Different Pastures

The news was equally as tasty; Mike, Billy, Cynthia and the rest of the gang had gotten quite sick indeed 'apparently from sampling too much of one of their new drugs, the Texas Rangers thought. All were now under arrest and in a State Prison hospital ward up north near the Arkansas border, too sick for transfer, let alone trial. All were in late stages of complete renal failure with inoperably damaged internal organs. That old well-expired cow worming medicine had just about destroyed their guts from their stomach all the way down to their bladder.

They would all live (thank goodness) but would be on very special diets and weekly kidney dialysis for the rest of their lives. I gave a small prayer of relief; I had admitting wanting to hurt and punish them, but I don't think I could have handled the news that I had killed a few of them - even in self-defense. Taking a life is a hard thing to live and deal with. I had heard this at least 100 times when I was a boy hearing the WW-II, Korea and Vietnam veterans speak.

If anyone, other than Brenda and I, knew that it was a drugged bottle of Southern Comfort (long since drunk and discarded before their capture) that was the medical culprit, neither of us ever heard a whisper of it.

Cynthia was now considered a 'member of the gang' (she was wearing their colors and had their female member tattoo on her butt now) and was going to be treated like one of them. They would all be receiving a very long-term prison sentence for the drug distribution charges, and they also faced possibly Federal interstate narcotics distribution charges, as well, not to mention other charges relating to organized crime. As sick as those bikers were, I was pretty sure their rich and powerful friends were going to make sure they stayed silent, one way or the other.

After our divorce became final and just before her trial, Cynthia and I had a very short phone conversation. We really didn't have much to say to each other, but I wanted to firmly close the door to the past. She was pretty much unrepentant about her crimes, and the only thing she seemed to be sorry about was that I hadn't taken the poison, and that they had been caught before their scheme had worked, so that she could live out her new life of luxury. I sadly told her to enjoy her probably extremely long stay in prison.

She might have laughed at me then when I hung up on her, but when it became obvious to her that she was going to be charged by the Feds as an equal accessory to interstate drug-dealing, and with State Attempted Murder charges in final preparation, Cynthia now couldn't rat out on her new lovers fast enough. This didn't do her much, if any good for her at her trials, and she didn't make a very sympathetic figure to her juries. They all saw her for what she was, a thieving, murderous and utterly treacherous rattlesnake!

Cynthia would be quite old indeed by the time she would ever be eligible for parole, if she lasted that long. Her testimony against her former lovers would undoubtedly anger the gang and its affiliate groups, not to mention the rich and powerful syndicate than ran things at the top, and her new prison life in constant protective 24/7 isolation would indeed be probably quite hard on her. She later asked several times to speak with me again, but I always refused. I was absolutely done with her and never even wanted to think of her ever again. In fact it was surprising how soon she was nearly utterly forgotten from my mind.

Brenda also confirmed that the lab had detected large doses of that new and very powerful methamphetamine, in quantities that would easily have killed me, from just a single sip of that lemonade. In total, another forty-six other items from my house had also bore the same poison traces, and displayed either Billy's or Cynthia's fingerprints on each item. These lab reports helped to earn the pair of them the maximum possible sentence for Attempted Premeditated Murder, life in prison, without the possibility of parole.

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By early summer, I was a divorced and free man with Cynthia not receiving a single penny in settlement from me. It took a bit of research, but I found that in addition to her old condo, she also had a small townhouse in Houston (which I was also granted in the settlement) that she was using as a love-nest and storage place for her stolen loot. I recovered much of my mother's old jewelry there and found pawn tickets for several of the more expensive missing items that had been passed down through the family over several generations. A few of the nicer missing antique furniture items from the ranch also turned up at a local antique dealer who was selling the items on consignment for her, and I soon got them back as well.

A great number of additional items of great value were found, probably loot she was holding for the biker gang. During the trial, the prosecution discovered that Cynthia and the gang's relationship went back several years, and she had known both Mike and Billy from the time she was a wild teenager, and she already had a juvenal criminal history for theft.

At a loss for what to do to return the other probably stolen items, I contacted the Houston Police, who didn't seem terribly interesting in collecting the items as evidence, so I just called the Salvation Army to send a truck and clear out both the condo and the townhouse. Some of the stuff was nice, I admitted, but I didn't want her stolen loot in my house.

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Over that summer and into the early fall, I started spending more and more time with Brenda. At first it was just Friday or Saturday nights but then more often she'd 'drop by for a horseback ride' on a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon, which would invariably turn into a long afternoon of socializing and I would usually grill dinner for her. Increasingly, she would be dressed for show, wearing increasingly revealing shirts and tank tops and often cutoff shorts, tight and ever so suggestive. Soon it became both days of the weekend and, before we knew it, she wasn't going 'home' at all.

The decision to become lovers, involved no conversation whatsoever, we had just held each other's hand, looked into the other's eye and kissed like there was no tomorrow, before we knew it we were in bed together. May she never leave it!

Our talks and plans for the future invariable involve 'us' now. She would like a small quiet very private wedding sometime very soon, but she isn't pushing for a date. We've also discussed selling the ranch here since the local property values have exploded, and we are starting to see a lot of ranches now being turning into subdivisions, becoming just another bedroom community for Houston's non-stop cancerous growth.

She is quietly looking for an Assistant Sheriff's position with some remote rural county where we and our children can live quiet lives. Undoubtedly, with what my one hundred acres will sell for here, I could easily buy five hundred or maybe even a thousand acres of equally good land elsewhere. No decision has been made yet, but she has received a very promising offer from a small County we'd never heard of called Lovett, and I think we'll drive down there next weekend to take a look.

Life sometimes has a way of offering a hungry horse a new and different pasture to graze in, and I have found mine as well! A loving filly who is just as hungry for life (and a home cooked steak dinner) as I am!