Gregory Dennis Cuddy had attended the Twin Pines Bible Camp for the first time at the age of fourteen. Since then, he’d come back eight consecutive summers. In his third year, he’d joined the staff as a peer counselor. Having just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Ross Wentworth Bible College, a private evangelical institution in Brownwood, Texas, Greg was now the youth minister assisting Reverend Wardle and teaching Bible study twice a day.
An East Texas boy who loved to fish and hunt and excelled at sports, Greg had been a high school football star. But when a knee injury ended his athletic career, he took it as a sign from God to enter the ministry. In the fall, he would begin his studies for a master’s in theology.
At six feet and two hundred and ten pounds, Greg Cuddy was every mother’s dream of how a grown son should look. He was the all-American boy with light brown hair, an athletic physique, strong masculine features, and a rich baritone voice that would serve him well from the pulpit.
As a teenager, Greg had seriously considered a career as a forest ranger or a game and fish officer, but the call to preach the word of Jesus had been too strong for him to resist. However, he knew that he wouldn’t be happy with the sedentary life of a church-bound minister. He had already decided that once he had his master’s degree in hand and was fully ordained, he would serve Jesus as a career navy chaplain in the Marine Corps.
In addition to his role as youth minister, Greg also supervised the Twin Pines adventure program and served as the camp’s riflery instructor and range master. When word came that the local sheriff had been shot, the woman who’d stopped to help had been murdered, and the killer was on the loose in the county, Reverend Wardle had naturally put Greg in charge of camp security.
Greg enthusiastically instituted a head-count policy, had campers team up in a buddy system so no one went anywhere alone, and assigned the staff to a rotating nighttime sentry duty schedule.
Tonight was his turn to pull a shift. After lights-out, he went to the armory and retrieved the lever-action .22 Marlin model 1897cb his parents had given him on his fourteenth birthday, loaded it, and made a walking tour of the campus before driving a staff pickup down to the gate to make sure it was locked.
After finding everything secure, he sat in the truck with the windows open, the motor and lights off, and let his mind wander. The last several days had been a rush for Greg. He liked the feeling of being in charge of camp security. It was kind of like being sheriff of Twin Pines. He liked the buzz that came from doing something that seemed a little dangerous. The idea of putting it on the line to protect others appealed to the image he had of himself as a natural born leader.
Now he was thinking that maybe he should delay graduate school in the fall, put off becoming a full-fledged minister for the time being, and enlist in the Marine Corps. With a tour of duty under his belt as a jarhead, surely he would be more accepted by other Marines once he became a navy chaplain.
Above the murmur of a slight breeze in the treetops, he heard some twigs snap in the underbrush. He stiffened, clutched the stock of his Marlin, and listened intently to the ensuing silence for a while before relaxing and taking a deep breath.
Wildlife abounded in these mountains. It could have been a deer, a coyote, a porcupine, maybe even a black bear or a mountain lion, although the big cats were rarely seen.
As Greg put the Marlin aside and reached to switch on the engine, a burning pain exploded inside his brain, a flash of white light burst in front of his eyes, and his head hit the steering wheel.
Craig Larson opened the door to the Bible camp pickup and in the glow of the interior dome light looked at the slumped form of the young man he’d coldcocked with the butt of the Lincoln County sheriff’s handgun. On the bench seat next to him was a sweet-looking lever-action .22 rifle. Larson reached across the kid and grabbed the rifle. It was fully loaded with .22 long cartridges, a nice addition to his arsenal.
He decided not to kill the kid right away. He’d left behind too many bodies—alive and dead—that had kept the cops on his heels and within striking distance. Of course, until the last several days, he’d been in such a big hurry to get away from the cops there had been no time to even think about properly disposing of the bodies.
He tapped the kid on the back of the head to make sure he stayed unconscious for a while, wrestled his limp body to the passenger side of the cab, searched his pockets, and found a key that unlocked the gate barring the road. He got the bundle of money and jewelry he’d stashed under a pine tree, along with the pistol he’d lifted from Roach’s luggage at the Albuquerque motel, slid behind the wheel, fired up the truck engine, and looked over at the cross dangling from a chain around the kid’s neck.
Larson chuckled as he closed the driver’s-side door and drove through the open gate. He’d come down the mountain to steal a vehicle from the Bible camp so he could get moving again, and the Christians—God love them —had made it so damn easy.
As he drove, Larson reviewed in his mind the route he’d selected from a state highway map in the old lady’s truck. He knew from the radio news broadcasts that the cops had thrown up roadblocks around the county, and although he didn’t know exactly where they had their checkpoints, he figured he was bound to run into one of them at the junction to U.S. 70, a major east-west highway up ahead.
Larson’s plan was to travel east for a spell before heading north. He glanced over at the inert form of Gregory Dennis Cuddy, who, according to his driver’s license, wasn’t going to get to celebrate his upcoming twenty-third birthday. The kid, who had unwittingly supplied Larson with transportation and a loaded rifle, might still be of service. The Texas state line was only a few hours away. Why not dump Cuddy’s body—Kid Cuddy, Larson decided to call him—on a Texas highway before traveling back into New Mexico and heading north? That might get the cops swarming to a place where Larson wouldn’t be.
It was a worthy idea, but first Larson had to find out if he had a roadblock to contend with, and if so how to get around it. Although the Bible camp pickup truck probably wouldn’t raise suspicion, and Larson looked quite different with a shaved head and the start of a beard, he wasn’t about to just drive up to the roadblock and try to bluff his way through.
He stayed within the speed limit on a road with no other traffic, passing through the historic village of Lincoln, where few lights were on in the inhabited houses that fronted the highway. Beyond Lincoln the road was fairly straight with gentle curves every now and then, but he still kept a light foot on the accelerator. As the hills on either side of the highway receded, he came around a long, easy bend and caught sight of flashing emergency lights in the distance.
He slowed just as the truck headlights illuminated a real estate sign at a driveway offering a horse ranch for sale, turned in, quickly drove off the gravel lane, and parked the truck under some trees in a pasture that bordered a riverbed. He killed the lights and engine, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Across the way stood a house and horse barn accessed by a wooden plank bridge that spanned the river. Everything appeared dark and quiet.
Larson reached over and felt Kid Cuddy’s neck for a pulse, found it, and tapped him on the skull for good measure, to keep him knocked out.
Larson had no idea where his heightened sense of humor had come from, but he was enjoying it immensely. He switched off the dome light to keep the cab dark when he got out of the truck, picked up the Marlin, stuck the semiautomatic in his belt, and started walking down the shoulder of the highway toward the flashing emergency lights, a short quarter mile distant.
When he was close enough to take a good look, he crouched down in some bushes and shaded his eyes from the flashing lights. He spotted one officer sitting in a black-and-white state police patrol car parked diagonally facing his direction. Orange cones and road flares placed across the pavement served as barriers to stop traffic.
Larson could see the cop clearly. He had a clipboard resting on the steering wheel and was writing something down under the bright glare of a halogen task light. Larson moved closer, until he was no more than fifty yards away, and waited a good five minutes to make sure there wasn’t a second cop somewhere off in the bushes taking a dump. The cop’s driver’s-side window was open and Larson could hear the low sounds of sporadic radio traffic.
Larson had grown up in northeast New Mexico hunting rabbits, rodents, and varmints with a .22 as a kid, before moving on to larger animals and more powerful weapons. At a range of fifty yards on a still night with a clear target and a sweet rifle loaded with long rounds, one good head shot was all he needed to take the cop out.
