Above the murmur of a slight breeze in the treetops, he heard some twigs snap in the underbrush. He stiffened, clutched the stock of his Marlin, and listened intently to the ensuing silence for a while before relaxing and taking a deep breath.
Wildlife abounded in these mountains. It could have been a deer, a coyote, a porcupine, maybe even a black bear or a mountain lion, although the big cats were rarely seen.
As Greg put the Marlin aside and reached to switch on the engine, a burning pain exploded inside his brain, a flash of white light burst in front of his eyes, and his head hit the steering wheel.
Craig Larson opened the door to the Bible camp pickup and in the glow of the interior dome light looked at the slumped form of the young man he’d coldcocked with the butt of the Lincoln County sheriff’s handgun. On the bench seat next to him was a sweet-looking lever-action .22 rifle. Larson reached across the kid and grabbed the rifle. It was fully loaded with .22 long cartridges, a nice addition to his arsenal.
He decided not to kill the kid right away. He’d left behind too many bodies—alive and dead—that had kept the cops on his heels and within striking distance. Of course, until the last several days, he’d been in such a big hurry to get away from the cops there had been no time to even think about properly disposing of the bodies.
He tapped the kid on the back of the head to make sure he stayed unconscious for a while, wrestled his limp body to the passenger side of the cab, searched his pockets, and found a key that unlocked the gate barring the road. He got the bundle of money and jewelry he’d stashed under a pine tree, along with the pistol he’d lifted from Roach’s luggage at the Albuquerque motel, slid behind the wheel, fired up the truck engine, and looked over at the cross dangling from a chain around the kid’s neck.
Larson chuckled as he closed the driver’s-side door and drove through the open gate. He’d come down the mountain to steal a vehicle from the Bible camp so he could get moving again, and the Christians—God love them—had made it so damn easy. Praise Jesus.
As he drove, Larson reviewed in his mind the route he’d selected from a state highway map in the old lady’s truck. He knew from the radio news broadcasts that the cops had thrown up roadblocks around the county, and although he didn’t know exactly where they had their checkpoints, he figured he was bound to run into one of them at the junction to U.S. 70, a major east-west highway up ahead.
Larson’s plan was to travel east for a spell before heading north. He glanced over at the inert form of Gregory Dennis Cuddy, who, according to his driver’s license, wasn’t going to get to celebrate his upcoming twenty-third birthday. The kid, who had unwittingly supplied Larson with transportation and a loaded rifle, might still be of service. The Texas state line was only a few hours away. Why not dump Cuddy’s body—Kid Cuddy, Larson decided to call him—on a Texas highway before traveling back into New Mexico and heading north? That might get the cops swarming to a place where Larson wouldn’t be.
It was a worthy idea, but first Larson had to find out if he had a roadblock to contend with, and if so how to get around it. Although the Bible camp pickup truck probably wouldn’t raise suspicion, and Larson looked quite different with a shaved head and the start of a beard, he wasn’t about to just drive up to the roadblock and try to bluff his way through.
He stayed within the speed limit on a road with no other traffic, passing through the historic village of Lincoln, where few lights were on in the inhabited houses that fronted the highway. Beyond Lincoln the road was fairly straight with gentle curves every now and then, but he still kept a light foot on the accelerator. As the hills on either side of the highway receded, he came around a long, easy bend and caught sight of flashing emergency lights in the distance.
He slowed just as the truck headlights illuminated a real estate sign at a driveway offering a horse ranch for sale, turned in, quickly drove off the gravel lane, and parked the truck under some trees in a pasture that bordered a riverbed. He killed the lights and engine, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Across the way stood a house and horse barn accessed by a wooden plank bridge that spanned the river. Everything appeared dark and quiet.
Larson reached over and felt Kid Cuddy’s neck for a pulse, found it, and tapped him on the skull for good measure, to keep him knocked out.
Kid Cuddy, the knocked-out king, Larson thought with a smile. Kid Cuddy, down and out for the count. Soon to be that way permanently.
Larson had no idea where his heightened sense of humor had come from, but he was enjoying it immensely. He switched off the dome light to keep the cab dark when he got out of the truck, picked up the Marlin, stuck the semiautomatic in his belt, and started walking down the shoulder of the highway toward the flashing emergency lights, a short quarter mile distant.
When he was close enough to take a good look, he crouched down in some bushes and shaded his eyes from the flashing lights. He spotted one officer sitting in a black-and-white state police patrol car parked diagonally facing his direction. Orange cones and road flares placed across the pavement served as barriers to stop traffic.
Larson could see the cop clearly. He had a clipboard resting on the steering wheel and was writing something down under the bright glare of a halogen task light. Larson moved closer, until he was no more than fifty yards away, and waited a good five minutes to make sure there wasn’t a second cop somewhere off in the bushes taking a dump. The cop’s driver’s-side window was open and Larson could hear the low sounds of sporadic radio traffic.
Larson had grown up in northeast New Mexico hunting rabbits, rodents, and varmints with a .22 as a kid, before moving on to larger animals and more powerful weapons. At a range of fifty yards on a still night with a clear target and a sweet rifle loaded with long rounds, one good head shot was all he needed to take the cop out.
Larson patted the rifle, silently thanked Kid Cuddy for his Christian generosity in providing him with such a fine weapon, brought the stock to his shoulder, held his breath, sighted down the barrel, and gently squeezed the trigger, thinking this was really going to piss all the other cops off.
Out of the corner of his eye from his hospital bed in the partially darkened room, Paul Hewitt could see his wife sleeping in the chair, her head resting against a pillow supplied by the night nurse. He’d married Linda almost twenty-five years ago and she was still his girl.
Small-boned and only five-foot-three, she managed to seem taller. Paul attributed it to her slender legs, narrow waist, and long neck, which gave the appearance of height. She wore her dark brown hair long, and he loved it when she wrapped it in a French twist and used her grandmother’s hairpins to hold it in place.
Soon after they married, Paul had asked Linda to agree to an end-of-life power of attorney stipulating that in case of a catastrophic injury or terminal illness he was not to be placed on life support. At the time, he’d joked about having “do not resuscitate” tattooed across his chest. Linda had countered his power of attorney with one of her own, stipulating the same conditions.
A man who loved life, Paul longed for death. Below the neck he felt nothing, not even the sensation of his diaphragm moving as he took a breath and slowly exhaled. He was angry at Craig Larson for not killing him and for inflicting a cruel and horrible burden on Linda. He closed his eyes.