Michelle considered her words before replying. “Like Peter, she’s a person of strong conscience and conviction.”
“We were supposed to talk to her this morning. Missed our appointment.”
“Have you tried calling?”
“Not yet. Been a little busy. Have you talked to anyone in your Sulfur Springs congregation about Peter?”
“I’ve called.” She shook her head. “I can’t tell if they really don’t know anything or if they’re too afraid to talk. What are you going to do?”
“We’re not leaving Coronado County until we know what’s going on with Peter,” Rainy said.
A smile came to Michelle’s lips, one of understanding, and she said, “You’ll need a vehicle. We don’t have any car rentals in Cadiz. So, how would you like my truck? She’s got a lot of miles on her, but she’s reliable as the day is long.”
“We couldn’t,” Rainy said.
“Don’t worry. Somebody blows her up, she’s fully insured.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She handed me a ring with two keys on it. One was an old skeleton key. She touched the other. “This key’s for the parsonage.”
“What’s the other for?”
“That’ll open the church, in case you decide you want to pray there. And one more thing. You’ll need to give me a lift back to the ranch.”
“If you’re willing to risk a ride with us,” Rainy said.
She took Rainy’s hand. “Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
CHAPTER 9
* * *
We dropped Michelle at her ranch, which was east and south of Cadiz, set among grassland within sight of the border fence.
“I drive my property along that fence almost every day, and almost every day I find something left behind by the mules,” she’d told us on the way there. “Mostly backpacks stuffed with marijuana. I always wonder why they’ve dropped them, what the consequences might be. I call the sheriff’s office. They come out, take possession. It’s the same for all of us who own property that abuts the fence.”
“Do you try to interfere with the trafficking?”
“Are you kidding? That’s just asking to get shot. Life along the border,” she’d said with a shrug.
We headed back toward Cadiz. Once again, Rainy was quiet in a disturbing way, her focus to the south, beyond the fence.
“What is it, Rainy?” I asked. “What’s coming at us from across the border?”
“When I know for sure, Cork, I’ll tell you.”
“Why all the mystery? We almost got ourselves blown to kingdom come this morning. What aren’t you telling me?”
She turned her brown eyes to my face and studied me as intensely as she’d studied that foreign landscape to the south. It occurred to me that Rainy knew almost everything there was to know about my life before we met. I’d shared it with her willingly. But in her own life, there was a great gap, and that gap was the years she’d spent in Arizona during her first marriage. She’d offered me little pieces of information, but never the whole ball of wax. And now here we were, in that territory of her untold life, and I was aware of how much of her was still a mystery to me.
“Do you trust me, Cork?”
“I want to, Rainy.”
“Do you trust me?” she said again.
I should have been able to answer immediately. “Yes,” I finally said.
Was it the truth? I wanted it be.
“You’ll know everything soon, I promise,” she said.
“How soon?” I asked. “And what does it depend on?”
Before she could answer, I spotted a Border Patrol vehicle coming up fast behind me, the light bar flashing. It pulled close, and in my rearview mirror I saw the officer at the wheel waving me over. I braked to a stop at the side of the road and lowered the truck window. The hot air rushed in and with it the smell of that arid place, which was beginning to seem to me like the distant smell of death, dry and leathery.
The agent got out. His green uniform was smartly pressed, his shoes polished, his metal badge shining in the bright sun. He wore mirrored sunglasses under the bill of his green cap. His right hand rested on the butt of his holstered sidearm.
“Morning Mr. O’Connor. Ms. Bisonette.”
I recognized him from the day before, when we’d been stopped on the Old Douglas Road.
“Good morning, Agent . . . ?”
“Sprangers. Jamie Sprangers.”
He took off the sunglasses. His eyes were like small glistening stones, his face tanned and cut by lines from squinting into a relentless sun. He was handsome, his good looks dark, what, I suppose, a romance novelist might have called “swarthy.”
“Heard about the incident with your vehicle this morning,” he said.
“Seems like all of Coronado County’s heard about it,” I said.
“Big county, small population. Word travels fast. Especially with something like this. Kind of unusual.”
“Not so much, from my understanding.”
He nodded. Once. Then looked across me at Rainy.
“How’re you holding up, ma’am?”
“Just fine, Agent Sprangers.”
“Your son is Peter Bisonette. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“Gone missing, I understand.”
“We haven’t heard from him since the day before yesterday. No one has.”
“Lots of kids are uncommunicative. A day or two doesn’t seem like much to be concerned about. Any reason you should be worried?”
I said, “Mind me asking what your interest is, Agent Sprangers?”
“That destroyed Jeep Cherokee you rented. That has all the hallmarks of a hit. Around here hits usually go along with the drug traffic. Drug traffic across the border is one of my areas of concern.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Does the name Rodriguez mean anything to you folks?”
I didn’t let a thing show on my face. I hoped Rainy didn’t either.
“Should it?” I asked.
“Mexican family responsible for most of what crosses illegally along the border here with Coronado County. A cartel, more or less. They call themselves Las Calaveras. The Skulls. Carlos Rodriguez heads the family. Enjoys being called Lagarto. Lizard. Something like a hit, that would come from orders handed down by Rodriguez.”
“I don’t know that name,” I said.
I glanced at Rainy. She shook her head.
Over Sprangers’s shoulder, I saw three vultures circling on thermals, in the same way I’d seen the day before when we encountered the agent. He saw me looking and turned.
“Buzzards,” he said. “Admirable creatures in their way. They survive in a landscape inhospitable to most other animals, thriving on what dies in that landscape. An interesting fact about those buzzards. They defecate and urinate on themselves, use the evaporation of the water as a coolant. They’re all about survival, whatever it takes. I’ve always seen that as a valuable lesson. Not uncommon for us to stumble across the bleached white bones of someone who ignored that lesson. A lot more of those bones in this desert than we’ll ever find. Out here, the lost usually stay lost forever.” He turned back to us, reached into his shirt pocket, and drew out a business card, which he handed to me. “In Coronado County, you need to be very careful about who you talk to, and even more careful about who you trust. If you feel you’re in any danger, call me.”