Dead or Alive kk-12 Read online

  Grace squeezed Clayton’s hand. “Okay.”

  Ten minutes later she returned from the kitchen to find Clayton on his side sleeping soundly. She had no intention of waking him. Hopefully, he would sleep undisturbed throughout the night. She picked up the book she was reading from the coffee table, turned out the lights, and went quietly down the hall to check on the children before retiring to the bedroom.

  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. Praise Jesus.

  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.

  Kid Cuddy, the knocked-out king, Larson thought with a smile. Kid Cuddy, down and out for the count. Soon to be that way permanently.

  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 Marl
in, 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.

  Larson patted the rifle, silently thanked Kid Cuddy for his Christian generosity in providing him with such a fine weapon, brought the stock to his shoulder, held his breath, sighted down the barrel, and gently squeezed the trigger, thinking this was really going to piss all the other cops off.

  Out of the corner of his eye from his hospital bed in the partially darkened room, Paul Hewitt could see his wife sleeping in the chair, her head resting against a pillow supplied by the night nurse. He’d married Linda almost twenty-five years ago and she was still his girl.

  Small-boned and only five-foot-three, she managed to seem taller. Paul attributed it to her slender legs, narrow waist, and long neck, which gave the appearance of height. She wore her dark brown hair long, and he loved it when she wrapped it in a French twist and used her grandmother’s hairpins to hold it in place.

  Soon after they married, Paul had asked Linda to agree to an end-of-life power of attorney stipulating that in case of a catastrophic injury or terminal illness he was not to be placed on life support. At the time, he’d joked about having “do not resuscitate” tattooed across his chest. Linda had countered his power of attorney with one of her own, stipulating the same conditions.

  A man who loved life, Paul longed for death. Below the neck he felt nothing, not even the sensation of his diaphragm moving as he took a breath and slowly exhaled. He was angry at Craig Larson for not killing him and for inflicting a cruel and horrible burden on Linda. He closed his eyes.

  Because he was a cop, and a good one at that, Paul knew how to ask questions and get people talking. Fortunately, the spinal cord injury had not caused aphasia, so over the past two days he’d chatted with doctors, nurses, physical therapists, nursing aides, and medical students about his condition. What he’d learned was depressing and disheartening. Physical therapy would consist of someone else moving his arms and legs to keep his muscles from atrophying. He would have to be turned in his bed to avoid sores. He would require laxatives and enemas in order to have bowel movements, would be forced to wear a bag to defecate into and a urinary device to piss into. He would have to be wiped and cleaned, washed and dressed, hoisted and lifted, fed and shaved. Because of his injury, he would now and forever be susceptible to bouts of pneumonia, bone fractures, urinary tract infections, cardiovascular disease, pulmonary embolisms, and a host of other complications.

  Linda, as his primary caregiver, would require support, possibly therapy, certainly some regular relief from the stress of looking after her husband. Couples counseling was considered essential to deal with the initial and ongoing trauma of both living as a quadriplegic and living with one.

  The miracle of modern medicine that had kept Paul Hewitt alive was a crock of shit.

  He opened his eyes. Linda was standing over him, smiling.

  “Kill me,” he said.

  Her eyes widened in shock. “Don’t say that.”

  “Find someone who will.”

  “Never.”

  “Get me a lawyer.”

  “What for?” Linda asked.

  “I want a divorce,” Paul said, shutting his eyes to block out the sight of his wife’s face.

  Chapter Five

  Officer Leroy Alfred Ordonez’s body sat upright behind the steering wheel of the state police black-and-white, his head resting against the seat back. His right eye and mouth were open and there was a hole where his left eye used to be. A gooey blood stream from the wound had trickled down his cheek, coagulated on his uniform shirt, and dribbled on the clipboard lying in his lap. The size of the entry wound and apparent absence of an exit hole indicated that the killer had used a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22, most likely a rifle.

  Clayton swallowed hard and stepped away from the black-and-white. Flashing emergency lights hurled brilliant colors into a midnight sky. Behind him, Gene Walcott, the only Lincoln County deputy on roving patrol duty, walked up the highway with a flashlight looking for evidence the killer might have left. In front of him, Captain Steve Ramsey, the district state police commander, stood with another officer viewing a laptop computer monitor Ramsey had placed on the hood of his unit.

  Clayton glanced back at Ordonez’s body. Some time back, after four seasons playing minor league baseball, Leroy had returned home to Ruidoso. He’d worked construction for a time before attending the state police academy and graduating first in his class. Leroy liked to joke that he could have made the big leagues if he had only learned to hit sliders, field grounders cleanly, and run the bases without being thrown out.

  When their shifts coincided and time allowed, Clayton and Leroy met for coffee or a meal break. Although they never socialized much away from the job, Clayton considered Leroy a friend. At home on his refrigerator was an invitation to attend Leroy’s upcoming marriage to Kathleen Ann Pennington. Grace had circled the date on their calendar and begun searching for a wedding gift. Now a gift wouldn’t be necessary.

  Clayton looked away from Leroy. He’d bottled up the image of a paralyzed Paul Hewitt staring at him from his hospital bed, and now he had to clear his mind of Leroy Ordonez. He walked over to see what Steve Ramsey had discovered on the video taken by the camera in Leroy’s unit. Ramsey shifted his large frame to one side so Clayton could look at the laptop monitor, and pointed at the frozen image of a blurry, washed-out pickup truck.

  “The killer was driving this truck,” he said, looking down at Clayton from his six-foot-six height. “It’s the only vehicle that passed through the roadblock around the time of the shooting. The driver blasted through the orange cones without stopping. We can’t make out anything inside of the cab.”

  Clayton leaned forward for a closer look. What appeared as a blob on the passenger side door might be a magnetic business sign or a logo. “Can you zoom in on the passenger-side door?”

  “Until the lab can enhance the video, this is the best picture quality we have right now,” Ramsey replied.

  “Go back a few frames,” Clayton said.

  The officer operating the laptop did as Clayton asked and froze the image again. The passenger door showed two slightly distinct but very wavy horizontal lines.

  “Those lines could be nothing more than shadows,” Ramsey said.

  “Can you zoom out?” Clayton asked.

  “It’s a late-model Ford,” Ramsey offered as his officer made the adjustment. “Probably a four-wheel-drive F-150.”

  “That’s a Twin Pines Bible Camp pickup truck,” Clayton said, flipping open his cell phone.

  “Are you sure?” Ramsey asked.

  “Let’s make sure,” Clayton said as he pulled up Gaylord Wardle’s phone number from the recently dialed list of calls on his cell phone and pressed send. After twelve long rings, Wardle picked up.

  “Where are the camp’s pickup trucks usually parked?” Clay
ton asked Wardle after he’d quickly identified himself.

  “At the maintenance building. Why?”

  “What are the makes and models?”

  “We have three Ford F-150s, four-by-fours. They’re a couple years old. Why?”

  “One may have been stolen. Go to the maintenance building right now, find out if a vehicle is missing, and call me back immediately.” Clayton rattled off his cell phone number.

  Five minutes later a very upset Wardle called back to say a truck was gone and the camp’s youth minister, Greg Cuddy, who was supposed to be on security patrol, was nowhere to be found.

  Clayton calmed Wardle down enough to get a description of Gregory Cuddy and a license plate number for the truck. “Wake up everyone at the camp and do a head count,” he ordered Wardle. “We need to know if anyone else is missing. I’ll be there as soon as possible.”

  “Is a head count at this time of night absolutely necessary?” Wardle demanded.

  “Either you do it, or I will,” Clayton replied.

  “All right,” Wardle replied without enthusiasm.

  Clayton disconnected, filled in Ramsey on what he’d learned, corralled Deputy Walcott, and told him to stop searching for evidence and follow him to the Bible camp. He got in his unit, switched on his emergency lights, and drove away. As the crime scene faded in Clayton’s rearview mirror, a dispatcher issued a five-state regional BOLO on the truck, citing an officer down and the possible abduction of one Gregory Cuddy.

  Back at the roadblock, not a word had been spoken about the impact of Leroy’s death on the men who’d found him. In order to cope, every officer at the crime scene had wiped away all personal feelings. Grief would have to wait. Anger would have to wait. The shrinks called it depersonalization, but to Clayton and the others it was simply an issue of their own emotional survival.

  According to the time and date stamp on the video, the cop killer had a good ninety-minute head start in the middle of the night, when there were few if any officers patrolling highways, and absolutely none roaming the many unpaved rural country roads of southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. It would take a miracle to catch him before daybreak, and chances of a capture after that weren’t much better. He could be long gone before a dragnet could be launched.