Chapter 4
EMTs loaded both women from the Pontiac convertible into an ambulance and transported them to Weatherford Hospital before the dust settled.
Lafayette Johnson shuffled forward as if on wooden legs, slack-jawed at the bloody scene. Cutter was focused on getting the women to safety and hadn’t noticed the gun still dangling from the kid’s right hand.
“Go ahead and holster up,” Cutter said, voice quiet but firm. “Then pat this guy down for a second weapon. He may have a pocket gun.”
“Pat him down?” Johnson asked, incredulous and more than a little green around the gills. “Half his head’s g … I mean, no way you can think he’s a threat anymore.”
“For hell’s sake,” Cutter said. He leaned into the Pontiac and checked the body himself.
“Outlaws are not known for carrying the most dependable firearms. Let’s say the medical examiner goes to move the body and a two-dollar pistol with masking tape for a handle falls out of this guy’s pocket.
Some bystander gets shot in the face, and whose fault would that be?
” Cutter nodded across the highway. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a sizable peanut gallery in the westbound lanes.
It’s not a good look for me to be going through the pockets of a man I just gunned down. ”
Johnson put a knuckle to the brim of his hat, tipping it back. For just a moment, his eyes flashed with the fury of a child who’d been scolded with the truth. The flash subsided as quickly as it came.
“I never thought about it that way,” he said, almost like he meant it.
Chastened and hangdog, Johnson finished the search.
He found no more weapons. A crumpled electric bill and a pay stub from Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant identified the dead man as Vincent Kirby Millner.
The power bill showed an address in Glen Rose, about an hour south of Weatherford.
That all tracked. Cutter knew the frequent flyers in Parker County. This guy was new.
The sun blazed away in earnest by the time the medical examiner took custody of Vincent Millner’s body.
Cutter’s paperwork would contain little more than the basics of the man’s offenses, names of other officers at the scene—and the weather.
Millner was an armed robber and probably a murderer, shot to death in the course of taking hostages.
Sheriff Langford would glance at the report, but that was about as far as any postshooting investigation would go.
It was well before noon, but the inside of Cutter’s patrol car had reached volcanic levels by the time he climbed inside.
The metal seat-belt clasp was hot enough to raise a blister.
He started the engine and, passenger window down, opened and closed the door a couple of times, replacing the hundred-thirty-degree air with hundred-degree stuff that the air conditioner could more easily handle.
The odor of burning brakes still lingered.
Outside, Deputy Johnson had recovered from Cutter’s “course correction” and now sauntered down the shoulder of the interstate toward his own patrol car like John Wayne.
His right hand rested on the butt of his revolver, canting his holster to the side.
A swagger didn’t come naturally to many folks.
Most, like Lafayette Johnson, looked awkward, like they were trying just a little too hard.
Cutter shook his head and sighed. The kid was teachable, but it would be an uphill slog. He grabbed the mic from his dash.
“Parker County 62,” he said. “I’m clear from the interstate. You want me at the crime scene?”
Manhunts weren’t common in Parker County, but when they did occur, the Sheriff’s Office took command.
Sheriff Langford broke squelch before Dispatch had a chance to answer.
“Wayne, this is Bud,” he said, as if the whiskey-rich voice needed an introduction.
“I need you at the ground search. Weatherford PD’s got I-20 shut down for us a half mile west of the armored car.
Morton and Garza are handling that scene.
” The sheriff was an old Parker County cowboy.
A hell of a lawman, but he didn’t go much for ten codes, preferring plain talk over the radio.
His voice grew quieter as he turned to issue orders to someone nearby but kept the radio keyed. Then, “Cutter, you still with me?”
“I am.”
“Good deal,” Langford said. “Bring LJ with you.”
Cutter gave a low groan before acknowledging the order.
“Will do.”
Lafayette Johnson stopped walking and yanked the handheld radio from his belt.
The sheriff was his mother’s brother, which, from what Cutter had witnessed so far, was probably the only reason he’d made it through field training.
Working on his own now, he seemed prone to make the same mistakes over and over—the kind of guy who was bound to get one year of experience twenty times if he made it that long.
“Bud, I’m fine by mysel—”
The sheriff cut him off. “Consider yourself Cutter’s shadow. That’s the end of it.”
Cutter shot the kid a wan smile, then leaned out his window. “You heard the man,” he said. “Let’s head up Bankhead and see how we can help.”
Murders and manhunts drew more cops than a report of a naked woman.
Blood in the water brought in responding units from every surrounding county.
What had only a short time before been a wide spot on a quiet backcountry road took on a carnival atmosphere.
Law enforcement officers and citizen volunteers crawled the area like ants.
Patrol cars, unmarked sedans, and farm trucks parked on both sides of the road on the parched grassy shoulder.
One pickup sagged with what looked like last year’s hay—a sheriff’s posse volunteer stopped on the way to feed cattle.
Cutter found a spot a dozen cars back and across the road from the abandoned Crown Victoria.
He held down his hat and crouched instinctively as a Department of Public Safety helicopter out of Dallas thundered over at five hundred feet off the deck.
In addition to the DPS chopper, Texas Rangers had commandeered two television news helicopters to aid them in the search.
The reporters were all too happy for an excuse to get in close to the action.
Cutter’s shirt stuck to his back with sweat before he made it ten steps from his patrol car. The sun was well overhead now, beating the odor of parched grass and scorched earth out of the ground and making the entire countryside smell like an old haybarn.
A couple of sheriff’s posse volunteers who lived out toward Aledo arrived pulling a trailer with Honda three-wheelers. The machines were all well and good, Cutter thought, but awfully loud—a good way to get yourself ambushed when an outlaw heard you coming.
Whoever had been driving the suspect Ford had crashed into a tree a mile and a half up Bankhead from I-20, just east of Center Point Road.
The sheriff’s working theory was that the outlaw had fled into the woods on foot.
By the time Cutter and Johnson arrived, county and state units were posted at roadblocks on Center Point and Newell Roads, as well as a mile east on Bankhead, in case their bandit had made it farther than they thought.
As of yet, no one had put eyes on their suspect, meaning they were basically looking for anyone who ran.
Johnson took a paper cup of iced tea from one of more than a dozen citizens and sheriff’s posse volunteers who crawled the scene around the abandoned Crown Vic. He put an open hand to his brow to shield his eyes from the glare and looked around between gulps of the cold tea.
“How’d they all get here so fast?”
“It’s human nature to want to be a part of something big,” Cutter said. “Makes us feel less helpless, I guess, less like there are things we just can’t control.” Cutter sighed. “Anyway, keep your eyes open. There’s always a chance one of these helpers is helping our guy escape.”
“Or one of ’em could be our guy himself,” Johnson said.
“Now you’re trackin’,” Cutter said.
Sheriff Langford stood over a folding card table not twenty feet from the bandits’ stolen Crown Victoria.
Hat pulled low over his eyes, he clutched a pair of sunglasses in his free hand while he pored over an open map.
Cutter couldn’t remember seeing the man smile more than a couple of times over the nine years since he’d lost his only son during the Battle of Hue City in Vietnam.
Langford glanced up at Cutter’s approach and whistled him over, motioning with the hand that held the sunglasses.
“D Wayne, take a look around the suspect vehicle, would you please,” he said when Cutter was closer. Accustomed to working around cattle, the sheriff kept his voice low and even, but there was never any doubt that what he said was an order. “Do your thing and find their tracks.”
Cutter wanted to say, You mean right where you’ve set up your command post, but he bit his tongue and said, “Will do.”
A few tracks from the sheriff weren’t likely to matter in the great scheme of things anyway.
No less than two dozen pairs of patrol boots, including Trooper Teague’s Justin Ropers, had trampled the dirt and grass around the sedan well before Langford had arrived on the scene.
Fortunately, Teague had sketched a footprint he thought might belong to the driver.
The highway patrolman wasn’t much of an artist, but the sketch was clearly of a pair of lug-soled military jungle boots—something with which Cutter was extremely familiar.