Nothing but Trouble (17 page)

“Would you mind if I took a look around on my own?” Kerney asked.

“Not at all,” Joe said. He paused to watch as the men cut a section of the wire fencing and began attaching it with brads to the post-and-beam corral. “Make yourself at home. Just remember to close the pasture gates behind you.”

After Joe and Bessie left, the day hands took a break, hunkering down to smoke cigarettes and drink some water. The welcome coolness of the cloudy morning had given way to a blistering sun, which felt uncomfortable in the humid air left behind by the rain squall.

Kerney talked with the men for a time, and once they learned that he ranched on a small place up in Santa Fe County and had known the Jordan family all his life, they loosened up noticeably. Mike and Pruitt, the two cowboys who’d stopped on the highway after the border agent’s body had been dumped, wanted to talk about the incident. Kerney obliged but kept his narrative of the event short.

He learned that the two men bunked together in a rented house in the town of Animas, and worked as stock haulers and heavy equipment operators when they weren’t hired out on the area ranches.

He asked Mike, a muscular six-footer in his thirties, about the problem of illegal immigrants crossing the border.

“The government would have to post an army down here to stop them,” he said. “We see the crap they leave behind everywhere. Back-packs, clothing, water bottles-you name it.”

Pruitt, who had the upper body of a weight lifter and carried a few extra pounds around his waist, nodded in agreement. “Hell, if you had the time, you could track them cross country all the way to Deming.”

“I didn’t see much evidence of that when I was out here yesterday,” Kerney said.

“They make a beeline for the smelter smokestack,” Mike explained. “They call the warning beacon on it the Star of the North.”

“I heard about that,” Kerney said. “But you’d think with Antelope Wells close by, it would draw more people crossing the border through this ranch.”

Mike shrugged. “I don’t know why the coyotes don’t use it that much. But if they did, Walt Shaw would run them off in a hurry. He doesn’t let anybody on the ranch he doesn’t know personally.”

The men went back to work and Kerney left, heading south toward the barn where he’d seen Shaw and his unknown associate unload the van.

On the one hand Shaw’s protectiveness about the ranch made sense; trespassers were never welcome on private land. On the other hand Shaw’s desire to keep strangers off the ranch might serve the alternative purpose of keeping certain activities hidden.

At the barn Kerney took another look again for an entry point. But daylight made no difference and he found none. He studied the tire tracks left behind by the van and followed them south along the ranch road. Soon the valley widened and he came to a fenced pasture that held over three hundred well-fed Angus heifers and calves, along with a few bulls that had been separated from the herd into a smaller paddock. The herd was clustered around a water trough and a nearby solar panel on a metal stanchion that supplied electricity to a well pump.

Kerney passed through the gate, closed it behind him, and crossed the pasture. Drawn by the sound of his truck the cows raised their heads, got to their feet, lifted their ears, and followed behind in a slow trot until it became clear no feed would be set out.

Through another gate Kerney continued south. In the distance he could see the faint outline of a fence that ran east and west across the wide valley, which he took to be the ranch boundary. He stopped and consulted the maps he’d bought in Santa Fe as part of the research he’d done on the Bootheel. He located his position on a Bureau of Land Management map of New Mexico that showed all federal, state, local, tribal, and privately owned land in the state and saw that he’d crossed over into the Playas Valley.

He looked up from the map through the rear window and saw the faint beacon of the Star of the North twinkle on and off. He switched to another map that showed the immediate area in greater detail. Clearly marked on it, no more than three miles away, was a landing strip.

Previously, Kerney had paid the map symbol no mind. It was not uncommon for larger spreads in remote locations to have landing strips. Big ranchers frequently used small fixed-wing airplanes to check on livestock, inspect fence lines, access range conditions, or occasionally ferry in needed equipment and supplies.

He put the maps away and scanned the land in front of him. There was no evidence of human habitation on the valley floor or in the hills and mountains that bracketed the basin. There were no telephone poles, electric lines, or microwave towers that would require maintenance or repair, and there was no sign of a landing strip on the north side of the fence that cut across the valley.

Kerney put the truck in gear and followed the tire tracks in the ruts of the dirt path until he reached the fence, where the tracks swung toward Chinaman Hills, a low-lying, bleak rise that bumped out of the valley. Before he reached the hills, the tracks veered south again, passed through a gate, turned east, and took him directly to the landing strip.

Kerney got out of the truck and looked around. On the bladed, packed dirt surface he could see fresh tire impressions from the nose and main landing gear of a light aircraft. Multiple sets of footprints led him to the spot where the vehicle had been parked, suggesting several trips had been made back and forth to load cargo. Although he wasn’t certain, Kerney didn’t think the landing strip was on the Jordan ranch. He walked around the strip in a wide circle and found a rutted dirt road that showed no signs of recent traffic and cut east across the valley toward a windmill. He went back to the truck and drove along it until he came to a locked gate that barred his passage. He climbed over it and read the posted sign attached to the other side of the railing. The landing strip was on the Sentinel Butte Ranch.

Kerney had seen enough. He checked his watch. If he hurried along, he could still make the drive to Virden, snoop around for a bit, arrive in Santa Fe by midnight, catch a few hours’ sleep, and get to work on time.

Back at the new horse corral Kerney spotted Shaw talking to the day hands and stopped for a little friendly conversation. Shaw greeted him cordially and asked if he’d enjoyed his tour of the ranch.

“I’ve never seen desert grassland look so good,” Kerney replied.

“It’s been a lot of hard work to bring the rangeland back to where it should be,” Shaw said with smile, “and it never would have happened without the coalition.”

Kerney asked about the coalition, and Shaw explained that the area ranchers had agreed to make grassland available to each other in exchange for creating land-use easements that prohibited subdivision.

“We get scant rain down here,” he added, “and the monsoons that do come are fickle, putting moisture on one ranch and bypassing another. Grass banking allows us to move cattle to neighboring ranches where there’s ample forage. How much of the ranch did you get to see?”

Kerney laughed. “Not a hell of a lot, given the size of the spread. I stopped near some westerly hills.”

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 bottomland. Contained by low brown hills the valley was a green carpet of hay- and cornfields, some of which were punctuated by bright orange pumpkins that had been planted in among the long, straight rows.

Fat cattle grazed along fence lines in mowed fields, and in the sky above a black hawk, clearly identifiable by the broad white band on its tail, swooped down toward the wooded stream bottom. Mountains rose up behind the hills, one peak soft as a rounded shoulder, another shaped like a citadel carved out of solid rock.

Virden consisted of several dozen tidy farms and houses that lined the roadway paralleling the valley floor or fronted several side lanes flanked by orderly rows of mature shade trees. The only business in the settlement was a quilt shop in a single-wide trailer that stood near an old abandoned schoolhouse with a rusty, hipped metal roof, boarded-up windows, and an overgrown playground containing a broken swing set.

Kerney cruised the area, looking for Shaw’s van. He followed a farm road that led into the hills, where he found a derelict homestead and the hulk of an old tractor behind a locked gate posted with a No Trespassing sign. Back in the village he stopped on a lane where an older man was working on a truck parked under a shade tree in front of a house.

The man looked up from the engine compartment and nodded when Kerney approached. In his late sixties, he had a deeply seamed face and a semicircle of thin gray hair that crowned his bald, freckled head.

“Engine trouble?” Kerney asked with a smile.

“Busted thermostat,” the man said. “You lost, or just passing through?”

“Poking around is more like it.” Kerney extended his hand and told the man his name. “This is really an out-of-the-way, beautiful valley you live in.”

The man put a screwdriver in his back pocket and shook Kerney’s hand. “Name’s Nathan Gundersen. If you like the quiet life, it’s the right place to be. You looking to buy some property?”

“Is anything for sale?” Kerney asked.

Gundersen shook his head. “Not really. Folks here tend to hold on to what they’ve got.”

“Do you know Walt Shaw?”

Gundersen leaned against the truck fender. “He grew up in these parts. What’s your interest in him?”

“A friend of Shaw’s told me that he came here and went deer hunting with him,” Kerney said, “so I thought I’d check out the area before the season got started.”

“Maybe they were hunting up in the mountains,” Gundersen said, “but not down here. We don’t allow it. The whole valley to the Arizona state line is posted.”

Kerney shrugged. “I guess I must have misunderstood.”

“Not necessarily,” Gundersen said. “Walt owns a farm in the valley, about two miles down the highway toward Duncan. Little white house that sits just back from the road. He leases out the acreage and uses the place as a retreat of sorts. Don’t see much of him. Comes here occasionally to check on things and stay overnight. During deer season he sometimes brings a friend along to go hunting in the mountains.”