“So you never wanted a regular life?”
“What the fuck’s that? Barbeques and ballgames?”
—Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley, Heat
ON THE EVENING OF THE THIRD DAY OF THE MANHUNT, THE SKY was clear, and the waxing three-quarter moon, eight days away from being full, cast a bright light across the Antelope Valley, illuminating the Joshua trees and the greasewood and the cholla in a way that defined them well. If you were sitting on top of the Three Sisters Buttes and had a good eye, you would have spotted a man on a bike. From the way it wobbled, the bike appeared to be rickety and old, or maybe it was just because the man had difficulty pedaling. He was heading east, across a dirt road, toward the buttes, then turned north and headed toward a group of dilapidated sheds. Next to the sheds was another house, a well-kept, single-story, wood-frame house, with a driveway that was swept clean, a basketball net over the garage door, and some kids’ toys in the yard. Between the complex of sheds and the main house was a tree, a mesquite tree, noteworthy because few trees grow in this area, and this one was large and flourishing. There were lights on in the house, and inside it was a family, a Hispanic couple and six of their nine kids. The mother was a cleaning lady, employed at the thrift shop of the Twin Lakes Community Church, the one where Steve’s friend John Wodetzki was the pastor. She knew Steve well; he frequented the thrift shop and purchased household items such as toasters and fans, redistributing them to needy residents of Lake Los Angeles. She was aware of the fact that Steve had been killed earlier that week, although she did not watch television regularly and had not seen all of the ensuing coverage. At 10 that evening, the man on the bike pedaled up toward the sheds and hopped off, laying the bike down or propping it against a wall. She recognized the man as an associate of C. T. Smith, who lived in one of the sheds on the property. He was carrying an assault rifle. Afraid, she stepped away from the blinds. For the second time that week, Donald Kueck walked into his buddy’s place and asked for a favor. “Man, I’m hungry,” he said. Then he gave Smith $10 worth of food stamps. “Get me some food, would you?” he asked, and then told his friend to put it in an old bus in the sands nearby. Smith agreed, and then Kueck asked for water. A little while later he picked up the rifle and left, riding into the night, pedaling hard, we can imagine, riding faster, alive with H2O, faster now, taking off, imagining that he was levitating, out of sight, and even out of mind he might have thought—his own mind, his own joke, Fuck off world, I’ll see your manhunt, and I’ll raise you with this, now entering the jet stream and flying through the night, vanishing like a raven.