In his early fifties, born and raised in the town of Carrizozo, the Lincoln County seat, Paul Hewitt had been in law enforcement for slightly over thirty years. He’d started out as a patrol officer in Roswell and worked there for five years before transferring to the Alamogordo PD, where he rose to the rank of captain before retiring. After returning to Carrizozo, Hewitt ran for sheriff, got elected in a close race, ran for reelection four years later, and won by a wide margin. Limited to two consecutive terms, he was stepping down in January. This time he’d promised his wife, Linda, his retirement would be permanent.

Both of them were longtime horse owners who loved camping, trail riding, fly-fishing, and backpacking. With two children raised and launched, they planned to spend a good deal of time fishing in New Mexico’s mountain lakes and streams, riding the high country, and hiking the wilderness while they were still fit and young enough to enjoy it.

But that was next year, after winter had passed and they’d returned from two weeks at a Mexican beach resort where they would celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Today, Paul Hewitt was filling in on patrol while Clayton Istee was away at training and taking annual leave for the rest of the week.

A small department, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office had only a few sworn personnel to patrol a county larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined and then some. When first elected, Hewitt had pledged to the voters that his department would provide round-the-clock coverage. Although at times he was stretched thin by officer vacancies, family emergencies, and mandatory training and annual leave requirements, he’d managed to keep that promise, mostly by going out and pulling patrol shifts himself.

Hewitt actually enjoyed working patrol when the occasion arose. It got him back in touch with the rigors of the day-to-day grind his deputies faced and the law enforcement issues and needs that mattered most to his constituents. It also gave him an opportunity to connect with the residents of some of the smaller settlements and villages scattered throughout the county, which often got overlooked until something bad happened.

With three decades of policing under his belt, Hewitt was alert and watchful by second nature as he cruised the county roads in and around the settlements of Tinnie, Hondo, San Patricio, and Glencoe. It had been a quiet morning. He’d stopped several tourists on state highways for speeding, and because he was driving an unmarked, slick-top unit, he issued verbal warnings to them instead of tickets. He’d helped a young woman on her way to work change a flat tire, made a close patrol of several neighborhoods in the fast-growing residential community of Alto, outside of Ruidoso, where some recent burglaries had occurred, and taken a coffee break at a roadside diner owned by a buddy who’d once been a fellow officer in the Alamogordo PD.

Back in his vehicle, which had everything but official police markings and an emergency light bar on the roof, Hewitt drove a long loop that took him from Lincoln to Fort Stanton and on to Capitan, before heading back toward Carrizozo. Traffic had been light all morning, with an occasional big rig on the main east-west, north-south roadways, a few recreational vehicles slowly navigating the climb through the hills to the mesa behind Fort Stanton, and some of the rural folks on their way to town.

Throughout the morning he’d paid close attention to state police radio traffic, listening for an update on the status of the dragnet for Craig Larson. Although Larson had subsequently killed two people, there had been no confirmed sightings of him since he kidnapped the owner of a Springer auto body shop, left him in the desert, and stole his truck.

Hewitt parked on the shoulder of the highway a few miles north of Carrizozo, near the White Oaks turnoff, checked in with dispatch, asked if there were any updates on Larson, and got a negative reply. He was about to start up the road to the old mining town, which was trying to reinvent itself as an arts and crafts center and tourist attraction, when a blue Chevy with Oklahoma plates flew by.

Hewitt’s radar clocked the vehicle at 85 in a 55-mph zone, way above his tolerance level for speeders. He swung around and followed the Chevy, closed the gap, and called dispatch.

“This is S.O. One,” Hewitt said. “I got a blue Chevy with Oklahoma plates traveling south at a high rate of speed on Highway 54 past the White Oaks turnoff. Requesting wants and warrants.” He read off the license plate information.

“Ten-four, S.O. One. Stand by.”

“Ask Carrizozo PD to assist in making a traffic stop,” Hewitt added. He needed a uniformed officer in a marked unit to write the citation in order to make it stick in court.

“Ten-four.”

Less than a mile outside of the town limits, the Chevy slowed. Hewitt came up behind the driver unannounced just as Carrizozo Police Chief Oscar Quinones’s unit came into view with emergency lights flashing.

Hewitt hit the switch to the emergency lights mounted in the grill of his unit and gave a short siren blast to get the driver’s attention. He was close enough to see the driver’s head snap in the direction of the rearview mirror. But instead of slowing and pulling off the highway, the driver accelerated, swerved into the oncoming traffic lane to pass a slower moving vehicle, and headed right for Oscar’s police cruiser. Quinones turned sharply to avoid the crash and his vehicle left the pavement, slammed into a guard-rail, and nose-dived into an arroyo.

Hewitt tried to contact Oscar by radio as he gave chase. At the town limits the driver blew through the traffic light, made a wide turn on U.S. 380 heading west, and accelerated around a tractor-trailer pulling out from a gas station at the intersection. Hewitt stayed on the Chevy’s tail and tried reaching Quinones again with no luck. He told dispatch to send first responders and emergency personnel to Oscar’s twenty ASAP, and requested backup assistance from any and all available units.

Hewitt sat right on the Chevy’s rear bumper, with his speedometer at 110 mph. The Chevy veered over the centerline, forcing oncoming traffic off the pavement. Hewitt eased off, hoping the driver would move back into his lane, but instead the driver braked hard, spun the Chevy around in a tight one-eighty, and came at him head- on.

Paul cursed and turned to avoid the impact, but the Chevy swerved and torpedoed into the side of his unit. Side and front air bags deployed, metal crunched, buckled, and squealed. The unit tilted up on two wheels, did a complete flip, and landed right-side-up with a bone-shaking jolt.

Stunned and shaken, Hewitt reached for the seat-belt latch, but it was wedged tight against the mangled door. He reached for the glove box, found the pocketknife he always kept there, cut through the seat-belt webbing, and was about to scramble out the passenger door when a shadow in the rear window made him reach for his sidearm and duck. Glass shattered with the booming retort of a large-caliber handgun. Hewitt freed his weapon and tried to plaster himself against the floorboard under the steering wheel, which proved impossible.

The sharp sounds of gunfire continued, the rounds tearing into the Plexiglas-and-metal cage behind the seat back. Hewitt opened the passenger door and scrambled out just as something hit him like a sledgehammer in the back of his neck. In an instant, a shock wave of searing pain ran through his body before he passed out.

Still somewhat groggy from the Chevy’s impact with the unmarked police cruiser, Larson threw the empty handgun away when he saw the unconscious cop with a bullet hole just below his neck lying half-in, half-out of the vehicle. He grabbed the cop under the arms, pulled him the rest of the way out of the vehicle, and flipped him over on his back. He looked dead, but even if he wasn’t, it didn’t matter. In fact, nothing much mattered to Larson anymore.

From the corner of his eye he saw an older woman in blue jeans and a Western shirt climb out of a pickup truck parked on the other side of the highway and hurry toward him. From inside the wrecked police vehicle he could hear the dispatcher on the radio talking in “ten”codes.

Larson reached down, grabbed the .45 semiautomatic from the cop’s hand, turned, and from a distance of ten feet, blew the woman away. He snatched the badge clipped to the cop’s belt, paused to pick up the keys the woman had dropped in the dirt, and gave her a quick look. Spurts of blood running out of the hole in her chest told him she was as good as dead.

He could hear the sound of a vehicle approaching a bend in the road a quarter mile distant. He ran to the wrecked Chevy, grabbed his stuff, hurried to the woman’s truck, and drove away before the car showed up in the rearview mirror.

All he could do now, Larson decided, was run and hide, until his luck or the money ran out and he couldn’t go any farther. It wasn’t much of an option, but it was still a hell of a lot better than spending the rest of his life in solitary confinement, or being executed by injection.

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