Page 12 of Backtrack

“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 tothe 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 hepored 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.

The rattling squeak of an approaching stock trailer drew Cutter’s attention away from Teague’s sketch. He glanced up to see Parker County Chief Deputy Roger Smith arrive with five saddled quarter horses in a twenty-foot gooseneck. Smith was a slightly bowlegged man with thinning hair under a sweat-stained hat. Like Cutter, he wore brown Wrangler slacks and a white cotton shirt with long sleeves and pearl snaps. Smith climbed out of his one-ton dually and gave a curt nod to Cutter. He hitched up his gun belt, the basketweave holster containing a shiny blue Colt Python. Many of the young bloods coming on the job opted for semi-auto pistols—but, like Cutter, Smith clung to his wheel gun with a sort of religious devotion.

The chief took off his hat and dabbed the sweat off his forehead with a crumpled red bandanna.

“Blue northers in the winter, killer floods in the spring, and now this sweltering shit.” He replaced his hat and shoved the handkerchiefin his pocket, squinting up at the sun. “Weather guessers say it’s supposed to top a hundred and five today.”

Lafayette Johnson piped up. “My mother says it sounds like endtimes.”

“It sounds like Texas.” Smith grunted. “That’s what it sounds like.”

“Same, same,” Cutter said.

The chief waved his hand in a circle over his head. “Let’s get this show on the road before this blasted sun torches us to a crinkle. I’ll ride that gray there with a butt like a barmaid. Cutter, you take your pick of any of the others.”

Smith, a longtime Parker County rancher, had grown up with the sheriff. He wasn’t one to name his horses, any more than he named his tractor or pickup. It was easier to call them “the gray” or “the blood bay” or “that bastard who’s always opening the gate.”