Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998

Welcome to the Rattlesnake Farm by Kenneth Gavrell

It began over lunch with Lourdes Delgado. Over enchiladas. When she started, I was more interested in looking at the lovely Lourdes and listening to the lilt of her voice, but before I reached my second enchilada, she definitely had me hooked.

“The woman simply vanished. No one has seen or heard from her in almost four weeks.”

“Are the New Mexico police still working on it?” I asked.

“I suppose they are,” Lourdes said, “but they don’t seem to be getting much of anywhere. Nothing from the hospitals or planes, trains, buses. They even checked all the taxi companies. No dead body has turned up.”

The last line sounded rather brutal for Lourdes, necessary as it was. “You mean all the homicide victims since then have been identified?” I said.

“Exacto.”

“How long was the woman in Albuquerque before she vanished?”

“She arrived on a Sunday. By Wednesday the hotel was aware there was something wrong. Her bed hadn’t been slept in on Tuesday night, and no one saw her after that.”

“Are you a friend of her daughter or just an acquaintance?” I asked.

“She works for us part-time at the office. She asked me to recommend a private investigator if I knew of any.”

“How old is the woman — what was her name? — who disappeared?”

“Nancy Canales. She’s forty-one. She teaches in the Astronomy Department at the university”

By now I was so interested I’d stopped eating. Lourdes sipped at her beer with lovely bps.

“So, as I understand it, she decides to take a week’s vacation in New Mexico, flies to Albuquerque, and disappears, probably on her third day there. The police have no firm leads, and her daughter wants to hire me to go up there and sniff around.”

“Actually, I don’t know if she can afford you,” Lourdes said. “She did mention that she and her mother have a joint bank account.”

“How old is the daughter?”

“Haidée is twenty-one, I think. A pretty, sensible sort of girl.”

“I’m not all that busy right now,” I said. “I’m willing to give it a few days. Tell her I’ll do it for the expenses of the trip.”

“You could look on it as a working vacation,” she said. “Have you ever been to New Mexico?”

“No. I was thinking the same thing. Have her come to see me.”

“When?”

“As soon as possible. This afternoon?”

“I’ll send her over when she shows up at two,” Lourdes said.

We pushed aside what was left of our cold enchiladas and ordered coffee.

Haidée was well named: lovely, dark-eyed, slim and curvy at the same time. She made me pop out of my desk chair. She spoke a rapid, educated Spanish, and I soon learned that she was a senior at the university.

After the usual opening amenities, which included offering her some of Maria’s macho coffee, I got down to cases: “What possible reason can you see for your mother’s disappearance?”

“I think something happened to her,” Haidée replied. “Something very bad. Or I would have heard from her by now.”

“Does she have enemies?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“So why should ‘something bad’ have happened to her?”

“There are all sorts of horrible people out there,” Haidée explained, making me feel like an idiot. “Murderers, rapists, crackpots, drug addicts. These days you don’t have to have enemies.”

“The common thread to most of the crime on this island is drugs,” I said. “Could that possibly have any connection to your mother?”

She shook her head wearily. “I believe she smoked some pot in college twenty or so years ago. All the activist students did.”

“So your mother was a sixties rebel.”

“More early seventies, but yes. She demonstrated against the ROTC on campus and against the United States presence here in general.”

I recalled those days clearly. I had been young then myself. I’d seen the shoo touts at the University of Puerto Rico on television.

“Do you have a photo of your mother?”

She had a wallet bulging with photos, and the one she handed to me showed a woman who looked about forty with short, dark (dyed?) hair and a face that had once been attractive but had been hardened by the twenty years since her youthful activist days. You would never mistake it for a happy face.

“I’ll need this,” I said. She nodded. She was dabbing at her adorable nose with a Kleenex.

“You have a cold?” I asked commiseratively.

“No—” snuffle “—an allergy.”

“What are you allergic to?”

“I don’t know. Everything.”

I swung back to the subject. “Tell me what you’ve learned from the police.”

She reeled it off rapidly:

“Well, my mother did get on the flight to Albuquerque, and she did arrive there and check in at the hotel, El Descanso, on the eastern edge of town. She signed the registration card; she had a reservation for seven nights. The third night she was seen leaving with a man about her own age. No one knew how she met him. She didn’t sleep in the hotel that night apparently. No one saw her after that. The police were not able to identify the man she left with.”

She paused as if trying to recall whether she’d omitted anything.

“You assume this man is connected with your mother’s disappearance.”

“It certainly looks that way,” Haidée said. She tugged out a fresh Kleenex.

“Your father is deceased?”

“No. He and my mother divorced when I was four.”

“Do you keep in touch with him?” I asked more out of curiosity than anything else.

“He works in Chicago now. I see him very occasionally.”

“Does he know your mother’s disappeared?”

“I wouldn’t know. I guess not.”

“You have no brothers or sisters?”

“No.”

I pushed out of my chair and extracted the office bottle of Palo Viejo from the filing cabinet. “I’ll leave tomorrow,” I said.

“I do hope you don’t drink too much,” she remarked baldly.

“No,” I said, “just enough.”

That cynicism seemed to satisfy her. I offered her a drink but she refused. She said she had to go back to work at Lourdes’ office.

The next day I flew from Puerto Rico to Houston, sat around the airport for two hours, and then went on to Albuquerque, arriving near evening. The sky over the Albuquerque airport looked like something by El Greco when he was in an evil mood, but it didn’t rain.

I’d had my travel agency book me into El Descanso, the same hotel Nancy Canales had stayed at. The agency had also arranged for a rental car at the airport. Following the directions of the guy at the rental desk, I drove north and east towards my hotel on Central Avenue. My first impressions were that Albuquerque was built very low — even compared to San Juan — and spread out. All the architecture seemed to be tan-colored and in the adobe style of the Indian pueblos. I wondered how they enforced their city planning laws; in Puerto Rico we couldn’t even enforce our traffic laws.

El Descanso was also built like an Indian pueblo, right down to the jutting beam ends. It shone almost red in the huge setting sun. Its lobby was rustic — Indian rugs and sombreros on the walls — and cosy. Behind a dark wooden counter a businesslike young man took my information and gave me my key. It was an electronic key.

I’d eaten on the plane, and I wasn’t hungry. After a shower and change of clothes, I went downstairs to the lobby to see how they reacted to private detectives investigating the disappearance of one of their guests.

The businesslike young man was all alone. He looked at me as if he was anxious to solve whatever problems I might have. I told him what I was and why I was there. He insisted on seeing my P.I. license, which I showed him, along with the photo of Nancy Canales.

To save time for both of us, I told him what I already knew. He seemed nervous now, as if he wished for guidance from some higher authority, like God.

“I remember the woman,” he said. “I checked her in. As I recall, she arrived about the same time of day you did.”

“Did you notice anything at all unusual about her?”

“No, nothing except that she was traveling alone. Not many people vacation alone.”

“How did you know she was on vacation?”

“She told me. She asked me about the sights to see. I gave her several brochures.” He chin-pointed to a rack of colorful reading matter against the wall.

“Did you see much of her?” I asked.

He wagged his head negatively-

“Did you see her with anyone else?”

“No, but Sonia saw her with that man the night she disappeared. I believe he was waiting for her just outside. Sonia told the police all about it as you seem to know.”

“What did the man look like?”

“She said he was in his late thirties maybe, trim, dressed like a cowboy.”

“What kind of car did they get into?”

“The police asked the same question. Sonia didn’t notice. She just passed them on her way in.”

I worked on him for a few minutes more, but that was all he knew. He said I could talk to Sonia when she came in at noon tomorrow. She would normally be around now, but her husband was in the hospital. Gallstones.

I thanked him for all this information and strolled back to my room.

The mysterious man. Did Nancy Canales know him before she came to Albuquerque, or did she meet him here? A middle-age sexual fling? It sure looked that way. Maybe the mysterious cowboy had nothing at all to do with her disappearance.

I switched on the TV and watched half of an awful movie before I fell asleep.

The next morning found me down at the police department, Missing Persons Section. A plainclothes cop there condescended to talk to me in spite of the fact that I was a P.I. from Puerto Rico. His name was Bradley, and Nancy Canales’s disappearance was one of his files.

“So how can you help me, Mr. Bannon?” he said.

“I was kind of hoping you could help me.”

He smiled. He had a wicked, long-time-cop smile. “We’re not here to assist private investigations,” he said.

“I’m working for the missing woman’s daughter,” I said. “You can imagine how she feels.”

“I don’t get paid to imagine,” Bradley said, “I get paid to move files. This file is here because the case is still open. I would like to move it over there—” he indicated a row of filing cabinets “—where we keep the cases that have been closed.”

“Each file is a human being,” I said. “More than one human being.”

“I don’t get paid to think about human beings,” Bradley said.

“The girl is only twenty-one,” I said. “A college student. Her parents have been divorced since she was four. Her mother’s all she’s got.”

Bradley made a tsk-tsk sound with his thin lips. “You’ll have me in tears in a minute.”

“Oh hell,” I said. “I’m on my way out.”

“Good,” Bradley said. “You have a nice day.”

I turned back. “If I do turn up anything on this disappearance, you can be damned sure I’m not going to inform you of it.” I added another pungent pair of words as I slammed the door.

People turned their heads to follow me down the hall. They didn’t seem surprised at my state of mind.

Over lunch I got an idea — a long shot. What if Sonia hadn’t noticed a car because they didn’t get into a car? I pointed my rented Chevy back to the hotel and parked it in the lot. There was a woman behind the reception desk; however, she told me that she wasn’t Sonia, she was Alicia. Sonia’s husband was being operated on at the hospital, and she was still there. There are some days...

I walked out into the street and surveyed busy Central Avenue. On my side of the street, stores, parking lots, another hotel — nothing that looked likely — but across the street were two bars and a Greek restaurant named The Delphi. I headed for the nearer of the bars.

It was deep and narrow, made two storied by balconies along two of the walls. The bar itself was a small horseshoe with about a million glasses hanging upside-down. Most of the place was tables, only three of which were occupied by couples nibbling each other’s earlobes. I grabbed a stool at the bar and ordered a margarita straight up from a burly guy who could have been Puerto Rican but was probably Mexican. I tried my Spanish on him, telling him I was from San Juan.

He seemed interested. “Está de vacaciones?” he asked me. Are you on vacation?

“No, realmente estoy trabajando.” Actually I’m here on business.

I took out my card and handed it to him along with the photograph of Nancy Canales.

“Carlos Bannon,” he grinned at the name, then dutifully studied the photo of the woman. “She’s the one who disappeared about a month ago. The police said she was Puerto Rican.”

“The police were here?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t help them. They also had her picture.”

“I knew it was a thousand-to-one shot.”

He grinned in agreement, then said, “You could ask her,” pointing to a young blonde waitress who was headed in our direction, having just descended from the balcony with a tray of empty glasses.

“Didn’t the police talk to her?”

“No. She was off duty.”

“Two Miller drafts and two margaritas on the rocks,” she said as she walked up.

The bartender started bar-tending. I introduced myself to the girl and went through my preliminaries again. I showed her the photograph. She almost knocked me off my feet when she said, “Sure, I remember her. I remember her face.”

“Was she alone?” I inquired deviously.

“No, she was with a guy — redneck type. I’ve seen him before. He runs a rattlesnake farm for tourists somewhere north of town.”

Jesus Christ, the woman was a gold mine.

“What’s his name?”

“He told me it was Jeb.”

“What else do you know about Jeb?”

“Not much. He’s only been in a couple of times. He’s got this quirk of always wearing yellow glasses — you know, the kind they use for shooting. He wears yellow glasses and jeans and cowboy shirts.”

“How did they behave that night?”

“Like everyone else. They sat over there—” she pointed to a remote corner of the balcony. “Quiet. I assumed they were pretty close.”

“Why didn’t you give this information to the police?” I asked.

“I didn’t know they were looking for her.”

“Don’t you read the newspapers?”

“No. Too depressing. I don’t watch the news on TV either.”

Actually I didn’t know if anything had appeared in the local papers. I said, quite honestly, “I’m surprised you remember her.”

“I remember her because she looked so unhappy. In that respect they weren’t like the other couples. Just look at that photo—” She glanced down at it. “She looks like a woman who’s been out in the rain for a long time.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “I thought so, too. How do I get to this rattlesnake farm?”

“I couldn’t say. I just know it’s north, off I-25.”

“What’s it called?”

“I couldn’t tell you that either.”

“Well anyway, you’ve been a tremendous help,” I said. “A bright girl like you should be doing something better than waiting on tables.”

“I will be, one day. I’m studying drama at UNM,” she said. “I’m going to be an actress.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Milly. Milly Taber.”

“I’ll remember it when you become famous,” I said.

“I hope you don’t have to wait too long,” Milly Taber said.

I crossed the street to the hotel and found the same woman, Alicia, sitting behind the desk. She was working on something and did a fine job of ignoring me. Her long black hair needed a good combing.

“I’m looking for a snake farm,” I said.

“Isn’t everybody,” she said.

“Seriously. A rattlesnake farm north of town somewhere off I-25.”

“I don’t know much about snake farms,” she said. She had eyes that reminded you of Anna Magnani in old black and white films. “Maybe Sonia would know about snake farms, but Sonia isn’t here today. She took off at the last minute.”

“Have you got a phone book I could look at?”

Her Latin eyes smoldered as she hefted one onto the counter.

Possibly it was listed in there, but I didn’t find it. I hadn’t the slightest idea what to look under. But I’m a private eye, little problems like this don’t deter me. I thanked Alicia for the phone book and went out to my rental car in the lot. There was a roadmap in the glove compartment that got me onto 1-40 and then onto I-25 north.

As I drove out of town, the land grew arid and gullied, with occasional stark hills. There was some brush and dry streambeds but no trees. Signs indicated there were Indian lands everywhere — there also seemed to be gambling casinos everywhere. I stopped at gas stations to inquire about rattlesnake farms.

Above San Felipe Pueblo, I found a kid at a gas station who knew where it was. He directed me to turn left at a road that led to Cochiti Pueblo. I’d see the snake place about a mile down on the left side.

Right after pulling out of the gas station I saw the first sign advertising the “Don’t Miss It!” snake farm. After the turn there were three smaller signs. The kid’s directions were good: it was almost exactly a mile down the side road. A four-foot-long red arrow directed me under a massive wooden sign that said Rattlesnake Farm and below that, A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME EXPERIENCE. The sign was flanked by two American flags. I pulled up in front of still another adobe-looking building that sat behind a split-rail fence separating it from the parking area. Only two other cars were parked in the dusty lot, an old Ford and a red pickup. A man in cowboy clothes was leaning against the door-jamb of the building sipping a beer. Unless he’d grown a potbelly and added twenty years in a month, this wasn’t the man I was looking for.

I approached Potbelly, his straw hat low over his eyes, and asked him about the man I wanted. “You police?” he asked.

“No.”

“Insurance investigator? Something like that?”

“Nope.”

I didn’t feel like being cooperative.

“Well, what are you?” he said finally.

“A friend of a friend.”

“That’s pretty damn vague, friend.” He crushed his empty beer can and tossed it expertly into a nearby plastic trash receptacle. “Come on in,” he said.

I followed his bluejeaned bottom into the building. It was about eighty by thirty feet and all one room. Along the sides and in two rows down the center were many glass cases full of snakes. To the right of the entrance was an old slant-topped desk and behind it a chair that leaned back against the wall. On the chair lounged a long-legged type in tan boots, jeans, and a plaid cowboy shirt. He rested a scuffed high-heeled boot against the desk. Next to the boot sat a plastic ashtray holding a burning cigarette and next to that a brown felt cowboy hat.

This one was wearing yellow shooter’s glasses.

“Ticket?” he asked.

“Actually I came to talk to you,” I said.

“Buy a ticket,” he suggested.

“How much is it?”

“Only two fifty.”

I gave him the money, and he looked friendlier. “Now, what did you want to talk about?”

“A woman you met in Albuquerque about a month ago. Her name was Nancy Canales.”

“I don’t think I know her,” he said. He had dry, worn-looking skin. His eyes were the kind of washed-out blue you see in drunkards and the people who run Nazi concentration camps. He got up and wandered around the desk. He was several inches taller than me.

“Why’m I supposed to know this woman?”

“Some people saw you meet her outside the Descanso Hotel on May twenty-second. A waitress in a bar across the street from the hotel also saw her with you the same night.”

He wandered along the cases of rattlesnakes against the wall, and I wandered after him. I noticed he had a ten inch hunting knife, with a nice stacked leather handle, on his belt. His fat friend had taken the chair behind the desk and was watching us.

“Why are you interested?” Yellow Glasses asked.

“She has disappeared. Her daughter hired me to find her.”

I showed him my license. It was in Spanish, of course, and I doubted he could read Spanish.

“Puerto Rico,” he said. “I’ve never been to Puerto Rico.”

I said, “She came here on vacation — or so she said — was seen with you that Tuesday night, and wasn’t seen again after that. It doesn’t look good for you. I’d hate to have to go to the police.”

He pointed to a huge brown rattler that stuck out its tongue at me. “That’s our biggest,” he said. “He’s a prize. And so’s this next one.” He moved to the following case, which contained, of all things, a white rattler. “Albino. Very rare.”

He shot his spent cigarette out the door and lit another from a dented Zippo.

“We’ve got every kind of rattlesnake here. Big ones, little ones, local ones, ones from far away — even foreign ones. Yes, this is a rattlesnake lover’s paradise.”

“I didn’t know there were rattlesnake lovers.”

“You want me to take one out?” he offered.

I declined.

Yellow Glasses took a deep drag on his cigarette. “What’s the story on this woman?”

“As far as I know, there is no story. She came up for a vacation, and she just disappeared. Nobody knows why, how, or even exactly when.”

“You have yourself quite a job, Mr...”

“Bannon.”

“I’m Jeb McGrath. That there’s Carvy.”

“Is that his first name or his last name?”

“He’s just Carvy.”

Carvy tipped his sweat-stained straw hat with his forefinger.

“Look, Mr. Bannon, let’s just lay out the cards,” Jeb McGrath said. He looked more like he was talking to the yellow rattlesnake in a case in front of him than to me. “I met this Nancy in Old Town on Tuesday afternoon. Frankly, I was trying to pick somebody up. She was a little older than I was looking for, but she was receptive. I spent some time talking to her and arranged to meet her again at her hotel that night. We went to the bar you were talking about and had a few drinks. That loosened her up. I suggested we go out to my place and have a few more drinks. She was in the mood, and we drove to my house out near Sandia. It’s a small place but I like it — private, even cosy, you might say. She stayed overnight, and I drove her back to town in the morning. She asked me to let her off at the Indian Cultural Center. That’s the last I saw of her. It was what you’d call a one-night stand.”

“Well, it’s all very neat,” I said. “Even plausible. But unfortunately you were the last one to see her alive.”

He turned on me suddenly like a rattlesnake. “I can’t help that.”

“You’re not helping me much,” I observed.

“I can’t help that either,” he said evenly.

“What do you think happened to her?”

“Maybe she wanted to disappear.”

“I doubt it. At least, I haven’t run into anything to suggest it.”

“Maybe she had an accident. Maybe she fell into the Rio Grande. How the hell should I know?”

“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?”

“As a matter of fact I do. I met him a few months ago in D.C. We had some drinks together.”

He was silent a moment. Leafing through his book of phone numbers?

“Here he is: Daniel Serpe. I’ve got his office number and his home.”

“Give me both.”

I jotted down the numbers on a tiny pad thoughtfully provided by El Descanso.

“Thanks a million, Bill.”

“You owe me one,” he said. “Let me know how things work out.”

“I’ll do that.”

I put down the receiver and wondered if I should call Daniel Serpe before going to the police station or afterwards. I decided to do it afterwards.

Writing the statement was a formality, and the cops knew it as well as I did. They weren’t going to find those bullets in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, and I hadn’t got the Ecense number of the truck — which was probably a phony anyway. But I went through the motions, and they smiled and thanked me, and I found a public phone and called Daniel Serpe’s office number.

He remembered Bill Evans and suggested that we meet somewhere for lunch — did I know Albuquerque? No, I said, I didn’t. Then I remembered the steak restaurant I’d almost made it to and suggested that. He said fine, he’d be there at one o’clock.

The air conditioning in the car didn’t seem much affected by the holes in the windows. I couldn’t lower them because they’d fall to pieces. I had to close the door gingerly.

El Vaquero was a large, very Southwestern looking place with roughhewn wooden tables and a tiny stage for a danceband. There was no band at one in the afternoon but a surprising number of people, mostly tourists and business types. Daniel Serpe was waiting for me on a sofa just inside the entrance next to a “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign.

He was a middle-aged man with distinguished looking silver temples that matched the conspicuous Indian-silver ring on his left hand. He wore a well-cut grey suit and a necktie that must have cost forty dollars. He appeared to be sucking something — which I later learned was a Tic Tac. A woman in an ankle-length suede skirt and a Jane Russell blouse seated us in a booth next to the windows.

“What happened to your face?” Daniel Serpe asked.

“Someone took two shots at me yesterday evening. It was a very close thing.”

He sucked his Tic Tac. “Do you think he was trying to kill you or just scare you?”

“Kill me.”

“He’s a bad shot.”

“We were both moving, and he was using a pistol. I was just lucky.”

“What are you involved in, Bannon?”

“I thought it was a missing person case; now I’m not so sure.”

“Fill me in.”

We ordered lunch, and while we waited for the food to arrive, I talked. I didn’t leave anything out.

“At this point it doesn’t make sense to me,” I concluded. “If Nancy Canales is connected with a leftist Puerto Rican independence group and Jeb McGrath is possibly associated with some right-wing militia group — I’m just surmising—”

“He is,” Serpe interrupted. “We know all about him. They call themselves the American Eagles.”

“Well then, what could they possibly have to do with each other? I understand he hates foreigners.”

“They have one thing in common,” Serpe said. “They’re both militant against the U.S. Government.”

“But from completely different sides of the political spectrum.”

“There’s an angle you haven’t thought of,” Serpe suggested. “These groups here have tremendous stockpiles of weapons. They are easy to come by.”

“I noticed a lot of gun shops along Central Avenue,” I said.

“Right. So it’s not guns they need, it’s cash. Guns bring high prices when they’re purchased by groups that find them hard to come by.”

“Our gun-control laws are as tough as New York’s,” I said.

“There you have a possible reason for their meeting,” said Serpe. He looked quite pleased with himself.

The waitress brought our food. I’d ordered a steak sandwich after my big breakfast, but Daniel Serpe had ordered a meal large enough for two. How did he keep that trim figure?

“It still doesn’t make sense to me,” I said. “You don’t kill a person who’s here to buy guns from you.”

“Perhaps he took the money and then killed her to keep the weapons,” Serpe proposed. “Perhaps he just didn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut.”

“If that happened, she was pretty stupid,” I said. “And she’s a professor at the university.”

Agent Serpe shrugged.

“Maybe Jeb McGrath’s only connection with her was sexual,” I said, “and we’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Not even a shrug to that one. “This steak’s very good,” Serpe said. “I’ll put this lunch on my expense account. Do you like jazz?”

“What?”

“I was wondering if you like jazz. I’m a collector, mostly bebop. It’s my passion.”

“Yes, I like jazz,” I said, “but I’d rather talk about Nancy Canales’s disappearance right now.”

“What more is there to say?” Serpe said. “Either I’m right or McGrath probably isn’t involved. As far as I know, his sexual activities are normal, not lethal.” He took another mouthful of steak.

We finished our meal without my learning anything more except that Daniel Serpe had been trained as a lawyer.

Out in the car I pulled out El Descanso’s little notepad and made a list:

My high school English teacher would have been proud. It didn’t help much.

I turned the car north toward the rattlesnake farm. Knowing where I was going, I made it in much better time than the day before. I found Yellow Glasses leaning against the split-rail fence in front of the building smoking a cigarette. I didn’t see his sidekick Carvy. This time there were two other cars in the lot besides the red pickup and the Ford.

Yellow Glasses squinted at me over the smoke of his cigarette. “What happened to your car window?” he asked.

“Somebody thought I needed more ventilation.”

“Well now, you’re lucky they didn’t ventilate your head,” Yellow Glasses smiled.

I waved my hand at his lot. “Business is picking up.”

“It’s pretty good on weekends,” he said. He was wearing his nice brown cowboy hat. “You been busy yourself?” he asked.

“You could say that. I learned that you’re a Boy Scout.”

That confused him. He pondered on it.

“A member of the American Eagles.”

He flicked away his cigarette butt. “And proud of it,” he said quite seriously. “You do get around, Bannon.”

“I’m surprised you’d be spending the night with a Puerto Rican woman.”

“I’ll take any woman I can get,” McGrath said. “Mr. Peter doesn’t know any prejudices.”

“The FBI thinks you and she were up to something else.”

I could almost see his ears go tense. His whole body seemed to freeze, but his voice remained exactly the same — soft and steady. “You been talking to the FBI?”

“I had lunch with them. They think you were selling weapons to Nancy Canales. They think she represents a terrorist group in Puerto Rico.”

He laughed. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“For the money. More money for your cause.”

“So where is she, and where are the weapons?”

“They think she may be dead and that the weapons are right where they always were. The theory is that maybe you took her money and...” I snapped my fingers like a gunshot.

McGrath’s shoulders hunched slightly. “You play a very dangerous game, friend. A man could get himself — hurt, in that game of yours.”

“I know,” I said. “Look at my face.”

A bulky figure moved into the doorway of the building. It was Carvy. He was looking at us with interest.

“The FBI has an informant,” I said. “Are you sure all your Eagles are high flyers?”

He released an expletive. “This is crap, Bannon.”

“The informant says he can lead them to Nancy Canales. But if this is all crap, you have nothing to worry about.”

McGrath squinted up at two birds flying against the yellow sun. “They say the air here is unhealthy for foreigners from Puerto Rico,” he said. “If I were you, I’d take care of myself.”

“Thanks for your concern.”

He gave me his easy Western smile. I walked back to my car. Carvy was still watching from the doorway.

Well, we’d see if it worked.

I pulled out into the road and turned right, headed for an idle quarry area about a hundred and fifty yards away that I’d noticed on my way in. I hid the car behind a massive pile of gravel and myself behind another closer to the road, where I could watch the entrance to McGrath’s tourist attraction. My watch read three fifteen; I might have a long wait. It was one of those times when I wished I hadn’t given up cigarettes.

In less than ten minutes one of the cars that had been in the parking lot left. It contained a tourist family of four. After that three cars pulled in, and another left.

But the Ford and the red pickup were still in there. It was like that till almost dark. By then I felt done in, as much from boredom as anything. Then the red pickup came out of the gate and turned toward me. There was still enough light to see that McGrath was driving and that he was alone. I scurried for my car.

He led me back to 1-25 and then north to Santa Fe. We drove past Santa Fe on Route 84 and then along the Rio Grande on 68.

By now it was dark, but a bright moon was rising. We took 68 into Taos, but still he didn’t stop. Past Taos he turned left onto 64. We’d been driving for nearly two hours. Finally I saw his taillights slow down and pull over to the right side of the road. I pulled over myself at the first spot I saw. He cut his lights, and I cut mine, as well as the engine.

On foot I crouched along the side of the road toward his pickup; by the time I got close to it he was out of sight. Where the hell was he? In front of me was a long silvery bridge. There was a metal sign beside the road, but I couldn’t read it in the dark. I walked a ways onto the bridge. Moonlight glistened off water that seemed to be miles below me. The bridge appeared to span an incredibly deep and narrow gorge. I dimly recalled reading about a famous bridge somewhere near Taos — six hundred and something feet high. Was this where he’d buried Nancy Canales’s body? Why go so far out of the way? Why use a tourist attraction?

I leaned over the rail and wondered how many people had tossed themselves off — it would be so easy to do. And that was when I saw what was happening. I was outlined out there like a perfect target; McGrath was in the rocks and brush below me. I dropped to my hands and knees but not quickly enough. There was a sharp pain in my left arm as if I’d been punched. McGrath, not I, had been the one to set the trap.

Occasional cars were passing, but no one was going to stop for a crazy man with a bleeding arm. I crawled toward the entrance of the bridge. My car seemed as far away as the bottom of the gorge. To get to it I’d have to dash from the semi-protection of the bridge rail. But what were the alternatives? If I stayed there, he’d come for me. If I tried to stop a car, I’d make myself a target. I dashed, like a pair of ragged claws, waiting to hear the next shot. But it didn’t come. I made it to my car, gasping like a fish out of water, and shoved myself behind the wheel. I jammed the lever into drive and U-turned out of there with a squeal they could hear in Albuquerque. Only when I was speeding south at eighty miles an hour did I start breathing at something like a normal rate.

My bleeding arm was drenching the car seat, but it was still partly functional. I didn’t think a bone had been hit — the pain wasn’t bad enough. Thank God it had been my left arm.

In Taos I got directions to the hospital and presented myself in the emergency room. The doctor there told me I was lucky: the bullet had gone clean through, and no bone had been damaged. He fixed me up as though gunshot wounds were not all that uncommon and told me a report would have to be filled out for the police. I reported the part about a sniper’s taking a shot at me at the Gorge Bridge, but I didn’t mention McGrath. I’d tell Daniel Serpe about that part of it.

The young doctor gave me some pills for the next morning. “The pain will be much worse then than now,” he assured me.

It was well past midnight before I got to my hotel. I looked at the car seat and at the two windows and reflected that the rental people were going to be very unhappy with me.

It was the next day, a little after one o’clock, and I was having lunch with FBI Special Agent Daniel Serpe at a Mexican restaurant of his own choosing. He ate with a hearty appetite. He was putting it on his expense account.

“Does it hurt much?” he asked, not looking especially concerned.

“I’m on painkillers.”

“You won’t be doing much with that arm for a while,” Serpe observed. “But all in all, you’re very lucky you’re not dead, Bannon.”

“I know. I’m beginning to feel like I have a bull’s-eye painted on me.”

“They won’t miss the third time,” Serpe said. “And you don’t even have a weapon with you — it’s not sporting.”

I didn’t reply. What was there to say? Serpe’s handsome Indian ring flashed as he helped himself to more salsa picante.

“Why don’t you go back to Puerto Rico,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do here. We’ll continue with our own investigation.”

“I don’t like leaving things half done.”

“You have no choice: there’s not a shred of evidence. Nancy Canales’s body hasn’t been found and I doubt it ever will be. As you’ve learned, these guys may be cuckoo, but they’re not stupid. No body: no murder. No slugs from either time they shot at you.”

“Just search the Rio Grande Gorge,” I said with lame humor.

“It’s a dead end for now,” he said. “But we’ll catch up with them eventually.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said tiredly. “I might as well leave.”

“No maybe about it,” Serpe said. He’d finished eating and was popping Tic Tacs. “Get on a plane and go home, my friend.”

So I did.

I won’t even describe the encounter with the car rental people at the airport. I got on a five thirty P.M. flight to Miami, and after a long layover there, I arrived in Puerto Rico at four in the morning local time. At that hour the airport taxi drivers try to relieve you of every cent you own. I finally arrived at my apartment at five A.M. and fell into a deep, grateful sleep.

I guess it had started to come together on the flight back, and I think the sleep helped some, but by the time I took my shower at noon everything made so much sense it was scary. That’s when I called up my pal, Special Agent Bill Evans, and arranged to meet him at the Berliner during happy hour for a drink. He arrived right on time, crewcut, slightly overweight, always affable. “Nice place,” he remarked. “I’ve never been here. I like the German decor.”

“It’s different,” I said. “What’ll you have?”

He went for a dark beer, and I ordered a margarita. Our trigueña Puerto Rican waitress looked very incongruous in her German getup.

“I just got my daughter one of those books of 3D computer pictures,” Bill Evans said. “They’re terrific. Have you seen them?”

I said I hadn’t.

“Absolutely terrific,” he said. “You hold the page here against your nose and then, with your eyes completely unfocused, you slowly move the picture out to arm’s length.” He demonstrated with the menu. “An absolutely different 3D image emerges from the page. Fantastic.”

“Sounds like it,” I said.

“You seem pretty down,” said Evans. “The arm, I suppose.”

“That’s part of it.”

“And not finding out what happened to Nancy Canales.”

“Oh, I know what happened to her,” I said. “She’s dead.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“Yes, I can. She was killed because the American Eagles learned she was an FBI plant. She was working undercover, and I think you were the one handling her. You here and Serpe up in Albuquerque.”

He just looked at me, all the usual joviality gone. I saw a face — cold, calculating — I’d never seen before. Our drinks arrived, and to my surprise Evans set his to one side.

“There’s no proof of that,” he said. “You’re just speculating.”

“I don’t need proof. Looking at you right now is proof enough. And if I’m right, everything suddenly makes perfect sense. How did they find out about her?”

He stared at me expressionlessly, then said, “The nearest we can figure, someone saw her with Serpe. Someone who knew who Serpe was.”

“You didn’t tell the police anything.”

“It wouldn’t have served any purpose.”

“No — and you guys don’t like bad publicity. How long had she been working for you?”

“From the beginning. She’s been an estadista for years.”

“Well, I’m sure you can replace her,” I said coldly.

“The bitch of it is, we could have had them,” Evans said. “We were that close—” he held his thumb and index finger millimeters apart. He had chubby hands. “And then it had to get screwed up.”

“Yeah, it’s a shame,” I said. “You know, you guys are good. You really had me taken in.”

He half smiled sheepishly; for a second he was the familiar comic in the crewcut. “We thought you might help us out,” he said.

The half smile disgusted me more than anything else. I had to leave. I had to make a call that I dreaded to the daughter of Nancy Canales.