The Carrion Birds (15 page)

D
ario lay in the mud. The cold seep of it up into his clothes from the ground beneath. The Walther still in his hands. The front fender speckled with buck from the shotgun. He didn’t know how he was alive, how he had managed to avoid getting shot. The man holding the shotgun, their eyes meeting—the same man from the bar, the same they’d followed to the house—and then the shotgun going off, Dario half turned with his finger on the trigger. Somehow, though, Dario was alive. Lying in the mud, feeling the sore intake of air into his lungs.

Running a hand along his chest, he felt where the balls of shot had struck the metal plate beneath. With one hand he undid the Velcro straps from his shoulders and pulled the vest off. Two distinct impacts in the chest plate, one beneath the heart, the other at his navel.

Nearby he knew one of their own was dead. The strangled call Dario had heard as one of the brothers—Felíx—yelled for help just before Dario heard the double pistol shot.

Dario forced himself up on his hands. The Bronco gone now and everywhere the falling rain. Twenty feet away the open, unmoving stare of Felíx’s eyes. Two deep chasms of blood printed on his forehead.

Three of Dario’s men were dead and the life Dario had made for himself in this town was already changing. The cartel’s place in Coronado no longer what it had been just days before.

He heard running now, the scuffle of soles across wet earth. Medina coming out of the darkness. “¿Estás herido?”

“No,” he said, checking his shirt again for blood. “No.” The Walther submachine gun in his hand, clutched so tight his fingers ached with it. The dented plate of the vest at his feet and a change coming over him that went rattling up through his bloodstream. Inside he felt something slide from one side to the other and he didn’t want it to go back.

Across the yard, Dario saw Medina’s eyes had turned away from him and looked toward the body in the mud. The light, off to the side away from where the headlights fell, a grainy black as gray and indistinct as newsprint.

“Está muerto,” Medina said.

“¿Quién es?” Dario asked, even though he already knew the answer.

“Uno de los hermanos.”

“¿Quién?”

“Felíx.”

Dario pulled himself up and rested against the side panel of Burnham’s truck. He should have been just as dead as Felíx. The puckered indent of the breastplate at his feet. The man wheeling around on him with the shotgun, the discharge of the barrel just bright enough for Dario to make out the face of the other man.

Out in the darkness, the sound of gunfire opened up again, followed closely by the race of the Bronco engine fading away through the night.

R
ay didn’t dare turn on the Bronco’s headlights. Rocks caught in the tires and went skittering around through the undercarriage. The dull white hands of the speedometer read fifty-six miles per hour, the night road coming at them out of the rain in twenty-foot sections.

Something wasn’t right with the engine. He could feel it, the temperature gauge hitting the red and the smell of burning oil coming through the vents. He didn’t know if they would make the town.

Checking his rearview, he saw a blaze of headlights turn away from the house, then follow up the road. He had about a half mile on them. The only thing visible in the rain-swept darkness the sight of those two pairs of headlights behind.

Using the emergency brake to avoid the sight of his brake lights, he turned the wheel hard to the right and they bounced off the road. With the speed now at twenty miles per hour, he could make out the rocks and bushes before he came to them and he headed due north across the plain toward Las Cruces, though he knew they would never make it.

T
om woke to the sound of the rain washing against his bedroom window. The wind strong from the west and the window casings thumping together like two wooden boats in a storm. He turned over in bed and put his feet to the floor, wiping his hand down along his eyes. The room slow to come into focus. Behind him he heard Claire turn away in her sleep, pulling the bedding from where he sat. She lay facing the far wall with her back half exposed and the sheets bunched at her waist.

Quietly he dressed in an old T-shirt and a set of baggy cotton pants. The feel of the material falling and then straightening on his legs as he rose and walked to the window to pull back the shades. Thunder had woken him, but now there was only the night out there. Nothing but the rain moving around in the darkness. A brief flash of lightning far off over the mountains but no thunder.

What Claire was doing wasn’t right, leaving him one day and then showing up again, as if she hadn’t left him in the first place. Or perhaps it was his fault for letting her do this to him. He was starting not to care, that was the trouble with it. He never thought he’d become a person like that, but looking back toward the bed he couldn’t say he hadn’t wanted a few moments alone with Claire after all he’d seen that day.

He felt the memories heaped up inside of him, like the day had shaken them all loose and he hadn’t yet had the chance to put them back. He walked through the house listening to the rain. On the kitchen table he looked at the old police radio he’d kept from his time as sheriff, the dials worn down to the metal, and the familiar etchings now carved loose of their paint. He put the kettle on, waiting for the water to begin rattling at the metal sides of the pot.

He didn’t like what he’d done to himself. All that time behind him, all the decisions he’d made, all of it adding up little by little, knowing he had not made the sum greater than the parts. The judge on that last day of the hearing had taken him aside, asking Tom if he had anything to add. Anything that might make his situation any better.

“I can’t tell it any other way.”

“You’re going to have to, Tom.”

There was nothing to say. The past was the past, there was no changing that now. Tom wasn’t the same anymore, he wasn’t anything like the man he used to be. Headstrong to the point of being callous. Righteous. Those things just couldn’t describe him anymore. His instinct for the day-to-day now tarnished. There was a lot to recover from and he was trying, even if it meant waking up the next day to work Deacon’s cattle.

What he’d done to Angela Lopez hadn’t been right. There was no getting around that, not now, not ever. It was the mistake that would define his life. He knew at the time he’d wanted Lopez to stand in for everything that was going wrong with Coronado: the loss of jobs, the empty storefronts, the death of Ray’s family.

He’d learned to catalog this away inside him over the years. He was still pissed off over the thing but he knew he couldn’t help that now. He’d lost that power. His one attempt to make things better already spent. Now there was only the present, the rain outside slicking the wood siding of his house, the windows rocking in their frames. Tomorrow would be different, he hoped. Talking with Kelly had made him feel something about himself that he hadn’t felt in a long time, that maybe there was still some use left in his life. Some hope for the future.

Out in the living room he heard the clacking of Jeanie’s nails on the hardwood. She rounded the corner and came into the kitchen, running her nose beneath his hand, looking for attention. Tom’s own glassy reflection there on the kitchen window. The whistle of steam as it broke out of the kettle. He didn’t want to think about any of it anymore, and he sat with his mug of tea at the kitchen table while Jeanie nuzzled his hand. The drum of the rain out there in the night, pounding away inside him like his own thoughts.

D
ario Campo stood on the wooden porch holding the Walther loosely in his hand. The clip still full, still weighted down with all its potential. He looked out at the gravel drive, at the dead brother there, the slightly darker pool of blood filling with rainwater. The cars gone now—Medina and the rest—all of them chasing through the desert after the Bronco.

Three of the men who’d been sent up from Mexico were now dead. Paid killers. Lalo, the biggest of them, lay on his back inside the house, his hands raised up toward his face and a pool of blood formed in the shape of a fan on the floor beneath his head. On the porch near where Dario stood—watching Medina’s headlights cut long ribbons of darkness away from the rain—Hector, also killed, shot first in the upper thigh, then finished in a line upward that ended with a single shot in the side of his temple.

Dario knelt and took the HK submachine gun from the man and swung the strap over his shoulder, still watching the darkness of the desert, watching the swing and flourish of the headlights through the rain, reminding him of an ocean he’d once seen in a movie—the wash of a lighthouse over the water.

Entering the house with the HK on his shoulder and the Walther in his hand, he took a big step over the body in the doorway. He was careful about the blood. He didn’t want to touch it. He felt a strange pleasure standing there in the darkened house with the smell of the plaster still strong through the room.

In the hallway upstairs he came to a small room. In what little light came in from the window, he stooped and found a waxed canvas coat, balled up on the floor, the indentation of a head still in the material. He picked it up and shook it out. A large coat, insulated with flannel padding. He put it to his nose and inhaled the smell of the desert. In one of the pockets he found a cash receipt from the Lucky Strike Diner outside of town. The date on the receipt one day before. In the other pocket he found a prescription drug bottle. He stood examining the label, trying to read the name.

Beneath the coat he found a set of boots and socks. He tucked the boots under his arm, and the socks into one of the jacket pockets. He folded the jacket and stuffed it under his arm with the boots. Leaving only the slight rattle of the prescription bottle in his hand.

Every room in the house empty and no sign of the heroin anywhere.

Dario came out onto the porch and stood waiting. He didn’t know what to do next and he watched the headlights come back toward him over the flatness of the desert. The car high beams offering up just enough light to make out the name written on the side of the prescription bottle. Rain still falling everywhere in the desert, and a slight smile beginning to spread across his face. Three dead this night and at least one more to follow.

T
he Bronco came rolling to a stop thirty minutes after they’d left the road. All three rear windows blown out. Rain fell heavy on the roof and slipped in through the window frames, collecting on the seats. Several minutes had passed since Ray had seen anything like a light, be it house or car.

“Looks like we’re walking,” Ray said.

“If it’s all right,” Sanchez said, “I’ll just stay here.” He was holding the side of his gut with a hand, and, as he finished speaking, he removed the hand, trying to push himself up on the seat. The palm of his right hand a beet-red color that even in the dark Ray knew was blood.

“Jesus,” Ray said. “You should have said something.” Ray reached up to flick on the overhead dome light. He was watching Sanchez. The hand back over the wound. A pale sweat showing on his face.

“It wouldn’t have mattered.”

“We could have tried for the town,” Ray said.

“And if we didn’t make it?”

“We could have tried.” Stunned, Ray didn’t know what else to say.

Sanchez removed his hand again and just sat looking at it in wonder as if something was written on his palm that he wanted to memorize. “It’s the first time I’ve been shot. I can’t even tell how bad it is,” he said. “I don’t even know what it looks like.” His voice was strangely level, his young face heavy as clay in the bright overhead light.

Ray opened his own door, walked around the front of the Bronco in the rain, and pulled Sanchez’s door open. He knelt there with the water falling on his back, his head just below Sanchez’s shoulder. He pulled away the bloodied material to look at the wound. One hole bleeding a thin watery red. Blood all down Sanchez’s pants and soaked into the seat. With his hands he supported Sanchez, leaning him forward so that Ray could check his back. No exit wound, the bullet somewhere inside.

“How does it look?” Sanchez asked. He hadn’t moved at all while Ray examined him, only taking his hand from the wound, his muscles held tight, trying to avoid the pain.

“I think the worst is over.”

“That’s good,” Sanchez said.

“Yes,” Ray said.

There wasn’t much of an option here. Ray took Sanchez’s hand and put it back over the wound. With his teeth he ripped one of the sleeves from the shirt he was wearing, sliding it down off his arm. He balled it in his hand and tried as best he could to wring the rainwater from it. Ray made a bandage from the torn piece of cloth. He pressed it to the wound and had Sanchez hold it.

“I can’t really feel it,” Sanchez said. “Am I holding it tight enough?”

Ray looked at Sanchez’s hand again. “You’re doing fine.”

Sanchez had rolled his head around on the seat and his eyes looked at Ray with something like glazed recognition, there and not there.

“Listen,” Ray said, “we’ve got to do something about this. I need to try and get into town. There isn’t much else we can do here.”

Sanchez nodded, told him he understood.

Ray walked around to the other side of the truck again. Nothing but night all around them and the rain blowing in from the west in silver-blue sheets. “Jesus,” Ray said under his breath, low enough that Sanchez couldn’t hear him.

Ray closed his door. He went around the Bronco again and knelt in the mud beside Sanchez. “I’m going to go now,” he said.

“Don’t,” Sanchez said. “Don’t leave me out here.”

“There’s nothing I can do for you here.”

“You’ll come back?”

“Yes,” Ray said. “I’ll get you out of here and we’ll head north for Las Cruces.”

“You promise to come back?”

“I shouldn’t be long.”

“I know,” Sanchez said.

Ray reached in over Sanchez to flick the dome light off.

“Could you leave it?” Sanchez asked. His eyes shifted upward toward the light, then back to Ray.