The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  “I’m fine,” Claire said. “Your phone’s been ringing though. There’s a good number of messages from Deacon.”

  “Take a seat, Tom,” Ray said, pulling himself up in his chair and gesturing to a spot next to Claire. “There’s been some changes around here, I see. I never expected you to end up working for Deacon.”

  Tom sat, looking to Ray. The guns on the table between them, just as close to Ray as they were to Tom. The only difference, the barrel of that hunting rifle lay faced toward Tom. “You know you’ve always been welcome here, Ray, but not like this.”

  Ray looked to the coffee table and then moved a hand out and set the guns out of sight on the floor. The feel of the couch shifting as Claire tensed at his movements. When Ray looked back up at Tom, he said, “I’m in trouble.”

  “I know,” Tom said, watching his cousin now, trying to understand what he would do next. “There’s people that are looking for you and not just the law. The DEA is going to get the call at some point today, if they haven’t already. You made a pretty good mess out of things.”

  “I shouldn’t even be here,” Ray said. “I came back because I wanted to start again. I thought I’d give it a chance. But it didn’t work out that way for me and I should have been gone from here two days ago. All of it’s fucked now, you understand?” Ray pushed a hand up his face, scrubbing hard at his cheek with his palm.

  “I don’t understand,” Tom said. “I told you you’re welcome here and I mean it, but you need to help me with this if I’m going to help you.” He looked from his cousin to Claire. “You mind if Claire just calls in to her office, just lets them know she’s sick or something? With all that’s been going on around here there’ll be people looking for her soon enough, if they aren’t already.”

  Ray took his face back from his palm and ran his eyes across to the phone where it sat on a side table by the door. Ray nodded toward the phone and Claire hesitated, then rose, watching Ray the whole time.

  When Claire began speaking into the phone, Tom said, “Burnham’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Ray nodded. He was watching Claire where she stood at the phone.

  “All of this over some drugs?” Tom said.

  “A lot of drugs,” Ray said, turning back to look at Tom. “Though I’m starting to think it’s about more than that.”

  “The cartel?”

  “I don’t know,” Ray said. “I’d have thought maybe so, but I’m just working here, I’m not the one in charge. You should know that about me.”

  “You’ve been gone a long time, Ray.”

  “Whatever’s been done,” Ray said, “the actions I’ve taken—I didn’t mean any of it. I was just doing my job. You should know that, shouldn’t you?”

  Tom sat looking out on the sunlight that drifted in through the living room windows and lay flat along the floor in a yellow rectangle. “I’m not the sheriff anymore, Ray. I don’t have that sense of duty. There’s no right way anymore.” Across the room he saw where Claire was standing watching them both, her hand held down on the phone as it sat in its cradle. “I don’t need to do what’s expected of me,” Tom said.

  Ray worked his jaw, the muscles showing on the side of his face. He wouldn’t raise his eyes from where he’d dropped them. “I’m sorry about all of this,” Ray said. “About you losing your job and about this now.”

  Tom glanced to Claire again, he didn’t know why, but he needed her approval, he needed to know if what he was about to say would matter to her and in what way. “I’m telling you I can help you if you care to be helped,” Tom said to Ray. “There’s people here who want to help you.”

  Ray still wouldn’t look up. Claire shifted a little where she stood, looking unsure of whether she should return to the couch. There’s no right way, Tom thought again. There was no clear path, not anymore. The road he’d followed had taken him here and he’d thought for the longest time that it had been the right road, but now he thought maybe it hadn’t been and there were greater things at play in this world than doing what everyone expected of you. “I can help you,” he said to Ray again. “I want to help you.”

  The Border Patrol plane had passed Kelly fifteen minutes before, the drone of the engine working over the landscape long after the body of the plane was lost from sight. She didn’t know what they would find, or if they would find anything. She sat with her feet pulled up on the bumper watching the plain of the desert fall away before her toward Mexico, only ten miles away to the south.

  She didn’t have much hope in any of it anymore, the law, this town, the mayor, or even herself. All that she’d learned over the years seeming to have abandoned her. A feeling inside her of pure loneliness, and a certainty that whoever had shot up the Sullivan house last night, leaving those men dead in the dirt, was gone now. The Border Patrol plane was simply wasting its time as it came back north, wasting her time, too.

  She couldn’t help but think that if she’d just been a little faster to bring her concerns to Eli, to stand up for herself, maybe she wouldn’t be sitting here on the bumper of her cruiser listening to the useless drone of the plane. Maybe she never should have taken the job, maybe it had all ended for her the moment it had ended for Tom. The last few days had made her feel hopelessly beyond herself, cut loose and helpless to stop anything in this town.

  From inside the cruiser the radio crackled on and she jumped at the sound, her nerves quickening. She was off the hood and inside the car by the time Pierce began relaying the information about the Bronco the pilots had found just north of town.

  “What did they see?” Kelly asked. She had the radio pulled out on its cord and held close to her lips as she watched the sky to the north, trying to get a position on the plane.

  “They said there’s something in the passenger seat,” Pierce answered, the static shift of the radio bouncing up out of the speaker, and in the background the relay of the pilot’s voice through the intercom at the office.

  Already she had the door pulled closed behind her and she was turning the key in the ignition. The town just up the road and then the desert highway leading north. Somewhere up there the plane was circling and she felt ready for whatever it might bring.

  All the men who remained—Ernesto, Carlos, César, and Medina—stood out at the bar, drinking and talking. Dario in his office with the door closed. The phone held to the side of his face.

  “Felíx está muerto,” Dario said.

  “Lalo está muerto,” he went on.

  “Hector está muerto.”

  There was a bitterness in his mouth as he said their names. All the men he’d known, doing this work, carrying on like this through life like death would never find them. But it would, and Dario knew his time would come, when he’d have his chance to test himself against the inevitable. Trying as best he could to draw blood.

  It wouldn’t be long now and he listened to the men out there at the bar, all of them knowing it was only a matter of time. Gus Lamar’s body up there, sitting in his own house, waiting for whoever might find him first.

  On the other side of the line he heard the voice, scrappy with distance, bouncing up out of the receiver as if pulled up through the desert itself. “No,” Dario answered as he thought about the night before and the skill of the gunmen and what might happen if they came through that door after Dario and the men inside. He needed more time. He needed more of everything. The only real fun he’d had in the town since he arrived, he’d had the night before in t
he rain and then again that morning in Gus Lamar’s living room. He wanted to test himself, needed it like the fix to a sickening addiction. “No,” he repeated, “no tengo las drogas.”

  The only response Dario could hope for now was that Juarez would send more men.

  Together they listened to the messages on the machine. Deacon’s voice growing tighter as the time ticked by and the messages came to their end. The scent of his clothes burning in the barbecue out back coming to Ray through the screen, acrid as burning tires—Sanchez’s shoes and wallet thrown in on top of it all. He hadn’t known he’d ask for help until he’d done it. And now he wore a set of Tom’s jeans and a dark woolen button-up, to replace his own. He still didn’t know what he was going to do but they’d laid out enough for Ray to know they were heading to his father’s place, where Tom said Ray would still be welcome.

  The pager on his hip had vibrated several times already and Ray had looked at the number and put it away again. No time now to call Memo back. No idea what he would say to the man, or how he would tell him about his nephew. A doubt in Ray’s mind that it would change anything. Memo would want the drugs regardless. What happened to Sanchez wasn’t on Ray, though he feared somehow Memo would find a way to blame him for the boy’s death.

  From the start, when Claire had opened the door, Ray didn’t really know how it would go. He’d forced himself inside, worried that someone might see him. The fear built up in a way he hadn’t felt in years. The feeling that he was at an end, his end, or possibly even Tom’s—not knowing what he might do if Tom had been there and pushed him back out into the wilds.

  All through the desert he’d worried about being caught, and even as he’d come to the porch, the sound of the highway behind him, fourteen-wheelers and tankers moving past on their way from one job to another. His fear lessened now that he was around people who knew him again, who’d grown up with him, known him before his life had gone the way it had. An uneasy certainty going through him the whole time, since coming down the road toward Coronado three days before, that he would be found, and all that he had done in the time since he’d left, in order to escape his past in this town, would be stacked against him.

  The tape spun to a stop and he heard the machine click and rewind. Deacon’s voice still fresh in Ray’s memory and Claire waiting there behind them on the couch as Tom looked up at Ray and asked why there would be a message on the phone from Deacon, asking where his father, Luis, was. Why he wasn’t at work, when so many days in a row he’d never been late, never missed a day. Tom’s eyes searching Ray’s, looking for some answer, and Ray with no answer to give but to shake his head, looking from his cousin to the answering machine there on the table by the phone. Dropping his eyes away, if only for something to do, to break off his cousin’s stare, because Ray knew now why Luis hadn’t shown up to work that day, and had known since this morning when he’d changed out of his clothes, looking for his prescription bottle of pills.

  The Bronco sat in the flatlands about three or four miles off from the big mountains farther on to the east. Accessible only by an offshoot of the gravel road that quickly turned loose and empty, crumbling away at the edges, and cut through by large open areas of wash.

  Kelly got up out of the cruiser, taking in the landscape, the dull brown of the creosote and burro bushes running all the way out across the flatlands. The smell of the rainstorm hanging fresh in the air as the sun dried the land. Overhead the wide circle of the Border Patrol plane was audible as it looped across the sky above, its wing tip pointed down at them like a finger. From where she stood it was clear the Bronco’s rear windows had been blown out. The metal pockmarked by the same automatic fire they’d seen that morning at the Sullivan house.

  Through her open cruiser window, she heard the pilots come on the radio and as soon as Pierce gave them the go-ahead they cut for El Paso.

  “You smell that?” Kelly said, her nostrils picking up the scent leaking from within the Bronco.

  “Worse than this morning.”

  “Much worse,” Kelly added. She walked over to the Bronco, careful with the placement of her feet. The rainstorm had erased much of what she could see on the dusty surface of the desert, where the grasslike sedge grew up through the cracks, and the brush cast a thin veneer of color to the land.

  She came around to the passenger side and pulled the door open. The man inside had been shot in the side of the abdomen. For a long while Kelly stood there staring at him.

  Except for the blood, he looked as if he had just sat down for a nap and not woken. Barefoot with his chin resting forward on his chest, he seemed oddly comfortable.

  “What do you think?” Pierce asked.

  “I think it’s strange he would be sitting in the passenger seat like this.”

  “All this,” Pierce said, moving his arms to encompass the bullet-riddled sides and shattered windows of the truck. “And that’s what you think is odd.”

  “Where are his shoes? Why would he be sitting here in the passenger seat like this?” Kelly said again, running each thought down to its source.

  Pierce put a hand up over his nose and leaned in close to look at the body. “There’s somebody missing, isn’t there?” Pierce asked.

  “There’s a whole lot missing,” Kelly said.

  Tom had seen the way the messages from Deacon changed Ray. The downturn of his lips and the constant shift of his eyes to Tom’s front windows and the land beyond, looking as if he wanted to be anywhere but where he was. “Should I be worried?” Tom asked.

  “Is Luis usually late for work?”

  “No,” Tom said. “Not usually, but sometimes he goes on benders and he’ll miss a day. Judging from when I saw him last, just a couple nights ago, there’s a good chance he’s home in bed, sleeping it off.”

  Ray was looking out the window again and Tom knew it was time to leave. Every minute they spent here at his place was another minute Kelly or someone else might stop by for a visit and find Ray there.

  “Have you thought about what you’re going to say to Billy?” Tom asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about it for ten years,” Ray said. “I still don’t have the answer.”

  “You’re going to be fine,” Tom said. “He’s a good kid. He’s more of an adult at the age of twelve than maybe even my father is.”

  Ray smiled a little. He was still looking out the window toward the highway. “I’ve thought a lot about coming back here,” Ray said. “I’ve wanted it for a long time, and before all this I thought maybe I’d make a go of it, but I just don’t know if that’s possible anymore.”

  “Give it some time,” Tom said. He didn’t know what else to say and he could see his cousin had been living with the guilt of what he’d done, leaving Billy the way he had, leaving them all. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  They went out to the Volkswagen and got in. The hope in Tom’s mind that all would be okay, and they would drive over to Gus’s without anything going wrong and then somehow they would drive Ray north. Tom with no idea what they would find. The message from Deacon and the memory of driving Luis home only two nights before still fresh in his mind. A hope in Tom’s gut that his father would be there, passed out and smelling of alcohol.

  Tom drove the Volkswagen and Claire sat in the front with the dog held between her knees so that the mutt wouldn’t growl at Ray in the back. In Tom’s hands, the Beetle felt like it skimmed over the road’s surface like a boat over wa
ter, a wake of dust rising up behind them as they came off the valley highway. In the distance the Hermanos Range sat like teeth around the valley floor, bowed out toward the north where the highway went through. Each peak covered in a gloss of snow where the storm had come the night before and shaved it clean.

  When they came out into the flatlands that had held the Lamar oil fields twenty years before, Tom could see Gus’s house sitting there as it had all through his childhood, the stables off to the left and the staff houses behind. He pulled the Beetle in, his eyes searching back toward Luis’s place, where he saw his father’s truck was missing.

  From the backseat Ray leaned forward. “How long has it been since you’ve been here?”

  “I was here a couple days ago,” Tom said, looking to the porch where the screen door sat against the frame. “Strange as it now seems, we talked about you.”

  “You see anything—” Ray paused. “You see anything that doesn’t look right?”

  Again Tom leaned forward, scanning the landscape with his vision. A swirl of dust kicked up far down the valley and then blew itself out, pushing a dry weed before it. He elbowed the car door open and stood. “You have a reason you’re asking?”

  “No reason,” Ray said, sliding the driver’s seat forward so that he could get out of the small car to stand next to Tom. “I’ve just gotten cautious, that’s all. The last few days haven’t gone as well as I’d hoped.”

  Tom gave Ray a sideways glance but didn’t say anything to him. Gus should have been there by now, standing at the doorway to invite them in, spit at Ray or hug him, he should have been there to say something. Their relationship never a good one but Gus’s words to Tom only a few days before suggested Ray would be welcome. Gus saying how he still cared for his son even if he knew Ray had chosen badly in life.

  The sun felt hot on his skin. A bright yellow orb above them, passed over its half point. The shadow of the porch roof, slightly canted away from them, hit the ground at an angle. Looking back at Claire, he told her to wait there. “Let the dog out and watch her to make sure she doesn’t get too far. Ray and I are going to go in for moment and talk with Gus.”