The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  Tom had been in the back for almost a minute. His legs stiff where he leaned against a small cinder-block wall, half his height, which allowed him a view toward the bar. His ears tuned now to all there was around him, listening to the night and the strange silence of the town sitting there with the absence of gunfire.

  Two minutes passed before Ray came out the back door and stood in the moonlight. He was covered in dust, and he carried an old double-barreled shotgun in his hands.

  “Aren’t we a pair,” Ray said when he saw Tom crouched at the wall, the Baby Eagle in his hand, resting over the top, barrel pointed toward Ray.

  Tom stood, his arm shaky with the gun.

  “I see you’ve been deputized,” Ray said, nodding toward the sheriff’s department vest Tom wore. “Was that what they gave you for turning me in?”

  “I haven’t said one thing against you,” Tom said. “It’s just me here, you don’t have to worry about anyone else.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ray said. “Not anymore.”

  Tom looked from Ray to the back door. He didn’t know where Tollville was. And he wasn’t quite sure what he would do if the DEA agent found them there in the back lot of the bar, having a conversation like two men on a smoke break. “I’m not sure how this is supposed to work,” Tom said. “I offered you a chance before and you didn’t take it.”

  “You should have known it wasn’t going to end that way for me.”

  “Yes, I should have,” Tom said. “But somewhere along the way I hoped maybe it could.”

  Ray grinned. There was blood splattered on the front of his shirt and up beneath his chin. Tom was certain none of it was Ray’s. “It doesn’t have to end for us this way, either,” Ray said.

  “Ray,” Tom said, and then stopped short, not knowing how to go on. But knowing he had to—that something had to be said and that Tom was perhaps the only one who could say it. “You’ve taken this too far, you’ve hurt yourself in the process, and I think you know the only thing—the best thing for you, is to turn yourself in.”

  “You didn’t want any part of me before, why should you want any part now?”

  “Don’t force this, Ray,” Tom said.

  Ray took a step toward the street.

  “Don’t,” Tom said, the Baby Eagle in his hand, held steady on his cousin. Tom’s voice sharp in the stillness of the night, hanging there between them in the silence.

  Ray took another step, watching Tom the whole way. He never raised the shotgun more than a few inches from the ground, never pointed it toward Tom.

  “Ray, don’t force my hand,” Tom said. But even he knew the tone of his voice had betrayed him. He knew he could never shoot Ray and that it was a mistake even being here, but that he’d had to come. He had to see it for himself to understand it all. His cousin and what he was capable of.

  “You want to point that gun at someone,” Ray said, “you’ll go inside. You were never going to help me with what needed to be done. But you’ll see that the job is finished and if you ever cared about my father, you’ll understand why it needed to be done.” He took another step and kept moving. His feet carrying him not toward Tom, but away. He was around the edge of the bar and crossing the street to the opposite side before Tom felt the Baby Eagle drop, hanging loose in his hand against his thigh. The back door to the bar partially open and only the bleakest of hopes for those inside as he ran across the lot.

  The odor of spilled liquor and the metallic taste of blood came out of the bar to meet him, the door pulled wide, and a fog of clay dust suspended everywhere in the air all the way to the front. He let it all wash over him for a moment before stepping into the murk within. His eyes adjusting and the thin track of the hallway going on ahead of him for a space of fifteen feet before opening into the larger bar. As he went forward he crouched, listening for any sounds ahead.

  A brief fall and clatter of masonry heard ahead of him and then the crush of brick underfoot. “Tollville?” he called, his voice weaker than he’d expected. He called the agent’s name again and waited for a response as something electrical popped and fizzled out. The bar lit for a moment with a pale blue light, showing the haze of gunfire still in the air.

  Tom waited, listening to what lay ahead. The thin scuffle of footsteps again and then Tollville’s voice calling his name out of the haze.

  Somewhere in between, down the hallway, Tom heard a choking cough rise out of the air, repeat several times, and then fall silent. The sound, Tom thought, of someone drowning.

  Walking quickly up Main, trying to get his thoughts in order, Ray dug the used shells from the shotgun, letting them fall warm to the street. With the empty sound of the plastic clattering up off the concrete behind him, he went on.

  He’d come out of the bar thinking about all the years compounded behind him, built up solid as anything in his life. Where he’d been. What he’d done. And he realized that that road leading south—the one that had left his son mute and his wife dead—led north as well.

  Marianne’s car broadsided right off the road and the dark scar of those double tire tracks left there on the cement like some sort of calling card that Ray hadn’t, until now, had any idea how to read. Though he’d tried. He’d given his heart to it all these years, hoping to replace something inside him that there was no replacement for.

  All of it had been a setup. Marianne all those years before, all the way to Burnham where he lay on the ground three days ago, bleeding that pale watery blood from the side of his cheek, trying to speak the words Ray just wasn’t ready to hear: Memo was playing crooked with all of them.

  Jesus, Ray thought, the rules have changed and nothing is the same.

  He’d been in the bar only a few minutes. Still, it had been too much, his thoughts now turned to what he would do and where he would go. He’d let it continue for too long, realized somewhere along the line that he’d even enjoyed it. He had to remind himself now that his father was dead. A man who—at his end—had known Ray only as a memory.

  Ray had to think about that. Nothing else mattered, not the drugs or his life. A pressure in his chest he was all too familiar with, a white-hot pain carrying him forward.

  All he had left was birdshot and he brought up a set of shells and played them down into the barrels. A car came to a stop a block off, its headlights on him. The driver sat there stunned, then pushed the car into reverse. Ray snapped the breach closed and moved away across the street, turning now to keep his eyes on the bar, not expecting to see Tom again, but not leaving anything to chance.

  He hadn’t expected to make it and the thought that he was alive seemed wondrous and strange. He kept moving away from the bar, the shotgun at the ready, with no real plan other than to get north to Las Cruces, to Memo, and to the office where he’d taken his first job.

  They were too far away and Kelly knew it. Nothing from Pierce for five minutes and then his voice over the radio, bristling with panic, as he described for them what he was seeing before him on the street.

  “Say again,” Kelly said. The lights of Coronado only a few minutes ahead of them.

  “He’s just walking up the street.”

  “Who is?”

  “The man with the shotgun.”

  “Stay there, Pierce,” Kelly said. “Don’t move from where you are, just stay right there.” Beside her, Hastings had taken the Mossberg twelve-gauge off the stand and he was feeding shells into the body.

  The night air outside her
window rushed by, Coronado ahead, and no way for her to be where she knew she needed to be at that moment.

  “He’s going to walk away,” Pierce said, his voice diminished, as if coming from a distance, or in a rush. Then nothing and only Kelly left there on the radio feed calling Pierce’s name.

  A voice caught Ray midstride. Ray moved his head around slow till he could see the young deputy where he stood, holding his service weapon on Ray. The open door of the deputy’s cruiser acting as a kind of shield to protect him, and almost no chance of using the shotgun at that distance. Perhaps the deputy would catch one, but most likely he’d just spray the car down with birdshot, all of it going into the metal.

  The deputy calling for him to throw the shotgun down.

  All Ray knew was that he wanted to get away, as far away from this town as he could get. With the deputy still yelling at him, Ray lowered himself to the ground, crouching low so that he could lay the shotgun flat out on the cement. It had been stupid to think that there was a possibility of making it out of Coronado alive. As he raised his hands up, he brought Dario’s .45 with him.

  The sound of the shot echoed out on the silent street, and Ray looked down at his side where the blood had begun to flow, and soak at the material of his shirt. The deputy still holding his gun on him, a look of shock and confusion painted on his face.

  Ray put a hand over the wound and felt the warm blood on his skin. He dropped to one knee, the pain coming now, and the ache of the bullet’s path through his skin.

  With his eyes still on the deputy, Ray brought the .45 up and fired toward the deputy three times, aiming beneath the patrol car door, for the deputy’s feet. The young deputy called out as one of the bullets hit, and he rolled out into the street.

  Ray lurched to life. Pulling himself up, he limped forward. Warm blood now soaking down into Ray’s jeans, the gun faced out on the deputy while the other hand held tight to the wound as his frayed muscles ground like sandpaper against his movements.

  No time for the shotgun. Nothing left in Ray but the desire—pure as anything he’d felt in his life—for escape.

  As Ray came closer, the deputy raised his own gun and Ray shot him once in the shoulder. The deputy’s gun flying and Ray moving forward till he was standing over the young boy. The deputy sucking in hoarse breaths of air, his lungs gone shallow and the pain evident on his face.

  Ray bent and whipped him across the temple with the butt of the .45, hard enough to knock him unconscious.

  Tom was already on the office phone with the paramedics when he heard the single pistol shot outside. Tollville looking up from where he crouched, holding a handkerchief to Dario’s neck. The white cloth beneath Tollville’s hands a blood-red color and the thin glistening of liquid shimmering in the dim office light.

  Dario long since gone unconscious and Tollville with his hands held to the man’s neck as he looked up toward Tom. “You know I can’t leave,” Tollville said. “I can’t leave him here.”

  Tom hadn’t said a thing to Tollville about Ray. How could he? Every minute he was in there—every minute he didn’t say something he fell a little farther down a rabbit hole of his own making. There was simply too much to explain now and he hoped with every second that he could somehow find his own way out.

  Outside they heard three more shots, loud as the first but with a wild urgency. Tollville’s eyes fixed on him till he couldn’t take it anymore and he went running out of the office and through the bar. He had no plan but to get outside, away from Tollville and the stink of blood.

  What he saw was worse than he expected, and he found himself moving fast, up the street and toward the receding taillights of the county cruiser as it went north. A body in the street that he hoped was not Ray’s and in the same scope of time knew was Pierce’s.

  The boy there in the street with his gun fallen on the cement a few feet away. He was shot through the flesh of his shoulder and through the foot. The boy stiff where he lay on the street and a surge of fear through Tom that he might be dead. Guilt strong and fluid as it washed over him.

  Kneeling, Tom felt Pierce’s slow breathing. A welt on the boy’s face that was now beginning to swell and that Tom knew must have been where Ray had hit him. Pierce was shot twice, but in places that Tom hoped would spare his life.

  Up the street the taillights could now be seen only as a small blinking beacon of light far ahead. He looked behind him toward the bar, then farther still, south toward Mexico and all that lay along the highway. A blue and red shimmer of light he knew was Kelly.

  In a little over a minute she would be there with him, asking questions Tom couldn’t answer. So he left Pierce there in the road for Kelly. She would be there soon enough and in the meantime, Tom knew he would run, chasing after those taillights, Luis’s truck keys in his hand and no idea whatsoever of what was to come next.

  Kelly stopped her cruiser just a few feet shy of the bar. A pickup truck with missing plates sitting there with its rear wheels on the sidewalk and the front hood and cab of the truck all the way through the wall of the bar. Her eyes lingered on this for only a moment. Hastings got up out of the cruiser with the wash of the lights now seen on his skin as he closed the door and Kelly searched ahead of them for Pierce’s cruiser.

  No sign of the bubble lights anywhere down the line of cars parked on Main and no radio contact from Pierce at all. Farther up, an ambulance rounded the corner, where the cross street for the hospital sat, with the wail of the sirens reverberating down the street.

  Shielding her eyes from the red and white flash, she reached for the center console and brought up the radio again, repeating Pierce’s name several more times and listening for a response.

  It was only when the ambulance slowed several hundred feet ahead of her, its wheels turned sideways, that she saw the dark shape of a body lying in the street.

  Ray pushed the cruiser past eighty, the speedometer climbing, the needle cresting ninety and still moving. All around nothing but the empty desert. The lights of Coronado behind him, and the terrible pain in his side where the bullet had gone in. Blood soaking its way up through his shirt, and the sweat showing on his forehead as he drove.

  In forty-five minutes he’d hit the interstate, and then, if he didn’t pass out and roll the car, he’d get himself to Deming. Ditch the car and find a place to heal before he made his move on Las Cruces. Going after Dario had been a rash decision, he could see that now. Still, it hadn’t been the cartel men who had shot him, but some deputy, half his age. There was some comfort in that, and he went on with the pain in his side pulsing beneath the skin every time he shifted in his seat.

  Looking down at himself in the dim interior light of the cruiser he saw the dirty hole where the bullet had punched through the shirt. With his free hand he raised the cloth and surveyed the damage, a slick sparkle of blood high on his skin, like a fine, dark syrup over everything.

  He was a mess and there was no way he would get past any motel clerks looking the way he did. Shirt stained with blood. Smelling of gunpowder, sweat, and murder. There was barely a chance he would make it to the interstate driving the way he was in a stolen county cruiser, swerving into the opposite lane to pass cars and the long semis heading north.

  He just had to keep going. The cruiser feeling smooth and powerful beneath him. He hoped the deputy wouldn’t die. The boy just a child really, probably one year out of high school. Too young for something like this. For this mess.


  He swerved out into oncoming traffic, passing another big truck. Almost clipping an oncoming car as he swerved back into his lane and heard the semi’s air brakes squeal behind him. Jesus, he thought. Stay focused. You still have a chance, just forty-five more minutes and you can put this all behind you.

  When Kelly made it to Pierce, his skin was already brittle and flimsy as wax paper. His breathing gone shallow and labored. Blood all over the cement. But the paramedics were telling her there was someone down at the bar in far worse shape with a critical neck wound. They gave her a compress and moved on, leaving her there with Pierce.

  She knelt next to him, pressing the compress to his shoulder, trying to wake him any way she could. Hastings, who had followed her at a run, had already gone back down the street, going for the patrol car, intending to bring it up the street so that they could get Pierce into the back and take him to the hospital.

  There had been training for this type of thing, but all that just didn’t seem to register. Raising her voice, Kelly realized she was yelling now, trying to get the boy to wake. Her voice carrying down the street with no one around.

  Blindly, without thinking or really knowing what she was doing, she began to drag him up the street toward the hospital. A nasty-looking welt at the side of his temple and bullet wounds in his shoulder and foot. His shoes scraping on the cement as they went.

  Where was Tom? Where was Tollville? Not a single person on the street, and Kelly dragging the boy beneath his armpits. Her own muscles beginning to ache with the effort. And Tollville now beside her, telling her to stop, to just put him down, that another ambulance was coming. He’d been on the phone to the state police, asking them to block the roads.

  One hundred miles an hour over the blacktop and the bleeding hadn’t stopped. Ray reached down and pushed his palm into the flat at the side of his ribs. Sudden pain and his vision drifting.