Dead or Alive (30 page)

Although his stomach still hurt and he had no appetite, Kerney hadn't eaten all day. So he sat on a fallen log and forced himself to swallow some soup Clayton had mixed up from a packet and warmed over a small propane camp stove, and nibble on some cheese and crackers, hoping to keep it all down. When he couldn't stand the thought of another bite, he buried the remains of his meal in a pit and covered it, so the smell wouldn't attract any passing bears or other hungry critters.

“You're still not feeling good, are you?” Clayton asked as he hoisted the bag of foodstuffs up to a high tree branch and tied it off.

“I'll be fine after a good night's sleep,” Kerney replied as he took off his boots and slid into the sleeping bag.

He spent the early part of the night awake, leaving the warmth of his sleeping bag once to vomit and returning to swelter in the cool air. When sleep came, he dreamed bizarre images of Craig Larson's murder and mayhem, and woke up several times in a sweat. Finally the fever broke, and he fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

In the morning, Clayton woke him up with a hot cup of tea. “I heard you in the night,” he said. “You look awful.”

“I bet I do.” Kerney sat up and took the tin mug from Clayton's hand. “Thanks.”

“I put some honey in it. That should settle your stomach down some.”

Kerney nodded and sipped his tea.

Clayton looked Kerney over with worried eyes. “We can always pull back and have Vanmeter send in replacements.”

“No way. I'm fit enough to continue.”

“You're sure of that?”

“Yeah.” Kerney smiled. “Whatever got to me has passed.”

“Do you mean that literally?”

“It's gone one way or the other.”

“How about some dry toast and a bowl of instant oatmeal?”

“Sounds about right.”

“I'll get to it.” Clayton rose, went to the camp stove, and got busy with breakfast.

As he drank more of his tea, Kerney watched Clayton, a son he never knew he had until a few short years ago. He thought he was damn lucky to have the man as his son and his friend.

After breakfast, they broke camp and were starting out to cut Larson's trail when Frank Vanmeter called again. This time, to tell Clayton that Paul Hewitt had died in his sleep overnight.

Clayton stiffened in shock and gave Kerney the news, the expression on his face a mixture of agonized sadness and pure rage.

After thanking Vanmeter, he climbed off his horse, silently handed Kerney the reins, and walked into the forest until he was out of sight. Fifteen minutes later, Clayton returned. His eyes were dry and features composed, but he had hacked off his long hair with his hunting knife. Kerney figured it was Clayton's way of mourning the loss of Paul Hewitt. It was more eloquent than any spoken words.

“Let's go,” Clayton said with a hard edge to his voice. He took the reins from Kerney's hands, got on his horse, and started up the slope of the wooded canyon wall.

Kerney said nothing and followed him.

 

 

Throughout the morning, Craig Larson stayed lost until the distant sounds of heavy machinery reached him in the thin mountain air. He followed the sound for hours, winding his way up and down canyons and across the ravines wet with standing pools of murky rainwater from yesterday's storm. He let his horse drink from them before gulping down the gritty water himself, and although it smelled like burned ash from the recent forest fire and tasted muddy, it didn't seem to do him any harm. He stayed under the trees with his jittery horse for a good half hour, upwind of an adult bear wallowing in a large pool of water, until it ambled away.

He climbed toward the top of the next ridgeline as the growing sound of engines told him that human activity was close at hand. On the crest, he stayed hidden and looked down into a large valley at an open-pit coal mining operation. It had cut into the earth a good hundred and fifty feet below the surface soil and shale-like substrate. He guessed a good thousand acres were being actively mined while another thousand had been reclaimed with native grasses and shrubs.

There were two monster electric shovels loading ore onto gigantic trucks, and at the far end of the pit, massive front-end loaders were excavating coal from what looked like a blast area. A gravel road left the valley in a direction Larson reckoned hooked up somewhere with the railroad spur. He was glad to be well north of it.

He climbed down from his horse, tied the reins on a tree branch, got some canned food out, and ate it for lunch as he watched the machines and considered his next move. Above him, a single-engine airplane dipped into the valley and flew back and forth across the mining operation.

Finished with his food, he threw the empty tin away, grabbed the Weatherby out of the saddle scabbard, and for the fun of it, sighted the weapon on the big, low-moving electric shovels, the front-end loaders, and the trucks hauling the coal. He zeroed in on the shovel operators, wondering if he could take them out. With the distance to the targets, the constant movement of the machines, and the breezes that were kicking up in the thin mountain air, it would be awesome marksmanship.

Larson decided not to bother. He put the Weatherby away and set out to ride the perimeter of the valley mine under the tree cover. Hopefully, something would turn up to give him a sense of what to do or where to go next.

As he circled, his view of the valley expanded to include another part of the operation where the coal was crushed before being transported to the railhead. He continued the loop, riding for a good hour before arriving on the opposite ridgeline overlooking the valley. From there he headed north until the sound of rubber on pavement made him get out of the saddle.

He tied off his horse to a tree and walked through the forest until he could see a strip of blacktop. It had to be the highway that ran from Raton, past the coal mines and up to the Vermejo Resort Ranch and its fancy lodge, where millionaires came to hunt big game during the day and drink martinis at the bar at night.

He spotted a state police car parked at the side of the road. Within minutes another black-and-white passed by heading toward Raton. He walked on until he could see the access road to the mine, where a state cop car was parked next to a black SUV. A state police officer and a security guard stood talking between the vehicles.

Larson returned to his horse. The cops had figured out exactly where he planned to go and had set a trap for him. There were probably more stationed along the highway waiting to cut him off, with a posse of cops likely coming up behind him on horseback. It was time to make a new plan.

He heard the repetitive thud of a chopper overhead coming up the narrow canyon the highway snaked through. More cops most likely. In his mind it sounded like
stop the cops
being played over and over again.

That's what he needed to do, but he had to be smart about it. Run and gun, gun and run, might be the best way. Take a cop out and move on. Then take another and another and another. Make them pay to the max for all the shit they'd put him through. But first, he needed to scope out what he was up against before he pulled the trigger on the first one.

He mounted up and disappeared into the forest, thinking he and not the cops would call the shots.

 

 

After hours of riding, Clayton and Kerney cut Larson's trail at a wildfire burn area that had destroyed a good four thousand acres of timber, sterilized the thin layer of topsoil, and exposed the washed gray granite, hardened quartz, and sandstone rock of the mountainside. They found a disturbed area where Larson had camped overnight, called it in, and kept moving, dropping into the ravine where tracks and sign showed Larson had paused to drink. In the next ravine, they found fresh bear scat and recent hoofprints that traveled even higher, until they topped out on a crest that overlooked an huge open-pit coal mine.

Kerney and Clayton looked down at the raw, gaping wound in the land.

“Well, we all like our cars and electric lights, I guess,” Clayton said.

“Don't we, though,” Kerney replied, thinking resource extraction could be a whole lot less wasteful. “At least they're making an effort to reclaim the land. That didn't use to happen.”

Clayton grunted and moved off to inspect the area for more signs of Larson. Kerney's gut wrenched and he scurried into the woods and promptly lost all the food in his stomach. Most of the morning he'd been feeling all right, but in the last hour or so the sweats and the chills had returned along with a gut that felt like it was about to explode.

“I've called in a chopper to take you to Raton to be looked at,” Clayton said when Kerney returned to the horses.

“I'm not going.”

“Don't be stubborn. You're sick. We'll drop down into the mine so the chopper can pick you up.”

“I don't want you going up against Larson alone,” Kerney said.

“I won't be. We've got a picket line of uniforms spread out along the length of the highway, so I've got all the backup I need.”

“Uniforms sitting in squad cars aren't the same as someone in the saddle next to you.”

“I'll be careful,” Clayton said.

Kerney shook his head in protest. “I'm staying.”

“You're going,” Clayton said flatly. “A sick partner doesn't do me any good and could get us both killed.”

Clayton was right and Kerney knew it. “Okay,” he said. “I'll get myself checked out.”

They picked their way carefully down to a cut that took them to a gravel road where monster ore trucks rumbled by, kicking up dust so thick it stung the eyes.

“You know,” Clayton yelled over the sound of a passing truck, “if you eat food during a storm supposedly you either lose your teeth before you get old or your stomach stays cranky.”

“Who told you that?” Kerney yelled back.

“Moses Kaywaykla, my uncle by marriage. In fact, if you're eating and there's a lightning flash, you're supposed to spit the food out right away.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“To further your continuing education about Mescalero traditions and beliefs.”

“Oh, and I just thought you were telling me I had a cranky stomach to make me feel better.”

“Your sarcasm is duly noted. Actually, I thought it would take your mind off it.”

Kerney laughed in spite of himself. Up ahead, a state police helicopter came over the tree line and landed on reclaimed flats planted in clover, saltbush, and side oats grama grass.

Clayton broke the roan gelding into a canter and Kerney followed suit on his buckskin, the packhorses loping behind. They reached the chopper to find a lady paramedic standing by. She ordered Kerney off his horse, checked his pulse, listened to his heart and lungs, took his temperature and blood pressure, prodded his gut with her fingers, and told him to get in the chopper.

Kerney hesitated. “What's the verdict?”

“Don't know,” the paramedic replied with a smile. “Your heart's strong and your blood pressure is okay. Maybe food poisoning or some intestinal bug, but we'll let the doctors decide.”

Kerney gave Clayton a dirty look and got in the chopper with the paramedic. Clayton smiled broadly, backed the horses away, and waved as the pilot fired up the rotors. When the helicopter was airborne, he called Vanmeter and told him Kerney was in-bound to Raton from the coal mine. “Has anyone sighted Larson?” he asked.

“Negative,” Vanmeter replied.

“That means he's probably discovered we've been waiting for him and he's either doing an end run or moving laterally. I'm going back to pick up his trail.”

“You shouldn't do it on your own,” Vanmeter cautioned.

“I'll keep my distance,” Clayton replied, lying through his teeth.

As he trotted the horses down the gravel road, loud, shrill whistles blew, the heavy equipment stopped moving, and all was quiet for a moment before an explosion ripped open an exposed coal seam at the far end of the pit. The dust from the blast formed a dense cloud that floated over the valley and coated the stately mountain evergreens above the pit.

Clayton covered his mouth with a handkerchief and rode away from the mine.

 

 

All morning long, radio stations in Raton had broadcast half-hour bulletins about the police manhunt for Kerry's brother. People were warned not to open their doors to strangers, pick up hitchhikers on the roads, or let their children out unsupervised. Listeners also heard that the reward for information leading to Craig's capture had reached fifty thousand dollars.

On one of the hourly news shows, a newsman interviewed Truman Goodson's widow, who broke down crying, demanding Craig be brought to justice. Kerry looked up Mrs. Goodson's address in the phone book and took the fifteen hundred dollars cash he'd held back from his brother to buy a new deer rifle and put it in an envelope without a note or return address, put four first-class stamps on it to make sure it got there, and dropped it in the mailbox on the highway.

On a talk radio show, a trucker called in to say there were dozen of cops concentrated along Highway 555. He cogitated on the idea that they were flooding the high country looking for Craig. Another caller reported a rumor that the police had recovered out on the prairie a fortune in jewels and a pile of cash that Craig had stolen from a bunch of people he'd killed that the cops didn't know about.

All the police would say officially was that the manhunt for Craig had intensified and the public would be advised as soon as he was apprehended.

Kerry had gone to work in the morning only to be interrupted by a state police investigator accompanied by Everett Dorsey, who for the umpteenth time questioned him about where Craig was heading with his stolen horses and supplies. For the umpteenth time Kerry played dumb.