The Carrion Birds (13 page)

“Fire.”

“I thought you said it wouldn’t come to that.”

Gus shook his head. “It won’t. A few of the men that were laid off spent the day drinking in their trailers. They’re just spouting off, wasting their time. They should have been looking for work.”

“I certainly don’t need any of this right now,” Kelly said.

“I heard,” Gus said. “Tom stopped by on his way down from Las Cruces last night. He told me he’d seen you on the highway earlier.”

“Well, as you probably know, it didn’t get much better today.”

“Heard that, too,” Gus said, half listening to her and half watching something that was going on up front. “I’m sorry,” Gus said out of the side of his mouth, “this is a waste of your time.”

Kelly turned back to the front just in time to see Strope stand and let one of the store-bought pastries fly toward the union head where he stood at the table. The pastry caught the union man square in the chest and slipped off his shirt with the thick weight of its icing. “Jesus, Strope,” Kelly said, as she got to her feet, speaking low in the silence that followed. “You can’t really be this dumb, can you?” She took her time walking around toward him, making sure she was between Andy Strope and the door as she went forward up the row, one hand outstretched to keep the other men back, while the other clutched at the cuffs on her belt.

The whole time, Strope, square jawed and big as he was, just standing there looking at her with the same dull blaze in his eyes that Kelly had seen the night before at the bar. “You can’t take me in for this,” he kept saying. “What’s the charge? I threw a doughnut at a man, and you’re going to take me in?”

Kelly didn’t let her stare drop away from Strope. She was aware of everyone watching her, the oil workers sitting and waiting to see what she would do as she forced her way up the row trying to get to Strope. “How about public drunkenness,” she said. “I can smell it on you from here.”

As big as he was, he went pretty easily, perhaps knowing it wasn’t going to do him any good to bullshit her. She’d been in the bar last night, she’d heard just about all he was going to say to her, and now she was just tired of the whole thing. Tired that this was getting to be her normal night in this town, oil workers pissed off and blowing off steam.

There was a dead kid in the morgue, and she was stuck doing work like this. It didn’t matter to her, and she had half a mind just to let him go on throwing pastries at the union heads. She sort of wanted to do it herself, but she didn’t, not even bothering to cuff Strope as she led him outside to the patrol car, where he’d get locked in the rear cage.

When she came back in, Gus was waiting for her at the door, looking out at the rain, the meeting already started back up again. “Now I’ll be spending the next couple hours babysitting a drunk till Hastings comes on for the night shift,” she said, looking to Gus. “Any other enemies of the state I should be watching out for?”

“I’d say you got public enemy number one, right there,” Gus said. “At least you know in this rain no one is going to light anything on fire. They’d have to light the wells if they lit anything, and even Strope isn’t that dumb.”

“Thanks,” Kelly said. “Please don’t mention that to the mayor, I might end up on a stakeout with more pastries.” She laughed and looked away to the patrol car, where Strope was leaning his forehead against the rear pane of the window.

“Good luck with him,” Gus said, exchanging a smile with Kelly before she turned away and went out to her cruiser, shielding her face from the rain with her hand.

R
ay woke in the dark to the sound of a hard rain falling on the roof. Stiff from sleeping on the floor in the upstairs bedroom, he rolled over and pushed himself up. He couldn’t remember if he’d been dreaming. For years after his service he’d taken pills to help him sleep. Years traveling through jungle hills could do that. The unease he’d felt after returning to the quiet of the desert cityscape following all those years away, hiking through foreign forests before the war had even been official. The wooden stocks of their guns warped from the humidity. Every shot he took in those first months off by a centimeter or two, as he struggled to calibrate his rifle.

All of it only a moment in his life, a small blip along his timeline that kept replaying itself nightly in his dreams. The doctors even using the term “recalibrate” in his first months back as they gave him the pills, talking to him about his homecoming, talking to him like he was a rifle with a centimeter-or-two leftward pull.

The rain had woken him and he felt for a moment lost in the sound. How many hours had he been asleep? He’d let himself be pulled down into the black abyss. It had been too easy and he knew it. He should never have closed his eyes.

After he’d lost Marianne and given up his son he’d replaced the pills with alcohol, drinking himself to sleep. But since deciding to come home, he was back on them again, blending alcohol and medication every night in order to get his sleep. The pills helping him concentrate, a whole bottle to help him keep his mind from wandering. The empty beer cans there on the floor, taken from Sanchez, not enough to get him through the night. And the feeling of those pills mixed with the alcohol like a soft snow, coated heavy on his skin.

He stood in the dark of the second-floor bedroom, working his hands over his eyes. Through the window he saw the rain out there in the desert falling straight and hard from the sky, hard as ice and just as loud.

Taking a blanket he’d found in the back of the Bronco, he’d gone to sleep in his boxers and when he walked to the window, he felt the cold draft that had come with the rainstorm. The moon shrouded in clouds. Outside, everything a dark gray movement of rain and wind. The storm over the plain looking like some ancient picture show, speckled with flecks of dust, eaten away with time, crackling with age.

He’d felt uneasy standing there in the backyard with Sanchez, looking up at the mountains he’d once known. Talking about how to kill a man, how to put your two hands to his throat and pop the vertebrae apart like chicken bones. It wasn’t how he’d remembered it, how he’d thought killing would always be for him, it was cold-blooded and murderous, the boy never waking, just the body fighting it, subconsciously aware.

A growing unease moved through Ray now. Sanchez boasting about the things he hadn’t done. Each word seeming to close in tighter around them. A vision of Jacob Burnham in the dirt at Ray’s feet. The barrel of that shotgun to the old man’s heart and Ray’s finger bent down around the trigger.

Sanchez was just a kid, half Ray’s age, and kids did stupid things. They didn’t listen. They went to town when they weren’t supposed to. Ray had gone upstairs thinking it through, thinking how good it would be to get clear of all this, of Memo, of Sanchez, of the whole damn business. He was done with this thing, he knew it now, knew he didn’t have it in him, knew if he carried on with this life he’d be dead soon. He didn’t care. There wasn’t anything left and he stared out the window thinking about Burnham’s final words, and how if Ray had listened maybe he wouldn’t be here now.

Out on the rain-swept plain Ray saw headlights break over a far-off hill, nothing else around. The headlights dipping back beneath the earth, into the ground, then rising up again over the next hill, gradually coming closer.

He backed away from the window and took the Ruger from beneath his folded jacket, there on the floor. He saw the car fully now, metal body streaked in rain, moving across the plain with its two bright lights leading the way. He dressed and waited at the window. Watching, he saw the headlights slow and move up the drive toward the house.

He recognized it now as the Bronco. From the upstairs window, he saw Sanchez push open the Bronco door. Stand up into the rain, then run for the house in five long steps, trying as best he could to avoid the puddles.

The boy scared Ray. Not in a hurtful way, but in a reckless, broken way that carried with it no forgiveness. Ray didn’t know how well he’d handled the boasts Sanchez was making, trying to build himself up in Ray’s eyes. Perhaps he’d been too hasty in dismissing the boy, too ready to not believe.

Ray’s attention turned again to the dark desert landscape as two more cars materialized from the rain—brought up out of some deep crack in the earth—no headlights on. Just following along in the same rain-swollen ruts Sanchez had taken over the small rise a mile out, then dipping back beneath the earth, then rising once again.

Ray gripped the gun, the metal as solid and dangerous beneath his skin as those two darkened ghosts traveling in a line across the desert toward them. His first thought that they were Memo’s men come to get the heroin, but the reality sinking into him that it was too early and they were not Memo’s men at all. Watching, Ray knew Sanchez would never listen, would never stick to what he had been told, and that it was a mistake for Ray to have thought he could have trusted him.

F
rom the lead car, Dario watched the man who’d been in his bar that night—too drunk to know they’d been following him—close the house door behind him. Medina was driving and they sat at the bottom of the drive with their lights off and the wipers pushing water across the windshield at a steady pace. Dario nodded his head toward the house. There in front of it was Burnham’s pickup truck. The same truck he’d loaded the heroin into only a couple days before.

Without needing to be told, Medina eased the car forward up the slight incline. Water everywhere on the drive and flowing down toward the road like a river. The man had come into the bar two hours before, already smelling of alcohol, speaking to Medina like he was underwater.

“All these people,” the man said under his breath, Dario sitting at the bar, three stools down. “They don’t know me, they don’t know what I’m about.” He threw up his arms, raising the tempo of his voice, trying for attention. “I’ve been to prison. I put my time in, earned my place here at this bar, in this town, running things for my uncle.”

He ordered a drink from the bar and sat mumbling to himself. After a while he turned and spoke to Lalo and the other men, sitting off a ways at one of the wooden tables. All of them watching him since he’d entered, following his movements from door to bar stool. The man trying to give back that same cold look, but his eyes drifting again toward the bar and then the drink before him.

Dario watched him drink two more whiskeys, doubles both. The night had been slow and Dario sat smiling over his cup of lukewarm coffee, watching this man, a few years younger than him, sinking deeper and deeper toward the bar.

Dario waved Medina over and told him to give the man one more double, on the house. There were no well workers in the place tonight, all of them staying away after the blowout they’d had the night before. Many, Dario thought, probably already gone back up north to look for work, heading for the interstate, Texas, and probably farther.

That the man was looking for someone to talk to was obvious, he would talk to anyone at this point. The cowboy hat he had been wearing cast out on the bar before him and Dario moving over on the stool as Medina brought the whiskey. “You should go,” Dario told him. “You should take off and get away from here. The police have been looking for someone like you.”

The man turned away from the whiskey to look at Dario with his linen suit, clean-faced from his shave that morning.

“I was listening to you,” Dario said. “I think you’re the man they’ve all been looking for.”

“Who’s been looking for me?”

“The sheriff,” Dario said. “She came in last night looking for you, she was looking all over the place, asking if we’d seen you.” Dario watched the man’s eyes drop once, then again, the hoods working and the lashes bobbing on his face with the alcohol. “Friend,” Dario said, addressing the man. “What were you saying you were in the business of?”

The man wobbled off the stool with one hand held out on the bar for balance. Dario just watching, not getting up, but watching, only his coffee cup on the bar before him.

“I think I’ve had too much.”

“Your hat,” Dario said, looking at the worn threads of felt there on the bar, the familiar look of the thing he was sure he recognized now.

“It’s not mine,” he finally said, the focus in the man’s eyes drifting. “Never was.”

“Yes,” Dario said. “Perhaps it isn’t.” Dario picked the hat up off the bar and examined it under the overhead light. “Maybe a friend of mine left it here.”

Both of them standing now beside the bar, the hat in Dario’s hands as the man searched the room with his eyes, panic now apparent on his face. The words that eventually surfaced a train wreck of bent metal. “It’s time . . .”

“It’s time you were going,” Dario finished.

Behind, there was the hard squeal of a chair. Lalo stood from the table, looking to Dario for direction.

“Perhaps we can help you out with a ride?” Dario asked.

“No,” the man said, holding out a cautious hand, speaking to both men now. “I’ll be fine.”

He stumbled toward the door without turning to look behind him. Dario watched him go, and when the bar door closed, they were already moving to the back, where their own cars sat.

W
hen the door shattered inward with the big booming sound of a shotgun fired at close range, Ray was already moving down the stairs. A big Mexican came through what was left of the door frame with a Mossberg pump raised on his shoulder in a sweep of the room. The door lay turned over on the floor, both hinges blown out of the jamb, a fine dust of plaster from the walls in the air, and splintered pieces of wood all across the floor. The Mexican turned at the sight of Ray and raised the shotgun toward the stairs. Ray put one bullet in the man’s chest from about twenty feet out, then, still moving down the stairs, before the man had even fallen, Ray put another bullet in his head.

A strange quiet filled the room for a half second. The big Mexican lay there on the floor, his arms played back in a pose suggesting he had tried to catch the bullet with his hands. Ray carried the Ruger, holding it on the door and the night beyond. His pants pulled roughly up on his hips. Barefoot, he took the stairs two at a time, switching the Ruger to his off hand in order to scoop the Mexican’s shotgun up. Then almost in the same moment flattening his body to the floor as the guns opened up on him from outside the house.