Just to make sure he didn’t dream it all up, Larson looked out the kitchen window. The truck was there all right, parked next to the propane tank, baking in the harsh light of a blazing afternoon summer sun. He mixed up a can of frozen orange juice concentrate from the freezer and started a pot of fresh coffee. The stove clock read 1:10.
While the coffee brewed, he slugged down some orange juice, gobbled some aspirin from the bathroom medicine cabinet, brought the clock radio from the bedroom into the kitchen, and plugged it in. With the TV out of commission, he’d have to rely on the radio to stay updated on the manhunt.
He poured hot coffee into a mug, sipped it, fiddled with the dial, and found five AM stations but only static on the FM band. Of the AM stations, three were playing country music, one was broadcasting a canned talk radio show, and one was a pulpit for an evangelical Christian preacher asking for money.
The noise hurt his head. Larson turned off the radio, washed down more aspirin with orange juice, and considered what to do. He’d originally planned to torch the lodge and burn the truck before leaving in Ugly’s Subaru, but smoke from a fire like that would be seen for miles and draw a lot of attention in a big hurry.
As he abandoned that idea, he walked to the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, and stood under a hot shower. He needed to move on before someone came looking for Ugly, and find a place where he could hide out for a couple more days until he was sure the manhunt had fizzled out.
He toweled off. If he recalled correctly, he’d seen a laptop in Ugly’s office at the ranch headquarters. One of the tricks he’d used when he first started running from the law was to research houses for sale on the Internet. Because real estate agents posted so much information about and so many photographs of properties on websites, it was easy to find vacant houses to case and break into for a night. He decided to drive back to the ranch house, surf the Internet, and see what he could turn up.
Larson dressed, went to the kitchen, raided the cupboards for packaged and canned food, and put it all in a pillowcase. He did the same with whiskey from the liquor cabinet and carried everything to the Subaru. He transferred his money and jewelry stash from the truck to the car, went back inside the lodge, unwrapped all the freezer food from the refrigerator, and spread it throughout the house. Then he scattered dry cereal, sugar, crackers, flour, and rice on the floors, topped it off with the contents of several cans of tomato sauce, opened the doors and windows, and removed all the screens.
By nightfall the building would be crawling with all sorts of insects, birds, snakes, and four-legged critters. If and when the police came looking for Ugly, they would find one godawful mess.
Larson put the weapons and ammunition in the Subaru and took off for the ranch house. He stopped on the mesa and did a quick surveillance on foot just to be sure no surprises awaited him below. Satisfied that all looked okay, he drove down, used Ugly’s keys to open the front door, powered up the laptop in her office, and clicked on the Internet icon on the screen. Within minutes he was scrolling down a real estate agency’s website listings for homes, land, and ranches in northeastern New Mexico.
Larson found three properties in the Springer area to his liking, but the one that stood out was a small ranch on the Canadian River east of town, off a country road with no close-by neighbors. Larson knew exactly where the property was located, figured he could get there without getting back onto the pavement, and best of all the pictures on the website showed the property to be vacant.
He shut down the computer and went scavenging through the house, found a top-quality sleeping bag, an inflatable air mattress, a high-powered flashlight, a camp stove, a portable battery-operated radio, and all the other gear he would need to stay comfortable for a few days. He supplemented his foodstuffs from the kitchen cabinets, and from the gun cabinet in the living room he added a .357 Colt pistol and a 9mm Glock autoloader to his arsenal, along with a hundred rounds of ammo for each handgun.
After closing all the curtains and drapes, Larson locked up the house and left the ranch feeling upbeat. The place where he was going was remote, but not too far away from several working ranches. After settling in, he would reconnoiter the neighbors to see if he could locate a vehicle to replace Ugly’s car when it was time to move on.
Two more days of hiding out should do it, Larson thought with a smile as he fiddled with the car radio and found a country station playing an old Marty Robbins tune. Larson hummed along until he remembered he’d forgotten to chase down Ugly’s mare, unsaddle her, and put her in the stable. He slowed the Subaru to turn around but then decided to blow it off. Whoever found the mare and went looking for Ugly Nancy was in for a big surprise.
Since the day Craig Larson escaped from custody and started his rampage, Everett Dorsey, chief of the Springer Police Department, had gotten very little sleep. Along with his three officers, Dorsey had been putting in eighteen-hour days trying to turn up any shred of information from Larson’s hometown friends and acquaintances that might help get a fix on the fugitive’s whereabouts. An eyewitness had sighted Larson in and near the settlement of Gallegos, less than seventy miles from Springer as the crow flies, which had convinced Dorsey that Larson had been heading home to familiar turf to lie low for a while. But where?
Dorsey had redoubled his efforts to find out where Larson might be hiding by concentrating his attention on the twin brother, Kerry. After three intensive interview sessions he had started to break through when his efforts had been sabotaged by a contract psychologist with the state police sent up from Santa Fe to draw information out of Kerry. But what the shrink didn’t know was that while Kerry looked as normal as the next person, he had a few loose screws, wasn’t very bright, didn’t relate well to strangers, and was as stubborn as a mule when it came to protecting his brother.
Blown off by the psychologist, Dorsey had complained to the major in charge of the state police task force, but to no avail. Condescendingly, the major had advised Dorsey to leave the head stuff to the shrink.
Dorsey eased into his desk chair and rubbed his tired eyes. Housed in a separate three-office suite of the town hall building one block off the main north-south drag, the Springer Police Department headquarters was a dismal place to spend any time. Battered old desks, ancient filing cabinets, and frayed miscellaneous office furniture filled the small rooms. Clutter added to the mess.
Dorsey liked it that way; the cramped, unattractive quarters kept him and his officers from hanging out there, which meant they spent most of their time on the streets actually policing.
Dorsey opened his eyes. If the reports of his officers were to be believed—and there was no reason to doubt them—nobody in the town of Springer had heard, seen, or had any form of contact with Craig Larson since the last sighting. On a much wider scale, the sheriff’s offices in eight counties, the district state police office, area game and fish officers, the local livestock inspector, and the special state police task force out of Santa Fe were reporting the same results.
All of this meant it was possible that Larson hadn’t come home to roost, but had just passed through Colfax County on the way to his next crime. But there had been no new reports of murder or mayhem.
Dorsey’s stomach grumbled from lack of food, but he knew if he stopped to eat, the food combined with lack of sleep would put him into a stupor for the next twelve hours. He was about to go back out and talk again to all of Craig Larson’s high school classmates who still lived in the area when the telephone rang.