The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

“Why?”

  “He might at least be able to tell us something we don’t already know.”

  They were parked a hundred feet up the street from the bar, and when the man pulled his hands back from his face, they could see he was looking directly at them. Kelly raised a hand, waving at the man, letting him know they were there looking right back at him. He went on smoking, and after about twenty seconds of just offering up a dead stare, he threw the cigarette down and went inside.

  “I believe that was littering,” Hastings said.

  “You want to be the one to go get him?”

  “I’ll let him slide if you will.”

  “No,” Kelly said, “I don’t think I can on this one.” She was up out of the cruiser with the door shut behind her before Hastings had a chance to talk her away from the place. No telling how long it would take Tollville to get down to Coronado and Kelly with no more patience for waiting.

  Too much on her plate now to look any other way, no idea what had happened to Burnham, but a dead certainty about the boy in the hospital, the three out at the house, and the gut-shot man in the Bronco. It was a veritable killing spree, and she was looking at the bar door as if it held all the answers she needed.

  Dario stepped away from the men when Kelly came in. He’d been sitting with his back to the bar, speaking with the new men, just up out of Juarez, telling them all what they’d need to know and what to expect. None of them rousing even a mutter as they’d listened to him. Medina, behind the bar, was the first to raise his eyes as the door slid open and then, almost with the same movement, gave Dario a slight nod of the head, pointing with his chin toward the front of the bar.

  Dario had known it would happen like this. Expected it from the start—waiting as he had been all this time in the bar. He hadn’t expected the woman to come alone like this. Gus Lamar out there in the house, dead in his living room chair, and the bottle of prescription drugs waiting on the front steps. Now the reality of the woman there in his own bar, standing there alone, as if he’d simply invited her in for a drink. A strange admiration he now felt at the sight of her there alone, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom.

  As Dario stood from the stool he was aware of the quiet in the room. Kelly taking her first few steps toward them and the stillness he felt behind him like the electric tension in the air before the lightning breaks far overhead. A smile on his lips he could not control. The squeal of a stool as one of the men stood, not knowing yet what the play was and how close they were supposed to let Kelly get before something was done. With his hand still on the bar, Dario raised his fingers in a small show of supplication. Kelly walking toward them to take a seat a little ways down the bar, away from the group of men, her hat now thrown out on the bar and her fingers drumming on the wood.

  “Sheriff,” Dario said, the smile still on his lips as he took the seat next to her. A tinge of excitement rumbling through him. The thought in his head that every day after this one would be different from any that had come before.

  “¿Cerveza?” Medina asked, not bothering to move off the back bar, where he’d been leaning since the men had entered.

  Kelly ran her eyes down the bar, appearing to take it in, no one except her and the men in the place. “A drink, Sheriff?” Dario asked, his hands on his lap as he swiveled on the stool to speak with her.

  “Soda water and lime.”

  When Medina turned to him, Dario ordered a coffee. He watched Medina take a glass from the back bar and fill it with ice. In the mirror over the bar he could see Kelly’s shoulders and the top of her uniform. Down the bar on one side the men were beginning to take their seats again, and he heard Medina say something to them and then the mutter of a reply.

  When the soda water came, Kelly folded out a couple dollars from her pocket and put them on the bar. Dario watching as Medina slipped them off the bar in the same movement he used to set Dario’s coffee before him. Still no one’s voice had risen above a whisper. Beside her, Dario sipped from his cup, waiting for what he knew would come, the inevitable reason she was here and the answers he was not prepared yet to give, but that he knew he would. His time in this town drawing to a close, and the feeling all around him in the air that the world had quickened and begun to spin all that much faster.

  “Dario,” Kelly said, turning on the stool and holding her hand out toward him, “I think it’s time we met formally.”

  Ray stood in the stables, examining the picks and spades, the blades rusted and unused and the wood almost petrified with age. His father’s body already carried to the cluster of oaks up the valley where his mother had been buried twenty years before, and which held Marianne.

  Ray brought a shovel up and then, running a finger down the handle for splinters, he put it back, bringing his hand up and looking it over where the dull vermilion of dry blood showed between the whorls of his fingertips. He had been standing for a long time looking at his hand when Tom came in and ran an open palm up the nose of one of the horses where it stood in its stall.

  “You should talk to him,” Tom said. “He’ll understand you. He reads lips like me or you read the newspaper.”

  “I don’t imagine he’d want anything to do with me.”

  “It’s been a long time, Ray.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Ray said, the volume growing in his voice, uncontrollable. “It’s been too long. Looking at him now I can tell you I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me. Can’t we leave it at that?”

  “It’s whatever you want to do, Ray. But you should know you and Billy both lost a father today and there’s something you owe that boy that you can’t just ignore anymore.”

  Ray looked away, everything changed and none of it how he’d thought it would be. He looked back to the spades and picks leaning against the side of the stable. “Is that why you came in here?”

  “I’m going to need to make some calls,” Tom said. “I’m going to need to explain to Deacon where I am.”

  Ray put his hand down and let it hang by his side. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ray said. He looked up at his cousin, waiting to see what would be said.

  “I can still help you,” Tom said. “But you need to understand things have changed. This isn’t about some cartel men you shot out in the desert, this is Gus we’re talking about now and I don’t want this to go any further. I have Billy and my father to worry about, and Claire.”

  “And yourself,” Ray said.

  “I didn’t say that,” Tom said. He stepped away from where the horses waited with their heads and necks pushed out over the stall doors. “Look, I can tell Deacon my father got sick—that he drank himself sick. It will buy you some time to get out of here, but after that I am going to the sheriff and I don’t plan to lie to her.”

  “You’ll buy me time?” Ray said, his voice slow and deliberate in the stillness of the stables.

  Tom shook his head, looking away out of the stable doors. “Do what you like here,” Tom said. “Bury Gus. I can’t be part of this any more than I already am. I’ll take Claire and we’ll head into town, and we won’t say anything about what we saw out here till you have time enough to get away. It’s all I can promise.”

  Ray looked at his hand again. He ran it down his pants, pressing his fingers to the material. “What about Luis?”

  “Claire’s with him now, she’s got him up and he’s drinking water and talking again. I’ve got his truck keys and when this is all done, I’ll p
ick up his truck in town, then drive back here and be with him.”

  “He say who did this?”

  “The man Burnham worked for, the same you probably already have an idea about,” Tom said. “I don’t want to say any more. I don’t want to be involved in this.”

  “Your hands are clean, then?” Ray said, a grin on his face as he said it and a pain in his chest as his voice broke a little and he quickly regained himself. “I’m not judging you now, I’m just telling you the facts. I thought better of you than this. I don’t know if I can let you go.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “We had a deal, didn’t we?”

  “Nothing is the same as it was only an hour ago,” Tom said. He walked closer to Ray. “Luis said he wants to help you bury Gus. He said you can take Gus’s truck if you want to run. I can’t stay here any longer though. I thought I could help you but I see now that I can’t.”

  “What about Luis?”

  “If I’m not back in time with his truck, he can take Billy and ride one of the horses up to Deacon’s like he did yesterday for work. I expect that will be what he’ll do once you have Gus in the ground.”

  Ray turned and looked at the tools again, feeling something inside of him pushing against his skin. “How much time do I have?” he asked, his eyes still on the spades.

  “Two hours at the most. I don’t think I could explain for any more than that.”

  “Okay,” Ray said, his mind working, adding mileage and time all into one. “Okay,” he said again.

  Kelly took another drink, then put the glass down on the bar. She was aware that no one had said anything for a minute or more. She rolled the glass around, making small watery circles on the wood. It had been going on like this for a long time now and it was going nowhere. “You’re saying you have no idea about the old Sullivan house outside of town?” she said.

  “None,” Dario responded.

  “None at all?”

  “No sane person would have been out in that weather.”

  “That’s probably right,” Kelly said. “No sane person would have.” Kelly watched Dario take a drink from his coffee.

  “Did something happen out there?” he said.

  “Something did.”

  “Well,” Dario said, laughing a little as he said it, “don’t lead me on and then not finish. I swear I can take it.” There was the slightest of accents to his voice. Not a bad-looking guy. Midthirties. No scars. No tattoos. He could have been just a guy at a bar drinking a coffee.

  Kelly lifted her glass and felt the cool soda as it passed her lips. She thought over her position. It really didn’t matter whether she told him or not, but she was interested to know how he would respond. “We found three dead bodies,” Kelly said.

  “That’s horrible.” Flat toned, his voice giving nothing away.

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’re going around asking questions?”

  “That’s how it works.”

  “How many before me?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many people did you go to before me?”

  “You’re it,” Kelly said.

  Tom drove south on the highway with Claire. At the big courthouse he pulled around back and brought the Volkswagen to the curb. “You go on ahead of me,” Tom said. “There’s no point in both of us getting in trouble for this.”

  Claire looked at him where he sat in the driver’s seat. Jeanie behind him. “What do you expect me to say?”

  “I don’t expect you to say anything. I’m sorry about this. I’m sorry I brought you along with us when I should have known there was trouble.”

  “You had no way of knowing,” Claire said. She put a hand back over the seat and nuzzled Jeanie where she sat. “I’ve known Ray almost as long as I’ve known you, and I knew how it would go when he showed up, and I knew how you would react.”

  Tom smiled for a moment, both of his arms pushed out on the steering wheel, waiting on her to get out so that he could go around the front and make whatever he was going to say official. “You know a lot about me,” he said.

  Claire laughed and leaned into him, putting a hand up over one of his arms and pulling it down. “Maybe that’s why it never works out for us.”

  “Maybe,” Tom said. He gave her a weak smile and looked away down the street.

  “You don’t need to tell Kelly anything,” Claire said. “I wouldn’t blame you for it if you just turned this car around and took us both back to your place.”

  “That’s a lot you’re saying there,” Tom said. “I can’t tell you I haven’t been thinking the same thing on the way down here, but Gus is gone now and I can’t simply forget that.”

  “You think by saying something you’ll be doing any better?”

  “Luis saw who did this,” Tom said.

  “Dario?” Claire said. “How long do you think Luis or even you will last if Dario finds out there’s someone going to stand up to him?”

  “My dad will be all right. I told him what I was planning to do and he didn’t try to stop me,” Tom said. “I’m trying to do what’s right.”

  Claire still had his arm wrapped with hers and he could see her eyes were wet along the edges. “Sometimes what you think is right, isn’t right for everyone,” she said. “You’re not the sheriff anymore, you never seem to understand that. What you’re going to do may end up hurting more people than you think.”

  “Who?” he said. “I told you already I talked to my father, he knows what could happen and so do I.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Then who?”

  “Me,” she said, rushing the word before he was ready for it. “You’re doing a fine job of thinking about yourself.”

  “I’m going to leave your name out of it.”

  “You just don’t get it,” Claire said. She took her arms away from him and moved toward the door. “What happens to me after all this? What happens to us? I don’t want to see you get hurt again. They’ll take away more than your badge this time.”

  Down the street a car came around the corner and headed their way. Tom watched it till it went past, the woman in the driver’s seat not even bothering to look their way. “I can’t talk about this anymore,” Tom said. “I told you how I feel, and I can’t sit here like this anymore. If someone sees us sitting here together, everything I say later will come into question.”

  “Just drive us back to your place,” Claire said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “You know I won’t do that,” Tom said. He was looking up at the back door of the courthouse, aware that anyone could come out of the building at any time. “Get out,” he said.

  She stared at him coldly, the sparkle of tears in her eyes. He told her he would park the car up the street and where she could get her keys and then he reached over and pushed her car door open.

  When she was gone he drove the Volkswagen up a block and parked it. Leaving the keys up under the back right tire, he came down the street with Jeanie trailing him on her leash, and crossed toward Main and the front entrance of the courthouse.

  It wasn’t till he passed the courthouse parking lot that he slowed, looking at the one cruiser outside. No idea if it was Kelly’s car or if it was one of her deputies’. Only two cars left in the department after the one at the hospital had burned. He checked his watch. Still plenty of time before something needed to be said and he would drive his father’s truck back north, he o
wed Ray that at least.

  “Claire told me you were a pig farmer now.”

  Tom turned to find Eli at the top of the courthouse steps. The mayor taking the stairs quickly, stopping only when he was a few feet away from Tom. Ten years since they’d said more than a greeting to each other.

  “I also heard you’ve been assisting Edna with the killing of that boy.”

  “I’ve been trying to help out,” Tom said.

  “Pigs,” Eli said again. “I guess I should have seen it on you from the start.”

  “I’m not in that business anymore,” Tom said. The anger growing inside him as he stood there and the thin smile on Eli’s lips that Tom had always hated. “I left it a while ago to get into cattle. I thought maybe you’d heard that from Claire, but maybe not.”

  “I didn’t know you two were still together.”

  “We’re not,” Tom said. At his leg he felt Jeanie yawn and lean into him. Her canines showing as the air whistled up out of her throat.

  “I see you still have that mutt.”

  Tom didn’t say anything. He knew exactly where this was going, and he didn’t have any desire to help it along.

  “It’s a poor replacement for a woman,” Eli kept on. “But I guess there’s not too many that will still have you.”

  Tom smiled, forcing the muscles in his face. Eli and him on the sidewalk and Tom knowing that if they kept on this way he was going to hit the man. “Have you seen Edna?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Eli said. “I told Edna to fire that young deputy two days ago but he’s still around, waiting in the department office with the DEA agent that came down from Albuquerque today.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You know him,” Eli said. “Tollhouse or something? The same one who came down for your hearing.”

  Tom shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his palms grown sweaty where he clenched them at his sides. “I think I better be going,” Tom said. He nodded a good-bye to Eli, taking the first couple steps toward the department doors around the side of the building.