Slow Kill (35 page)

Kerney walked to the corral on the opposite side of the barn and Comeuppance trotted over to check him out. He spoke to the horse in low, reassuring tones, but Comeuppance didn’t buy it, and moved away, shaking his mane.

Kerney checked the stalls. They were clean, with a fresh mat of straw laid down, and the doors were latched open to give the animals access to shelter. The geldings were friendlier, and Kerney spent some time talking to them and feeding them a few horse biscuits.

He went to the house thinking that having the animals on the ranch made the place seem a whole lot less lonely. He’d call Riley in the morning and thank him for his good work.

There was only one phone message on the answering machine and it was from Sara, reminding him not to forget that she loved him. Although he still worried about her, it put a smile on his face.

In the morning, Kerney found it unnecessary to call Riley Burke and thank him. At first light through the kitchen window, he could see the young man inside the corral working with the gray gelding. The horse had a halter on, and attached to it was a lightweight, thirty-foot line.

Riley stood behind the horse outside of the kick zone and flicked the line against the gray’s hindquarters. The startled horse took flight and Riley followed along, pitching the line gently against the gray’s rear quarter until the animal broke into a canter.

After the gray made a half dozen turns around the corral, Riley reversed its direction and repeated the exercise. Finally, the gray slowed and lowered its head. Riley approached the horse at an angle, coiling the line as he moved in, and the gray retreated, refusing to join up. Riley backed off, flicked his line against the gray’s hindquarters, and set the horse in motion again.

Kerney liked what he saw. Riley was starting from scratch with the gray, training it his way, gauging its agility, responsiveness, and temperament. He watched for a few more minutes, then showered, dressed in his uniform, and walked to the corral. Riley released the gray and met Kerney at the fence.

Tall and slim, Riley had his father’s square jaw and deep chest, and the same widely spaced brown eyes and button nose as his mother. His sandy-colored hair was hidden under his cowboy hat.

They exchanged greetings and Kerney nodded in the direction of the gray. “What do you think?”

“Both geldings are well balanced,” Riley said. “They got good, long muscles for stride and mobility, and their front legs match up nicely with their chests. All in all, I’d say they’ll make fine cutting horses. But it will be a while before we know how good they are.”

Kerney nodded, quietly pleased that Riley approved of his selections.

“You only bought one mare,” Riley said as he climbed the fence and dropped down next to Kerney.

“I’m hoping your dad will sell me one of his.”

Riley nodded. “I think he might consider it. Comeuppance is going to need a firm hand if you’re planning to ride him.”

“I already have,” Kerney said.

Riley hitched a boot on the low railing. “I can’t understand why he wasn’t raced. He’s got the bloodlines and the conformation for it.”

“According to the trainer, he does fine on an empty track, but doesn’t like running in a crowd. I appreciate the work you’ve done while I was gone.”

“I wish I could have done more,” Riley replied. “My dad’s trail-riding business picked up last week, and he corralled me to take some tourists out on half-day trips.”

Kerney knew that Riley’s parents worked hard to keep their ranch afloat, and trail rides during the tourist season brought in some much-needed income. “That’s okay.”

Riley’s comment about trail riding made Kerney think about Kim Dean’s cabin in the Canadian River canyonlands. Last night at the office, he’d reviewed the status report on the hunt for Claudia Spalding and no one had thought to look for her there. According to Lucky Suazo, the Harding County sheriff, it would make a perfect hideout.

“I’ve got to go,” Kerney said abruptly, turning on his heel. “We’ll talk later. Thanks again.”

Riley watched Kerney walk briskly to his house. In less than ten minutes, he came back out the front door, dressed in jeans, boots, and a work shirt, with his sidearm strapped to his belt. He got into his pickup truck and drove away, kicking up a trail of dust on the ranch road.

Riley wondered what had made Kerney switch getups so quickly and leave in such a big hurry. Behind him, the gray snorted quietly and he turned to find it had come closer, no more than three feet away. He moved slowly away from the animal, showing his back, and the gelding followed along.

Riley stopped as the gray closed the distance. He reached out, and rubbed the animal between the eyes. The gelding didn’t flinch. Now the training could begin.

Only one highway traversed the Canadian Gorge, a state road that ran from the town of Wagon Mound to the village of Roy. A tangle of canyons and mesas, the gorge dropped off the high plains of northeastern New Mexico into breaks over a thousand feet deep in places. Cut by rivers and streams, most of the Canadian was remote and wild, virtually empty of people, sprinkled with the remains of failed Hispanic and Anglo settlements.

Other than the locals, some hunters, and occasional tourists, few people visited the gorge, a forty-five mile swath of box canyons, slippery rock mesas, boulder-strewn streambeds, sandstone chutes, rock slides, and bottom land meadows. But there were signs that a more ancient civilization once used the gorge. Caves cut into the soft sandstone mesas were littered with pottery shards and flint. Rock art of birds, animals, feet, abstract symbols, and fantastic creatures were engraved in the perpendicular vermillion walls. Cliff overhangs were thick with the black smoke from a thousand years of campfires.

Kerney crossed the canyon and entered the most sparsely populated county in New Mexico. About eight hundred people lived in Harding County, an area larger than the state of Delaware, and just about all of them resided and worked on the high plains grasslands.

He passed quickly through Roy, a village with a post office, school, one restaurant, a few small businesses, and a lot of shuttered, empty buildings. Not too many years ago, there had been a state park with a lake near the village, which had drawn tourist traffic and put some money into the local economy. But the lake dried up and the park was closed. To Kerney’s eye, Roy looked about as dead as the lake.

North of the village, the Kiowa National Grasslands spread out over the prairie that rolled toward a flat, endless horizon. To the west, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose up into a sky peppered with enormous puffball cumulus clouds that crowded the peaks.

Kerney turned off at Mills, once a small hamlet that had served dryland farmers. A victim of drought, it was reduced to a few scattered buildings along the highway. Eight miles in on a dirt road, he dropped into the canyon. Juniper-studded mesas towered over the slow-moving, shallow river that snaked through the valley, parts of it hidden from view by stands of invasive salt cedar trees that lined the banks and sapped up precious water.

Instead of drought, a long-ago flash flood had wiped out the agricultural settlement of Mills Canyon. The torrent had left behind rock wall ruins of a few buildings, including an old hotel, and had inundated the bottom land crop fields, now reclaimed by junipers, yuccas, and cactus.

Kerney found Sheriff Lucky Suazo waiting for him near the hotel ruins. He’d brought along two saddled mounts in a horse trailer. Suazo ran a small cow-calf operation when he wasn’t busy enforcing the law. Built close to the ground, he had a narrow face and a thick mustache that covered his upper lip.

Lucky’s department consisted of himself and one chief deputy. Together, the two men policed over 2,100 square miles. Fortunately, crime wasn’t rampant in Harding County.

“You made good time,” Suazo said as he shook Kerney’s hand. “How sure are you that this Spalding woman is at the cabin?”

“It’s nothing more than a guess,” Kerney said.

Suazo nodded and raised his chin at the mesa across the river. Flat-topped, with a wide band of sandstone that ran horizontally along the base, it was capped with rock.

“We’ll skirt that mesa through a side canyon,” he said. “The trail is good for a spell, but then it gets rough. Keep an eye out for rattlers. We’ve got plenty of them.”

On the ride in, they followed a jeep trail that was much too rocky to accommodate a horse trailer. They saw signs of deer, bear, and mountain lion along the rocky trail cut.

Suazo briefed Kerney on Kim Dean’s cabin. “It’s on a little spit of high ground at the end of a small canyon near a clear spring,” he said. “There’s a cleft behind it where the trees thin out, but it would be a damn near impossible climb to the top. The cabin faces the canyon mouth, so we better go in on foot.”

“Is there any cover and concealment?” Kerney asked.

Suazo reined in his horse where the jeep trail petered out. “Some mountain mahogany, a few cottonwoods and box elders, some pinons and junipers. We can leave the horses at a sandstone chute just outside the canyon, and get fairly close on foot without being seen. But the last quarter mile beyond a rock slide is all meadow, part of it fenced. If Spalding is there, she should see us coming.”

Kerney swatted a mosquito. “Does she have a back door out?”

“If she can climb the cleft, she does,” Suazo said. “But it would take her deep into the back country, miles from anywhere. Outsiders who go in there often get lost and some don’t ever come out.”

He pointed at the rimrock mesa six hundred feet above their heads. “We’ll ride single file from here. The cabin was originally an old line camp on two sections surrounded by state trust land. Hadn’t been used for years until Dean bought it and fixed it up. Got it dirt cheap, according to county records.”

They moved slowly ahead, climbing the mesa, until the horses started lunging and stumbling on the trail, kicking up stones and puffs of gray dust. They dismounted and finished the ascent on foot, pulling the animals along.

At the top, they paused and sipped water from Suazo’s canteen. Kerney could see Hermit’s Peak, fifty miles distant, at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Beyond, the Colorado Rockies were dense and black against the horizon.

Suazo remounted and Kerney followed suit. They rode down an easy switchback trail off the mesa, cut across a dry streambed, and stopped at the sandstone chute at the mouth of the canyon.

“You don’t sit a horse like a city cop,” Suazo said as he swung out of the saddle.

Kerney dismounted and pulled his rifle out of the scabbard. “I’ve been riding some recently.”

“You’re thinking Spalding’s armed and dangerous?” Suazo asked as he reached for his rifle.

Kerney studied recent boot prints in the sand. They were small, the right size for a woman. “Best to err on the side of caution. But my hunch that she’d be here looks like it was a pretty good guess.”

“Let’s go find out for sure,” Lucky said as he started into the canyon.

From behind a pinon tree, Suazo covered Kerney’s back, as he ran zigzag across the meadow toward the cabin. A redtail hawk screeched out of a pine tree, and Kerney looked up to see the figure of a woman climbing the cleft in the canyon wall.

He motioned Suazo forward, skirted the cabin, laid his rifle aside, and started up the cleft.

“There’s no way out, Spalding,” he yelled. “Climb down.”

Spalding shook her head and kept moving. Kerney paused for a better look at her. She carried a backpack strapped to her shoulders and had a canteen on her hip. He didn’t see a weapon. He glanced back at Suazo, who’d rounded the cabin and pointed at an outcropping twenty feet above Spalding’s head.

“One round,” he called out.

Suazo got the message and fired once. The round tore into an outcropping and showered rock fragments down on Spalding, who froze momentarily.

“Come down,” Kerney ordered. “Do it now.”

Spalding shook her head and started climbing again.

Kerney went up the split, using footholds where he could find them. Spalding cleared the outcropping before he could reach her and disappeared from sight. He looked down at Suazo, eighty feet below, with his rifle aimed and ready.

“Where is she?” he called.

“Standing on the ledge, staring at me,” Suazo said. “She can’t go any farther. It’s slick rock from there to the top.”

“Any weapons?”

“Nothing in her hands,” Suazo answered. “I think she wants to jump.”

“If she moves toward the edge, blow her fucking head off,” Kerney yelled.

“She’s at the edge now.” Suazo raised his sights a bit, but held his fire.

Kerney reached for the lip of the outcropping, and felt Spalding’s boot come down hard on the fingers of his left hand. She looked down at him, red-faced and angry.

He pulled his hand free, found a crevice for his foot, swung up and over the ledge, kicked out a leg, and knocked Spalding back. He scrabbled to his feet, spun her around, and pushed her hard against the slick rock wall.

Spalding yelled in pain and slammed her boot down on Kerney’s instep. She turned, and broke for the edge of the outcropping. Kerney grabbed for her with his injured hand but couldn’t hold on. He lunged and caught her around the waist as she stood staring down at the barrel of Suazo’s rifle. He pulled her back to safety.

He put her facedown on the outcropping, planted his knee on her neck, cuffed her using his uninjured hand, and raised her to a sitting position, holding on tight to the cuffs.

She turned and looked at him. Her nose and forehead were scraped raw and bleeding, and her eyes were riveted on Kerney’s face.

“How are you going to get us off this ledge?” she asked matter-of-factly. “I’m handcuffed, and your hand looks broken.”

Kerney’s left hand ached badly. Except for the thumb, his fingers were swollen. He tried to move them, and pain shot up his arm. He wondered how many Spalding had broken. He tried to wiggle his wedding band off his finger with his thumb, but it wouldn’t budge.