Doc had a very particular fetish, and he talked about it all the time. He fantasized about being murdered, disemboweled, buried in the desert. His friends thought he was joking. But Doc insisted.

By Rachel Monroe
Illustrations by Steve Kim

On a warm day in March 2000, national park ranger Cary Brown woke up early and decided he might as well go ahead and start his patrol. Big Bend, where Brown was stationed, is located in Far West Texas, with the thin green ribbon of the Rio Grande serving as the border with Mexico. It’s one of America’s least-visited national parks, a remote and sunbaked place whose martian landscape of sharp canyons and sudden outcroppings implies some deep-buried geological violence.

Not long after sunrise, on the park’s main road, Brown pulled over a pickup with a suspicious tarp-covered load in its bed. There were two men inside the cab. When he peeked under the tarp, he found blocks of marijuana, about 400 pounds of it. As Brown started to arrest the driver, the passenger reached under the seat, grabbed a bottle of water, and sprinted off into the desert.