Suspended Sentences by Brian Garfield Read Free Book Online Page B

here in property-tax auditors and land reappraisals. He will find every application for a building permit held up for months, perhaps years. He will find his heavy construction equipment impounded by the County for violations of safety and pollution regulations. He will find his car ticketed incessantly for violations of vehicular codes, and he’ll find his home, his office and other real property cited for every conceivable violation of the building codes. He will find himself and his executives subjected to an endless barrage of bureaucratic foul-ups, lost applications, misplaced documents — a nightmare of red tape, a systematic campaign of official harassment that will bring all his businesses to a total standstill and result in the across-the-board bankruptcy of every enterprise controlled by Ron Baylor Owens.”
    â€œAnd one more thing,” I added in the same quiet voice. “It’s conceivable that some fatal accident just might happen to befall me if I began to put such a campaign into action. You and Owens should be aware that this is a rural county and that my family is one of the oldest here. We’ve known one another for generations around here. Some of these old boys — friends of mine, I play poker and hunt deer with them — some of these gents can shoot a flea off a coon-dog’s ear at six hundred yards. They’re not above settling their grievances in the old-fashioned frontier manner. I’d like you and Owens to understand that if anything happens to me, it happens to Owens. I doubt it’s much fun spending the hours wondering when to expect the bullet out of the darkness.”
    I got up and left him then; I’d said all I had to say.
    Part of it was a bluff. I don’t number any killers among my friends. But Farquhart and Owens were city boys and they didn’t know that for sure; we had a redneck reputation up our way.
    The rest of it had been quite true. I was fully prepared to drown Owens’ companies in bureaucratic obstructionism and it would have been perfectly legal to do so: if you actually enforce every ludicrous regulation in the law you can cripple anyone. The reason it hadn’t already been done in Owens’ case was that he’d been pouring a great deal of money into the economy of the county. Folks are willing to put up with all sorts of shenanigans if prosperity comes with them. But people up in Ocotillo County are still a bit old-fashioned: they don’t condone willful murder as an acceptable way of doing business. I’d have had no trouble getting the cooperation of the other county officials.
    Coercion is a two-way street. Owens and Farquhart were dealers in fear; I’d given them their own medicine.
    Farquhart and his supporting battery of big-town attorneys put up a good defense but they didn’t produce the six lying witnesses; Baker and Calhoun were convicted on the steadfast testimony of Larry Stowe and the evidence of bootprints and a few other tangibles left at the scene. The killers were sentenced to twenty-year-to-life terms in the State Penitentiary at Florence. Rumor has it that Ron Owens had to pay both of them enormous sums to ensure that they wouldn’t implicate him in the murder. The presence of his Cadillac at the crime meant nothing; Owens simply gave out the story that he’d lent the car to the two cowboys but had no idea what they meant to do with it.
    But Owens pulled out of the county with satisfying alacrity. It took him a while to liquidate his properties but by Christmas he was gone, his offices closed, his residence sold.
    He wasn’t really very tough. I’d been looking forward to squaring off against him but evidently he didn’t enjoy playing a game against people who played harder than he did.
    The law doesn’t protect people unless people protect the law.

ENDS AND MEANS
    â€œ Ends and Means” is a story within a story; the interior story is an embellishment