Dead or Alive

by Michael McGarrity

  “I don’t think it was named after you. It’s been around a lot longer than you have.”

  “Yeah, I know that, but I like to think of it as my town. Actually, it was named for the son of Stephan Dorsey, a former U.S. senator from Arkansas. He built a mansion near the Santa Fe Trail Cimarron Cutoff. I understand it’s still standing and owned privately.”

  Kerney veered toward his unit. “I didn’t realize you were such a font of historical knowledge about New Mexico.”

  “I was forced to study white man’s history in school,” Clayton replied somberly as he climbed into his vehicle. “To further your education, you might like to know that the town of Clayton got its name in the late nineteenth century. Wasn’t that about the time when you were born, old-timer?”

  Kerney looked over the roof of his unit and grinned at Clayton. “Just about, wise guy. Just about.”

  The vehicles kicked up clouds of dust along the dirt road until they hit the pavement, and more dust flew when they left the highway and rattled their vehicles over the county road to the ranch turnoff. They stopped short of the gate to the ranch property, at the bottom of a small rise in the road that hid them from view.

  Clayton joined Kerney in his unit, passed him the pages he’d printed off the real estate website, and pointed to the photograph of the exterior of the ranch house. “If Larson is here, he’s got a clear line of fire from the house to the gate. Plus, he’s got a high-ground advantage once we enter the property.”

  “There’s not much cover going in,” Kerney said, flipping to the picture of the barn. “Unless we leave the road, cut the fence behind the barn, drive through, and use the barn as cover to get within striking distance of the house.”

  “Then what?” Clayton asked. “Charge the ranch house with our sidearms and shotguns against his high-powered hunting rifles?”

  “If he’s got a rifle, that wouldn’t be a good idea,” Kerney said. “Better we should entreat him to give up.”

  Clayton opened the passenger door. “Let me take a look at the tire tracks up ahead before we decide anything.”

  “While you do that, I’ll call for some backup firepower. Be careful.”

  “Always.”

  Bent low to stay out of sight, Clayton reached the crest of the small rise in the road, dropped prone to the ground, and belly-crawled in a circle, studying the tire tracks. He returned to Kerney’s unit and brushed a layer of dust off his clothing before settling onto the passenger seat.

  “Well?” Kerney asked.

  “Two vehicles recently went in, but only one came out. The size of the tread marks show that the vehicle still on the property is a compact or sub-compact passenger car. The vehicle that came and went is either a full-size light duty truck or SUV.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday. Blowing dust from the ranch road has barely begun to fill in the tread marks.”

  “Trimble owned a small Subaru that was missing from the Lazy Z,” Kerney noted.

  “Let’s assume Larson drove it here,” Clayton replied. “Have you called for backup?”

  “Yep, and as a result I had an interesting conversation with a Raton PD sergeant named Joe Easley. He’s ten minutes out from our ETA with a state police SWAT team and Frank Vanmeter in tow. Seems Easley found evidence that a missing female real estate agent named Tami Phelan brought a client out here yesterday, and hasn’t been seen since. Craig Larson’s fingerprints were found all over her vehicle.”

  “Let me guess,” Clayton said. “The lady drives a full-size SUV.”

  “You got it. A Jimmy Yukon. Which vehicle entered the ranch property first?”

  “The passenger car,” Clayton replied.

  “So what do you think we have waiting for us up ahead at the ranch—a firefight with Craig Larson, dead bodies, or both?”

  “Dead bodies,” Clayton replied solemnly.

  “You’re probably right.” Kerney gave Clayton a cautionary look. “But we’re still going to wait for Sergeant Easley, Frank Vanmeter, and SWAT before we go in.”

  Clayton chuckled. “Gee, thanks for looking out for me, Dad.”

  Kerney winced. “Ouch. I deserved that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Sorry.” Through the rearview mirror Kerney saw a dust cloud on the ranch road, signaling the impending arrival of reinforcements. “Vanmeter and his troops are almost here.”

  Some number of police vehicles arrived to disgorge a heavily armed SWAT team of eight officers in full regalia, Major Frank Vanmeter, two uniforms from the Raton PD, and a short, wiry cop wearing jeans, boots, a white shirt, and a Western-cut sport coat, who introduced himself as Joe Easley.

  “How did you fellows beat us here?” he asked Kerney as they shook hands.

  Kerney nodded at Clayton. “Agent Istee did some cybertracking of Larson on the Internet at the Lazy Z. And you?”

  “A missing-person report got us started. She’s a woman named Tami Phelan, a real estate agent in town, reported missing by her mother. We found her vehicle at her place of business, and when we searched her office, we found an entry on her computer that she was scheduled to show this property to a prospective client yesterday afternoon.”

  “Have you got a lead on the client?”

  “Just a name.” Easley consulted a pocket notebook. “Carter Pettibone. As far as we can tell, he’s not a local. I have officers contacting all the area motels to see if we can run him down.”

  Kerney nodded. “Very good.” He turned to Frank Vanmeter, who stood nearby with the SWAT commander and his seven officers. “How do you want to do this?”

  Vanmeter laid out a plan that started with a plea over a bullhorn asking Larson to give himself up. If there was no response in five minutes, the request would be repeated one more time before the SWAT team was sent in.

  Using the webpage photographs of the ranch property Clayton had downloaded and printed, it was decided the SWAT team would first clear and secure the barn, place a sniper in the hayloft to lay down covering fire, and launch tear gas into the ranch house before moving on the target.

  To get into position behind the barn without being seen from the house, the SWAT team would backtrack on foot down the ranch road, follow a shallow, winding arroyo to the fence line, and use the barn as cover to get into position.

  “Okay,” Vanmeter said, “let’s do this. And remember, nobody except Larson gets killed.”

  The SWAT team nodded in unison and moved out. When they reached the fence line, the SWAT commander gave Vanmeter a heads-up over the radio. Vanmeter made his bullhorn pitch twice to Larson, and when there was no response, SWAT moved to the barn.

  Near the assembly point on the ranch road, Kerney, Vanmeter, Clayton, and Joe Easley spent an anxious few minutes flat on their stomachs at the rim of the rise, binoculars trained on the barn, waiting in silence for either a radio report or the sound of gunfire. Finally, the radio crackled and the SWAT commander reported that the barn had been cleared.

  “We’ve got two dead victims in the back of a Subaru,” the commander said. “A male and female. The scene has been staged. Naked female on bottom, male with pants around his ankles on top. Vehicle matches the description of Trimble’s car. The license plate is missing.”

  “Dammit,” Vanmeter said. “Take the house.”

  “Roger that.”

  Just as the sniper opened up and started shooting out windows, Joe Easley’s cell phone rang. He answered, listened for a minute, and disconnected.

  “We’ve located the motel where Pettibone is registered,” he said. “According to the housekeeper, the room was slept in last night.”

  “Well, if Pettibone and the real estate agent are in the backseat of the Subaru,” Clayton said, “it sure wasn’t him who stayed there last night.”

  “I’m thinking it might have been Larson who used the room,” Easley said as he watched the SWAT team launch the tear gas canisters through the windows of the ranch house. “Because it sure doesn’t look like h
e’s here.”

  “What motel is Pettibone registered at?” Kerney asked.

  Easley told him.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” Kerney said. “That’s where we’re staying.”

  The SWAT commander gave an all-clear over the radio.

  Fuming at the thought that Larson had been so close at hand last night, Kerney got to his feet and started for the barn just as the SWAT team fanned out and started a field search of the property.

  Chapter Nine

  Either Larson had remembered the wrong road or it had badly deteriorated over the many years he’d been away. On a narrow, deeply rutted, rocky strip, he attempted to turn around and high-centered the Buick on some large rocks. Additionally, he’d smashed the tailpipe like an accordion and seriously damaged the muffler.

  He was out in the Big Empty with nobody around for miles, and there was no way he could pack out all his gear, weapons, and valuables in one trip. He would either have to get himself unstuck, or leave most everything behind and make the long, grueling trek to Kerry’s cottage in ninety-five-degree heat.

  Larson crawled under the Buick for a closer look at the problem. The front tires were two inches off the ground and the transmission housing was hung up on a humongous rock. He got the jack out of the trunk and cranked it up as high as it would go. Even at the fullest extension it couldn’t reach to lift the Buick off the boulder. He put some flat rocks underneath the jack and tried again, but with the Buick’s nose angled in the air, he couldn’t get leverage to budge it off the rock.

  A second look in the trunk revealed a towing strap tucked in the spare-tire well. He wrapped it around a nearby tree, secured it to the rear axle, revved the engine, put it into reverse gear, and tried to pull the car loose, using the axle as a reel. The rear tires spun, the Buick lurched back several inches, and the towing strap broke.

  Disgusted, Larson broke a stout branch off a down and dead juniper tree, crawled back under the Buick, and started loosening the soil around the rock with the stick. It was tough, dirty work, and after an hour he was breathing hard through a cotton-dry mouth.

  Wishing he’d brought some water with him, he crawled out from under the car and rested his aching back against the rear bumper. His forehead throbbed from hitting his head repeatedly on the undercarriage, and his knuckles were bruised and bloody.

  Groaning at the thought of being stuck in the middle of nowhere all night, Larson put rocks under the elevated front tires and placed more rocks behind the rear tires to prevent it from rolling backward and crashing down on him while he was underneath it. He dug into the rocky soil with the juniper branch again, and used the loosened dirt to build up a platform for the jack under the front axle. If he could raise the front end another inch or two, maybe he could push the car loose from the boulder and slide it free.

  After jacking the car up, he could see just the barest clearance between the boulder and the transmission housing. Hoping that was enough, he removed the rocks from behind the rear wheels, put the transmission into neutral, released the parking brake, and pushed the car from the front end as hard as he could. Metal screeched against rock as the Buick rolled back and all four tires dropped down.

  Body aching, hot and sweaty, dirt and dust embedded in every pore of his face and hands, Larson grabbed the bottle of twenty-year-old whiskey he’d liberated from the Lazy Z, took a long swig, and poured some of the liquor on his bruised and bloody fingers.

  After a careful inspection to avoid getting stuck again, he got behind the wheel and slowly backed up to where he could turn the Buick around. He headed toward Springer, hoping that the broken muffler wouldn’t attract any undue attention from the cops when he got there.

  On the main street, two state police cars were parked in front of a small hotel that had a popular eatery favored by locals and tourists alike. Up the street, he passed by the old courthouse, which had been turned into a museum and contained as a main attraction the only electric chair ever used in New Mexico—or something like that.

  It reminded him of old gangster flicks he’d seen on television where James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, or some other screen villain called their guns gats and their women molls and vowed never to let the screws fry them.

  Murderers on death row in the state pen didn’t get fried anymore. Instead, they got injected with a lethal cocktail, which was supposedly a more humane way to die. Larson thought forcing the cops to gun him down by shooting some of their own would be a far better way to go.

  Even though there were no cops in view, he stayed just under the speed limit as he continued down the main drag. There was one other back way to Kerry’s place, but to use it he’d have to trespass across part of one of the biggest spreads in the state. He’d also have to drive right by the prison and skirt an artificial lake fed by the Cimarron River that supplied the town with water and also served as a recreation area for fishing.

  There was some risk, but he was armed and dangerous like the television reporters said, so why not?

  He made the turn onto the prison road, and within a few minutes the high, double chain-link fences topped with concertina wire came into view. He gave the prison the bird as he drove past, at the same time silently thanking the nameless, dumb-shit guard at the Bernalillo County lockup who’d mistakenly scheduled him to be transported to Springer in the first place.

  Where the pavement gave out, the road swung toward the lake, and soon Larson was clunking over a rocky surface that wasn’t much better than the route he’d abandoned earlier. With no other alternative, he pressed on. Only a few people were at the lake, two elderly couples and a family of four, all fishing from the shore. They paid little attention as he drove by. After the lake, the dirt road smoothed out some, and Larson relaxed a bit as he drove deep into lush rangeland that stretched for miles, right up to the foothill canyons and mountains beyond.

  If he remembered correctly, a ranch road up ahead paralleled the wagon-wheel ruts of the historic Santa Fe Trail for a time, and then turned east toward Kerry’s place. Larson doubted the pasture gates would be locked, but if they were, he would bust his way through them one way or another.

  He turned on the radio when he reached the ranch road, just in time to catch a news bulletin from a Raton AM station that reported police were investigating a crime scene at a ranch in the Springer area. No other information was available.

  Larson wondered if the cops were at the Lazy Z or the other place on the Canadian River, and decided he really didn’t give a shit. It had been another hell of a day and he hadn’t even killed anybody yet.

  Kerry Larson finished installing a rebuilt starter in the ranch manager’s three-quarter-ton truck and cranked the engine. It started up fine, just like he knew it would. He would drive it over to ranch headquarters in the morning and catch a ride back to his garage from one of the manager’s two sons, who were home from college for the summer.

  Kerry had changed the engine and transmission oil, drained and flushed the radiator, lubricated the chassis, and rotated the tires. Although the three-quarter-ton had seventy-five thousand hard miles on it, Kerry kept it running in tip-top condition, just like he did with all the ranch vehicles.

  Following his normal routine, Kerry carefully cleaned the tools he’d used, cleared the debris off his workbench, and washed his hands at the small laundry sink. He stepped out of his stained and greasy overalls, hung them on a wall peg next to the barn doors, and looked up the ranch road that led to the state highway, where a police car was parked under one of the old shade trees.

  He’d told the police that he didn’t know where Craig was, but it didn’t seem to matter. They’d sent a head doctor to talk to him, and Chief Dorsey had come around again asking a lot of questions. And now cops were up there on the road watching day and night, just in case Craig showed up. They’d never catch his older brother like that.

  Kerry’s last chore of the day was the one he enjoyed the most, feeding and caring for a small herd of riding and pack horses the r
anch used to take paying sportsmen out on camping hunts. The herd was made up of mostly geldings and a few mares, all of them gentle and suited for inexperienced riders.

  On his way to the horse barn in the bone-dry, calm early dusk, he waved at the officer in the police car, thinking that when the day was done he could do with a meal at the diner on the outskirts of town. Maybe chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, a big slice of apple pie, and a cup of fresh, hot coffee.

  He thought about it hard as he put out feed, filled water troughs, cleaned up the manure, and spread fresh straw in the stalls. Going to town was no fun anymore. People he’d known all his life had started looking at him funny after Craig started shooting people and killing cops. It got worse when Chief Dorsey kept telling folks that Kerry had told Craig about Lenny Hampson’s tipping off the cops on his whereabouts. All of a sudden it seemed like Kerry had done something bad, when he hadn’t even known that Lenny had told the cops where to find Craig in California.

  He’d explained to Everett Dorsey that he didn’t have cause to see Lenny hurt, and didn’t know when Craig came by the house that he’d escaped from a prison guard. But that part of the story didn’t come out, and now he was getting the cold shoulder from just about everybody. Even folks at the ranch headquarters, who’d always treated him with respect, weren’t looking him in the eye anymore.

  Kerry finished up with the horses, said good night to every one of them, and walked down the hill to his house. Inside, he grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator, sat at the kitchen table, and took a long swallow. The old, squeaky plank floor in the front room made him look up just as Craig stepped into view.

  Kerry took in his brother’s shaved head, his beard that looked like barbwire, and his grimy, dirt-crusted face. “How come you look like that?” he asked. “What happened to you?”

  Craig pulled his brother to his feet, gave him a hug, and laughed. “I did it so people can finally tell us apart. You got any more beer in the fridge?”

  “That’s a joke, right?” Kerry grinned and got Craig a brew. “You look like you’ve been rolling around in a manure pile.”