The Carrion Birds (20 page)

“Tollville? We haven’t talked to him in a while
now. Not since the mayor brought him down to look at what happened to Angela
Lopez.”

“He used to be a friend of Tom’s. I doubt they are
anymore, but they used to be friends. He might be willing to help us out.”

The ambulance pulled up and the medics jumped out,
both Hastings and Kelly watching them as they gathered their gear. “What about
the drugs?”

Kelly smiled. “You mean the fact that there aren’t
any?”

“Something like that.”

“If it gets the DEA down here I’ll fill bags with
baking soda if I have to,” Kelly said, grinning now and waiting for the
medics.

I
t
came on Tom strongly, all in one sweeping movement, his legs carrying him out
the door onto the porch, where he gagged and coughed, feeling his own bile
bitter at the back of his throat. Gus dead and Billy missing.

He ran a hand beneath his lips, wiping at the
saliva on his chin, his knees bent down onto the wood of the porch and Ray still
inside with Gus. No sign of Billy anywhere Tom had looked and a desire now to
find both his father and the boy. The world had slid away from Tom in that
moment, all of it teetering toward the edge and then going over. No feel for it
anymore.

Getting to his feet, he stumbled down the stairs,
Jeanie now beside him and Claire up out of the car. Without saying anything he
rounded the house looking for his father. Three times he called his father’s
name, waiting each time for a response that never came.

When he reached the little apartment where he’d
grown up, and where his father still lived, he could see where the window
nearest the door had been broken out. The door stood slightly open and there was
a darkness within that Tom didn’t know what to do with.

He called his father’s name twice more, letting his
voice move ahead through the rooms before he, too, came to them, opening closets
and checking behind doors. Tom only loosely aware of Claire as he searched, her
voice coming to him out of the midday light from outside, her silhouette there
in the doorway as he stumbled back toward her.

An intensity to the look she gave him reached down
inside and scraped against the muscles of his chest. Tom with no words yet to
answer her as she asked him again and again what was wrong, what he’d seen
inside Gus’s place, and where Luis was. He put his hands to his knees and
dry-heaved several more times, the sun felt on his back as it hit his shirt and
he fought to get air into his lungs.

It was a while before he was able to form the
words, and he watched her face turn pale with the news.

“What about Billy?” she wanted to know.

He didn’t have an answer and he ran his hands up
through his hair, pulling against the skin of his temples before letting his
hands drop again. There had been a lot of blood inside Gus’s living room. More
than Tom had thought possible for one man.

R
ay
was only moderately aware of the hacking of his cousin outside, choking at the
air. Ray felt a pulse of blood in his veins that spread like a stain through his
chest and swelled at his throat. It had been a long time since he’d allowed
himself to feel this way and he was aware now of the anger surging inside him,
threatening to break through.

His father there in the chair, the blood on the
floor where it had run from his body and collected in a pool.

So much blood already. Everywhere.

Ray took a step back. He hadn’t yet allowed himself
to move, but he did now, feeling the muscles in his legs come unlocked. A pain
all down his chest, all the way to his feet as he moved away, his eyes still on
his father. Not since his wife had been taken from him had he felt this way.
Like an axe had been hefted into the heartwood of his life and the tender golden
flesh beneath exposed.

He turned and ran his eyes around the room. The
place just as he’d remembered it. Nothing changed from when he was a child here
to the days he’d had with his own son crawling around on the living room floor.
Gus and him sitting back as they watched the boy move in erratic lines across
the carpet. So much gone and a pain held deep in his chest.

When his breath came back to him, it came in a
surge—all at once—like someone surfacing from the depths into air. His lungs
hungry for the world above and his pupils dilated black and wide, as if coming
into light from a great darkness. He fell back with a hand held out for support
on the fireplace behind. The flash of memory shifting across his vision like a
slide reel, image after image from a life now completely lost to him. His wife
standing on the courthouse steps, the birth of their child, their first night in
the new house outside of Coronado, the call of sirens before the knock came on
his door, the wreckage of his wife’s car and the black scrape of tires across
asphalt that would never make sense to him.

Where was Billy? A desperate need to know now rose
all the way through him. Where was his son?

He slumped to the floor. Every bad thing that had
ever happened in this town to anyone he loved—his father, his wife, his child,
even Tom—was his fault alone.

K
elly
kept staring at her hat where it lay on the office desk. Hastings sitting on the
other side, waiting to hear what she had to say, and Pierce gone along to the
morgue with the medics. In her hand she held the report that had come in via fax
from the authorities down south. Every one of the men they’d found out at the
Sullivan house that morning had some sort of record down in Mexico. Violent
crimes. Two of them recently released from a jail in the Mexican state of
Sinaloa. At the top of the sheet, Hastings had scrawled the number for the DEA
office up in Albuquerque.

She’d put her hat there on the desk when she’d come
into the office and now she couldn’t stop looking at it. Flat brimmed and wide.
Her own sweat stained into the material. The hat not that different from
Hastings’s, only the tassels around the brim enough to distinguish it as the
sheriff’s hat and not one of her deputies’. She felt worn down—frustrated by all
that had happened and all that she’d been unable to prevent.

“No time like the present,” Hastings said, looking
at the phone on her desk.

“No, I suppose not.” Kelly picked up the phone. She
was still waiting to hear back from Pierce at the morgue, waiting to hear who
the man was they’d found in the Bronco, and while she waited, she thought she
might as well get on with it.

When the secretary at the DEA picked up, Kelly
identified herself and said, “I’m not sure how much Agent Tollville may have
already heard about us down here in Coronado, but I’m calling because I’d like
his help regarding what we’ve found so far.”

Kelly waited while the secretary put her on hold.
With the mouthpiece covered, she asked Hastings to give her some time alone.

After he’d gone she looked at her hat still sitting
there in front of her. With the back of her hand she swiped at it and watched as
it fell to the floor out of sight. When Agent Tollville came on the line, she
began to explain the situation.

I
t was
Jeanie who found Luis and Billy twenty minutes later, their clothes soaked in
the same mud that Tom had seen coated all over Ray that morning. The desert
grime dried into the material. Luis with his arm around the boy, holding him
close to his chest, and the boy shivering slightly even with the sun directly
over them. Luis’s eyes, dust-swollen in their sockets, looked back at Tom with
an erratic twitch that seemed to skitter from Tom to Claire and then back toward
the house.

“I saw them,” Luis said. “We were inside when they
came, Billy in his room and me sleeping on the couch. Gus woke us and told us to
go out through the kitchen as fast as we could. We’ve been here ever since.” He
was leaning now with his back to the rock, the last bit of shade on his face,
while his legs lay splayed out before him in the roasting sun.

“Come on, Dad,” Tom said, reaching a hand down
first to pick Billy up off the ground. “Come with us, it’s going to be all right
now, it’s just us.”

Luis shrugged his son off and pushed himself closer
into the rock, bringing his legs up with him. Eighty-one years old, he looked
frail and small, with his eyes darting all over the desert.

“Who did you see?” Claire asked. She dropped down
to Luis’s level, resting on her haunches as she spoke.

“I thought you were them,” Luis said. “When I saw
you come down that road, I thought you were them again, come back for us.”

With his hands, Billy told them about the light
from the house and how Luis had kept them hidden all through the night and into
the morning.

“Come on, Dad,” Tom said again. He signed to Billy,
“Can you help me with him?” Then to his father, “It’s safe now, it’s us. There’s
no reason to be scared, not anymore.”

Luis fixed Tom with his gaze, looking up at him as
if for the first time. “I heard the shot, I never even went back,” Luis said.
“You saw what they did to Gus?”

Tom didn’t want to say it in front of Billy and he
turned away so that the boy wouldn’t read his lips. “He’s dead, Dad.”

“I can’t go back there,” Luis said. He began to
repeat the words like a mantra, speaking not to them but past them to the
world.

Tom looked to Claire. “Take Billy,” he said. “I’ll
get my father up.”

Tom waited while Claire led Billy away, and then he
reached down and dragged his father to his feet. Tom was surprised at how thin
his father’s arms had become, the muscle tight beneath the skin, the skin
itself, felt through the shirt he wore, loose on his bones.

With his hand behind Luis, they walked back toward
the outbuildings, Claire ahead of them with Billy. Outside, beyond Gus’s house,
Ray was waiting for them. The gun now tucked away in his belt again and the
rifle strapped across his back. Up ahead he saw the boy flinch as he saw his
father, no idea if Billy recognized him at all. A lot of time had passed and the
pictures on the mantel were the only real connection between them anymore.

Claire led Billy into Luis’s place. Luis didn’t
even seem to register Ray as they approached, and Tom brought Luis into his
apartment and laid him down on the bed, waiting over his father till the old man
turned away to the wall and stayed that way long enough for Tom to know he
wouldn’t turn back any time soon.

“He saw them?” Ray asked. He was standing in the
doorway looking in on Tom where he sat at the edge of his father’s bed. Claire
stood a few feet behind, a blanket thrown over Billy’s shoulders and Claire’s
hands rubbing warmth onto the boy’s back.

“He saw them,” Tom said. “But he’s not going to
talk about it, at least not now.” Tom looked from Ray to Billy, trying to see if
the boy understood.

“And the boy?” Ray asked.

“You know he couldn’t have heard anything. Luis was
protecting him through the night. He didn’t hear a thing, and he doesn’t know
anything more than what we can see for ourselves.”

Tom watched to see how his cousin had taken it.
Ray’s father was dead inside the house, and there was nothing Tom could say to
change that. There was only dealing with where they were now and what they would
do. He watched Ray for a moment more, long enough for Ray to lean his weight
into the doorframe, slump-backed, with his head searching the ceiling above.

“Luis is in shock, Ray,” Claire said. “He probably
has pneumonia from being out all night in the rain.” She stopped and worked her
hands together, the dirt rolling from her palms as she pressed them together.
“I’m sorry about what happened to your father,” she said, almost as an
afterthought, though Tom knew her well enough to know it wasn’t. “I didn’t know
him well but I understand from Tom that he was good to both of you.”

Ray nodded. He was looking now toward Billy, and
then when he saw Tom’s eyes on him, he turned back to Luis. “How is he?”

“He’ll get better,” Tom said. “They both will. They
need some time and they need some rest, but they’ll get better.”

“I never thought it would go this far,” Ray
said.

“I know,” Tom replied.

Tom had never thought life could ever be like this.
But it was, and they stood apart from each other for a long while in the silence
that followed until Ray shifted, turning back toward the house, and said,
“You’ll help me bury him, won’t you?”

Y
ou
know any of those boys?” Kelly asked. She was sitting in the passenger seat of
Hastings’s patrol car, watching as an old Buick with Mexican plates went past
and parked around the corner behind Dario’s bar.

Kelly watched the men begin to appear from the side
street, filing out onto Main.

“New recruits for one of the wells?” Hastings
guessed.

“No,” Kelly said, “I really don’t think that’s the
way this town is headed.” She looked around toward the courthouse up the street
and their office in the basement. “How long since we called Tollville?” Kelly
asked.

“Can’t be more than half an hour,” Hastings
said.

They sat in the patrol car, Hastings behind the
wheel and Kelly in the passenger seat, watching as the men went in through the
front door. The last of them paused outside to light a cigarette, shading his
face for a moment with his cupped hands.

“They don’t look like any locals I’ve seen,”
Hastings said.

“Reinforcements,” Kelly said.

“I’ll be glad when Tollville shows.”

“Why?”

“He might at least be able to tell us something we
don’t already know.”

They were parked a hundred feet up the street from
the bar, and when the man pulled his hands back from his face, they could see he
was looking directly at them. Kelly raised a hand, waving at the man, letting
him know they were there looking right back at him. He went on smoking, and
after about twenty seconds of just offering up a dead stare, he threw the
cigarette down and went inside.