The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  He didn’t know if he would make it. Shot just above the gut like that. Blood all over him. Driving a stolen county cruiser right on into a major southwest city. He just couldn’t see how it would play.

  Up ahead the slight red and blue glimmer he knew was a state police cruiser, cresting the hill ten miles down the road. The highway leading on toward the Hermanos Mountains, no other roads to take, and a certainty the state police would block the highway off in the coming minutes, leaving Ray no way of making it to the north.

  The turnoff for his father’s place coming up fast, just two hundred yards away. He eased off the gas, taking the turn at a rough forty miles per hour, the back tires of the cruiser spinning in the gravel and the headlights sweeping the desert. A searing pain as he braced himself against the door.

  He righted himself and went on.

  The brake lights were just barely visible in front of Tom as he followed the cruiser up the highway. No idea how fast he was going, his father’s old pickup vibrating with the speed as the wind sloughed off and whistled past his mirrors. Even after five minutes the truck hadn’t gotten any closer. The cruiser brake lights were barely visible in front of him. Then nothing.

  Tom slowed the truck, rolling down his window as he came up on the spot he’d seen the brake lights go off the road. Cool air and a full moon above slipping through a series of dark clouds.

  Nothing out there in the flatness but the dim shape of desert brush. Darkness beyond.

  He drove on, taking it slow now, not wanting to miss anything. All around him the open blackness of the desert and a feeling of bewildered solitude. He had lost Ray and run from Kelly. There was little he could do now but go on and hope it would somehow turn out for him.

  In the glove compartment he found a flashlight, and he pulled it out now and played it over the creosote and chuparosa growing off the bank of the road. Somewhere to the south the night air lit up bright with the flash of lightning, the thunder following a few seconds behind.

  When he came to the intersection, he knew exactly where he was, and where the cruiser had gone. He pulled the truck down off the highway, feeling the tires leave the cement, and the dirt begin. The Lamar ranch just up the road.

  The room had the metallic taste of blood in the air. Kelly crept over the hood of the truck and slid into what was left of the barroom. Holding her gun out in front of her, she brought her flashlight up from her belt and flicked it on. The room was a complete mess. Chairs and tables upturned, walls broken up with gunfire—glass and wood splinters everywhere on the floor.

  Behind her, she heard Tollville’s feet touch down on the brick rubble beside the truck tires. The crunch of his footfalls loud in the stillness of the bar. A light fog of dust still hanging there in the room. Pierce taken away to the hospital, while Hastings went north to help out with the state police roadblock. In the aftermath, a crowd of town people now gathered outside the bar waiting for news from inside.

  Tollville came up beside her and motioned her on, the two of them moving around the bar on opposite sides. She recognized Medina where he lay on the floor, his eyes open, staring up at her, and a slick layer of blood everywhere on his face.

  “I was just in this bar, I had a drink with Dario just a couple hours ago. I recognize every one of these men.”

  “I recognize some of these men, too,” Tollville said, looking at the deep grooves of buckshot everywhere on the walls. “I think we can say this has officially become a federal investigation. The DEA office is sending a helicopter and we’ll get up in the air as soon as we can.”

  Kelly looked around the bar, stopped, and with the foot of her boot, turned bodies over until their faces showed.

  “Easy,” Tollville said.

  “I recognize every one of these men,” she said again. Not raising her eyes to meet Tollville’s, but simply standing there looking down at one of the dead men at her feet. Mexican like the others. It was amazing to her that in the three days since all this had started, she could feel so at home, almost casual, in a room full of dead bodies.

  As he came down the road toward the ranch, Tom turned his headlights off and navigated the slender dirt road in the overhead moonlight that remained, pale blue over everything. The bushes and fence posts, dulled in the light, seemed unfamiliar and ghostlike.

  He crossed over the cattle guard and pulled in behind the sheriff’s department cruiser. No sign of Ray. Lights on in the house and the pale trunks of the oaks up the valley just showing out of the darkness.

  He turned the ignition off and the night came at him out of the dark in a million different sounds. The engine ticking, the call of insects, the wash of air over the surrounding brush. From the glove compartment he brought out the flashlight again and flicked it on, testing it against the palm of his hand.

  Far out on the highway, he saw the line of cars building toward the red and blue pulse of a state police roadblock. A single cruiser going past—Hastings or Kelly heading north, flying down the highway toward the lights. Tom watched it go. A radio in the abandoned cruiser, but no intention of calling in anything till he found Ray, a slick shimmer of blood on the driver’s seat as he moved past, Tollville’s Baby Eagle held out in front of him.

  He didn’t know what was happening with Pierce, even if he was still alive. He wondered if Kelly or Hastings were looking for him now, trying to track him down. Everything Tom had built for himself in the last ten years, the credibility he’d had to build back for himself in this small town, now worth nothing if they found out he’d been helping Ray all along.

  Tom couldn’t do anything about Gus’s death. Perhaps those men down at the bar had it coming. Maybe they deserved every bit of Ray’s revenge, but looking now at the stolen cruiser and the blood on the seat, he knew Pierce hadn’t deserved any of it.

  Taking care with his steps, Tom came to the porch. Darkness all around him and the soft light of a lamp somewhere toward the back through the screen door. A slight breeze working past, moving over the land and running on into the house, where Tom stood on the porch. The wind chime sounding in the darkness and the creak of the screen door’s hinges, followed by a slight tremor of fear all down Tom’s spine, the door bouncing light against its frame. Thunder and the wet-stone smell of rain from the south all around him in the desert.

  One foot after the other he went forward across the porch until he was standing in front of the screen door looking in on the living room, where his father was waiting, and Billy sat across the room watching television on the small thirteen-inch black-and-white.

  “He’s not here,” Luis said.

  Tom stepped through the door and nodded to Billy where he sat near the bloodstain on the wall, and where he could see Luis or someone had thrown a sheet over the chair in which Gus had died.

  “Ray shot a deputy,” Tom said, watching his father where he sat, wanting to know if his old man knew this already or if it was news to him.

  “I figured as much,” Luis said. He got up from the chair and walked to the window where they both could look out and see the cruiser sitting there. “Your cousin wasn’t going to let this go and I think you knew it just as well as I did.”

  “You just let him go into town?” Tom lowered his voice. “Knowing what he was going to do?”

  “I didn’t know anything,” Luis said. “I wanted to assume the best just like you did. But assuming the best doesn’t mean that’s how it will turn out. It rarely does.”

  “He
’s not here?”

  “He was here just long enough to take his rifle and give his wound a rough clean. In and out in less than four or five minutes, he didn’t say much except that we should be expecting you and maybe some others. He said his good-byes to me and Billy and then he was gone.”

  “Where was he shot?”

  “In the side. There was a lot of blood on his shirt. I can’t say how bad it was but when he came out of the bathroom he made it sound like he wasn’t going to be back.”

  Tom went through the house room by room. The dim light he’d seen from the front of the house a mix of the living room lamps and the flicker of the television, and farther back a wall sconce left on in the bathroom. Nothing there except the remains of a roll of surgical tape, a large box of gauze, and some iodine left out on the bathroom floor.

  Kelly left Tollville inside the bar and stepped out the back. She was standing in the parking lot, the sound of the crowd out front now a low murmur of voices. From her belt she raised the radio and depressed the talk button. When Hastings came on she told him what they’d found.

  “It’s difficult,” Hastings was saying. “None of these patrolmen have any idea who we’re looking for up here.”

  “What do they have to go on?”

  “Whatever we got out of Pierce before we lost contact.”

  “You’re telling them to look for a man carrying a shotgun.”

  “Pretty much,” Hastings answered. “What about the Mexican border?”

  “Tollville put in a call to the Border Patrol and the Mexican authorities.”

  “We’re going to catch him,” Hastings said.

  “We don’t know anything about this guy. The border is only ten miles away,” Kelly said. “And if he’s from the south he could have crossed already and gone on from there.”

  Nothing but silence for a moment, and then Hastings’s voice on the radio. “The state police say they’re sending two cars down your way to help. I’ll bring them to the bar.” His voice sounded cold and distant through the radio. “Edna,” Hastings said a moment later, “have you heard anything about Pierce?”

  “He’s in surgery still, we won’t hear for a while yet.”

  “And Dario?”

  “The same,” Kelly said. “There’s nothing I can tell you.”

  “I hope we catch this guy,” Hastings said, his voice lower now, and the sound of the state police in the background lessened. Kelly knew Hastings had walked off a ways and was talking to her in a place where he wouldn’t be overheard.

  “I know,” Kelly said. “I know.” They finished the conversation, Kelly telling him that the DEA was sending a helicopter back down for Tollville and then they’d get out and shine the spotlight around, but the hope of finding anything in the night was slim.

  Tom came out of the house and stood looking around at Gus’s property. Nothing for him to see. He crossed from the house to the barn and found one of the horse stalls empty. If Ray had been there, he was gone now, and Tom came out of the barn looking for a sign in the sandy hardpack. The only bit of information his father had been able to tell him was that Ray had come out of the house and walked to the stables.

  Working as quickly as he could, Tom found the indent of the horse’s hooves in a little under five minutes. The hoofprints heading north up the valley toward the old Lamar oil station and possibly beyond to Deming. Luis waited on the porch as Tom searched.

  For a moment Tom thought about Claire, that she might be more his family than even his father was. Luis and Billy all that were left to Tom now. Gus the only one in his life who had ever really been a father to either Billy or him, but Luis trying now, knowing that he had to at least for Billy’s sake.

  Tom knew Ray wouldn’t come back, that he’d gone north and given them up. Whatever plan Ray was following, Tom knew it would end in disaster, just like the bar in Coronado, and that other people would be hurt.

  Tom stood there looking at the cool blue light everywhere, enough light from the full moon above to make out the hoofprints ten feet in front of him in the night.

  “Let him go,” Luis said from the porch. “He’s gone now. He’s not coming back.”

  He didn’t respond to his father and he knelt closer to the ground, examining the cut of the hoofprints, the edges slowly slipping away in the wind. They headed away north in a low gallop. He didn’t know what to do. The country ahead a flat wash all the way to the oil station and the mountains, then growing rougher as the land became steeper. It was horse country and he walked back inside the stables looking for a saddle.

  Kelly let herself into the department office and closed the door. Every one of the overhead lights had been left on. The room feeling foreign to her in the night with all five desks still arranged in rows through the office from when there’d been money to pay for the deputies who sat in them. Hastings down at the bar with the state police and no one inside the office now, though she’d hoped to see Tom sitting there waiting for her the way he had been that first day at the hospital, with his feet up, wanting to talk.

  She went through to her office and looked in. From beneath the desk she heard a clink of metal on metal and she almost jumped when Jeanie popped her head around the edge of the desk and looked up at her. “Hello,” Kelly said, bending down to put a hand out for Jeanie. “Where’s Tom gotten to?” The dog simply looked up at Kelly where she knelt. “He’s not giving you back, is he?”

  Kelly left Jeanie in the office and sat at Pierce’s desk. She put her head in her hands, taking three quick breaths, then holding the fourth, feeling it burn deep down in her chest.

  She picked up the phone and dialed the hospital, watching Jeanie where she lay inside the office. The hospital had no update as she listened to the doctor give her the rundown again on Pierce. She didn’t ask about Dario and she didn’t care. It was out of her hands.

  For a long time she just sat there. She wanted to pull the phone line right out of the wall, break the phone on the floor, and stomp on it till there was nothing left but bits of wire and plastic.

  Outside she heard the whoop whoop of the DEA helicopter moving in off the desert. Tollville would be looking for her now, and soon they’d get out there to see what they could see. Tollville had said Tom had been in the bar with him, that Tom had even worn a sheriff’s department vest and helped out. It was a lot to take in, and she ran her eyes around the room, searching for any sign, knowing that only an hour before, Tom and Tollville had been inside the office, along with Pierce.

  She heard the helicopter circle once over the town, the spotlight moving past the office windows. And though Kelly knew she would go, she wasn’t quite ready yet, and she picked up the phone again and dialed the old familiar number.

  She let the phone ring five or six times, waiting as the machine clicked over and she heard Tom’s voice come on. She waited for the tone but at the last minute hung up.

  Out in the parking lot she saw Tollville—through the light of the helicopter and the windblown dust the rotors were kicking up—moving toward the office. He was inside the department by the time she got Claire’s answering machine, and he was at the desk by the time she remembered the crowd of people outside the bar and the faces she had seen there.

  With one hand held up to quiet Tollville, she radioed down to Hastings and told him to ask Claire if she’d seen Tom anywhere.

  When Hastings came back on he said Claire didn’t know where Tom was, but she could
identify the truck sticking through the front of the bar, that she’d seen it earlier that day, and it belonged to Gus Lamar.

  Day 4

  Tom rode the brown mare north through the desert, a few minutes past midnight and the moon above at its midpoint.

  As he rode the light shifted, blue to black, beneath what remained of the clouds. The trail lost and then found. The tall, spiked fingers of ocotillo rising in places and the brittle scrub everywhere on the plain like dust across the darkened valley. After a while he saw it clear, the two burnished tire tracks left in the desert sand, where years before there’d been a road leading north. The hoofprints leading on.

  He didn’t know what he hoped for. Ray had shot a deputy, he’d murdered more than ten men, and he was out there still. All of it went against anything Tom could ever accept as a peace officer. But Ray was his cousin, a month older than him, and they’d been like twins once, growing up together and thinking for the longest time that they would always consider Coronado home. Now, Tom didn’t know how he felt, and he rode north.

  The old road leading on and the small dip to the north where the Hermanos Range slipped almost to the surface of the desert before rising again in a series of endless hills, covered in a web of pinyon and locust. Then farther on, the white dusting of snow high up where last night’s rainstorm had come across the peaks.

  He saw jackrabbits stand on hind legs, then go skittering off through the desert at high speed. He surprised birds, bedded down beneath the creosote, sending them twittering into the night sky, circling until he was safely past. Behind, the desert went on in a roll of blue hills all the way to the state police roadblock. The cars trailing away from the mountains like a necklace of precious stones along the highway.

  Not a single cloud above now as he came up the valley and saw the rusted tin roof of the old oil station sitting amid a hollow enclave of desert sand. The station only one room, the windows broken from their frames, and the old wood boards that made up the exterior looking worn and petrified by the desert sun. A place that had at one time offered a bit of protection for his father and the men he worked with. A memory now pulled loose from his childhood of riding north through the desert with Ray, carrying meals up from the ranch kitchen for the oilmen.