thousand of them live in Muir County, and that’s a generous census. It’s a vast place and difficult to get to. There are no interstate or federal highways running through it, and the county and state roads are poorly maintained; in winter, when there are storms every week, or during spring floods that originate from the rivers that flow down from the Sierras, access in and out can border on the impossible, except by private airplane—the nearest commercial airfield is in Reno, hours away. At any time during the year, you can be driving on one of the county roads and not encounter another car, or see another person, for several miles.
This is the unglamorous underside of rural America, as one finds in pockets of Mississippi or Arkansas and other benighted places; an overall feeling more like Appalachia than California. If you went up to some family sitting on their front porch, took their picture on black-and-white film, and then compared it, side by side, with a photo taken by Dorothea Lange in the 1930s, you’d see strong similarities.
Because of the inbredness of the area, there is a tremendous suspicion of outsiders. Still, it is America at the beginning of the new millennium, with cable television systems and satellite dishes and Internet providers.
A sizable segment of the population is Native American, scattered among four reservations. In recent years, particularly since the passage, in 1998, of Proposition Five, which legalized a myriad of types of gambling on Indian land with virtually no government control or oversight, the tribes have become militant regarding land-use issues, particularly gambling. There have been discussions amongst the various tribal heavies in the county about building a huge, multimillion-dollar resort to attract some of the money that flows into Tahoe, two hundred miles to the south, even though this is a remote area. If you build it, the feeling is, they will come. The gamblers.
There are no other minorities here to speak of. The last census did not list one African-American, and hardly any Latinos or Asians.
Over thirty percent of the permanent residents are on some form of welfare or government assistance. Despite the overall poverty, though, there are pockets of considerable money, based around mining, logging, and ranching operations. That’s the legal stuff. Then there are the illegal
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