The man came forward, picked up the baby, and walked toward Larson.
“Get in the vehicle and slide all the way over to the far side.”
Cradling the baby in his arms, the young man climbed in the van and scooted across the seat.
Larson put the barrel of the handgun under the woman’s right arm and pressed it against her breast. “Get in beside them,” he ordered.
Flashing a look of pure hate, the woman climbed into the van. She wore a wedding band that matched the one on the man’s ring finger.
“Give me your car keys,” Larson said.
“They’re in the ignition,” the woman said before her husband could respond.
Larson smiled at her. She was the one who had the balls in the marriage. “If they’re not in the ignition, I’ll kill you all.”
The man dropped his eyes, but the woman didn’t even flinch. “Like I said,” she replied, “they’re in the ignition.”
“Good.” Larson pointed the semiautomatic at the man. “Toss me your cell phone.”
Wordlessly, the man unclipped the phone from his belt and tossed it to Larson.
Larson ground it under his foot as he smiled at the woman, thinking she would probably be dynamite in bed if someone made her pay attention properly.
“See the sets of shackles at your feet.” He pointed his handgun at the floorboard. “Lock them around your husband’s ankles and then do the same to yourself.”
The woman snapped on the shackles and then looked Larson squarely in the eye. “Please leave the door open. Otherwise it will get too hot in here for the baby.”
Larson laughed. Even with a gun in her face, she’d scoped out the fact that a van for transporting convicts had passenger doors and windows that couldn’t be opened from the inside. “You’re a piece of work, sweetie, I’ll give you that.”
He got in the driver’s seat, drove the van behind a large juniper tree where it was hidden from the interstate, cut the engine, turned his head, and looked at the young family through the cage.
“I should kill you all,” Larson said.
“Please leave the doors and windows open,” the woman said.
Larson grinned at the woman. “You say please, but you don’t mean it. I should take you with me and teach you how to say it, honey.”
The woman gave him the finger.
“That wasn’t nice,” Larson chided.
He took the shotgun from the dashboard rack and put it on the backseat of the Honda. Then he closed all the van doors and windows, locked the man, woman, and child inside, and drove away. Since he was almost halfway to Springer, he decided to stop in and see his twin brother, Kerry. He had a quick question to ask him.
There weren’t any good alternate routes to Springer so Larson stayed on the interstate, keeping an eye out for cops. He made it to the Springer exit without a problem and drove directly to find his brother, who worked on a ranch along a two-lane highway that looped through open range to the town of Cimarron, some thirty miles distant.
The ranch had once been independently owned, but now was part of a bigger spread controlled by a prominent New Mexico family with strong political connections.
Larson hadn’t visited Kerry at the ranch for a good ten years, and he rattled the Honda along the ranch road that he remembered as being lined with large shade trees. Most of the trees were dead or stunted from drought.
He stopped in front of a cluster of barns, sheds, and corrals. Off in the distance on a small rise he could see the campus of the new prison where the Springer Boys’ School once stood. For a moment Larson wondered if Officer Trujillo was dead and if the young couple and their baby would survive. He decided it really didn’t matter and went looking for Kerry.
Larson’s brother was a full-time mechanic for the horse and cattle outfit. Cowboying had been his passion from the time they first did it as a summer job in their early teens. Larson liked the riding-around part, but thought it was way too much work for way too little money. A bad fall off a horse had forced Kerry to change jobs, and since he was naturally good with his hands he became a mechanic.
One of the barns served as Kerry’s garage. The doors were open and country music blared from a beat-up boom box on the hard-packed dirt floor inside. A ranch pickup truck on blocks had had its transmission yanked, and the cannibalized remains of two four-wheel ATVs were parked along the back wall.
Larson called out for his brother and got no answer. A grimy, long-sleeved denim shirt and a stained baseball cap hung on a peg hear the doorway. Larson put the shirt on over his jail-issue T-shirt to hide the semiautomatic stuck under his belt, and checked the other barn and a nearby horse stable. There were horses in the corrals but the barn and stable were empty inside.
He walked down the winding lane to the dell where the ranch house and guest cottage were nestled under large cottonwoods. The rambling hacienda had a long portal on the back side with an expanse of lawn enclosed by a low adobe wall. A flagstone path wandered from a gate in the wall to the guest cottage.
The main house was used infrequently by the owners to put up visiting family members, friends, livestock buyers, and the occasional hunter who paid for the right to hunt big game on the ranch. Kerry got free rent in the cottage for looking after the place when nobody was in residence.
Drawn window shades and curtains and the absence of any vehicles in the circular driveway told Larson the house was most likely unoccupied.
A heavy-duty pickup truck was parked outside the guest cottage. Larson had sent his brother the money to buy it. Through the open windows he could hear the sound of a noontime television news broadcast from one of the Albuquerque stations.
Before Larson got to the front porch, Kerry slammed the screen door open, hooted, and gave him a bear hug.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked with a grin.
Larson grinned back. “Saying hello to you, younger brother.”
Kerry had been born twenty-five minutes after Larson. Except for Kerry being a quarter-inch shorter, seeing him was like looking in a mirror. They had the same baby-fine brown hair, light brown eyes, nose with a crease right down the middle, and prominent chin with a small dimple.
Because of a difficult birth that cut off his oxygen supply, Kerry wasn’t nearly as bright as he should have been. In school, he’d tested in the very low normal IQ range and had been put in the slow classes.
“How come you’re wearing my old greasy shirt?” Kerry asked.
“Because I like it,” Larson answered.
Kerry laughed and held the screen door open. “Come on inside.”
The front room of the cottage was neat as a pin. An easy chair faced a flat-screen television that sat on a sturdy handmade stand. A framed photograph on the wall showed Larson and Kerry on horseback when they were kids.
“I need to know who you told that I was staying in Venice,” Larson said as he joined Kerry in the adjacent kitchen. After getting busted, he’d learned that a Crime Stopper tip out of New Mexico had led the cops to him. Only Kerry had known where he was staying.
“No one,” Kerry answered quickly with a shake of his head. He pointed at a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. “You want me to make you a sandwich?”
“No thanks. Somebody knew, Kerry. You told somebody where I was hanging my hat.”
Kerry looked down at his boots.
“Tell me who it was,” Larson demanded.
“Lenny,” Kerry replied slowly.
“I don’t know anybody named Lenny.”
“Lenny Hampson. Came here from Texas. He’s good people. Does auto body repairs out of his garage at his house. Sometimes we get together and have a beer at Josie’s. He heard about you and thinks you’re really cool. I told him you were laying low in Venice, but I didn’t give him your address or anything like that. I swear to it.”
“I believe you, little brother. Did you tell anybody else?”
