The Carrion Birds (18 page)

“They’re going to be all over this,” Eli said, his
voice giving it all away.

“It can’t be helped,” Kelly said. “None of us can,
not anymore.”

O
utside, the sun felt warm and thick on Dario’s skin as he stepped down
off the porch to stand in the light. He carried with him a dish towel and as he
stood, surveying the surroundings, he toweled his hands down and watched as the
blood came off onto the material.

Up the valley he could make out the aged oaks,
barren of leaves, the branches pointing upward into the air like skeletal hands.
In the end there was nothing he could have done for Gus. And he didn’t really
think the man had feared death until it had been upon him, those last painful
breaths of air before his lungs stopped moving and the hiss of wind went out of
his lips.

Now, Dario would wait. He would hold his ground, go
back to the bar and wait for what he knew would eventually come. The anxiety he
looked forward to, growing in his heart with each hour, wondering when Gus would
be found. And then what would become of the anger that would follow.

Behind him the men were coming out of the house
just as he had a minute before. The sun strong on their faces and their eyes
sliding, almost reptilian, as they came off the porch, looking from side to side
down the valley.

When they’d gone past him and moved on to the cars,
Dario took from his pocket the small prescription bottle and placed it on the
last step of the porch. Raymond Lamar’s name faced out toward whoever might find
it first.

With the day’s work ahead of him he turned and met
Medina by their car. Dario knew he would be moving on soon enough, but for now
he would wait. He would finish what needed doing—he would try to make the most
of it—before he was shipped off to the next town, where life would go on for him
the same as it always had.

W
ithin
five minutes of leaving Eli’s office, Kelly was on the phone with the Border
Patrol. Through her open office door she saw Pierce listening to her as she
explained the situation. When she was done she depressed the switch hook and
waited for the tone.

Not a damn thing to do but wait. She called over to
Tom’s place, but got no answer. In the morning, looking over the house, they’d
paced out the gunfight, Tom asking about any .308s she might have found, and
Kelly had nothing to tell him.

She put her gun belt on and then her hat. “Fuck
it,” she said. Moving around the desk toward the office door.

“Fuck what?” Pierce said.

“It.” Kelly passed Pierce where he sat. She didn’t
know quite what she was going to do yet, but she was done depending on Eli, on
Tom, on everybody who might know something and said nothing. “Radio me if
anything happens,” she told Pierce.

Outside, the rainstorm had gone by hours before in
the night, and the sky hung motionless above, clear and blue. Weather reports
saying it was only the first band of rain expected for the region. All of it
coming in from the West Coast. California soaked with it. Storm drains
overflowing and all of it running right back down into the Pacific.

She walked to her cruiser, watching the glint of
the sun on the metal and the dust all over the body. Nothing seemed clear to her
in the way it had once been. The town seeming to tip away from Kelly as the sun
rolled away above in the sky. Last night’s rain coming like a flood, leaving
disaster in its wake—all of it crowded in upon her and the thought in her head
that it would be nice if that was all she had to deal with.

T
om
scooped the last of the eggs off his plate, paid the bill, and then walked
outside to where his truck sat in the parking lot of the Lucky Strike Diner.
He’d left the Sullivan house feeling wound up, unsure of what to do next. He
knew his father and Deacon would be expecting him by now, waiting on him to come
up the long road and start the day’s work. But he wasn’t ready just yet. He
couldn’t shake the frozen images of those men laid out in front of the Sullivan
house. All the blood washed away in the rain from that body thirty feet from the
porch, like the man had just been dropped from the sky.

He glanced at his watch, a quarter past eleven.
Three hours late for work already. With his finger he depressed the hook on the
pay phone, listened for the tone, and then dialed the number. When he got
Deacon’s wife on the phone, she said Deacon was outside with the cattle, and Tom
told her he’d overslept, and would be by as soon as he could.

Claire’s Volkswagen was still in front of his house
when he pulled up. The little Beetle just sitting there like it had the day
before. He needed to grab his gear for the day and get going. No time for this,
he thought, as he opened his own truck door, waiting as Jeanie found a foothold.
No clouds left in the sky and a painting of mud on the body of the Volkswagen
behind the wheels. The sound of the pigs in their pen, heard through the wire
fence, and the smell of their manure in the midday air.

He closed his truck door and went up the porch
stairs. By the time he had the front door open, he knew something wasn’t right.
Jeanie making a low grumbling sound in the back of her throat as Tom let the
door swing open on its own weight. Claire there on the far cushion of his couch
and his cousin, Ray, sitting in the old lounge chair.

On the coffee table, peeking from beneath the
magazine in front of Ray, the long barrel of a hunting rifle, and close by what
looked to be a Ruger handgun. Claire gave Tom a desperate look but didn’t say
anything. Tom’s attention not completely on her, but on what Ray was going to do
and why he was here in Tom’s house after all these years. Though Tom could
guess.

“That rifle take a .308 cartridge, Ray?”

Ray leaned forward and pushed the magazine away so
that the wooden stock of the gun could be seen. “I believe it does,” he said.
“Go on and close that door, Tom. Leave the dog outside for a bit, would
you?”

Tom pushed Jeanie out and closed the door. He could
still hear the dog making that low growling sound outside, followed close by a
series of barks. Turning to face Ray again, he said, “You’re not in the best
shape, Ray. You’re looking like maybe you had a hell of a night and maybe not
that good a morning.”

The clothes Ray wore were dried a reddish-brown
tint from the desert. One sleeve missing from his shirt, and a set of
ill-fitting shoes pushed up on his feet. “You all right, Claire?” Tom asked,
turning now to face Claire where she was watching him from her side of the
couch. Tom with no idea how long the two of them had been here like this, but
willing to guess it had been a while and that the mayor and the rest of the
staff would be wondering where Claire was at this point, just as Deacon was
wondering about him.

“I’m fine,” Claire said. “Your phone’s been ringing
though. There’s a good number of messages from Deacon.”

“Take a seat, Tom,” Ray said, pulling himself up in
his chair and gesturing to a spot next to Claire. “There’s been some changes
around here, I see. I never expected you to end up working for Deacon.”

Tom sat, looking to Ray. The guns on the table
between them, just as close to Ray as they were to Tom. The only difference, the
barrel of that hunting rifle lay faced toward Tom. “You know you’ve always been
welcome here, Ray, but not like this.”

Ray looked to the coffee table and then moved a
hand out and set the guns out of sight on the floor. The feel of the couch
shifting as Claire tensed at his movements. When Ray looked back up at Tom, he
said, “I’m in trouble.”

“I know,” Tom said, watching his cousin now, trying
to understand what he would do next. “There’s people that are looking for you
and not just the law. The DEA is going to get the call at some point today, if
they haven’t already. You made a pretty good mess out of things.”

“I shouldn’t even be here,” Ray said. “I came back
because I wanted to start again. I thought I’d give it a chance. But it didn’t
work out that way for me and I should have been gone from here two days ago. All
of it’s fucked now, you understand?” Ray pushed a hand up his face, scrubbing
hard at his cheek with his palm.

“I don’t understand,” Tom said. “I told you you’re
welcome here and I mean it, but you need to help me with this if I’m going to
help you.” He looked from his cousin to Claire. “You mind if Claire just calls
in to her office, just lets them know she’s sick or something? With all that’s
been going on around here there’ll be people looking for her soon enough, if
they aren’t already.”

Ray took his face back from his palm and ran his
eyes across to the phone where it sat on a side table by the door. Ray nodded
toward the phone and Claire hesitated, then rose, watching Ray the whole
time.

When Claire began speaking into the phone, Tom
said, “Burnham’s dead, isn’t he?”

Ray nodded. He was watching Claire where she stood
at the phone.

“All of this over some drugs?” Tom said.

“A lot of drugs,” Ray said, turning back to look at
Tom. “Though I’m starting to think it’s about more than that.”

“The cartel?”

“I don’t know,” Ray said. “I’d have thought maybe
so, but I’m just working here, I’m not the one in charge. You should know that
about me.”

“You’ve been gone a long time, Ray.”

“Whatever’s been done,” Ray said, “the actions I’ve
taken—I didn’t mean any of it. I was just doing my job. You should know that,
shouldn’t you?”

Tom sat looking out on the sunlight that drifted in
through the living room windows and lay flat along the floor in a yellow
rectangle. “I’m not the sheriff anymore, Ray. I don’t have that sense of duty.
There’s no right way anymore.” Across the room he saw where Claire was standing
watching them both, her hand held down on the phone as it sat in its cradle. “I
don’t need to do what’s expected of me,” Tom said.

Ray worked his jaw, the muscles showing on the side
of his face. He wouldn’t raise his eyes from where he’d dropped them. “I’m sorry
about all of this,” Ray said. “About you losing your job and about this
now.”

Tom glanced to Claire again, he didn’t know why,
but he needed her approval, he needed to know if what he was about to say would
matter to her and in what way. “I’m telling you I can help you if you care to be
helped,” Tom said to Ray. “There’s people here who want to help you.”

Ray still wouldn’t look up. Claire shifted a little
where she stood, looking unsure of whether she should return to the couch.
There’s no right way, Tom thought again. There was no clear path, not anymore.
The road he’d followed had taken him here and he’d thought for the longest time
that it had been the right road, but now he thought maybe it hadn’t been and
there were greater things at play in this world than doing what everyone
expected of you. “I can help you,” he said to Ray again. “I want to help
you.”

T
he
Border Patrol plane had passed Kelly fifteen minutes before, the drone of the
engine working over the landscape long after the body of the plane was lost from
sight. She didn’t know what they would find, or if they would find anything. She
sat with her feet pulled up on the bumper watching the plain of the desert fall
away before her toward Mexico, only ten miles away to the south.

She didn’t have much hope in any of it anymore, the
law, this town, the mayor, or even herself. All that she’d learned over the
years seeming to have abandoned her. A feeling inside her of pure loneliness,
and a certainty that whoever had shot up the Sullivan house last night, leaving
those men dead in the dirt, was gone now. The Border Patrol plane was simply
wasting its time as it came back north, wasting her time, too.

She couldn’t help but think that if she’d just been
a little faster to bring her concerns to Eli, to stand up for herself, maybe she
wouldn’t be sitting here on the bumper of her cruiser listening to the useless
drone of the plane. Maybe she never should have taken the job, maybe it had all
ended for her the moment it had ended for Tom. The last few days had made her
feel hopelessly beyond herself, cut loose and helpless to stop anything in this
town.

From inside the cruiser the radio crackled on and
she jumped at the sound, her nerves quickening. She was off the hood and inside
the car by the time Pierce began relaying the information about the Bronco the
pilots had found just north of town.

“What did they see?” Kelly asked. She had the radio
pulled out on its cord and held close to her lips as she watched the sky to the
north, trying to get a position on the plane.

“They said there’s something in the passenger
seat,” Pierce answered, the static shift of the radio bouncing up out of the
speaker, and in the background the relay of the pilot’s voice through the
intercom at the office.

Already she had the door pulled closed behind her
and she was turning the key in the ignition. The town just up the road and then
the desert highway leading north. Somewhere up there the plane was circling and
she felt ready for whatever it might bring.

A
ll
the men who remained—Ernesto, Carlos, César, and Medina—stood out at the bar,
drinking and talking. Dario in his office with the door closed. The phone held
to the side of his face.

“Felíx está muerto,” Dario said.

“Lalo está muerto,” he went on.

“Hector está muerto.”

There was a bitterness in his mouth as he said
their names. All the men he’d known, doing this work, carrying on like this
through life like death would never find them. But it would, and Dario knew his
time would come, when he’d have his chance to test himself against the
inevitable. Trying as best he could to draw blood.

It wouldn’t be long now and he listened to the men
out there at the bar, all of them knowing it was only a matter of time. Gus
Lamar’s body up there, sitting in his own house, waiting for whoever might find
him first.