The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  Kelly nodded. She wasn’t even really looking at Eli, so much history between them and none of it any good. She felt his grip hard on her elbow. “We’re not working with much here, Mayor. We’re not working with anything, really.”

  “You have a name, don’t you?”

  “We have a dead boy with a name, and a record for drug possession,” Kelly corrected.

  “You tell any of that drug stuff to anyone and we’ll have a federal investigation here,” Eli continued. His hand wrapped tight to her elbow, he led her farther down the hall, Hastings and Tom still up by the room, watching them both where they stood almost at the elevator. “Yesterday was bad enough,” Eli went on. “You understand? That’s not what we need. That’s not at all what we need around here. News vans, reporters, federal agents.

  “You left a kid to do what you and Pete should have been doing and now that boy in the room back there is dead. I don’t even want to know what this will mean for our image.”

  Kelly mumbled an apology. Part of her not even listening, holding her tongue back, knowing it was no use. She felt bad for Pierce, she’d let him down, let him get buffaloed by some unknown force, either Dario or some other, and still she had nothing to go on but the dead boy in the hospital room back there.

  “Seventy-five percent,” Eli was saying, still going on his tirade, “that’s what is left of the population. Layoffs and empty storefronts, that lot at the end of town big enough for a Wal-Mart, no developers in two years, nothing happening. You tell someone about this boy and his drug charges, about what you or Tom thinks is going on in this town, and it will kill us. You understand me on this, Sheriff?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I hear you.” Kelly knew it was only a matter of time now. She couldn’t hope to hide any one of these things from the town, from the people, and especially from the media. One of her patrol cars burned to the metal three floors down, the black smoke of its tires visible for miles around. What the mayor was asking was out of her hands, there was no stopping it, a balloon on the wind, rising skyward.

  “Good,” he said, releasing her elbow. He stood straight now, almost a foot taller than her. “I don’t need any further aggravation. I don’t want to see Tom around here anymore, it’s bad enough with everything we have going on in this town.” He paused, looking up the hall. “You hear they laid off thirty more men yesterday?”

  She nodded. “I heard that.”

  “Just what we need,” the mayor said. “There’s a meeting tonight and I want you there.”

  “The union?”

  “Whatever they’re calling themselves.”

  “What about Gil Suarez?”

  “Who?”

  “The victim.”

  “I thought we understood each other on this,” Eli said, his eyes sharpened. “I’ll field any questions that might come up on this. I don’t want you going down any dead ends. Right now that’s not what we need. Business,” he said, “that is all we should be worried about now. Business and making sure this town isn’t empty by the end of the year. You might as well start looking for a replacement for your deputy while you’re at that meeting tonight. There will be a lot of men looking for work.” He turned and without saying good-bye walked toward the elevators.

  Behind her, sitting just inside the nurse’s station, Kelly saw Pierce watching her. “I’m sorry about that,” Kelly said. “I’m sorry about what the mayor just said.”

  Without moving from his seat, Pierce said, “I fucked up. I know that, there’s nothing else for me to say. Maybe Gil would still be alive if I was on that door. The mayor’s right about me.”

  “No,” Kelly said. “No, he’s not. If you had stayed on that door you’d be just as dead as that boy in the room. They were coming for him no matter what, and it was my fault for not seeing it.” Up the hall, Hastings and Tom were still waiting for her. She didn’t have a clue where to go from this point. She felt scraped raw by the mayor’s words, by what he wanted her to do, and all that she knew she was powerless to defend.

  Dario flicked the knife down and watched it quiver in the wood floor of his office. The steel handle shivering like a tuning fork. He was sitting in his desk chair with the door closed and a .45 semiauto on the desk in front of him. He stretched out his hand toward the gun, wanting it close to him. The skin showing white where it came exposed between his fingers. The knife on the floor still lightly moving.

  Juarez was sending men. They had always been planning to send some. But now, with the killing of the boy in the hospital, there would be more of them.

  He was examining the gun when Medina came to the door, knocking lightly until Dario responded.

  “¿Muerto?” Medina asked, putting a cup of coffee in front of Dario. Through the doorway, behind Medina, the plastic tubs of cherries, limes, and lemons were visible on the bar where he’d been prepping them for the day.

  “Sí, probablemente,” Dario answered.

  “¿Y los hombres?”

  “En la tarde.” Dario put the coffee cup to his lips, thinking about the men who would come in the afternoon and what that would mean for them.

  Medina stood in the doorway wringing his hands as if looking for something else he could do. “¿En la tarde?” Medina said. “¿Cuántos?” He looked from Dario to the knife on the floor, and then back to Dario.

  “Bastante.” Medina turned to leave and Dario stopped him. “The knife,” he said in English, holding out his hand toward where he’d flung the blade down. Medina pried it off the floor and brought it over. Dario watching him, wondering how much longer they’d be together in this town.

  Memo had offered him a way out, but all that was gone now, all that was in the past. And the feeling came onto him in that moment with a strength he hadn’t been expecting. He was scared, possibly for the first time in a long time. And he knew he would do anything now, that Memo had put him in a corner, had possibly even meant to from the start. Leaving Dario to dangle in the wind.

  Only Memo hadn’t counted on how far Dario was willing to take it. He had wanted a way out, a change, but all that wasn’t how it could be anymore. He looked at the knife and knew he would gut anyone who came between him and getting the drugs back. He would slice the lips right off a man who said a thing about him. He would reach down and take the tongue right off the back of a man’s throat and leave him drowning in the blood. It was that simple.

  He was tired of it all. He was tired of all that his life had become and all that was expected of him. Now, he thought, he would do what he knew he should have done from the start, he would do what needed to be done to preserve himself that little bit longer. The thought of death still circling him, as it always did, high up like a carrion bird on the wind.

  Tom sat in the children’s swing outside Kelly’s house. He pumped his legs and let the momentum take him up, the chain links grating against each other as the swing moved. Inside, he could see Kelly’s husband, Drew, at the kitchen window. Kelly’s place a quarter mile away from the center of town. The swing set left there after the family before had moved out and Kelly had moved in.

  He pumped his legs again, feeling the metal pole above bend with his weight. The door to Kelly’s house opened as Kelly came out, carrying a couple beers.

  “Your husband all right with you taking a late-afternoon swing with another man?” Tom asked, pointing to the second seat there beside him. His own legs dug now, toes first, into the dirt at his feet as he teetered forward on the rusted chains.

  Kelly smiled, giving one of the beers over to Tom and looking behind her at the house, where Drew was still hard at work on what was left of the dishes. “I doubt he’d mind it just this once.”

  She sat, the metal beam above their heads bowing with her added weight. Tom had offered her a ride home, waiting while she’d finished up at Coronado Memorial, then going into the department office to help her with the paperwork. Inside t
he kitchen, Drew looked out at them and waved. He was a big man, over six foot, with short-cropped wavy brown hair.

  “He loves you,” Tom said. “It’s easy to see, you know.”

  Kelly took another drink from her beer, pumping her legs, her feet dragging against the ground with the backswing. “My gentle giant,” she said. “Sometimes I wish there was a little more excitement to our lives, but you know, when it comes down to it, we’re happy here.”

  “A normal life.”

  “Something like that,” Kelly said.

  Tom took a drink from his beer. “Thanks for this,” he said.

  “Dinner?”

  “Just this.” He circled his hand to encompass the ground, the house, the world, all of it together. “I had a good time today. It brought me back to old times.”

  “It was worth it just to see Eli’s face when he saw you,” Kelly said. “If you want a little more of this life, running around keeping order, you’ll come with me to the union meeting tonight.”

  “I thought the mayor told you to stop palling around with me.”

  “If he cared enough about this he’d be at the meeting himself.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I think I’ve had enough, I certainly don’t miss sitting in on those meetings, listening to everyone bicker.”

  “Cattle keep to themselves, don’t they?” Kelly smiled, making sure he knew she was only joking. “Tomorrow it’s back to the usual?”

  “Who would have known,” Tom said. “Me as a cowboy.”

  “I would have. Not much difference from your job to mine,” Kelly said. “One way or another, we’re always going to be wranglers. The best thing about your job is that you actually know what you’re going after. Me, I don’t have a clue.” Kelly put her heels to the ground, dragging them till the chains stopped their swinging. “What do you think this is all about?”

  “Gil?”

  “Yes,” Kelly said. “I hate that we didn’t protect him. Whatever he was into, he deserved better than this.”

  Tom took a sip of the beer. He felt just like her, but he knew she felt that guilt worse than he ever could. Gil had been hers to protect, though Tom had never really thought someone would take it to that level, burning the cruiser like that and killing the boy in his sleep. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself for something you couldn’t have done anything about. You said it yourself when you talked to Pierce: they were coming for that boy no matter what.”

  “I’m trying to figure it and I just can’t.”

  “What is there to figure?” Tom said. “It just comes back to the usual suspects, drugs or money.”

  “How much?”

  “Enough to try and kill that boy one day, then come back and finish him off the next.”

  “That much,” Kelly said.

  “I’d estimate it was even more than that,” Tom said. He kicked his legs out and swung till he could get his feet fully under him, leaning back now against the seat of the swing to stand.

  “What’s your view on all this?” Kelly asked.

  “I don’t have one,” Tom said. “I wish I did, but the truth of it is that people do crazy things for far less than drugs or money.”

  “There it is,” Kelly said, trying to stifle a laugh.

  “There what is?”

  “The optimist I love from the old days.”

  “Pessimist, you mean.”

  “Exactly.”

  The men came up from the south in the afternoon. There were six of them. Coming into the bar, it seemed to Dario, all at once. Not there, then there. Six dark figures, blocking the light from the front window, big and menacing as anything he’d seen in recent years.

  The six figures just waiting there, letting their eyes adjust to the gloom. Medina paused in his work at the bar to look back at them.

  Dario stood slowly and drew their attention. He knew half of them by sight, the two brothers, Ernesto and Felíx, as well as the big Oaxacan, Lalo.

  Dario introduced them to Medina. Asking the ones he didn’t know for their names and while they told him, committing each of them to memory: Hector, César, and Carlos. He asked each man in turn if he wanted anything—a beer, a Coke, a water—and began to tell them what little there was to know about Gil Suarez, Jake Burnham, Coronado, and the twelve kilos of missing heroin.

  Tom made it home just before the rain began to fall. With what little daylight remained, he stood in the stables grooming the two big bays, their coats dusted in white hair like an old dog’s muzzle. Both startled and showing the white bulges of their eyes as the rain began to ping on the tin roof.

  Jeanie, resting at Tom’s feet, didn’t even bother to raise her head from her paws as the rain came on. The pellets hitting hard as stones, then rolling off and falling in ropy streams to the ground. A small carved line of earth where the rain fell and dug up the land.

  He put a hand out, feeling the drops hitting on his palm. Above, the sky had grown dark and flat as river stones. The events of the day somehow faded into memory. Kelly and him walking out of the hospital hours before, nothing but the thin purple bruise along the kid’s neck to say anyone had ever been in the room with him at all.

  He brought his hand back in and put it wet to the horse closest to him, its eyes not as big and white as before. His hand moving down its neck, feeling the smooth, almost waxen, touch of its coat. A gust of wind and the splatter of rain falling now in sheets.

  Outside, through the falling water, he saw where a small part of the southern fence needed mending. What remained of his herd—twenty-some pigs in all—crowded up under the particleboard shelter. Farther on, his own house a dull gray against the rain, the windows the only points of light. Inside he’d kept it just the way it had been before all his trouble; before he’d shot Angela Lopez, before he’d lost his job and his life had changed in that most definite of ways.

  From where he stood, he could just make out the cars going past on the highway. A slate-blue coloring to everything around him and the lights of the traffic moving up the highway, first there, then gone in the rain, only to reappear, floating again across the wide bottomland of the valley floor like lightning bugs over a darkening background.

  He’d been expecting her when she came, the headlights turning up off the highway and traveling on up his drive toward the house. Claire’s face in profile to his own as she pulled her Volkswagen in beside his truck.

  Watching her for a time as she stood in front of his place, the rain falling everywhere, he came to the door of the stables and waved her over. It was a hundred feet at most and by the time she made it she was soaked through. “I didn’t think you’d be here,” she said. A cold, straight cut to her face, the rain all over her skin and falling from her chin. The dimples now seen in her cheeks as she looked up to him and her skin marked in places by small moles and other minor imperfections.

  Tom turned and went back to the stalls. “Why’d you come, then?”

  Claire stared back at him. He knew he’d said the wrong thing but he wasn’t in the mood for her tonight. The dimples in her cheeks gone and her lips downturned where she stood just inside the stables, her long brown hair black with water as it hung against her back. She was ten years younger than him. They’d known each other for a long time now, and there was little Tom felt he could say to her that she hadn’t already heard.

  “Don’t be like that,” Claire said, walking over to where he stood next to the horses. The same two he’d bought three years before when he’d had the money. One for Claire and one for him, but the romantic idea of riding them every day never quite their reality. “I came by last night and you weren’t here. I got worried, that’s all.”

  “I’m fine, you can see that, can’t you?”

  “Fine?”

  “Yes,” he said. He finished grooming the horse and then went over and brought the blankets
and leathers back farther in from the rain, the water splashing up off the ground and speckling the stable floor.

  “You pissed off Eli pretty good today,” Claire said, leaning back against the stall, watching him.

  Tom tried not to let the smile show, but it was there all the same. “Yeah?”

  “After coming back from the hospital he was furious. He didn’t understand what Kelly was doing, letting you up there like that,” Claire said. “I didn’t really understand, either. But I liked to see him angry about it, and for once he didn’t stack it all against me.”

  “Kelly probably shouldn’t have brought me in on this, but I’m glad she did,” Tom said. He was watching her, wondering if it would ever work between them again, or if it was working right now and he just didn’t know it.

  “He doesn’t like you very much,” Claire said with a smile.

  “No, he never has. Even when I was employed and he was just doing his first term.”

  “The newsmen showed up again and he talked to them about the boy. I don’t think he wanted Kelly doing it.”

  “I saw some of the vans on my way through town. It looked like they were going to stick it out for the night.”

  She shivered a bit where she stood and Tom looked away toward his truck and her small Volkswagen sitting out there in the rain. He was trying not to invite her in, knowing where all of it would lead, just as it always did between them. “You ever hear of the rule of three?” Tom said, turning back to her. “They’re using a tried-and-true method of newscasting, waiting around for the next big event. Something’s bound to happen.”

  “Yeah,” Claire said, “if they wait long enough. In this town it might take years.”

  He’d run out of things to do, the bridles and reins now put back from the open stable doors, the blankets over the stall gates and the horses fed. No idea what he was doing anymore, what he was putting off. Something inside of him nervous as a little boy about to ask a girl out on his first date. “I was going to wait the rain out here, but it looks like you could use a towel,” he said.