“Afraid not,” I said. “Any fatalities reported around here lately?”
“Just yesterday. A biker. Snake bit him and he was so panicky driving himself to the hospital that he ran his Harley off the road.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. You worried about your son, ma’am?”
“A little,” Rainy said.
“And this Rodriguez?” The cop looked at me.
“Not so much about him. You part of the local constabulary?”
“Mister, I am the local constabulary.” He slid off his stool and came over. “Mike Sanchez.”
“Cork O’Connor.” I shook the hand he’d offered. “This is my wife, Rainy.”
“How do, ma’am?”
“I’d be better if I could find my son,” she said.
“When did you last hear from him?”
“Yesterday. He called. Then nothing.”
“Kids,” the cop said with a shrug. “They’re like that. Call you when they need something, but otherwise about as conversive as a rock. Am I right?” He glanced back at Sylvester for agreement, then said, “Gets his mail here, huh?”
“This is where I’ve sent all my letters and cards for the past year or so,” Rainy said.
“That is curious,” Sanchez said. “Does he work around here?”
“He used to. In Cadiz.”
He mulled that over. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll ask around. If I hear something, I’ll let you know. You have a number where I can reach you?”
I wrote down Rainy’s cell phone number on the back of one of my business cards and handed it to him.
He read the card and squinted at me. “Confidential investigations? You’re a P.I.?”
“Among other things.”
“Any good?”
“I make a living.”
“Well, hell, you don’t need my help, then.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “I’ve always found the cooperation of local law enforcement to be of the highest value. I was a cop, too, for a lot of years. Sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota.”
The barmaid returned from the kitchen. “Ready to order?”
“Hang on a sec, Sierra,” Sanchez said. “Rainy, has your son been known to have a beer now and again?”
“Maybe,” Rainy said.
“Sierra, you ever serve a young man named Peter Bisonette?”
She gave it some thought. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Why?”
“These folks’re looking for him. Gets his mail here in Sulfur Springs, apparently. Got a photo or something?” Sanchez asked Rainy.
She took out the picture she’d shown to the postmistress. The barmaid studied it and shook her head. “Never saw him before. Sorry.”
Sanchez opened his hands as if to say, See? We’re all in the dark. He shook my hand again and returned to the bar.
When we left, Officer Mike Sanchez and Sylvester were still sitting at the bar. The cop called a good-bye to us and promised a second time to let us know if he heard anything. The post office was closed by then. We got into the car, and I thought I was stepping into an oven preheated for roasting a chicken. Heading back down the main street, I looked into my rearview mirror. The postmistress was standing in front of her office, shading her eyes against the sun, staring at us like we were a couple exotic birds she might never see again.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
“Someone’s lying.” Rainy’s voice was as cold as the day was hot.
“That’s a given,” I said. “We saw half the residents of Sulfur Springs, and they all claim to know nothing about a young man who, at the very least, has collected his mail there for the past year.”
“Why would they lie?”
“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”
“How do we do that?”
“Why don’t we talk to Peter’s current employers, the Harrises? Maybe they can enlighten us.”
I had no idea how to find the Harris property. Saunders had simply said it was on the other side of the Coronados, the mountains to the east of Cadiz. I stopped and studied the Arizona highway map I’d picked up at the car rental office in Tucson. Just beyond the Coronados were a couple of towns—Hebron and Lacabra—little dots on the map, just like the dot for Sulfur Springs. We could get to them by returning to Cadiz and circling north of the mountains or by taking an unimproved county back road that branched off just outside Sulfur Springs and stayed south, which would easily save us an hour of driving time.
We took the back road and almost immediately rounded a hill and came to a barren flat where a community of trailers sat like bricks baking in a kiln. I spotted lots of motorcycles parked there, alongside Jeeps and trucks with oversize wheels, probably designed to help navigate rugged desert tracks. Canvas tarps had been stretched from some of the trailers, shading tables and lawn chairs. There wasn’t a human being in sight, no one outside in that intense heat. I recalled the two bikers who’d roared down the main street of Sulfur Springs and who’d seemed so out of place to me.
“Paradiso,” Rainy said.
“What?”
She pointed toward a sign made of weathered gray wood that was nailed to a post. The word PARADISO had been burned into it in black letters.
“Paradise,” Rainy said. “Could have fooled me.”
“You seemed pretty fluent with Spanish in your conversation with the postmistress back there. I didn’t realize you could speak it so well. Or, hell, at all.”
Once we were past the trailer community, Rainy became intent on studying the landscape, her eyes scanning the barren stretch to the south, as if expecting something to come at us suddenly out of Mexico.
“Not much call to use it in Tamarack County,” she finally said.
“You learned it while you were at the U of A?”
We’d shared our histories, or I’d thought we had, so I knew that Rainy had been a student at the University of Arizona, where she’d met her first husband. They’d divorced after four years and two children, and Rainy had moved back to Wisconsin, where she’d finished her education as a public health nurse and had raised her kids as a single mother. About her time in Tucson, I knew almost nothing. About her first husband, I knew only that she preferred to discuss him as little as possible.
“More or less,” she said, and I could tell from her tone that was the end of this conversational thread.