Dead or Alive

by Michael McGarrity

  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.

  Dorsey picked up and a woman with what he guessed to be a German accent asked to speak to the officer in charge.

  “This is Everett Dorsey, the police chief, ma’am,” he replied. “How can I help you?”

  The woman explained that she was calling from Frankfurt, Germany, that she was the executive assistant to the CEO of the multinational company that owned the Lazy Z, and that she’d been trying to reach the ranch caretaker without success over the last forty-eight hours.

  “A group of our corporate executives are due to arrive at the ranch from Hong Kong in three days, and various arrangements needed for their accommodations must be made,” the woman added. “It’s not like Ms. Trimble to be away or unavailable for several days without giving advance notice. I’ve left a message with the Colfax County sheriff and have not yet heard back.”

  “Ms. Trimble is the ranch caretaker?” Dorsey reached for a pen and a writing tablet on his disorderly desk.

  “Yes, Nancy Trimble. Could you please send an officer to see if she’s ill or has had an accident?”

  “I’ll surely do that, ma’am,” Dorsey said, “but first I need to ask you some questions.”

  “By all means.”

  The executive assistant, Ms. Hannelore Schmidt, told Dorsey that Nancy Trimble was a divorced, older woman in her sixties who lived full-time at the Lazy Z. Schmidt didn’t know what kind of vehicle Trimble owned but said the company kept a silver Hummer on the premises. Dorsey also learned Trimble was the only employee and that no corporate executives or their guests were currently staying at the ranch. Schmidt supplied Dorsey with the name and phone number of a neighboring rancher who boarded the Lazy Z horses when the Lazy Z wasn’t in use.

  Dorsey asked Schmidt how he could reach her and she rattled off a string of numbers. He wrote them down, realizing he’d never made an international telephone call before.

  “I just dial these numbers you gave me to get through to you?” he asked, feeling like a total hick.

  “You must dial your international access code first,” Schmidt replied.

  “Okay, thanks.” Dorsey wasn’t about to ask if she knew his international access code. “I’ll call you back.”

  “Thank you, Chief Dorsey,” Schmidt said. “But before you ring off, let me give you the key pad code to the ranch road gate.”

  Dorsey wrote down the code, said good-bye, hung up, and headed for his unit, not even thinking about contacting the sheriff’s office, which as far as he was concerned had dropped the ball. He’d spent nine years with the Colfax County S.O. before becoming the Springer police chief, he held a cross-deputy commission that gave him full law enforcement powers outside the city limits, and he was a good half hour closer to the Lazy Z than any deputy. Besides, if there was the slightest chance that Trimble’s disappearance was in any way connected with Craig Larson, Dorsey sure as hell wanted to be in on it.

  He called Ed Seward, the rancher who boarded the Lazy Z stock, and
asked if he’d recently seen or talked to Nancy Trimble.

  “Not since last week,” Seward answered. “We stopped and visited in town for a few minutes. Is there a problem?”

  “Don’t know. I got a call from the ranch owner’s assistant asking me to make contact with Trimble. Said she couldn’t get in touch with her. Did Trimble seem like her normal self when you saw her?”

  Seward laughed. “Nancy keeps to herself, so it’s hard to say what’s normal with her.”

  “What kind of car does she drive?”

  “A dinged-up green Subaru. One of those hatchback models.”

  “What do you know about her?” Everett Dorsey asked.

  “Not much. She has a grown son who lives back east. South Carolina, I think. I can go over there and check on her, if you’d like.”

  “I appreciate the offer, Ed,” Dorsey replied, “but it’s best if I do that.”

  “You’re the law, Everett,” Seward said. “Let me know if I can help out.”

  “Will do.” Dorsey disconnected and made radio contact with one of his officers, Rick Mares, and Mitch Lowe, a local state police officer.

  “I need backup on a welfare check at a ranch,” he said to both men. “Care to join me?”

  “You got something, Everett?” Mitch asked.

  “Yeah, a cautious nature,” Dorsey replied.

  Mitch laughed. “Give us a ten-eighty-seven.”

  Dorsey told the officers where to meet up.

  Larson’s new hideout was perfect. The setting was remote, the unlocked barn was less than one hundred steps from the house, and the old pitched-roof house sat on a knoll that gave him excellent views in all four directions. He parked the Subaru in the barn just in case someone came wandering up the ranch road, broke into the house through a side window, and took a look around. The rooms were empty, the curtains and shades closed, and the house was spic-and-span clean. According to the real estate sales brochure he’d found on a kitchen counter, the walls had been freshly painted, the hardwood floors sanded and resealed, a new forced-air propane-fired furnace had been installed, and the one-year-old roof was still under a full warranty. Total cost for the property, which consisted of the house, barn, and shed on eighty acres, was less than the cost of a manufactured double-wide on a postage stamp-size lot in a Santa Fe trailer park.

  Larson checked to see if the utilities were working. The kitchen wall phone had no dial tone, there was no juice to the ceiling lights, and the stove and furnace had been turned off. Fortunately he had water, probably from a gravity-fed well.

  Larson opened the propane tank valve on his way to the barn, where he unloaded his arsenal, supplies, and gear from the Subaru. It took three trips to get everything into the house.

  He set up housekeeping in the living room and kitchen, lit the stove and water heater pilot lights, and turned on the portable radio just in time for a top-of-the-hour local news summary from a station broadcasting from nearby Raton, the county seat and largest community in the far northeast corner of the state. He was still a hot topic on the news, but not the headline story. That honor went to a Raton man who had shot and killed his estranged wife at her place of employment.

  The house was hot and stuffy, and Larson was about to open all the doors and windows when he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. He took a peek though a living room window and saw a late model GMC SUV roll to a stop at the closed but unlocked gate. A portly, older man got out of the passenger side of the Jimmy, opened the gate for the driver, and climbed back in. As the SUV drew near, Larson read the magnetic sign on the driver’s door that read:

  TAMI PHELAN

  YOUR HOMETEAM REALTOR

  RATON, NM

  Larson shook his head in disbelief at such shitty luck, picked up the 9mm Glock, and waited for his uninvited guests to arrive. But when a leggy blonde in jeans with big hair and a stacked pair opened the driver’s-side door and climbed out, Larson grinned and changed his mind about his bad luck. He watched Blondie fast-talk the old dude as he climbed the porch steps and waited for her to unlock the front door. He was another porky like Bertie Roach, the man from Tulsa Larson had offed in the Albuquerque motel, and Lenny Hampson, the bigmouth friend of Kerry’s he’d left in the desert.

  “The property is in excellent condition,” Blondie said as she swung the door open and moved aside for Porky to enter first. “There are thirty acres under irrigation. It would make an excellent horse ranch.”

  Larson shot Porky in the chest as he stepped over the threshold. Grunting, the man crumpled to his knees and fell face forward. Before Blondie could react, Larson grabbed a handful of her big, curly hair and yanked her inside.

  “What did you do?” Blondie screamed, her hand flying to her mouth as she stared at the body on the floor. She had bright red fingernails.

  Blood from Porky’s chest wound seeped across the newly refinished, once pristine hardwood floor, which was no longer a strong selling point for the property.

  “What did you do?” she screeched again, her gaze locked on Larson’s face.

  “Three’s a crowd,” Larson explained with a smile as he wrapped his hand around her neck. “You must be Tami.”

  Tami averted her eyes. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Hurt you?” Larson replied softly, feigning indignation. He dug the barrel of the Glock into Tami’s neck and forced her to raise her pretty head so he could take a closer look at her. “Why, when I’m finished with you, sweetie, you’ll be calling me your daddy and begging me for more.”

  He cocked the Glock for dramatic effect and ripped open Tami’s blouse. She was indeed stacked.

  Everett Dorsey met Officers Lowe and Mares at the entrance to the Lazy Z. The two men stood with Dorsey in front of his unit while he filled them in on his conversation with Hannelore Schmidt of Frankfurt, Germany.

  “Nancy Trimble is in her sixties and lives alone at the ranch,” he added, “so it’s possible she might not be missing at all. She could have taken a bad fall or dropped dead.”

  Officer Mitch Lowe consulted his paperwork. In his late twenties, he had just completed his seventh year with the state police. A frown crossed his boyish face. “The locked gate was reported by the officer assigned to contact residents in this area. He left a phone message, but there’s been no follow-up since then.”

  Rick Mares, Dorsey’s senior officer, a thin and wiry man in his forties, shrugged a shoulder. “It’s been frustrating as hell to make contact with everybody, and a bitch to track people down. There are folks who are out of town, people on vacation or sick in the hospital, people who live somewhere else and have a second home or a getaway place out in the boonies. Hell, we’ve even got some Texas ranchers who own outfits just for summer grazing and there’s not a soul to be found on any of those spreads.”

  “It hasn’t been easy,” Lowe concurred.

  “Let’s hope Nancy Trimble is alive and well,” Dorsey said as he stepped over to the electronic keypad of the solar-powered gate and punched in the code. “But with Larson on the loose, we go in prepared for anything.”

  The gate swung open and the three officers convoyed their units slowly down the ranch road, scanning the landscape for anything that looked out of the ordinary. They arrived at the ranch headquarters to be greeted by a saddled horse that cantered over from a nearby open field, the reins of its bridle falling loose to the ground.

  “Could be that Trimble did have an accident,” Mitch Lowe said as he reached out and caught the horse’s reins. He wiped a hand across the dusty saddle. “Nobody has been astride this animal for at least a day, maybe more.”

  Dorsey unholstered his sidearm. “Let’s check the house before we get ahead of ourselves.” He knocked on the locked front door while Lowe and Mares inspected the exterior for any sign of forced entry.

  “Anything?” he asked when they returned.

  Rick Mares shook his head. “It’s locked up tight and the window shades and curtains are drawn.”

  �
��Do we break in?” Mitch Lowe asked.

  Dorsey didn’t hesitate. “Kick in the door.”

  Inside, they did a quick plain-view search and found evidence that the house had been ransacked.

  “Do we call in forensics?” Rick Mares asked as they returned to the front porch.

  Dorsey scanned the grounds. “Let’s do a sweep of all the other structures first.”

  They forced their way into the two guest houses, walked through the barn, the stables, the tack room, and the horse arena, looked inside the fenced paddocks and the silver Hummer, and did a field search of the immediate surrounding area. There was no sign of Trimble, her body, or her green Subaru.

  Mitch unsaddled the horse, put it in a paddock, and fed it some oats. In the late afternoon light, Dorsey stood with the two officers in front of the main ranch house looking up at the mesa.

  “Trimble is missing, her car is gone, the ranch house has been tossed. The gun cabinet was left unlocked, so we can presume some weapons are missing along with other items,” Dorsey said. “I’m thinking there’s a good chance Larson has been here. We’ll call in forensics and keep looking.”

  He pointed to the ranch road that snaked up the mesa. “Let’s see where that road goes.”

  The road, with fresh vehicle tracks, took them to a hunting lodge on the mesa top where they found the truck Larson had stolen from the Dripping Springs Ranch. Mitch Lowe called it in and they took a quick look inside the lodge and found it occupied by vermin, spiders, some squawking crows perched on the back of a leather couch, several flighty robins, and a coiled rattlesnake. There were bird droppings, rat shit, and coyote scat in every room, along with about a million or more red fireants.