Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [143]
THE TWO MEN HAD FACED OFF nine years earlier, when Sorensen pulled Kueck over for reckless driving on a desert road at high noon. Kueck accused him of being a phony cop, and Sorensen radioed for backup. Furious, Kueck spent months trying to get the deputy fired, writing letters to everyone from Internal Affairs to the FBI.
Now, as Sorensen headed onto Kueck’s property, it was almost high noon again, 110 degrees in the shade. Sorensen passed a NO TRESPASSING sign and cautiously proceeded down the dirt road toward Kueck’s tiny trailer, spotting abandoned cars and mountains of junk everywhere. In a few minutes, his brains would be in a bucket.
Kueck, like all desert creatures in the midday heat, was probably lying low. A hermit who had lived in the Mojave for nearly thirty years, he had a thing about snakes. He kept a Mojave green, one of the most lethal reptiles in North America, at his front door, the rippling embodiment of the great battle cry “Don’t Tread on Me.”
The Mojave—a desert nearly as large as Pennsylvania—has historically been a haven for people who hate the system, from Charles Manson to Timothy McVeigh, and Kueck was no exception. A psychotic ex-con who fed his anger and self-recrimination on a cocktail of meth and Darvon and Soma, he had moved out here to get away from society’s relentless demands for smog checks and food-stamp registration and housing permits. But now that system was closing in on his front door, in the form of a deputy with a gun.
According to the disjointed account that Kueck gave later, he was in bed when Sorensen arrived. “What’s up, buddy?” he asked. The deputy told him to step outside, but Kueck, perhaps half-tweaked after a weeklong speed binge, believed Sorensen was there to hurt him, maybe even evict him. Although Kueck wasn’t trespassing—he was living on land bought for him by one of his sisters—he knew he was in violation of a myriad of codes, eking out an existence in a ramshackle trailer without the proper permits. Worst of all, he feared going back to jail—“a concentration camp,” as he called it. Confronted by Sorensen, he felt like he was down to his last card. “I figured I better dig up the old rifle and shoot him,” he admitted later.
What happened next, according to police, is that Kueck kicked open his front door, aimed his Daewoo at Sorensen, and blasted him with .223s. The high-velocity bullets screamed into the deputy’s body below his vest, shattering and buckling him like a piece of glass as he spun around and managed to get off three shots before Kueck blasted into Sorensen’s right side and arm, tearing the 9mm from his grasp as rivulets of blood quenched the Mojave’s hot sand.
But Kueck wasn’t finished. We know from witnesses who heard the shots that a second volley of bullets was fired, and we also know from the coroner’s report that Kueck put a round directly into Sorensen’s face. He kept firing into the deputy’s torso, using the rifle like a stiletto to carve up Sorensen’s insides. When it was over, Kueck had raked the deputy’s body with fourteen shells.
Unbeknownst to Kueck, he was being watched. After hearing the shots from their home a mile away, Wayne Wirt’s wife and kids had climbed a tower and now, through a scope, observed Kueck ransacking Sorensen’s Ford. They immediately dialed 911. Kueck disappeared from their view; he was on his knees, hidden by the SUV, tying a rope around Sorensen’s legs, crisscross, crisscross, trussing him like a bagged deer, right ankle over left. He dragged the body toward the back of his yellow Dodge Dart and tied it to the bumper. Then he picked up the deputy’s brains and threw them in a bucket.
As sirens wailed across the Mojave, Donald Charles Kueck vanished. A few minutes later the phone rang at his daughter’s house. “I’m sorry,” he said in tears. “I won’t be coming over on Monday.