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.