Chisos Mountain Sunset

By Jimmy Patterson

Career criminal Lionel Wayne Sturgis is traveling from Florida to California to visit his dying mother. The only problem is that he has to steal a string of vehicles to get there. His plan goes horribly wrong when he takes a truck in Louisiana and is later pulled over outside of Alpine, Texas. Sturgis starts shooting, killing a police officer in the process.

Faced with a jury trial, Sturgis works with Garrison Trask, a criminal defense attorney with 25 years experience. An anti-death penalty advocate, Trask defends the surly Sturgis who appears to have no remorse and no redeeming qualities.

Sturgis ultimately battles more than just a jury of his peers, and learns that the rugged Big Bend region of Texas is no place to be taken lightly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450295918

Jimmy Patterson

Jimmy Patterson is the author of Sticky Doorknobs and 50 Years: The Story of the Diocese of San Angelo, and coauthor of the novel Chisos Mountain Sunset. He has two other books in the works, as well as a third novel with his coauthor, Tom Morgan. Tom Morgan is a criminal defense attorney in Midland, Texas, and the coauthor of the novel, Chisos Mountain Sunset. He is a graduate of the Baylor University Law School.

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

I dedicate this book to my wife, LaVerne. Thank you for walking beside me, always supporting me and helping me each step of the way. Thank you to my parents, Elsie and Dr. David Morgan, who taught me the value of hard work and going the extra mile. Thank you to my children, Meredith and Brent, who love me unconditionally.

I also dedicate this book to Jimmy Patterson, who graciously agreed to join LaVerne and I in the writing of this book, and to give us the opportunity to live out our dream.

Lastly, I dedicate this book to the criminal defense attorneys of the United States who are, indeed, the trustees of freedom.

-- Tom Morgan

To Karen, Jennifer, Kelsey and James: your support for my dreams and abilities through the years has been what has kept me going. I love you all more than anything.

To Tom and LaVerne Morgan for your outstanding support and generosity, and even more so for wanting to keep the dream going.

To Ellen Hopkins: Thank you for helping me believe in myself, and for asking me to help you finish a task one day in late 2009. Were it not for that offer and our subsequent work together, this may not have happened.

To the memory of the late Fr. Tom Kelley, for transforming my life. Your work at Our Lady of San Juan was Christ-like and I will forever be indebted to the love you gave our family during its formative years.

And to the memory of my dad, Harold Patterson, who is up there with my Mom, Betty Jo, and very likely shedding a tear of happiness right now. Thank you for teaching me your love for God’s Big Bend.

-- Jimmy Patterson

Foreword

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE were it not for the generosity and creative risks Tom and LaVerne Morgan decided to take when they approached me about doing this in 2009. Asking me to turn a court case into a fictionalized account of what happened – writing a novel, in other words -- was something for which I had been hoping and praying my entire adult life.

Chisos Mountain Sunset is based on a trial involving a police officer shooting in West Texas more than a decade ago. Reading the original courtroom transcript, it was easy to see the courage of the officers involved and the brazenness of the suspect. I took many liberties with all characters. By God’s grace, all parties in the original incident survived. In Chisos Mountain Sunset, one of the main characters dies.

This book has enabled me to do two things I have wanted to do for quite awhile: write a book using the Big Bend region of Texas as a backdrop, and base a character on the late Father Tom Kelley, a man who helped spiritually form me and all the members of my family before his death in February of 2005. The character of Fr. Tom in Terlingua is loosely based on Midland’s Fr. Tom, and it only scratches the larger story he deserves to have written.

My father taught me about the beauty of Big Bend when I was much younger, but it wasn’t until 2003 when I finally made a trip to the area. It was love at first sight. It is paradise to me, and as magnificent a creation as God has ever designed. It certainly belongs in the Good Lord’s Global Top 100.

More recently, in meeting and getting to know Tom and LaVerne, I based the main protagonists in the book – Garrison and Lucy Hannah Trask -- on them. Any additional similarities are coincidental. The story is primarily set in Alpine and Terlingua, two of my favorite destinations in Big Bend. It is also set in a 90-mile stretch of land between the two towns, as bad and as beautiful a land as you’ll ever see.

I know only a few people in Alpine and so any remarks made concerning fictional Alpiners is strictly coincidental. I have great respect for those who live there, especially, Sheriff Ronny Dodson, whom I met several years ago in my days as a newspaper writer. He is a great storyteller with a larger than life personality, and he is very entertaining. The character of Sheriff Adair is loosely drawn on my memories of riding around Brewster County one day with Sheriff Dodson several years ago. That ride along remains one of the highlights of my years as a writer for the Midland Reporter-Telegram. Thank you, Sheriff.

-- JIMMY PATTERSON

MARCH 2009

HE NEVER ANTICIPATED THE WIND. IT whipped and threw him about, striking without notice as fast and unexpected as a lightning strike from a distant almost invisible cloud. One second it would be perfectly still, the next he would be steadying himself in the only way he could, by taking an extra stumble step to prop himself up and avoid tumbling into the nearest prickly plants. The rustling mesquite bushes were everywhere and, he thought, surely must be the only thing alive out here other than him. He would have sought shelter from the wind but there was no shelter because this was the desert, el grande Chihuahua, as the natives south of the border called it in what at first seemed a mocking insult. Chihuahuas were anything but grand: skinny yapping little dogs with fingernail-on-chalkboard barks that tugged at pant hems and nipped at heels. Giving the same name to a huge, sweeping desert that stretched hundreds and hundreds of miles from West Texas south to San Luis Patosi in central Mexico just didn’t make sense.

Lionel Sturgis knew nothing about San Luis Patosi. Or Mexico. He knew even less about West Texas, but he realized after only a short two or three hours that fleeing into this unforgiving expanse may in fact be as effective and as fatal as any death penalty some damn jury was about to hand him.

As protection went, it was the nearest thing Lionel would find: a boulder the size of a school bus. He crawled up next to it, finding the wind had lessened somewhat but had still somehow managed to find its way over, under, around and maybe even through the giant rock. It crept under his shirt collar like icy prickly fingertips and created a chill that shook him to his bones. He eased his head back onto the rock and caught a breath. With his adrenaline slowing for the first time in hours, a flood of thoughts came rushing back to him and he remembered like a bad and repeating dream all of the events of the day; events that would only hasten the end of his life, which had been fast approaching even before he decided to grab the bailiff’s gun.

* * *

Perhaps fittingly, the Brewster County Courthouse was blood red. It sat two blocks from where the south side of Alpine evolved from small town to big desert, as far as the eye could see, quite literally going from quaint anywhere USA neighborhood to mesquite and rock and dirt in the span of just one street.

District Judge Terry Raftery’s courtroom sat high on the second floor of the rustic old building. The wood planks creaked when judges and police and the accused walked across them and it was easy to tell who was who: the lawmen walked strongly and briskly, a sense of purpose in their stride. Judges walked slower with a sort of amble (they had only short distances from their chambers to the bench and so the walks by the robed ones were usually brief.) The accused often shuffled, annoyingly dragging their feet, which served as a constant irritant to Judge Raftery. Their footsteps were often but not always easy to identify in another way: by the unmistakable sound of chains that bound their ankles close together. When he was younger and harsher, few things sounded as much like justice to Raftery than a prisoner’s shackled feet clinking and clattering upon the wooden floors in a blood red courthouse in the middle of a town that was as old west as you could find in the 21st century. In his older years, though, he had become somewhat more lax and required the binding of an offender’s feet less and less than when he was younger.

On the day a seven-woman, five-man jury was expected to return a verdict in the State of Texas vs. Lionel Wayne Sturgis, Judge Raftery sat rumpled on his throne at his oaken bench. His face was crinkled behind a pair of half-frame reading glasses though he rarely read anything that wasn’t blurred or distorted anymore. Raftery had convinced himself repeatedly in the last few years that, in his position, he didn’t need to read all that much. Instead he would only listen to the evidence, even though lately he wasn’t too good at that either, especially when the TV that sat on his judicial desk was on, as it often was, and tuned to University of Texas sports, as it always was.

Raftery was an avid Longhorn, a giver of hundreds of thousands to his alma mater and a man who was a revered and respected Texas-ex who also participated in virtually any cause with a U and a T in its name.

He had consistently proved through his years on the bench that he was a master at multitasking. Until recently when his mind had begun to show signs of slippage, he could adjudicate while cheering loudly on the inside. But his judicial slips had become more noticeable and more frequent, and, thus, harder to ignore. There had been the hearing several months ago when the judge issued a $500 bail for a man accused of a double murder. And Raftery, who had made for himself somewhat of a reputation for taking custody of car keys from people charged with DWI, had also begun to take custody of the car keys of defendants charged with crimes such as simple theft and credit card abuse.

On the morning the verdict in the capital murder trial of Lionel Wayne Sturgis was to be read, the courtroom’s front door opened with a creak and Raftery’s bailiff Slim Simmons escorted in the defendant.

Garrison Trask, the attorney for the accused, stood at the defense table and watched Slim escort his client into the courtroom. Weeks worth of research and preparation would soon come to an end and Trask felt good that his performance in front of jurors would at least earn him a hung jury. His closing argument had been impeccable, his logic impenetrable, his facts flawless. The men and women who had decided his client’s fate had been out two days. The longer the better, Trask knew.

A bead of sweat formed on Trask’s temple and rolled down the left side of his face. He’d been at this for 25 years and had established a reputation as the best criminal defense attorney in West Texas. Still, he had never been able to shake the nerves that came when a jury was to return a verdict, a day that Trask always viewed as the time his career hung in the balance.

On this decision day, Raftery told Slim that the offender was to remain unshackled. He had exhibited behavior that was anything but violent and not the least bit questionable or unusual. Sturgis had remained a calm though surly defendant, as polite as someone who was also sour could be, and he had brought on no trouble during the trial. Raftery was of the belief that the shackles were unnecessary if a defendant proved himself up over the course of a trial, something that was, again, more easily accomplished in the judge’s recent years.

You ready? Trask asked his client.

Sturgis nodded his head almost indiscernibly. Never one to waste words he said nothing and continued his stare at the paperwork on the table in front of him. Sturgis wasn’t buying Trask’s notions that he believed the jury had found in his favor or had at least hung on a verdict, but was instead convinced he was headed for a date with a poison needle. Sturgis knew he was doomed. He’d been convicted 30 times in his life. He could read a jury like a book. They didn’t like him, and they would be cutting him no slack. A couple even looked like they’d volunteer to kick the chair out from under him if he’d had a noose around his neck. This Lionel Sturgis knew.

Slim the Bailiff signaled to Judge Raftery that the jury was ready to return. They had convened in the tiny room two days earlier on a warm day in Alpine, when most people would have preferred to be outside enjoying a respite from the harsh winter that 2009 had delivered. But since jury deliberations had begun, the spring-like weather had been replaced by stormy skies and a brutal, strong wind seldom seen even in these parts. The weather forecasters up in Midland said Mother Nature’s foul mood was due to 2009 being an el nino year.

When the jury rose from its table containing 12 half-empty cups of coffee in the deliberation room, the lights in the second floor of the courthouse dimmed and finally went dead as small branches from the poplars on the courthouse lawn flew by. The splatter of raindrops hitting the window sounded more like the pitter-patter of a snare drum being played by a child hitting his fingertips on the instrument.

What the devil is goin’ on out there? Raftery asked.

Slim the Bailiff opened the door for the jury to return and stood respectfully as each member returned to the box.

The seven women on the panel represented a cross section of Brewster County. Three had been pooled from south county, which ran along the Rio Grande, just across the border from Mexico. One was a non-profit director, another a housekeeper, and a third the property manager for the resort in Lajitas. Three of the four women who lived in Alpine, 90 miles to the north of the southern population center, attended Sul Ross State University, as did three of the five men on the panel. The other two men were laborers, one was an auto mechanic, the other a farmer who owned a spread outside of town.

The farmer had been voted foreman on the first day of jury selection two weeks before.

When the jurors were seated, Slim took his position next to the defendant just in case there was any trouble, even though no one expected any, least of all a judge who frequently glanced off in the direction of his television. Slim spent a few moments of his time glancing at the weekly edition of the Alpine News Herald and the lead story of the death of a prominent member of the Texas Senate from the area.

On the day the jury was to return with its verdict, even the sheriff himself had been called away, Trask thought it odd that the Brewster County Sheriff would be on a domestic dispute call north of town. Seemed like maybe Sheriff Adair needed to show his face in the courtroom during such a monumental moment. For a trial that had begun controversially, with many security concerns, Lionel Sturgis’ fate had seemed to turn into almost a non-event. Yesterday’s news. Everyone in Alpine knew he would fry for what he had done. They only wanted to know how long it would take. So much surrounding the trial, from security to the sheriff’s whereabouts, had seemed to grow a bit lax.

Raftery motioned for Slim to approach the bench.

Slimbo, Raftery called him by his nickname, this damn storm is playin’ hell with my reception and the ’Horns are about five minutes from game time. When we get this verdict back and the prisoner is loaded in the van down to Huntsville see what you can do to get Juan to come and fix me up, will ya?

As if on cue, the lights came back on and Raftery’s TV lit back up as UT’s starting lineup was being analyzed. The announcer felt it necessary to explain just why the Horns didn’t have much of a prayer at making it past the first round.

Vitale, you moron, Raftery snarled at the analyst’s so-called expert insight.

Raftery finally turned his attention to the gallery in the courtroom, all of whom had remained standing after the jury had returned.

Y’all be seated, Raftery instructed the two dozen or so in the gallery who awaited the verdict, many of whom were relatives of Sturgis’ shooting victims, along with the editor of the News Herald.

Mr. Trask, is the defense ready?

We are, your honor.

Are the people ready?

People are ready, your honor.

Mr. Sturgis, please rise, Raftery gave his instruction.

Unnoticed by everyone in the courtroom was how Sturgis’ handcuffs had come unlatched from his right wrist, which had held his wrists behind his back. The accidental unlatching was the apparent result of Slim’s shoddy and careless work of relocking the cuffs after Sturgis had convinced the bailiff he needed to stop by the men’s room on his way back to the courtroom. Slim, no doubt had other things on his mind what with a new grandbaby due in a few hours, his wife’s battle with cancer and all sorts of other items that filled his head these days.

The jury foreman unfolded the paper on which was written the verdict, and as the paper crinkled upon its opening, Sturgis’ hands came completely free. The click of the metal sounded as the cuffs loosed themselves from their hold and sent a sudden adrenaline rush through the defendant. He realized he had been given one last chance at freedom. Or maybe he would be dead in two minutes, he really wasn’t sure which. He shifted nervously between Trask and Slim, waiting for the jury to reveal what it had decided after reviewing all the facts and testimony.

Condemned to die was all Sturgis could see as his certain future. He would be shipped away to a maximum-security lock-up in some ugly, barren cotton field in West Texas where he would waste away until they killed him at midnight a few years down the road. He felt sick at the thought of another stretch in jail and, even though he had become accustomed to prison life and fully knew that one way or another this would be the final sentence he would serve, Lionel Wayne Sturgis was struck with a wave of nausea. He simply couldn’t – wouldn’t – go back to jail again. He could no longer tolerate the thought of it.

Trask also waited for what seemed forever before Raftery tore himself away from whatever he was doing at his bench. His honor’s dawdling gave Sturgis all the time he would need to decide how he would proceed in the next few seconds now that his hands were free. Would he take a chance, the only one he had left? Or would he submit to the jury’s verdict without causing a violent commotion and write his own death ticket?

Despite his confidence in the job he had done and the feeling that he had at least won a hung jury, Trask, the middle-aged, respected attorney, had also run a decent chance of losing what would only be his second case in 250 jury trials in the last 25 years.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict? the judge finally asked as if he had all day.

The farmer turned jury foreman looked at Raftery and cleared his throat. He stood up and unfolded a half-sheet of white paper, his hand steady.

Your honor –

It was all the foreman could offer up for those assembled in the courtroom before a noise, a scream and a sudden thrashing about in the direction of the defendant’s table would capture everyone’s attention.

In one effortless and fluid motion, Sturgis pulled his arms out from behind his back and neutralized those on either side of him. He gave a quick elbow to Trask’s face knocking him off balance and disorienting his attorney — literally the only friend he had left — long enough so Sturgis could do his real damage. He reached over in the same motion as the elbow to Trask and grabbed Slim’s gun from his holster. He fired a shot in the air to ward off anyone who might be thinking about trying to stop him. Screams and gasps filled the old room. Raftery suddenly realized his Longhorns were no longer the most important event of the moment. Sturgis looked with menace at Judge Raftery, whose attention was focused fully on the proceedings in his courtroom for the first time since opening arguments had begun.

Don’t nobody move a muscle! Sturgis yelled.

There was still a bustle of noise about the gallery and jury box, and from the corner of his eye, Sturgis saw the second bailiff, the one who had been assigned the off-lead position away from the defendant, make a move to stop the assault, a foolish decision on his part. Sturgis wheeled and fired a round into the bailiff’s thigh. He shrieked in pain as he fell to the floor.

I’m serious, people, Sturgis reminded the crowd. Don’t … nobody … move … dammit!

Raftery had reached under his bench and set off the panic alarm about 30 seconds earlier, which sounded in the sheriff’s office in a building that adjoined the courthouse on the north side of the complex.

Sturgis didn’t know for sure that the judge had tripped the alarm, but he was fairly certain one had sounded somewhere by now. He’d been in enough similar situations to know there was a limited shelf life on such brazen attempts at escape and he figured he had about 60 seconds to get out of the building. Somehow.

Sturgis pointed at the farmer.

Get over here, Sturgis demanded.

The farmer did as he was told.

Pick that chair up and throw it through the window. Do it now, Sturgis told him.

With the gun trained on him, the farmer picked up the chair behind the state’s work table and heaved it through the floor-to-ceiling window. It broke through with a thundering crash of glass and wood that rained down and out onto the south side of the courthouse lawn. The rustling of the wind and leaves brought on by the unusual conditions outside would prevent anyone more than a block of the courthouse