Free Extreme Denial by David Morrell Page A

landscape below him, sand and rocks stretching off toward barren mountains. What else did you expect? he told himself. New Mexico’s a desert.
    At least, Albuquerque’s compact four-level terminal had charm, its interior decorated with colorful Native American designs. The airport was also remarkably efficient. In a quick ten minutes, Decker had his suitcase and was standing at the Avis counter, renting a Dodge Intrepid. The car’s name appealed to him.
    “What’s the best way to get to Santa Fe?” he asked the young woman behind the counter.
    She was Hispanic and had a bright smile that enhanced the expressiveness of her dark eyes. “That depends on whether you want the quick route or the scenic one.”
    “Is the scenic route worth it?”
    “Absolutely. If you’ve got the time.”
    “I’ve got nothing but time.”
    “Then you’ve got the right attitude for a New Mexican vacation. Follow this map,” she said. “Go north a couple of miles on Interstate Twenty-five. Turn east on Forty. After about twenty miles, turn north on the Turquoise Trail.” The clerk used a felt-tip pen to highlight the map. “Do you like margaritas?”
    “Love them.”
    “Stop in a town called Madrid.” She emphasized the first syllable, as if distinguishing it from the way the capital of Spain was pronounced. “Thirty years ago, it was almost a ghost town. Now it’s an artists’ colony. There’s a beat-up old place called the Mineshaft Tavern that brags it has the best margaritas in the world.”
    “And are they?”
    The woman merely flashed her engaging smile and handed him the car keys.
    As Decker drove past a metal silhouette of two racehorses outside the airport and followed the clerk’s directions, he noticed that Albuquerque’s buildings seemed no different from those in any other part of the country. Now and then, he saw a flat-roofed stuccoed structure that looked something like the adobe he had seen on television, but mostly he saw peaked roofs and brick or wood siding. It worried him that the television program might have exaggerated, that Santa Fe would turn out to be like everywhere else.
    Interstate 40 led him past a hulking jagged line of mountains. Then he turned north onto the Turquoise Trail, and things began to change. Isolated log cabins and A-frames now seemed the architectural norm. In a while, there weren’t any buildings at all. There was more vegetation—junipers and piñon trees, various types of low-growing cacti, and a sagebrushlike shrub that grew as high as six feet. The narrow road wound around the back side of the mountains that he had seen from Albuquerque. It angled upward, and Decker recalled that a flight attendant on the MD-80 had made a comment to him about Albuquerque’s being a mile-high city, just over five thousand feet above sea level, the same as Denver was, but that Santa Fe was even higher, seven thousand feet, so it was a climb to get there. For the first few days, visitors might feel slow and out of breath, the flight attendant had told him. She had joked that a passenger once asked her if Santa Fe was seven thousand feet above sea level all year round.
    Decker didn’t notice any physical reaction to the altitude, but that was to be expected. After all, he had been trained to think nothing of high-altitude low-opening parachute jumps that began at twenty thousand feet. What he did notice was how remarkably clear the air had become, how blue the sky, how bright the sun, and he understood why a poster at the airport had called New Mexico “the land of the dancing sun.” He reached a plateau, and the view was breathtaking. As he peered to the left, he saw a rolling desert vista that seemed to go on for hundreds of miles to the north and south, the western view bordered by faraway mountains that looked higher and broader than those near Albuquerque. The road’s gradual climb took him through sharp curves, at many of which the vistas were even more spectacular. Decker felt as