Dead or Alive (2 page)

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.