Nothing but Trouble_ A Kevin Kerney Novel - Michael Mcgarrity [57]
Shaw nodded. “Those are the Chinaman Hills on the Sentinel Butte Ranch. Joe tells me you’re the police chief up in Santa Fe.”
“Not for long,” Kerney said with a grin. “I’m about to retire. This trip is sort of a dry run to see what it feels like to be a civilian again. I think I’m going to enjoy it.”
“You’ll be coming back down when they start filming the movie?” Shaw asked.
“With my family,” Kerney replied. “We’re going to make a vacation out of it.”
“I’ll look to see you then,” Shaw said, extending his hand.
After a handshake and a good-bye Kerney left thinking Shaw continued to come across as a pleasant fellow with nothing to hide. But why had he come back to the ranch on a rare day off? Had one of the day hands called to let him know Kerney was poking around unescorted? If so, that meant it wasn’t a chance encounter.
Shaw had hauled ass down from Virden in time to intercept Kerney and find out where he’d been. As before, he’d acted cordial and not in the least uptight. But then Kerney had played the innocent, had carefully omitted mentioning all that he’d seen, and had deliberately reassured Shaw that he wasn’t into any kind of cop mode.
If Shaw was into something illicit, chances were good that he would backtrack on Kerney.
Where the ranch road curved out of sight of the horse corral, Kerney stopped the truck, got his binoculars out of the glove box, hustled up to a small rise, and stretched out in the tall bunch grass. Through the binoculars he could see the dust trail of Shaw’s pickup heading south toward Chinaman Hills on the Sentinel Butte Ranch.
Chances were that Shaw would lose Kerney’s tire tracks in a hard rock portion of the ranch road that curved around the base of Chinaman Hills. If not, so be it.
Eager to get to Virden, Kerney returned to his pickup and drove away. He’d never been to the settlement before and knew nothing about it. Although he was a native of the state and enjoyed exploring it, Kerney had yet to see it all and probably never would.
New Mexico was larger than the combined landmass of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Within its boundaries were the soaring southern Rocky Mountains, the bone-dry Chihuahuan Desert, the windswept high eastern plains that butted up against deep canyonland gorges, the stark, majestic northwestern Navajo Nation, and the tangled western Mogollon Plateau that rose to meet wild mountains of dense climax forests.
Over the years he’d ridden, hiked, backpacked, and camped from his boyhood haunts near the Tularosa to the high country above Taos, four-wheeled in the desert, and deliberately detoured to see isolated hamlets, ghost towns, and remote archeological sites. He looked forward to the time when he could show Sara and Patrick the wonders he already knew and discover new ones together. Johnny’s movie would be their first opportunity to do that as a family.
As he left the Bootheel, the mountains receded and gave way to mesquite flats, playas of sand, and stretches of irrigated cotton fields that were startlingly green against the dun-colored terrain. He passed through Lordsburg, a dusty ranching and railroad community that drew its lifeblood from the interstate traffic with little to offer other than fast food, cheap motels, and self-serve gas stations.
Beyond the town the desert continued to dominate. Flatlands were interrupted by an occasional mesa or the knobby spines of low hills. In the distance barrier mountains rolled skyward, promising relief from the heat of the day. It was raw country, where monsoon rains ran over the hard-baked soil and spilled into deep-cut arroyos, the sun cracked the earth into spiderlike fissures, and harsh volcanic mountains stood, weathered and desolate, above the expanse of sand and scrub.
Soon after the cutoff to Virden the road dipped into a valley and revealed the narrow ribbon of the Gila River, the last free-flowing river in the state, barely discernible through thick stands of cottonwoods that bordered its banks. On the far side of the river Kerney could see a swath of irrigated fields that stretched along the