Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [150]
At 3:30 P.M., Sheriff Lee Baca stepped out of an Air 5 chopper and was escorted to a bank of microphones to address the news media. He gave an assessment of the situation and the suspect, and ended the press conference with a terse summation: “We’re down to what’s known in this business as dead or alive.”
As SWAT commanders positioned the BEAR and set up a tactical plan, Lillienfeld tried one last time to get Kueck to surrender. “We’d like to kind of resolve this thing before it gets dark out,” he said. Kueck replied that he did not want to get arrested or killed before sundown. “Nobody wants to kill you,” Lillienfeld said.
At 5:26, the loudspeaker began blaring—“Donald Kueck, come out with your hands up.” A half-hour later, the first round of tear gas was deployed, quickly followed by a second. As the gas billowed through the main compound, Kueck called Lillienfeld and claimed to be in the bushes, daring him to “send in the dogs.”
SWAT launched another volley of tear gas and the BEAR moved in for the kill, obliterating sheds as it barreled toward the main compound. Kueck opened up with his automatic, spraying the giant assault vehicle with gunfire. Air 5 and 6 hovered over the sheds as fires broke out in one shed, then two, then a third, as Kueck—perhaps shot himself—darted in and out of the flames, blasting rounds. By 8:45, the entire compound was on fire, and the fire grew and as the moon appeared above the Mojave, it became a conflagration with giant freak-show flames that scorched the heavens, and some wondered if it was the Twilight of the Gods, and the news choppers came to the fire like mechanical moths, relaying the image to millions who watched the flames dance on television, the phony hearth that interrupted regular programming with coverage of the End. Around the perimeter of Kueck’s last stand, hundreds of deputies and law-enforcement personnel watched the grisly bonfire burn and wondered if they had finally got him. A few miles away at Mount Carmel, the nuns watched the flames in the distance and prayed.
AT MIDNIGHT—MORE THAN three hours after the fire began raging—SWAT was ordered to search the area. Ten minutes later they found Donald Kueck on his back, nearly cremated, clutching his rifle. When they went to move the body, it crumbled. A few days later, his family scattered his ashes off one of his favorite buttes.
Months after it all went down, the crime-scene tape at Kueck’s trailer still fluttered in the wind. There were some old jars of peanut butter and a pair of Nikes (size eleven)—just waiting for the next hermit with a useless dream. The land remained a scavenger’s paradise of busted bicycles and generators, engines and furniture, lawn mowers and tables and chairs. There was a broken-down La-Z-Boy facing the buttes—Kueck’s chair, according to his family, the one he sat in when he watched the sun rise over the Mojave. From here he could survey his strange desert kingdom. He had come out here to escape civilization, but he knew he could be evicted at any point. The desert was shrinking, and civilization didn’t like people who violated its codes.
“Lynne,” he said in one of his last letters to his sister, “I’m writing this down because I get choked up when trying to talk about personal issues…. I know the next life is waiting for me…. I don’t want you to blame yourself if the inevitable comes to pass. This feeling has been growing for the last one to two years.” Then, in a burst of optimism, he added, “Of course the future can be changed and it would be fun trying. Since I was twenty years old, I’ve had a dream of building a little place in the desert.”
To the right of the La-Z-Boy