Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [118]
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