The Last Ranch Read Online Free

Kerney, Pvt. Fredrick Robertson Tyler forgot about keeping his nose clean and getting out of the army with an honorable discharge. Known as Fred to his buddies on the base, Tyler stood outside the ophthalmology ward, lit a cigarette, and mulled overhis discovery. First off, he needed to make damn sure that he wasn’t mistaken about the man he’d helped wheel from surgery to post-op. If it was Kerney, it would be stupid to reveal himself to the woman and little girl who were visiting him at his bedside. A closer look at Kerney’s medical chart should do the trick, and if Tyler needed more proof about the patient’s identity, a pal in personnel could let him have a look-see at his service jacket.
    Tyler took a long drag on his smoke, hoping the woman and little girl would come out of the building before his cigarette break was up. He wanted a closer look at Kerney’s happy little family for future reference.
    When the war started, Fred figured he was too old, too lame, and too undesirable to be drafted into the army. But at age forty-four, with an armed robbery conviction on his sheet and a smashed foot courtesy of a fellow inmate at the New Mexico State Penitentiary in Santa Fe, his local draft board classified him as acceptable for limited military service. A month later he was inducted into the army, put through an abbreviated Basic Training course for men unfit for combat assignments, and sent to Fort Bliss along with a few other semi-cripples, misfits, and miscreants to serve as medical orderlies.
    Years of living in prison surrounded by dangerous men made the army a cakewalk for Fred Tyler. He figured he’d remain safe and sound stateside at Fort Bliss, frequent the Juárez whorehouses when he had money and some leave, maybe earn a stripe or two, and get out with everyone else who’d been drafted for the duration plus six months. Then he’d return to the business of robbery.
    But if he was correct about the man in post-op, he had to change that plan some. Years earlier, he’d been expecting to rob a kid named Matthew Kerney living alone in a house his mother had left him, only to have the kid scald him with boiling hotcoffee, stab him in the arm, knock him unconscious with a frying pan, and get him arrested by the cops. Later in open court, Kerney had accused Tyler of killing his friend Boone Mitchell, which Tyler had done, though it couldn’t be proved at the time because no dead body had been found.
    Kerney’s accusation caused the presiding judge to hang two consecutive sentences on Tyler, doubling his prison time. For that alone he needed to settle accounts. Moreover, it gnawed at him that a punk kid barely out of high school had gotten the best of him. Now, miraculously, here was an opportunity for a reckoning. Tyler figured something much more painful than a bone-breaking beating or a slow, agonizing death for Matt Kerney was in order.
    The price Kerney paid needed to be steep. As Kerney’s wife and daughter stepped out into the hot early-morning sun, he got the idea that maybe Kerney losing his family might just be the ticket. As they approached him, that notion became even more appealing.
    He field-stripped the cigarette butt, smiled, touched a finger to his fatigue cap, and said as the woman and child drew near, “Don’t you worry none about your man, ma’am. We’ll take good care of him and get him back home to you in a jiffy.”
    The woman took a half step back, gave him a studied look, smiled through thin lips, and thanked him rather stiffly, as if he were some lowlife crud looking for a handout.
    The tight-assed bitch’s reaction pleased Tyler. He watched her hurry to the visitor parking lot clutching the little girl tightly by the hand.
This just might be a lot of fun
, he thought.
    ***
    A nna Lynn drove through downtown El Paso past the ritzy, ten-story Hotel Paso Del Norte that soared over the nearby plaza. Several years earlier,