“You didn’t try to make contact with her again?”
“She wasn’t attractive enough for that,” he said crudely.
I’d got as much as I was going to get out of this cowpoke. Unless I turned him over to the police. But the police meant Bradley on this case, and Bradley wasn’t going to give me the time of day so why the hell should I help him out? Screw Bradley, and screw Jeb McGrath. I told him I’d run out of questions. Maybe I’d get in touch with him again. He released a stream of smoke through his nostrils and nodded.
I touched my nonexistent hat to Carvy as I walked out the door into the bright sunlight. They both watched from the shadow of the doorway as I drove away.
They didn’t seem to do a whole lot of business.
It was getting near cocktail time. I put the car in the hotel lot and went back to the bar across the street. For the first time I noticed it was called Gringo’s. The burly Mexican bartender was polishing glasses. The same barstool was vacant, and I ordered another margarita straight up.
The bartender asked what I’d been up to.
“I talked to the guy who was here with the woman who disappeared.”
“How did you find him?”
I spotted the blonde, Milly, chatting with some customers at a table. The place was much more crowded than earlier. “Your waitress put me onto him. She told me he ran a rattlesnake farm.”
“Interesting line of work.”
“He wasn’t much help. Claims she was a one-night stand — he never saw her again.”
The bartender studied a champagne glass he was burnishing. Milly came over with an order; she smiled hello.
“Hello yourself,” I smiled back. “I found him.”
“Did it help?”
I gave her a rundown of our conversation. “The guy’s a bit too macho to be real,” I said. “Yellow glasses, rattlesnakes, a ten inch belt knife — it’s a little too much.”
“You should hear his politics,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“He downs a few and starts on politics: the liberals, the foreigners, the atheists — hates just about everybody. Hates the government. Talks about how he’s gonna buy a place in the hills and five his own godgiven way.”
“Sounds like a survivalist.”
“Sounds like the Ku Klux Klan sometimes,” Milly said.
“You think politics has something to do with this?” I asked her.
She mused a moment. “I doubt it.”
“Well, the woman who disappeared has left-wing politics, if anything,” I said.
“For sure he’s not left-wing,” Milly Taber said. She took her tray of drinks back to the table.
“Pretty girl,” I said to the bartender.
“Damn right,” he said. “And smart, too.”
“Too bad I’m not twenty years younger,” I said.
“Me too,” he said.
We both sank into self-pitying silence.
I wanted to make a long-distance phone call, but it was too late to do that — it would have to wait till morning. Instead, after showering, I went down to the hotel lobby to ask about a good steak restaurant. The businesslike young man who had checked me in was back. He gave me the name of one close to the Sandia tramway “that people seem to like.”
I drove north on Tramway Road. The restaurant was farther out than I had thought. Soon there was windswept flatland to my left and the Sandia range climbing to my right. The sun was setting in a wash of pink and orange. I saw few side roads. One of them had a sign for a winery. At that point, with no other cars nearby, a blue pickup pulled up rapidly on my left to pass. It had the kind of almost-black tinted glass that you see in Puerto Rico and that frequently bodes no good. As I watched him pass, his passenger window cranked halfway down, and in my usual paranoia I thought I saw a pistol barrel over the edge. Then I heard the two shots and felt a sharp stinging on my left cheek. I ducked and slammed on the brakes and swore all at the same time. The car careened wildly to the right and came to a stop with two wheels in a drainage ditch.
I looked up. The blue pickup was speeding off. There were two bullet holes in my left and right front windows. The windows were cobwebbed into a thousand sections. It had been a miracle that I hadn’t been hit. I felt my face and winced; the hand I took away was bloody.
A car that had been far back was now coming to a stop behind me. Another was pulling up across the road. The two drivers, both men, got out to see how I was. One of them had a telephone and called the cops.
It took an hour and a half to talk to the cops and to get the car pulled out of the ditch. Except for the two windows, the Chevy seemed to be all right. There were some small scratches on its right side. The cops said they’d like me to come in the next day and give them a statement about what had happened. I said fine.
Having lost my appetite, I drove back to the hotel. It was close to nine o’clock. I had one stroke of luck: there was no one at the front desk for the moment. I slunk up the carpeted stairs and down the hallway to my room.
My face didn’t look as bad as I’d been imagining. There were tiny fragments of glass in my left cheek, but they would eventually work their way out. The blood was in those spots, but there was no large wound. After some washing up I’d look as good as someone with incipient plague.
I tried watching TV, but that didn’t work. You can’t watch TV after someone has tried to kill you. Sleeping isn’t that easy either.
After a hearty breakfast at a pancake house I returned to El Descanso and dialed Puerto Rico long distance.
He came on sounding affable — he always sounded affable. Which seemed strange to me for a guy who’d seen three marriages collapse on him. “Federal Bureau of Investigation — Evans speaking.”
“This is Carlos Bannon, Bill.”
“Hey, Carlos. It’s been a long time.”
“A few years in fact. That case where the clothes were soaked with cocaine.”
Bill Evans chuckled. “I remember it well,” he said. “Hey, listen to this one. A guy says to another guy, What do you think of this cocker spaniel I got for my wife?’ The other guy answers, ‘That’s not a bad trade.’ ”
He guffawed at his own joke. As I said, three divorces.
“That’s a good one,” I said.
“You call for any special reason, Carlos?” he asked after he’d recovered.
“I’m calling from Albuquerque. I want you to do something very unkosher for me: to let me know if you have a file on a woman I’m looking for up here — a missing person case.”
“What the hell,” he said jovially. “Give me the name. If there’s anything you’re not supposed to know, I won’t tell you.”
“Fair enough. Her name is Nancy Canales. How long will it take you to check?”
“We have computers now, buddy. I’ll get back to you before lunch.”
Puerto Rico time was two hours later than Albuquerque.
I thanked Evans, gave him the hotel number, and rang off.
It took him longer than I’d expected, but eventually the phone beside my bed rang. “She may be a live one,” Evans’ voice said. “We believe she’s affiliated with a leftist independentista group called Sueño de la Independencia — SDI for short.”
“I’ve heard of them. A couple of terrorist incidents.”
“That’s right. Not a big group. Our informant said she was their accountant.”
“Do terrorist groups have accountants?”
“I guess so,” he chuckled. “She teaches at the University of Puerto Rico.”
“Has she ever been picked up?”
“Nope. She’s never been connected with anything specific. You don’t pick up people because of their beliefs.”
Thanks for the lesson in civil rights, Bill. “Look,” I said, “do you know any agent here in Albuquerque that I could maybe talk to?”