The Carrion Birds (16 page)

“If they see—”

“I’ll be okay.”

Ray didn’t know what to say. Sanchez just sat there in the seat, his clothes soaking wet, the only skin visible his pale, sweat-stained face. Ray reached in and brought out the shotgun. There were no shells left. He looked to the backseat, where the hunting rifle was, but didn’t move to get it. Finally, after just sitting there on his haunches, he pulled the Ruger from his waistband and laid it on Sanchez’s lap. “You can use this if you need to. You’re going to be fine,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Sanchez nodded.

Ray stood and Sanchez followed him with his eyes. Ray closed the door.

He walked out into the darkness, the rain becoming only a feeling on his skin, unseen and constant as the wind or the air. The ruts of the tires leading away toward the road, some five or six miles away, now filled with water and appearing in places like small overflowing canals.

Behind him he saw the pale dome light of the truck. He felt the cold seeping through to his bones. Water dripped from his face, from his hands, from everywhere. Between bursts of wind he thought he heard a song playing. He didn’t remember turning the radio on and he looked back toward the Bronco in a sort of stupid wonderment.

He turned to follow the little canals of water leading back to civilization. He began to run. He ran until his lungs burned and his heart ached. He ran till he couldn’t feel his legs. Till his bare feet pulsed beneath him with every beat of his heart. The silver water falling, shaping the carved outlines of the Bronco’s tires in the mud.

When he couldn’t run anymore, he bent over panting with his hands held down on his thighs, gasping for air. He felt the blood in his head as he stood. The swell of it under the skin. Not a light anywhere in the desert. No road, no house, not one single thing.

Billy would be thirteen years old that spring. It was an odd thing to think about, standing there, his breath pulled down out of the air in rain-filled gasps. Broken capillaries somewhere inside his lungs. Mucus and the metallic taste of blood all down his throat. For all the trouble Sanchez had given him these last few days, he didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve to go like this, and Ray glanced back the way he’d come, trying to find his bearings.

Ray didn’t know where he was. He rested his hands on his hips and looked out on the desert through the rain. He turned and looked to the north, tried to see through the night all the way to the gray-blue Hermanos Range he’d known as a youth. Nothing to see out there in the darkness except the darkness itself.

He turned on his heels. The last time he’d felt such desperation had been when Tom’s deputy had come to his door over ten years before. That moment forever there in his memories, like it was now, ever present. All that came afterward simply a surge of emotion, carrying him forward toward those who were responsible.

Slowly, he began jogging back through the rain toward the Bronco. It took him ten minutes before he saw the dome light again. In another five minutes he heard the radio. Something up out of Mexico, the sound of an acoustic guitar followed by a woman’s voice singing in Spanish.

Though he’d been willing life into the boy all through the night desert—following the trail they’d left back to the road, feeling the air enter his lungs, then pump back—he wasn’t surprised to find Sanchez’s eyes staring coldly at him from the interior of the Bronco. His hand dropped away from the wound and the torn piece of cloth held loosely between thumb and forefinger.

Ray reached in through the open door and closed Sanchez’s eyes. The man half Ray’s age, a boy any way Ray looked at him. Boasting about all the things he’d done in life, trying to live beyond his years. All that over now, all Sanchez would ever be now at its end, and Ray just there in the rain outside the Bronco looking in on him like a man looking in on something long since passed into the annals of time. Ray took back the Ruger from where it sat on the boy’s lap. The rain falling. The radio playing. The boy long since dead.

Day 3

D
ario had
waited long enough. The five of them sitting in two cars, watching Gus Lamar’s
ranch a hundred meters away across the desert floor, lamplight in two of the
windows and the staff houses off a ways, dark in every window. Five hours had
passed while they’d waited, watching the house, waiting to see who would come.
In all that time nothing had moved, the rain still falling but nothing to say
Ray Lamar would come back to the ranch, or to say if this was even home to him
anymore. Only the name on the prescription bottle and the image of the face
Dario had seen to guide him here.

To the east the first light was beginning to show
above the mountains, gray as it filtered through the clouds. And as they waited,
they could see the clouds beginning to thin and the rain letting up until it
became only drizzle on the car windshield.

He looked across at Medina, told him to pull the
car forward. When they drew closer, he knew he would tell Ernesto to check the
staff houses, while the rest of them went in after the old man who lived
inside.

R
ay
woke in the truck with Sanchez dead beside him. An early blue-toned light
spreading across the sky to the east where the clouds had partially cleared in
the night and a thin drizzle was now falling. Outside, the desert went on
without mercy, gray and flat as a griddle pan, running along all the way to the
mountains where the slope rose in waves of pinyon and juniper to the snow-topped
peaks.

He’d promised Sanchez a trip north, a way out. But
it wasn’t going to happen, and Ray sat there trying to accept the life that he’d
chosen. A life that had brought him here, connected him to Memo, and stolen from
him anything he’d ever hoped for.

He didn’t know what the day would hold. A slight
glimmer of hope that he was still alive, and that there was light enough to walk
by. The chance of a new beginning somewhere far out there, meager as it now
seemed.

He felt his age. Every muscle aching as the new
light spread over the mountains and the air shifted slightly, signaling the day
to come. He knew that in an hour the sun would be up over those mountains,
beating down on what remained of the window glass, and the metal body of the
truck.

Ray sat for a long time in the driver’s seat of the
Bronco watching the mountains take shape out of the wet, grainy light. The radio
long since dead. With a heavy hand, he eased the door open to feel the cold move
in on him off the open land, parting fibers in the shirt he wore, bringing new
life as it bristled against his skin.

With his bare feet on the ground, and the sun not
yet up over the mountains, he felt cold and alone. The brittle pulse of the wind
ran along the land in front of him, and the prick of the drizzle falling
everywhere. All along the plain, the dotted shapes of creosote and chuparosa
showing in a patchwork of dirt and gray-green vegetation. The receding track of
their tire treads, once seen behind them, almost completely taken away by the
rain.

All through the night the water had thumped down
out of the sky, pouring in through the shattered windows and slicking the seats.
The Bronco just sitting there in the open, and Ray knowing that whoever wanted
to find him—wanted to find Sanchez—would find them soon enough.

Leaning into the back, he took up the hunting
rifle, a thousand-meter scope on the thing and bullets almost two inches in
length. Getting up out of the truck, he laid the rifle over the roof, then
walked around to the passenger side. He went through Sanchez’s pockets, taking
his keys, taking his wallet, taking everything he found.

Ray bent again and took one shoe, then the other
from Sanchez’s feet, pulling them from beneath the boy’s heels and then sliding
them up over his toes. Now, with both shoes clutched in his hand, he leaned
against the Bronco and one by one, measured the soles of the shoes with his own
feet, estimating the difference. Both shoes too small. He took from his back
pocket the knife he’d used on Burnham’s Chevy seat and flipped it open. Holding
each shoe in turn, he cut lines down through the heel material and then slipped
them both on. They were a poor fit, but they’d do.

He was cold, hungry, and thirsty. One sleeve
missing from his shirt and only his undershirt left to cover his right shoulder
and bicep. Trying to move around as much as he could to create warmth, he
gathered what he could from the Bronco and set out, taking his direction from
the sun and the mountains. The rifle he carried in his hands, the Ruger pressed
beneath his waistband to his stomach. He thought how, if he could, he’d come
back for Sanchez, but looking out on the desert and the distance to walk, he
doubted he ever would.

The drizzle now clearing a little as the sun came
on, evaporating the clouds above. Sanchez behind him, sitting there with his
pockets turned out and his arms folded across his chest while Ray walked due
north, aiming to get as far as he could from the Bronco and all the history that
lay within.

T
he
call came early in the morning. Tom left Claire still asleep in his bed and
drove out to the old Sullivan house. There had been nothing over the radio, just
the familiar buzz of the static as he sat drinking his morning coffee.

He parked his truck off the road behind the county
cruisers, cracked the window for Jeanie, and walked the rest of the way up the
gravel drive to the house. The first body he saw lay uncovered just at the
doorway to the house. Tom paused to look at the old pickup truck sitting on four
slashed tires a few feet from the front porch. It was a truck he knew from his
time as sheriff. A truck that had belonged to Jake Burnham, though he didn’t
know if it did anymore.

He stood there looking at the truck for a long
while, thinking. Burnham had been somehow connected to Angela Lopez, and now
here was his truck, the familiar dents along the left front panel, the dinged-up
paint. Now at the edge of the fender was a silver pockmarking of fresh buckshot
where metal had bitten into metal, shaving the paint away.

Whatever this was, whatever he’d stumbled across
two days before on the highway and now out here at the old Sullivan house, it
was beginning to look much too familiar to Tom. Where was Burnham in all this?
Tom looked to where the dead body lay on the porch. Was it Burnham? With the
face turned out of sight he couldn’t tell.

Last night he’d gone to dinner at Kelly’s and
there’d been nothing left for them to follow, the two of them sitting out there
on the swing set thinking it through. Already, in a way, discussing the death of
the boy in the hospital like something in the past without an answer. Now they
had Burnham’s truck sitting on four slashed tires.

Tom stepped over the imprint of a tire tread and
stood watching the scene. The blurred outlines of footfalls and tire tracks
everywhere in the sand, not a single one of them clear enough to make a reliable
cast from. About thirty feet out from the house, Tom watched where the young
deputy knelt over the body of a man on the ground. Pierce took a photo, advanced
the film, then stood and met Tom’s eye.

“Got the call from Sheriff Kelly this morning,” Tom
offered.

“I saw you at the hospital yesterday,” Pierce said,
stepping back from the body to shake Tom’s hand. “Edna said you might be
around.”

Tom knelt over the body. Mexican. Two bullet holes
to the head. “Someone is a very good shot.”

“There’s another inside with a hole right between
the eyes,” Pierce said, something breathy and full of wonder in the way he said
it. Like a young boy running to tell his parents something fabulous he’d
seen.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Tom said.

“Me neither,” Pierce said.

“You got two bodies, then?”

“Three. There’s one up on the porch, looks like he
was trying to get in through the door but he never made it.”

“Any of them a skinny, old white man with a big,
flat-brimmed Stetson?”

“Huh?”

“Just testing a theory,” Tom said. He looked back
at the four slashed tires on Burnham’s pickup.

Tom said a quick good-bye to Pierce when he saw
Kelly move out of the house, meeting her as she came off the porch. “What do you
make of it?” Tom asked.

“It’s hard to make anything of it,” Kelly said.
“I’m dead tired over this whole thing. I spent the night hanging out in the
office, watching a snoring Andy Strope through the bars. My mind certainly
wasn’t ready for a morning like this.”

“These morning calls are getting to be a regular
thing between us, aren’t they?”

“I hope not,” Kelly said. “Have you ever seen
anything like this? I sure haven’t.”

Both of them had turned and were looking at the man
laid out on the porch. Nearby, Tom saw the top of the other man’s head inside
the doorway. There didn’t seem to be any door at all on the frame.

“Three bodies,” Kelly said. “Over a hundred holes
in this house, and not one gun.”

They walked up onto the porch and Tom knelt and
examined the dead man, Mexican like the other. “What type of ballistics did you
get back on Gil Suarez?”

“Hunting rounds, big ones, .308s.”

“You find any .308s yet?”

“No. Not a single one,” Kelly said. “As far as I
can tell each of these men was shot with a nine-millimeter.”

“A .308 would certainly have done more damage,” Tom
said. He looked from the body to the wood around the door. The wood siding
looking like a billion termites might be living inside the house. “Shot this one
right through the wall.”

“I saw that,” Kelly said.

“You see Burnham’s truck out there?”

“I didn’t like the look of it either.”

“So where’s Burnham? You know he works for Dario,
and I doubt he was the one who shot all these men.” Tom took a pen from his
pocket and opened the dead man’s jacket up so he could better see where the
bullet had gone in. “Eli wants you to keep this thing quiet, but I just don’t
see how you can anymore,” Tom said.

“I don’t . . .” Kelly’s voice drifted
off, she was looking at Burnham’s truck now and just shaking her head.

“These men aren’t local,” Tom said. “I’ll tell you
that now. What brought them here is what you’re going to need to find out, and I
think you know who you need to talk to.” Tom let the man’s jacket drop back down
onto his chest. The shirt underneath still wet with blood and the pen now
slightly red at its tip.

Kelly moved her eyes back to Tom. The slight click
and advance of Pierce’s camera buzzing in the background. “You mean Dario?”

“I don’t know who else. Burnham makes the
connection, it’s not that hard to follow after that.”

“We don’t have anything solid on Dario,” Kelly
said. “Honestly, Tom, it’s a horrible thing to say but after what happened with
Angela Lopez it’s a sensitive matter.”

“The only person being sensitive about that is
Eli.”

“He’s scared, Tom. Looking at these men here, shot
up the way they are, I don’t blame him.”

“Whatever this is,” Tom said, “it’s nothing you can
let slide anymore.”

“I know that—I know that better than most, but I
can’t just go asking these types of questions without proper cause.”

Tom smiled a bit. “I see a whole lot of cause
around here, Edna. Too much. In fact, you might start thinking about calling in
some help on this. DEA, Border Patrol, even the state cops.” Tom looked down at
the body again and then looked back at Kelly. “Strange how when a man moves to a
small town and tries to keep his business quiet, it just becomes everyone else’s
business in the process. You know what Dario’s been doing these last couple
years, the whole town knows, but I messed that up for us all and now everyone
wants to look the other way.”

Tom stood. He walked over for a better view of the
man inside the doorway. A single shot right between the eyes. A shot Tom knew
Burnham couldn’t make even if he was standing five feet away.

He turned and looked back at Kelly. “You want to go
through this with me?”

D
ario
stood in Gus Lamar’s living room, looking over the pictures the old man had up
on the mantel. Behind him, Medina waited in the living room doorway, a
submachine gun hanging off his shoulder, while César and Carlos stood to either
side of the big lounge chair, their hands held down on Gus’s shoulders, fixing
him in place.

“Help you?” Gus asked. He’d been asking the same
thing for the better part of a half hour, wearing his sleeping clothes, his
white hair mussed, and a coarse growth of silver all over his cheeks and neck.
Dario hadn’t spoken a word to him yet. He stood examining one of the pictures
over the mantel, the face he saw there, angular like the old man’s but
darker.

“You’re the father?” Dario said. “Ray’s father.”
Drawing the name up out of memory, the name he’d read on the side of the
prescription bottle.

Gus glanced from Dario to the set of pictures as
Dario reached a hand out to take the picture down.

He was careful with the picture frame, using his
sleeve, not wanting to leave any fingerprints. “I’m a friend of your son’s,”
Dario said.

“I know who you are,” Gus said. “You’re not a
friend of Ray’s.”

“No? Maybe not, but I know some about you, too, and
I’m guessing you could tell me a little about Ray if you needed to.”

Gus bucked a little in the seat and the men forced
him down again. “You want to tell me why you thought you could just let yourself
in?” Gus said, looking around the room at Dario, before moving his eyes across
to Medina. “I haven’t talked to my son in ten years, and anything you know about
him at this point is more than I’ve heard in a long time.”

Dario put the picture back on the mantel. He was
careful about how he placed it, lining it up just as it had been. When he drew
his hand back, he brought with him the heavy weight of the .45 he’d left sitting
up over the mantel. The old man’s eyes immediately fixed on the gun in Dario’s
hand. A slight smile flattened on Dario’s lips as he saw the old man tighten up,
and the reality sink into him. “If I tell these men to take their hands off you,
you promise not to do anything stupid?” Dario said.