Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [119]
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 piñons 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 piñon 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