The Carrion Birds (12 page)

“Gil?”

“Yes,” Kelly said. “I hate that we didn’t protect him. Whatever he was into, he deserved better than this.”

Tom took a sip of the beer. He felt just like her, but he knew she felt that guilt worse than he ever could. Gil had been hers to protect, though Tom had never really thought someone would take it to that level, burning the cruiser like that and killing the boy in his sleep. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself for something you couldn’t have done anything about. You said it yourself when you talked to Pierce: they were coming for that boy no matter what.”

“I’m trying to figure it and I just can’t.”

“What is there to figure?” Tom said. “It just comes back to the usual suspects, drugs or money.”

“How much?”

“Enough to try and kill that boy one day, then come back and finish him off the next.”

“
That
much,” Kelly said.

“I’d estimate it was
even more
than that,” Tom said. He kicked his legs out and swung till he could get his feet fully under him, leaning back now against the seat of the swing to stand.

“What’s your view on all this?” Kelly asked.

“I don’t have one,” Tom said. “I wish I did, but the truth of it is that people do crazy things for far less than drugs or money.”

“There it is,” Kelly said, trying to stifle a laugh.

“There what is?”

“The optimist I love from the old days.”

“Pessimist, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

T
he men came up from the south in the afternoon. There were six of them. Coming into the bar, it seemed to Dario, all at once. Not there, then there. Six dark figures, blocking the light from the front window, big and menacing as anything he’d seen in recent years.

The six figures just waiting there, letting their eyes adjust to the gloom. Medina paused in his work at the bar to look back at them.

Dario stood slowly and drew their attention. He knew half of them by sight, the two brothers, Ernesto and Felíx, as well as the big Oaxacan, Lalo.

Dario introduced them to Medina. Asking the ones he didn’t know for their names and while they told him, committing each of them to memory: Hector, César, and Carlos. He asked each man in turn if he wanted anything—a beer, a Coke, a water—and began to tell them what little there was to know about Gil Suarez, Jake Burnham, Coronado, and the twelve kilos of missing heroin.

T
om made it home just before the rain began to fall. With what little daylight remained, he stood in the stables grooming the two big bays, their coats dusted in white hair like an old dog’s muzzle. Both startled and showing the white bulges of their eyes as the rain began to ping on the tin roof.

Jeanie, resting at Tom’s feet, didn’t even bother to raise her head from her paws as the rain came on. The pellets hitting hard as stones, then rolling off and falling in ropy streams to the ground. A small carved line of earth where the rain fell and dug up the land.

He put a hand out, feeling the drops hitting on his palm. Above, the sky had grown dark and flat as river stones. The events of the day somehow faded into memory. Kelly and him walking out of the hospital hours before, nothing but the thin purple bruise along the kid’s neck to say anyone had ever been in the room with him at all.

He brought his hand back in and put it wet to the horse closest to him, its eyes not as big and white as before. His hand moving down its neck, feeling the smooth, almost waxen, touch of its coat. A gust of wind and the splatter of rain falling now in sheets.

Outside, through the falling water, he saw where a small part of the southern fence needed mending. What remained of his herd—twenty-some pigs in all—crowded up under the particleboard shelter. Farther on, his own house a dull gray against the rain, the windows the only points of light. Inside he’d kept it just the way it had been before all his trouble; before he’d shot Angela Lopez, before he’d lost his job and his life had changed in that most definite of ways.

From where he stood, he could just make out the cars going past on the highway. A slate-blue coloring to everything around him and the lights of the traffic moving up the highway, first there, then gone in the rain, only to reappear, floating again across the wide bottomland of the valley floor like lightning bugs over a darkening background.

He’d been expecting her when she came, the headlights turning up off the highway and traveling on up his drive toward the house. Claire’s face in profile to his own as she pulled her Volkswagen in beside his truck.

Watching her for a time as she stood in front of his place, the rain falling everywhere, he came to the door of the stables and waved her over. It was a hundred feet at most and by the time she made it she was soaked through. “I didn’t think you’d be here,” she said. A cold, straight cut to her face, the rain all over her skin and falling from her chin. The dimples now seen in her cheeks as she looked up to him and her skin marked in places by small moles and other minor imperfections.

Tom turned and went back to the stalls. “Why’d you come, then?”

Claire stared back at him. He knew he’d said the wrong thing but he wasn’t in the mood for her tonight. The dimples in her cheeks gone and her lips downturned where she stood just inside the stables, her long brown hair black with water as it hung against her back. She was ten years younger than him. They’d known each other for a long time now, and there was little Tom felt he could say to her that she hadn’t already heard.

“Don’t be like that,” Claire said, walking over to where he stood next to the horses. The same two he’d bought three years before when he’d had the money. One for Claire and one for him, but the romantic idea of riding them every day never quite their reality. “I came by last night and you weren’t here. I got worried, that’s all.”

“I’m fine, you can see that, can’t you?”

“Fine?”

“Yes,” he said. He finished grooming the horse and then went over and brought the blankets and leathers back farther in from the rain, the water splashing up off the ground and speckling the stable floor.

“You pissed off Eli pretty good today,” Claire said, leaning back against the stall, watching him.

Tom tried not to let the smile show, but it was there all the same. “Yeah?”

“After coming back from the hospital he was furious. He didn’t understand what Kelly was doing, letting you up there like that,” Claire said. “I didn’t really understand, either. But I liked to see him angry about it, and for once he didn’t stack it all against me.”

“Kelly probably shouldn’t have brought me in on this, but I’m glad she did,” Tom said. He was watching her, wondering if it would ever work between them again, or if it was working right now and he just didn’t know it.

“He doesn’t like you very much,” Claire said with a smile.

“No, he never has. Even when I was employed and he was just doing his first term.”

“The newsmen showed up again and he talked to them about the boy. I don’t think he wanted Kelly doing it.”

“I saw some of the vans on my way through town. It looked like they were going to stick it out for the night.”

She shivered a bit where she stood and Tom looked away toward his truck and her small Volkswagen sitting out there in the rain. He was trying not to invite her in, knowing where all of it would lead, just as it always did between them. “You ever hear of the rule of three?” Tom said, turning back to her. “They’re using a tried-and-true method of newscasting, waiting around for the next big event. Something’s bound to happen.”

“Yeah,” Claire said, “if they wait long enough. In this town it might take years.”

He’d run out of things to do, the bridles and reins now put back from the open stable doors, the blankets over the stall gates and the horses fed. No idea what he was doing anymore, what he was putting off. Something inside of him nervous as a little boy about to ask a girl out on his first date. “I was going to wait the rain out here, but it looks like you could use a towel,” he said.

“You’ll probably need one, too, by the time we get inside.” She was grinning now, looking at him in that way he knew there was no returning from.

Outside the stable doors he saw the rain falling against the bent wire fence. All the things that needed fixing in his life, and nothing ever seeming to get fixed. In the morning he’d go over and see about Deacon’s cattle. And it would be back to a life that—even for the shortest time—he’d allowed himself to forget.

A
bove, the night had gone cold. The sky flat and low across the valley as Kelly drove down from her house on her way into town for the meeting. Lights on in many of the windows now and the rain falling, gray, from an oyster-colored sky. She wasn’t looking forward to the meeting. No reason really for her to be there except that Eli had ordered her.

Pulling up in front of the church, she saw the basement lights on through the rain and heard the sounds of the men inside. The conversations carrying through the falling water, the door pushed open a hundred feet in front of her, light shining brightly out onto the parking lot, where it glistened like silver on the puddles.

The meeting hadn’t started yet when she walked in. Streamers hanging down the paneled room from a wedding a week or so before, highlighted in places by a rainbow of crepe flowers taped here and there along the wall. All down the hall, chairs had been set up and many of the oil workers sat waiting in them, while still more milled around a fold-out table where grocery store pastries and coffee were laid out.

“The mayor must be thinking we’re going to storm the courthouse,” a voice nearby said.

Kelly looked to the last row of chairs where the voice had come from and found Tom’s uncle, Gus Lamar, turned with his arm raised over the back of the chair beside him. “Investing in our futures,” Kelly said, walking over to stand behind Gus. “We’re always wondering when the oil companies will buy up the state government offices here in town.”

“The mayor told you to come?”

“Eli is just looking out for our futures,” she said, the sarcasm heavy in her voice as she came around and sat next to him.

Gus smiled and looked up toward the front of the hall, where the heads of the union were taking their seats. “You must have forgotten where you are,” Gus said, turning back to her. “This is a union meeting, we don’t give a damn what the oil companies do. As long as they keep paying a fair wage and stop laying men off every month.”

In the ten years she’d been sheriff she’d attended four meetings, always at the request of the mayor, and only if he thought there might be trouble. “I thought you retired, Gus. What’s all this us-against-them stuff?”

“I’ve been sitting in for a year or so now. I’d sit in on the corporate meetings over in Houston if I could, but I never made it into the billionaires’ club and my wells went dry a long time before the big guys came through and bought everyone out. I figure I’d just like to know what we’re in for in this town.”

“You looking out for our futures, just like the mayor?”

“Looking out for Billy’s future,” Gus said. “He’s going to need a job soon enough. I’m not getting any younger.”

“I just saw Tom, so I’m guessing you have Luis sober enough to watch Billy for the night.”

“Billy is most likely watching Luis,” Gus said. “He was too drunk to drive home last night and he left his truck in town.”

Kelly smiled, but didn’t say anything as she thought about Luis and what he’d said the other night, drunk on whiskey and tallboys. All of it a mess and Kelly sitting in on some meeting she didn’t have any desire to be part of.

One of the union reps was standing now, asking everyone to sit. Kelly recognized a few of the men she’d seen at the bar the night before, Andy Strope a head above the rest of them as he sat four rows up. “Last night I caught them talking about burning down a trailer over at the Tate Bulger,” Kelly said.

“Who said that?”

“Strope and some others.”

Gus shook his head like the whole thing was funny to him. “Andy doesn’t even work for the Tate Bulger. He’s just trying to get the rest of them all fired up.”

“Isn’t that why this meeting was called?”

“I don’t know about that,” Gus said. “What good would setting a fire do? They’re mad, but no one thinks if they lash out they’ll get their jobs back. It would never happen and all the union reps know it. I’d guess they’re going to talk strike, if they talk anything at all.”

Kelly looked up toward the front of the hall, where the union rep had raised his hands for quiet. She watched Andy Strope, four rows up, turn and whisper something to the man beside him. The union rep beginning to speak about the layoffs and what they meant for the union.

Beside her Gus sat up a little in his chair. Nearly eighty years old, he was still taller than most in the room and well built from the years he’d spent working his property. His had been a family operation at one time, but she knew that his son had fallen in with the wrong people many years before. The death of Gus’s daughter-in-law outside of town in a hit-and-run accident was still considered by many to be some sort of retribution for something Ray Lamar had done against the cartel.

Up in front a man stood to speak and then was shouted down, several in the audience, including those around Strope, standing up to protest whatever the man had been about to say.

Gus leaned toward her. “He was going to tell them he thought a strike wouldn’t do them any good and that they should just be grateful that those remaining still have jobs.”

“Really?” Kelly whispered. “You read minds now?”

“There was a big discussion over it before you came in. To tell you the truth, I think he’s right. The way things are going I doubt there’s much more than a year before the whole place goes dry.”

For a while Kelly tried to pay attention to the discussion, but most of it she couldn’t follow, the conversation going back and forth with the oil workers and the union reps as they tried to establish the basis for what they would do. A low chant arising from the crowd as the head of the union stood to speak. “What are they saying?” she asked Gus.