Page 25 of Coyote

Ignoring the trail would have meant leaving two men loose on our land with a road to the house. So we followed.

The tracks crossed a patch of bare caliche and disappeared. I stopped at the edge and worked my light across the hard ground.

Linc shifted behind me. "Lose them?"

"The tracks stop. He didn't."

I walked the perimeter a step at a time. A crushed stem leaned away from the trail. Dust sat on one side of a stone and not the other. Farther on, a juniper branch had twisted and failed to settle back into place.

I found the large heel again beyond the hardpan. The smaller man had kept stepping in his partner's prints. Or that was what they wanted me to believe. I crouched and put two fingers beside the heel. Deep. Same weight as before. The toe pointed toward the service road.

"We keep going," I said.

Linc looked back toward the dark behind us. "You think they're headed around to the south fence?"

"I think they want us to think they are."

The radio hissed when Linc tried Rafe at the wash. The walls stood too high on either side to push a signal out. Neither of us expected anything else out of the north wash.

"We can ride back until we hit signal," Linc said.

"And lose whatever they're doing out here."

"Or walk straight into it."

The men hadn't tried very hard to hide. That bothered me. So did the silence. Whoever was ahead knew we were following and wanted us to keep following.

But the prints still angled toward the road behind the ranch.

"We go as far as the ridge," I said. "From there we can see the service road and call in. If the trail keeps north, we turn back."

"The ridge," Linc said. "Then we turn around. I mean it, Coyote."

"Ransom get up to Albuquerque this week?" I asked.

"Tuesday." Linc kept his eyes on the fence line. "Says his brother's holding a fork now. Fed himself some eggs."

"That's good."

"That's eleven years and a fork." Linc reined around a cholla. "Ransom drove home doing ninety. Happiest I've seen him since Winston."

The trail climbed out of the wash and crossed another strip of hard ground. I found the large man again on the other side. His stride had shortened going uphill. The left foot turned outward slightly when he put weight on it.

No second edge. No partial toe. Nothing from the smaller boot.

It was possible he was still walking in his partner's tracks. Men did it to hide their count, and I'd watched this pair do it once already. But nobody steps in another man's prints for a mile without landing short somewhere, one lazy heel, one half-moon of toe outside the line, and this trail didn't have one in it. My teeth started aching low in the back. I kept on it anyway. The prints still angled toward the service road, and the road was what mattered.

The ridge rose ahead. Past the top, a low orange glow moved once and disappeared.

Linc saw it too. "Fire?"

"Lantern. Somebody's got a coat over it."

We tied the horses in the wash and went the rest of the way on foot.

The tracks led us through a narrow break in the rocks and into a shallow bowl protected from the wind. Somebody had made camp there.

One bedroll lay open beside a small fire. A coffee pot sat near the coals. Empty gas cans stood against the rock. A stone pinned a county map to the dirt. Somebody had marked the north fence in black and drawn an arrow toward Pae Saco's service road.