were kids. But if you don’t want to come along, I could just shoot you.”
Kerry gave a forced laugh. “That’s a joke, right?”
“Shoot you, take your truck, and pretend I’m you.”
Kerry reached into his jeans pocket and took out his keys.
“You don’t have to shoot me for that. If you need the truck to get away, take it. Tell anybody you meet that you’re me.”
“That’s awfully nice of you, little brother, but not without a shower, change of clothes, and a hot meal. Have you got anything you can cook up for me?”
“I’ve got some venison steaks in the freezer from an eight-point buck I took last year.”
“In season, I bet.”
“Yep.”
“Get them out and fry them up for us while I jump in the shower.”
Kerry hesitated. “Would you really shoot me?”
Larson shook his head, showed his teeth, and smiled. “That would just be like shooting myself, now wouldn’t it, little brother?”
“I guess so,” Kerry said as he reached into a cupboard for the frying pan. “I knew you were just funning around,” he added, trying to sort out why he felt so scared.
With the shower spray beating on his head, Larson mulled over possible ways he could kill Kerry, assume his identity, and get far enough away before the cops figured out the switch. Better yet, what if he could get the cops to kill Kerry, thinking it was him? He couldn’t hit on a good idea on how to make it work. But if he came up with a feasible plan, wasting baby brother wouldn’t be a problem.
He got out of the shower, toweled off, dressed in some clean clothes from Kerry’s closet, and looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. The scabs from shaving his head had healed over and his hair was growing back. His beard looked hoboscraggly and it itched. He thought about shaving his head again and decided not to waste his time.
He opened the bathroom door expecting to smell venison steaks sizzling in the frying pan. But there was no scent in the air and no noise coming from the kitchen. He called out to Kerry and got no answer. In the kitchen he found the frying pan on an unlit stove burner and the venison steaks in a freezer bag sitting in the kitchen sink.
Holding the 9 mm Glock autoloader just behind his right leg, Larson called Kerry’s name again. He moved quickly to the front room. Through the open door he could see Kerry’s truck was missing.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” Larson said. Had little brother turned on him? Or had he been frightened away by his threat to kill him?
Larson didn’t have time to wait and find out. He left the cottage, walked through a grove of trees to the horse barn, circled around the back of it, and took a quick look up the ranch road. In the fast-fading dusk the cop car was out of sight. Working as swiftly as possible, he saddled one of the geldings, put a pack frame on one of the mares, got some additional gear out of the tack room, and quietly led the animals behind the barn and back through the grove of trees to the cottage, where he filled a pillowcase with food, including the venison steaks.
He was twenty minutes away from the Buick, and if Kerry hadn’t sent the cops after him, on horseback he could make it safe into the high country by daybreak. To get there, he’d have to cross open country, and even in the darkness he would need to keep to the dry washes, arroyos, and streambeds.
Larson decided to move west toward the settlement of Miami and then cut north across a big spread to avoid the huge Philmont Scout Ranch, where thousands of Boy Scouts and their adult leaders were camped for the summer. Once beyond the town of Cimarron, he would turn west again and enter the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. There was hard riding ahead, but he could make it.
At the Buick, he packed up quickly, listening for the sounds of wailing sirens in the night, but all was quiet. He mounted the gelding, tugged on the mare’s bridle, and started out, feeling pumped about the trip ahead. It was like being one of the old Western desperados, like Jeremiah Johnson, or Tom Horn, or maybe Clay Allison, the gunslinger who had terrorized Cimarron back in 1870s.
He’d be like Clay Allison, Larson decided. At the old St. James Hotel in Cimarron, there was a plaque on the wall listing all the men that Allison had killed. Maybe when everything was said and done, they’d put a plaque on the wall for him. But if memory served, he’d have to kill a bunch more people to equal the number Allison had gunned down.
Although he’d thought about telling the cop parked on the ranch road that his brother was down at his house taking a shower, instead Kerry had waved and passed by without stopping. He knew there was something wrong with Craig, something bad-crazy, just from how he’d looked and talked. It was like Craig wasn’t his brother anymore. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to tell the police.
For the past half hour he’d been stopped in front of the marquee of the old Springer movie house, which had been turned into a church. The marquee read “NOW SHOWING: JESUS CHRIST.” While he wasn’t much of a churchgoer, Kerry had occasionally attended with Lenny Hampson and his family. They were trying to help him become a believer. He had thought about talking to the preacher, but the place was locked up tight and he couldn’t remember the preacher’s name and didn’t know where he lived.
The state police substation was just a few doors up the street in what was once an old mercantile store, and a black-and-white patrol car was parked out front. Light from inside the station shone through the large plate glass window onto the sidewalk.
Kerry’s stomach grumbled. Maybe a plate of chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes would help him figure out what to do. He always did better thinking with a meal in his belly. He cranked the engine, put the truck in gear, and drove off.
The Raton Police Department was housed in an ugly mid-twentieth-century, single-story municipal building that had a series of large windows below a boxy, yellow aluminum facade. The department shared a waiting area with the municipal court, and the part of it reserved for police business consisted of four beat-up chairs, three vending machines, one side table with a stack of dog-eared, out-of-date magazines, and a one-way privacy window where you spoke through a hole in the glass to state your business to a woman who doubled as dispatcher and receptionist. Kerney doubted that it could have been made any less inviting to the general public.
After announcing themselves and showing their shields, Kerney and Clayton were passed through quickly and led down a hallway to a briefing area that also served as a conference room. There, seated at tables lined up facing a speaker’s rostrum, were Sergeant Joe Easley, the Raton police chief, Everett Dorsey, Major Frank Vanmeter, three of his state police lieutenants in charge of the field search and interview teams, the regional state game and fish law enforcement supervisor, and the Colfax County sheriff. All had assembled to debrief on the Pettibone-Phelan murders and fine-tune the next phase of the manhunt for Craig Larson.
The Raton police chief nodded to Joe Easley and said, “Let’s get things started.”
“A BOLO on Pettibone’s Buick and another armed-and-dangerous advisory on Craig Larson have been sent out nationwide,” Easley said.
“We’re increasing patrols along major highways and the north-south interstate,” Frank Vanmeter said. He passed around a sheaf of papers and continued, “There’s a list included of the roadblocks we’ve got staggered throughout a four-county area.”
After reporting the tentative conclusions of the medical investigator regarding the causes and times of death for Phelan and Pettibone, and noting that family members had been duly informed, Easley summarized the crime scene investigation findings at the vacant ranch, Pettibone’s motel room, and Phelan’s vehicle. With that out of the way, the conversation turned to the advisability of intensifying field searches, increasing close patrols of rural properties and ranches, and making house-to-house welfare checks and follow-up visits again. “That’s just more of the same-old same-old,” Dorsey said.
“And we’ll keep doing it until something breaks or we get a brainstorm,” Vanmeter replied. “That reminds me, Chief Dorsey: Did you get anything out of Kerry Larson?”
