Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [146]
Guzman and Purcell hoped to catch a break—maybe some desert rat would live up to the name and drop a dime on Kueck; maybe as Kueck got more desperate he’d surface somewhere. But Kueck had another edge. In his possession were his cell phone, rifle, Sorensen’s gun—and the deputy’s two-way radio. While on the run, he was flipping through the frequencies and paying close attention to all the police chatter. When a call went out for backup at East 200 and Palmdale Boulevard, he knew to head in the opposite direction. On another channel, he learned that Black Butte Basin Road was hot, so he backtracked.
As the heat-seeking tentacles of law enforcement continued to probe every fissure in the Antelope Valley, cops squeezed Kueck the old-fashioned way. An old mug shot had been broadcast and plastered everywhere. Kueck looked like Mephistopheles. It shocked people who knew him in the old days, when he used to look like an Eddie Bauer model, but it proved all too familiar to certain locals, who called in to report sightings of the guy with the demented gaze, the defiant Mojave ponytail and Fu Manchu, the collapsed speed-freak face—someone had seen a man running down the Southern Pacific tracks in Llano; there was a strange guy in the aqueduct at 170 Street and Highway 138; someone just stole someone else’s rifle. In a furious attempt to bag the killer, cops in black-and-whites and SUVs raced all over the Mojave, only to find the sad truth of the American desert—another ex-con with no place to go, lying facedown in the sand, blasted on Yukon Jack.
At the Saddleback Market in Palmdale, everyone had a theory. “Maybe he flew out of here in one of those ultralight planes,” said one local chick, sucking hard on a Marlboro. “I hear he’s in Mexico,” said a guy in a T-shirt that read SHOW ME YOUR TITS. Someone else ascribed the murder to secret Army experiments up in the buttes, while another theorized that Kueck had floated down the aqueduct to Los Angeles.
Actually, Kueck hadn’t gone anywhere. He was hiding in plain sight, down the road a piece, about a mile from where he dumped his car. After avoiding the FLIRs that first night, he made a move. He knew that to escape detection, he could travel only at twilight or dawn, when his body temperature was the same as the ambient heat on the ground. As the sun rose and warmed the sand, he went to visit his buddy Ron Steres.
Kueck had been on the run for twenty-four hours, and his first priority was that of any desert creature: water. But Steres, an excon with an extensive arrest record, was known to have possessed controlled substances, and Kueck, jacked from the murder and the target of a massive manhunt, may have been looking for a fix. In the months before he shot Sorensen, Kueck had invested his meager income—a combination of disability checks, cash from selling junk at flea markets, and gifts from his sisters—in gems from the Home Shopping Network. When he showed up at the remote compound of collapsing sheds and trashed cars where Steres lived, the jewels had become his only currency, something he could trade for drugs and supplies.
Kueck didn’t stay long before fading back into the desert—he knew he had to keep moving. Although he shunned civilization, he couldn’t last indefinitely without it. And for a man who wanted nothing to do with the modern world, he was strangely obsessed with it: In one of the many phone calls he made to his daughter, he worried about how he looked on TV. He even considered cutting his hair for the first time in two decades—with his picture all over the news, maybe it was time for a change.
On Tuesday, after three days on the run, he visited Steres again. This time, Guzman and Purcell caught their break. Steres had been talking to his friends, and one of them called the cops. A SWAT team quickly swarmed the Steres compound. But no one was there. Once again, Kueck had vanished.
AT WHAT POINT do those