The Carrion Birds (11 page)

“That’s a dead man’s hat,” Ray said.

“I know,” Sanchez said. “I figured Burnham wouldn’t need it anymore.”

“It’s not a good look for you,” Ray said. “You should take it off.”

Sanchez finished the can he’d been drinking and leaned forward to break a new beer from the plastic. “Memo said it would be good fun down here,” Sanchez said. It was perhaps the second or third time Ray had heard the phrase from Sanchez since they’d met.

Sanchez opened the beer, waiting on Ray’s response. A cold wind rolled past them and Ray heard the grains of sand hitting away on the siding of the house. “You should be happy about what you’ve done,” Sanchez said. “The killing.”

“Happy?”

“Burnham and the kid. Cartel boys like that. Thought it would help you,” Sanchez said, smiling up at Ray with the beer in his hand, the ropy looseness of alcohol rolling through his voice. “Salud.”

“Why would that help me?” Ray asked.

Sanchez retracted the beer, sipped it, the cold bubbling liquid at the corners of his mouth. “Memo told me what you did when you got out of here, after he covered for you and hid you from the cartel and the law. He said you went house to house, making visits, killing anyone you thought was cartel.”

“Before this,” Ray said, ignoring Sanchez and his silly alcohol-filled grin, “you ever kill anyone?”

“Sure,” Sanchez said. “I’ve killed.”

“You have?”

“You saw me yesterday,” Sanchez said. “I did all the work. Caught that kid on the run, shot him from about three hundred feet out, right through the crosshairs.”

“Should have killed him,” Ray said. “You don’t finish, and it can end up hurting you.”

“I would have finished,” Sanchez said. “I should have been the one in that hospital room. It was my kill.”

“You ever kill someone up close? With your hands? No gun?”

“I have.”

“You have?”

“Sure.”

“Lots of men?” Ray asked.

Sanchez looked out on the desert. “Enough,” he finally said. “I’ve killed enough.”

Ray finished his beer in one long drink. “You haven’t killed anyone,” Ray said. “I don’t know what you thought you were going to learn down here or what Memo said I was going to teach you.”

“Pick someone,” Sanchez said in a rush. “Pick someone and we’ll see how I do.”

“Pick someone?”

“Sure,” Sanchez said. “Pick someone for me. I’ll show you how it’s done. I’ll show you how easy I can do what you do.”

Ray felt disgusted. Not waiting for Sanchez to offer, he reached down and grabbed another beer from the plastic. He stood there for a few seconds longer. Out on the plain a rain shower was moving across the desert before them in a sweep of gray-blue light. “I’m tired,” Ray said. “I can’t talk about this anymore.” With the beer in his hand he went back inside the house, leaving Sanchez to sit alone in his store-bought chair.

K
elly looked in through the open door. The kid could have been sleeping. Gil’s head turned away toward the window, the crime scene just as it had been found. Sheets pulled up over his chest, his arms resting on either side. The only thing to indicate what had happened a deep bruise on his neck that seemed to grow deeper while she looked in on him.

“He never woke up?” Tom asked, standing beside her and Hastings.

“Not that we know,” Hastings said.

“Pierce stepped away from the room for a minute when his cruiser went up. Walked down to the end of the hall to that window,” Kelly said, pointing toward the front of the hospital. “He was probably only gone from the room for thirty seconds.”

“And the staff?”

“Did just the same,” Hastings said.

Down the hall the elevator opened up and Kelly watched the mayor move out through the doors. Halfway up the hall he was already speaking to her. “You had a nineteen-year-old kid guarding the victim,” Eli said. “It should have been you or Pete up here, not Pierce.” The closer he came the more he slowed, looking behind Kelly to where Tom stood. “What’s he doing here?”

“I called him.”

“Called him?” Eli’s eyes gone small in his large head, a yellow oxford wrinkled up at the waist and the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. “Come here with me a minute.” He reached a hand out and took her elbow, leading her away. “What do you think you’re doing? That man is not your friend anymore,” Eli said in a low hiss. “He could have ended your career just like he did his. You need to be smarter than this. You need to understand there’s no good reason to bring him in on this, no matter what you may think.”

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.

D
ario 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.

T
om 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 the 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?”