Dead or Alive

Chapter One

Craig Larson stood in the middle of the crowded Bernalillo County Detention Center recreation yard and listened in disbelief as a dumb-ass guard told him he was going to be transported immediately to a minimum security prison outside his hometown of Springer, New Mexico. As it sunk in, Larson wondered if he was just about to become one of the luckiest jailbirds in the whole frigging world. Speechless, he stood rooted to the ground, looking at the guard with his mouth open.

“Come on,” the guard said. “Get moving.”

Larson nodded agreeably and followed alongside the guard, who explained that he would be processed out and turned over to a Department of Corrections officer for the trip to Springer.

“Got any personal stuff in your cell?” the guard asked.

Larson shook his head. Convicted but not yet sentenced, Larson knew there was no way in hell he was supposed to be going to the minimum security facility. All he could figure was that some dip-shit jail employee or retarded court clerk had screwed up. If that was the case, maybe lady luck was smiling.

Larson had jumped bail on the day of his sentencing hearing just over a year ago, after being convicted of embezzling over two million dollars from the estate of an elderly art dealer he’d once worked for. He’d been a fugitive from justice until last month, when cops busted him in an apartment two blocks from the beach in Venice, California, where he’d been shacking up with a divorced, thirty-something schoolteacher with thick ankles and a willing disposition to please.

Extradited back to New Mexico and booked into the county lockup, Larson had cooled his heels for two days before his attorney, Terry Foster, showed up. When Larson told Foster he didn’t like being in jail at all and asked if there was any way in hell he could make bail, the mouthpiece choked back a laugh.

Without attempting to hide his disdain, he told Larson that he faced additional counts for unlawful flight, and because of that the judge would most likely sentence him to the maximum time for his embezzlement conviction. With a touch of glee, Foster also noted that Larson’s fugitive status for more than a year would probably put him in the super-max prison outside of Santa Fe with the hard-core, badass cons. Foster concluded the meeting by telling Larson to find another attorney.

Larson figured Foster was pissed at him because he’d never been paid. But he also believed Foster had given him the straight scoop, because it jibed with what the old jailbirds in the county lockup had been telling him.

Until the guard said he was being transferred to Springer, Larson had contemplated faking alcohol addiction and a suicide attempt to see if he could get sent to a rehab program rather than prison. He knew he wasn’t the type to thrive in an iron-pumping, career-criminal, alpha-male penal institution.

Larson didn’t think of himself as overly aggressive or cruel. As he saw it, using guile, charm, and smarts was a much better way to commit crimes than violence. He resorted to that only when absolutely necessary.

The embezzlement conviction was nothing more than a one-time misstep on his part. Fortunately, the investigators on the case had been as dumb as most cops. Otherwise he would probably be looking at life without parole on death row.

In the processing area, Larson saw enough of the paperwork in front of a bleary-eyed guard to learn that he had been mistaken for another inmate with the same name who was slated to do eighteen months at Springer for a hit-and-run DWI accident.

The guard looked like he’d been held over to work a second shift. He barely glanced at Larson as he processed him out. The state correctional officer cuffed Larson’s hands behind his back and marched him to the sally port where an empty Department of Corrections van waited.

“Am I your only passenger today, Officer?” he asked as the guard pushed him into the passenger compartment behind the steel cage that protected the driver. The name tag on his uniform shirt read “D. Trujillo.”

“You’re it,” Trujillo replied gruffly.

Larson immediately started thinking that a breakaway might be possible. How to make it happen was the question. “Could you handcuff me at the front rather than behind my back?” he asked. “My arms and wrists really start to hurt when I’m cuffed this way.”

Trujillo thought about it. Larson was a middle-aged white guy with no priors who’d been convicted of nonviolent crimes. “Okay, step out of the vehicle.”

Trujillo made the switch, put Larson back in the van, locked his feet to leg shackles bolted to the floorboards, closed the side door, and got behind the wheel.

The sally port door opened and sunlight poured into the dimly lit space. Larson did some mental calculating as Trujillo drove outside into the glare of a hot, cloudless July day. Springer was a good two hundred miles up the interstate from Albuquerque. The drive gave him about three hours to figure out how to persuade Trujillo to stop, unshackle him, and let him out of the van. Even then, how would he get away?

Trujillo packed a semiautomatic sidearm and had a shotgun in a rack attached to the dashboard within easy reach. Both weapons were formidable obstacles to any escape attempt.

Larson listened as Trujillo advised a radio dispatcher that he was under way, transporting one prisoner. He held his breath, half-expecting to hear Trujillo ordered back to the jail, but the radio remained silent. In a few minutes, they were beyond the perimeter of the jail grounds, cruising toward the interstate, and Larson started breathing easier.

“I get really, really car sick sitting in the back,” he said.

“You can shit your pants and throw up all over yourself back there. Makes no matter to me,” Trujillo replied. “I’ll just crank up the air conditioner to get rid of the smell and hose down the inside of the vehicle after we get to Springer. I don’t stop until we get there.”

“You’d do that rather than let me puke outside?”

“Yeah,” Trujillo said with a slight smile. “And if you puke on yourself, you’ll get hosed down too.”

“Wonderful,” Larson replied. “I thought Springer was a boys’ school for juvenile delinquents.”

“It was, up until a couple of years ago,” Trujillo answered as he drove the van onto the northbound I-25 onramp.

Trujillo looked like he was in his mid-fifties, which made him ten to twelve years older than Larson. He had a round head, cauliflower ears, pudgy cheeks, and didn’t resemble any of the Trujillos that Larson had known in his youth. But he’d been away from his hometown for almost twenty-five years and how people looked back then was pretty much a dim memory.

Larson decided to probe. “Are you from Springer, Officer Trujillo?”

Trujillo shot him a hard glance in the rearview mirror. “I don’t need you trying to make small talk with me.”

Larson shrugged, smiled pleasantly, and looked out the window. In a few minutes, they would be on the outskirts of Albuquerque heading north. Assuming the identity mix-up at the jail stayed undiscovered, what could he do to get free?

He’d lied about getting carsick, but that ploy hadn’t worked. Getting Trujillo to cuff his hands in front gave him more use of his hands and arms. But that would be of no advantage unless he got unshackled and out of the cage. Other than the puking idea, nothing came to him.

He turned away from the window to find Trujillo checking up on him in the rearview mirror, and the thought hit him that the man couldn’t possibly be from Springer, a town of no more than thirteen hundred people. Unless he’d only just moved there, he would have seen the resemblance to Larson’s identical twin brother, Kerry, who lived on a ranch five miles outside of town.

Larson smiled.

“What’s so funny?” Trujillo asked.

“I just bet you’re not from Springer,” Larson said.

Trujillo grunted in reply.

“Come on,” Larson prodded with a easy smile. “Am I right or am I wrong?”

Trujillo sighed. “I’m from Raton, okay? Now just shut up and let me drive.”

“Whatever you say,” Larson replied as he turned his head to look back out the window. Trujillo kept the van in the right-hand lane of the interstate, and a steady flow of vehicles, including big-rig trucks, passed them by. Larson leaned forward and glanced through the cage at the dashboard speedometer. Trujillo had the van cruising along at a safe and sane seventy miles per hour.

They reached a long stretch of open road and Larson told Trujillo he was getting really sick to his stomach.

“Like I said before,” Trujillo replied, “go ahead and puke all over yourself. I ain’t stopping.”

Larson made a couple of gagging sounds, tried to look sour, which wasn’t all that difficult, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Unless lady luck dealt him a couple more good cards, he was doomed to ride all the way to Springer only to be sent right back to Albuquerque and then on to the super-max with the hard-core badasses after sentencing. The thought made him shudder.

Beyond Santa Fe the traffic thinned out considerably. In an attempt to wear Trujillo down, Larson complained again about being sick, but got no response. He stared at his shackled feet and wondered if he could yank his legs free, kick the cage apart, and wrap his cuffed hands around Trujillo’s neck and strangle him without getting himself killed in a car wreck.

He pulled hard at a shackle with his leg. The steel ring bit into his ankle and made him wince.

Halfway between Santa Fe and Las Vegas, the van blew a rear tire and slewed wildly. Trujillo steered into a spin, got the van straightened out, and braked gradually as he pulled to the shoulder of the highway. He got out to inspect the damage, then called dispatch, gave his location, and reported the tire failure.

“Do you need assistance and backup at your twenty?” the dispatcher asked.

“Negative,” Trujillo replied. He clipped the microphone to the dash and opened his door.

“Since we’re stopped, will you let me out so I can throw up behind a tree?” Larson asked.

Trujillo eyed Larson through the cage. He would much rather not have the vehicle smelling of puke. “Okay.”

He stepped out of the van, opened the sliding passenger door, unlocked the leg shackles, unbuckled Larson’s seat belt, and motioned him out of the van. “Let’s go. I’m right behind you.”

Trujillo prodded Larson toward a big cedar tree near a wire fence twenty feet from the shoulder of the roadway. “Get it over with,” he said, his hand resting on the butt of his holstered sidearm.

Larson dropped to his knees under the branch of the tree. He brought some bile up and spit it out as his hand reached for a small stick lying in the duff.

“Is that it?” Trujillo asked derisively, leaning over Larson’s shoulder.

“Give me a minute,” Larson said. He grasped the stick so that the end protruded from his closed palm, and with his head lowered, he gagged some more for effect and faked throwing up. He shivered, coughed, spit, and waited until he couldn’t hear the sound of any cars on the interstate.

“Are you done?” Trujillo asked.

Larson nodded but stayed put, hoping Trujillo would step closer and look down to see whether or not he’d been faking it. Just as he lifted his head, Trujillo came closer, within striking distance. Larson uncoiled and sprang, jamming the stick into Trujillo’s left eye. The stick protruding from his eyeball snapped off and Trujillo screamed as he hit the dirt.

Larson stepped back, kicked him hard in the balls, leaned down, and drove an elbow into Trujillo’s left eye. He straddled Trujillo, snatched his semiautomatic from the holster, slapped the barrel against his head, and pulled the limp body out of sight of the roadway, just before a car whizzed by. He fished a key ring out of Trujillo’s pants pocket, undid the handcuffs, and looked down. Blood poured from Trujillo’s mangled eye but he was still alive.

Larson thought about finishing Trujillo off and decided against adding a murder charge to his sheet. He shed his orange jail jumpsuit, pulled Trujillo’s pants off, then rolled him on his stomach and cuffed his hands behind his back.

The pants were way too big around the waist and about three inches too short. Larson cinched them tight with Trujillo’s belt, tapped the officer one more time on the head with the semiautomatic to keep him unconscious, and set to work changing the flat tire on the van.

As Larson tightened the last lug nut on the spare, a voice over the radio inside the van asked Trujillo to report in. Larson got behind the wheel and keyed the microphone several times to make static noises, hoping it would sound like a radio transmission failure. Then he floored the accelerator and drove away.

There was an undeveloped rest stop a few miles farther up. Larson knew he needed to ditch the Department of Corrections vehicle as soon as possible and find new wheels. Hopefully, a trucker would be parked there for a mandatory rest break or some motorist who couldn’t hold his water would be making a quick pit stop behind a tree.

The only vehicle at the rest stop was a Honda SUV. A young, good-looking woman in shorts and a halter top stood at the open tailgate at the back of the vehicle, changing a baby’s diaper. Nearby, a young man walked a small dog on a leash near a tree.

Larson pulled in next to the Honda to shield it as much as possible from motorists passing by, ripped the microphone cord off the radio in the van, and jumped out. The young woman turned. The startled look on her pretty face turned to anger when he grabbed her around the neck, pressed the semiautomatic against her head, and told her not to move. The man walking the dog froze.

“Don’t be stupid if you want this pretty lady to live,” Larson called out. “Walk toward me.”

The young man had dark, curly hair; scared eyes; and a face that looked like it hadn’t been used yet. He dropped the leash and the yappy dog took off after a rabbit on the other side of the fence.

Larson cocked the hammer for effect. “Now,” he ordered.

The man took a few cautious steps and stopped. “Don’t hurt my wife and baby,” he said anxiously, his voice cracking.

“Do as I say and you all might live.” Larson backed up to the van, pulling the woman with him, and told her to open the side door. “Pick up your baby and bring it over here,” he ordered the man.

Larson glanced at the naked infant. It was a girl, maybe six months old, lying on a dirty diaper that was soaked in gooey, mustard-colored, stinky shit.

The man came forward, picked up the baby, and walked toward Larson.

“Get in the vehicle and slide all the way over to the far side.”

Cradling the baby in his arms, the young man climbed in the van and scooted across the seat.

Larson put the barrel of the handgun under the woman’s right arm and pressed it against her breast. “Get in beside them,” he ordered.

Flashing a look of pure hate, the woman climbed into the van. She wore a wedding band that matched the one on the man’s ring finger.

“Give me your car keys,” Larson said.

“They’re in the ignition,” the woman said before her husband could respond.

Larson smiled at her. She was the one who had the balls in the marriage. “If they’re not in the ignition, I’ll kill you all.”

The man dropped his eyes, but the woman didn’t even flinch. “Like I said,” she replied, “they’re in the ignition.”

“Good.” Larson pointed the semiautomatic at the man. “Toss me your cell phone.”

Wordlessly, the man unclipped the phone from his belt and tossed it to Larson.

Larson ground it under his foot as he smiled at the woman, thinking she would probably be dynamite in bed if someone made her pay attention properly.

“See the sets of shackles at your feet.” He pointed his handgun at the floorboard. “Lock them around your husband’s ankles and then do the same to yourself.”

The woman snapped on the shackles and then looked Larson squarely in the eye. “Please leave the door open. Otherwise it will get too hot in here for the baby.”

Larson laughed. Even with a gun in her face, she’d scoped out the fact that a van for transporting convicts had passenger doors and windows that couldn’t be opened from the inside. “You’re a piece of work, sweetie, I’ll give you that.”

He got in the driver’s seat, drove the van behind a large juniper tree where it was hidden from the interstate, cut the engine, turned his head, and looked at the young family through the cage.

“I should kill you all,” Larson said.

“Please leave the doors and windows open,” the woman said.

Larson grinned at the woman. “You say please, but you don’t mean it. I should take you with me and teach you how to say it, honey.”

The woman gave him the finger.

“That wasn’t nice,” Larson chided.

He took the shotgun from the dashboard rack and put it on the backseat of the Honda. Then he closed all the van doors and windows, locked the man, woman, and child inside, and drove away. Since he was almost halfway to Springer, he decided to stop in and see his twin brother, Kerry. He had a quick question to ask him.

There weren’t any good alternate routes to Springer so Larson stayed on the interstate, keeping an eye out for cops. He made it to the Springer exit without a problem and drove directly to find his brother, who worked on a ranch along a two-lane highway that looped through open range to the town of Cimarron, some thirty miles distant.

The ranch had once been independently owned, but now was part of a bigger spread controlled by a prominent New Mexico family with strong political connections.

Larson hadn’t visited Kerry at the ranch for a good ten years, and he rattled the Honda along the ranch road that he remembered as being lined with large shade trees. Most of the trees were dead or stunted from drought.

He stopped in front of a cluster of barns, sheds, and corrals. Off in the distance on a small rise he could see the campus of the new prison where the Springer Boys’ School once stood. For a moment Larson wondered if Officer Trujillo was dead and if the young couple and their baby would survive. He decided it really didn’t matter and went looking for Kerry.

Larson’s brother was a full-time mechanic for the horse and cattle outfit. Cowboying had been his passion from the time they first did it as a summer job in their early teens. Larson liked the riding-around part, but thought it was way too much work for way too little money. A bad fall off a horse had forced Kerry to change jobs, and since he was naturally good with his hands he became a mechanic.

One of the barns served as Kerry’s garage. The doors were open and country music blared from a beat-up boom box on the hard-packed dirt floor inside. A ranch pickup truck on blocks had had its transmission yanked, and the cannibalized remains of two four-wheel ATVs were parked along the back wall.

Larson called out for his brother and got no answer. A grimy, long-sleeved denim shirt and a stained baseball cap hung on a peg hear the doorway. Larson put the shirt on over his jail-issue T-shirt to hide the semiautomatic stuck under his belt, and checked the other barn and a nearby horse stable. There were horses in the corrals but the barn and stable were empty inside.

He walked down the winding lane to the dell where the ranch house and guest cottage were nestled under large cottonwoods. The rambling hacienda had a long portal on the back side with an expanse of lawn enclosed by a low adobe wall. A flagstone path wandered from a gate in the wall to the guest cottage.

The main house was used infrequently by the owners to put up visiting family members, friends, livestock buyers, and the occasional hunter who paid for the right to hunt big game on the ranch. Kerry got free rent in the cottage for looking after the place when nobody was in residence.

Drawn window shades and curtains and the absence of any vehicles in the circular driveway told Larson the house was most likely unoccupied.

A heavy-duty pickup truck was parked outside the guest cottage. Larson had sent his brother the money to buy it. Through the open windows he could hear the sound of a noontime television news broadcast from one of the Albuquerque stations.

Before Larson got to the front porch, Kerry slammed the screen door open, hooted, and gave him a bear hug.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked with a grin.

Larson grinned back. “Saying hello to you, younger brother.”

Kerry had been born twenty-five minutes after Larson. Except for Kerry being a quarter-inch shorter, seeing him was like looking in a mirror. They had the same baby-fine brown hair, light brown eyes, nose with a crease right down the middle, and prominent chin with a small dimple.

Because of a difficult birth that cut off his oxygen supply, Kerry wasn’t nearly as bright as he should have been. In school, he’d tested in the very low normal IQ range and had been put in the slow classes.

“How come you’re wearing my old greasy shirt?” Kerry asked.

“Because I like it,” Larson answered.

Kerry laughed and held the screen door open. “Come on inside.”

The front room of the cottage was neat as a pin. An easy chair faced a flat-screen television that sat on a sturdy handmade stand. A framed photograph on the wall showed Larson and Kerry on horseback when they were kids.

“I need to know who you told that I was staying in Venice,” Larson said as he joined Kerry in the adjacent kitchen. After getting busted, he’d learned that a Crime Stopper tip out of New Mexico had led the cops to him. Only Kerry had known where he was staying.

“No one,” Kerry answered quickly with a shake of his head. He pointed at a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. “You want me to make you a sandwich?”

“No thanks. Somebody knew, Kerry. You told somebody where I was hanging my hat.”

Kerry looked down at his boots.

“Tell me who it was,” Larson demanded.

“Lenny,” Kerry replied slowly.

“I don’t know anybody named Lenny.”

“Lenny Hampson. Came here from Texas. He’s good people. Does auto body repairs out of his garage at his house. Sometimes we get together and have a beer at Josie’s. He heard about you and thinks you’re really cool. I told him you were laying low in Venice, but I didn’t give him your address or anything like that. I swear to it.”

“I believe you, little brother. Did you tell anybody else?”

“Nope.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yep.”

“Do you still have any of that money I sent you?”

Kerry nodded. “I paid cash for my truck like you told me, bought some tools and the new TV, and kept the rest for a rainy day.”

“Let me have it,” Lawson said, figuring Kerry had held on to a good ten thousand dollars. “I’ll pay you back.”

Kerry’s smile faded.

“What is it?”

“I’ve been thinking about getting a new deer rifle.”

“Keep what you need for that and loan me the rest,” Larson said.

Kerry’s smile returned. He took a flour jar from a cupboard shelf, pulled out three thick wads of twenties and fifties, counted out what he needed for the rifle, and handed Larson the rest.

Larson smiled approvingly. “That’s perfect. Now, if I were to visit your friend Lenny, where would I find him?”

Kerry gave Larson directions to Lenny’s house. It was right in town, off a highway that ran east to the Oklahoma state line.

“Let me borrow a set of clean clothes, younger brother,” Larson said.

“You could use some fresh duds,” Kerry replied with a chuckle. “I never saw you looking so grubby.”

Larson washed up and picked out a pair of fresh blue jeans with razor-sharp creases, a long-sleeved cowboy shirt, and a pair of boots. Everything fit perfectly. In the front room he took one of Kerry’s cowboy hats off a wall rack next to the door, pocketed the money, rolled up the clothes he’d been wearing and put them under his arm, stuck the sidearm in his waistband, and told Kerry that he had to get going. He stretched his free arm around his brother’s shoulders, gave him a playful shake, and asked him not to tell anyone he’d stopped by for a visit.

Kerry made a zipped-lips motion with his fingers and smiled in his typical bland, gullible way.

“I’ll call you from the road,” Larson said. “Does Lenny have anybody working with him?”

“He sure don’t.”

Larson left his brother on the front porch, walked up the lane, got in the Honda, and drove away. It was time to find a new vehicle, and he knew just the man to help him make the switch.

The garage where Kerry’s pal Lenny had his auto body repair shop was along an alley at the back of a house. Parked at the side of the garage were four cars with crumpled fenders, bashed-in front ends, or smashed door panels. Along the backyard fence, a sweet four-wheel-drive pickup with an off-road package was parallel parked.

The sound of a grinder on metal greeted Larson as he got out of the Honda. He spotted Lenny at the back of the garage, working on a rear rocker panel, and walked to him.

When Lenny looked up and saw Larson, he turned off the grinder, lowered his mask, and smiled. “What brings you by here in the middle of the day?” he asked. “You got some work for me?”

Larson had figured Lenny would mistake him for Kerry. He pulled out the semiautomatic and pointed it at Lenny’s face. “You’ve got the wrong twin, my friend.”

Lenny pushed his safety goggles up to his forehead and blinked hard. His face flushed red and he started to breathe rapidly. “What’s the gun for?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Larson said. Lenny was short. In fact you could call him stubby. He had big round eyes and a thick neck that made him look porky.

Lenny put the grinder down. “I don’t even know you, mister.”

Larson half-expected him to start stuttering like Porky Pig. “I’m going to kill you for calling Crime Stoppers on me.”

“I did no such thing,” Lenny blustered, almost stuttering.

“That’s a lie, Lenny. Tell me one more lie and you’re a dead man. Did you do it for the money?”

Lenny stared into Larson’s eyes for a long moment and then slowly nodded. “Times are hard. I needed the cash. Ain’t even got it yet.”

Larson smiled. “That’s better, Lenny. It’s always good to tell the truth.”

“Don’t kill me.”

“We’ll see about that. How about we get in your truck and go for a ride.”

“Take the truck, the keys are in it.”

“I need a driver, Lenny. Is it gassed up?”

“I filled the tank yesterday.”

“Excellent. Do a good job as my driver and I might let you live. But first, we need to bring that Honda in here and lock it in your garage. Let’s go.”

Larson kept Lenny company with the handgun aimed at his chest while the Honda got put away out of sight. In the pickup, Larson stowed the rolled-up clothes under the passenger seat with the shotgun and told Lenny to head east on the state highway toward the town of Clayton.

“Where are you taking me?” Lenny asked. He was sweating through his shirt.

“On a scenic country drive.” Larson cranked up the air conditioner. “How long have you lived in Springer, Lenny?”

“Twelve years come this September. I got a wife and two teenage kids. That’s why I needed the money.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Larson said amiably. “Do you know the back roads around here?”

“Some,” Lenny answered.

“Good. I’m gonna tell you what roads to take. If you get me to where I want to go, you may just live to spend that Crime Stoppers’ money on your wife and kids. You savvy?”

Lenny gulped and nodded.

About twenty-five miles outside of town, Larson directed Lenny to an unpaved county road that headed south. They followed it to a few miles north of the village of Roy, where it joined up with a two-lane state highway. Past the village a turnoff took them near the famous Bell Ranch and across the Canadian River.

They were traveling in the least populated area of New Mexico, where cows outnumbered the people and traffic was almost nonexistent. A few miles beyond the small Hispanic settlement of Trementia, Larson ordered Lenny off the pavement onto a country road that wandered through a vast basin peppered with red-rock mesas. When the country road turned into a seldom used ranch road, Lenny’s pickup truck with the off-road option package handled the washouts, deep ruts, and boulders without difficulty.

Ten miles beyond the cutoff to the ranch headquarters, Larson ordered Lenny to stop the truck. “Get out,” he said when Lenny killed the engine.

“What are you going to do?” Lenny asked in a shaky voice.

The bright afternoon sun bounced off the hood of the truck. It was getting on to the hottest time of the day. There were few clouds in the sky and virtually no shade on the parched basin. Heat waves rising from the ground distorted Larson’s view of a few nearby stray cows that had raised their heads at the sound of the truck.

Larson waved the gun at Lenny. “Out.”

Lenny scrambled out of the truck.

Larson slid behind the wheel and opened the driver’s-side window. “It’s ten miles back to the ranch headquarters cutoff and about twelve miles to Santa Rosa. You get to pick which way you want to go.”

“Don’t leave me out here without water,” Lenny pleaded.

“If you’d rather, I’ll shoot you now and leave you for the buzzards.”

Lenny shook his head. “Don’t do that.”

“My brother likes your company, Lenny, that’s the only reason you’re still alive. Buy him a beer when you get that Crime Stoppers check.”

Lenny nodded, lowered his eyes, and looked away.

Larson closed the window and drove off. The dust kicked up by the rear tires momentarily obscured Lenny as he stood at the side of the road. Larson thought about backing up and shooting Lenny just to be on the safe side, and he braked the truck to a stop. Through the rearview mirror he saw Lenny take off like a jackrabbit at a dead run cross-country.

He drove on, calculating it would take Lenny a good four or five hours to reach civilization on foot and get to a telephone, if he didn’t die from dehydration first. He would have to ditch the truck and find another ride, but he had more than enough time to get to Santa Fe before then.

Larson pressed the accelerator and bounced the truck over some big rocks. If he remembered correctly, he had about another mile of rough road before it smoothed out.

Larson hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was getting on toward late afternoon. In Santa Rosa, a town that catered to travelers on Interstate 40, a major east-west highway, he stopped, loaded up on snack food and soft drinks, and continued westbound. Traffic was fairly light and the big rigs pushed along at eighty miles an hour or more, only slowing to form convoys in the right-hand lane on the long hill climbs. Most of the passenger cars that passed him were from out of state.

Larson knew the route was heavily patrolled by state police, so he kept his speed at the posted limit and fell in behind a rancher in a big old diesel truck pulling a horse trailer. He tensed up when a black-and-white patrol car came at him traveling in the opposite direction, but it kept going and soon disappeared from sight.

He got off the interstate at the Clines Corner exit and headed north toward Santa Fe. He’d started the day in Albuquerque and was about to make almost a complete circle and end it in Santa Fe. There was no one behind him until he reached the White Lakes turnoff, when headlights appeared in his rearview mirror, coming up fast. He cut his speed in case it was a cop, and was quickly overtaken and passed by a black SUV with Texas plates.

Another set of headlights soon appeared in his rearview mirror, and Larson winced when the car closed and he saw the emergency light bar on the roof and the telltale spotlight mounted on the driver’s-side door. On a straight stretch of pavement, Larson slowed slightly to give the cop car a chance to pass, but it hung back. He tried again at the next passing zone but still the cop stayed behind him.

Larson’s mind started racing. If Trujillo had survived and the young family had been rescued, that would put the cops on to the Department of Corrections van and the Honda, but not Lenny’s truck. Had some cowboy with a cell phone on his way back to the ranch picked up Lenny in the desert and called the cops? He groaned in disgust at himself. He should have killed them all.

He checked the rearview mirror, trying to see if the cop was talking on his radio, but he couldn’t make anything out. If it was a tail and the cop had called for backup, somewhere up ahead there was sure to be a swarm of police blocking the highway. He decided to get off the pavement to see what the cop would do.

He crossed the bridge that spanned the railroad tracks near the village of Lamy, flashed his turn signal, and made a left onto a ranch road. He drove slowly for a quarter mile, constantly checking the rearview mirror for any sign of the cop car. The road behind remained empty, but that didn’t mean anything.

Where the ranch road divided, he took the right fork, which dipped into a canyon and rose toward a house that sat on the crest. He topped out to find a truck and small SUV parked in front of the house. A horse barn with a corral stood about a quarter mile across a grassy field, and dirt tracks traveled up a small hill toward a big piñon tree. In the canyon below there was no cop car or sign of dust kicked up by tires.

Larson decided to switch vehicles. He pulled to a stop, honked the horn, got out, and rang the front doorbell. After waiting a minute, he rang again. When nobody answered, he checked the SUV and truck, only to find them locked.

Larson figured the ranch belonged to one of those rich easterners who liked to play part-time cowboy while the wife shopped Santa Fe. He smashed a glass patio door with the handgun and went looking for car keys. He snatched them from a wall rack in the mudroom just off the kitchen and came outside just as a pickup truck came down the dirt track.

He stuck the car keys in his pocket, hid the weapon behind his leg, and waved as the truck skidded to a stop. A perturbed-looking cowboy in his twenties piled out.

“What are you doing here?” the young man demanded.

“I just stopped by to visit and found that patio door busted,” Larson said, bluffing.

“Hogwash. I was here twenty minutes ago and everything was okay.”

“Well it ain’t okay now,” Larson replied as he brought the handgun up and shot the cowboy twice in the chest.

The man coughed, clutched his chest, and collapsed to his knees. Blood stained his shirt and hands as he fell forward on his face.

Larson stepped up and turned the man over. This one was dead. Now for sure he’d be facing a murder one charge if he got caught.

He got into the SUV and drove back to the fork in the road where the vast Galisteo Basin spread out before him. The other branch of the road paralleled a broad, sandy arroyo. Should he return the way he’d come or take a chance on finding another outlet?

He decided to find another way to Santa Fe. If necessary, he’d drive cross-country and bust through fences. Once he got to Santa Fe, he’d leave the SUV in the mall parking lot at the south end of the city, take a bus downtown, and walk to Jeannie Cooper’s South Capitol apartment.

He’d given her a hefty sum of money to keep something for him and now he needed to collect it.