The Carrion Birds (26 page)

“Yes, I should have,” Tom said. “But somewhere
along the way I hoped maybe it could.”

Ray grinned. There was blood splattered on the
front of his shirt and up beneath his chin. Tom was certain none of it was
Ray’s. “It doesn’t have to end for us this way, either,” Ray said.

“Ray,” Tom said, and then stopped short, not
knowing how to go on. But knowing he had to—that something had to be said and
that Tom was perhaps the only one who could say it. “You’ve taken this too far,
you’ve hurt yourself in the process, and I think you know the only thing—the
best thing for you, is to turn yourself in.”

“You didn’t want any part of me before, why should
you want any part now?”

“Don’t force this, Ray,” Tom said.

Ray took a step toward the street.

“Don’t,” Tom said, the Baby Eagle in his hand, held
steady on his cousin. Tom’s voice sharp in the stillness of the night, hanging
there between them in the silence.

Ray took another step, watching Tom the whole way.
He never raised the shotgun more than a few inches from the ground, never
pointed it toward Tom.

“Ray, don’t force my hand,” Tom said. But even he
knew the tone of his voice had betrayed him. He knew he could never shoot Ray
and that it was a mistake even being here, but that he’d had to come. He had to
see it for himself to understand it all. His cousin and what he was capable
of.

“You want to point that gun at someone,” Ray said,
“you’ll go inside. You were never going to help me with what needed to be done.
But you’ll see that the job is finished and if you ever cared about my father,
you’ll understand why it needed to be done.” He took another step and kept
moving. His feet carrying him not toward Tom, but away. He was around the edge
of the bar and crossing the street to the opposite side before Tom felt the Baby
Eagle drop, hanging loose in his hand against his thigh. The back door to the
bar partially open and only the bleakest of hopes for those inside as he ran
across the lot.

The odor of spilled liquor and the metallic taste
of blood came out of the bar to meet him, the door pulled wide, and a fog of
clay dust suspended everywhere in the air all the way to the front. He let it
all wash over him for a moment before stepping into the murk within. His eyes
adjusting and the thin track of the hallway going on ahead of him for a space of
fifteen feet before opening into the larger bar. As he went forward he crouched,
listening for any sounds ahead.

A brief fall and clatter of masonry heard ahead of
him and then the crush of brick underfoot. “Tollville?” he called, his voice
weaker than he’d expected. He called the agent’s name again and waited for a
response as something electrical popped and fizzled out. The bar lit for a
moment with a pale blue light, showing the haze of gunfire still in the air.

Tom waited, listening to what lay ahead. The thin
scuffle of footsteps again and then Tollville’s voice calling his name out of
the haze.

Somewhere in between, down the hallway, Tom heard a
choking cough rise out of the air, repeat several times, and then fall silent.
The sound, Tom thought, of someone drowning.

W
alking quickly up Main, trying to get his thoughts in order, Ray dug
the used shells from the shotgun, letting them fall warm to the street. With the
empty sound of the plastic clattering up off the concrete behind him, he went
on.

He’d come out of the bar thinking about all the
years compounded behind him, built up solid as anything in his life. Where he’d
been. What he’d done. And he realized that that road leading south—the one that
had left his son mute and his wife dead—led north as well.

Marianne’s car broadsided right off the road and
the dark scar of those double tire tracks left there on the cement like some
sort of calling card that Ray hadn’t, until now, had any idea how to read.
Though he’d tried. He’d given his heart to it all these years, hoping to replace
something inside him that there was no replacement for.

All of it had been a setup. Marianne all those
years before, all the way to Burnham where he lay on the ground three days ago,
bleeding that pale watery blood from the side of his cheek, trying to speak the
words Ray just wasn’t ready to hear: Memo was playing crooked with all of
them.

Jesus, Ray thought, the rules have changed and
nothing is the same.

He’d been in the bar only a few minutes. Still, it
had been too much, his thoughts now turned to what he would do and where he
would go. He’d let it continue for too long, realized somewhere along the line
that he’d even enjoyed it. He had to remind himself now that his father was
dead. A man who—at his end—had known Ray only as a memory.

Ray had to think about that. Nothing else mattered,
not the drugs or his life. A pressure in his chest he was all too familiar with,
a white-hot pain carrying him forward.

All he had left was birdshot and he brought up a
set of shells and played them down into the barrels. A car came to a stop a
block off, its headlights on him. The driver sat there stunned, then pushed the
car into reverse. Ray snapped the breach closed and moved away across the
street, turning now to keep his eyes on the bar, not expecting to see Tom again,
but not leaving anything to chance.

He hadn’t expected to make it and the thought that
he was alive seemed wondrous and strange. He kept moving away from the bar, the
shotgun at the ready, with no real plan other than to get north to Las Cruces,
to Memo, and to the office where he’d taken his first job.

T
hey
were too far away and Kelly knew it. Nothing from Pierce for five minutes and
then his voice over the radio, bristling with panic, as he described for them
what he was seeing before him on the street.

“Say again,” Kelly said. The lights of Coronado
only a few minutes ahead of them.

“He’s just walking up the street.”

“Who is?”

“The man with the shotgun.”

“Stay there, Pierce,” Kelly said. “Don’t move from
where you are, just stay right there.” Beside her, Hastings had taken the
Mossberg twelve-gauge off the stand and he was feeding shells into the body.

The night air outside her window rushed by,
Coronado ahead, and no way for her to be where she knew she needed to be at that
moment.

“He’s going to walk away,” Pierce said, his voice
diminished, as if coming from a distance, or in a rush. Then nothing and only
Kelly left there on the radio feed calling Pierce’s name.

A
voice caught Ray midstride. Ray moved his head around slow till he could see the
young deputy where he stood, holding his service weapon on Ray. The open door of
the deputy’s cruiser acting as a kind of shield to protect him, and almost no
chance of using the shotgun at that distance. Perhaps the deputy would catch
one, but most likely he’d just spray the car down with birdshot, all of it going
into the metal.

The deputy calling for him to throw the shotgun
down.

All Ray knew was that he wanted to get away, as far
away from this town as he could get. With the deputy still yelling at him, Ray
lowered himself to the ground, crouching low so that he could lay the shotgun
flat out on the cement. It had been stupid to think that there was a possibility
of making it out of Coronado alive. As he raised his hands up, he brought
Dario’s .45 with him.

The sound of the shot echoed out on the silent
street, and Ray looked down at his side where the blood had begun to flow, and
soak at the material of his shirt. The deputy still holding his gun on him, a
look of shock and confusion painted on his face.

Ray put a hand over the wound and felt the warm
blood on his skin. He dropped to one knee, the pain coming now, and the ache of
the bullet’s path through his skin.

With his eyes still on the deputy, Ray brought the
.45 up and fired toward the deputy three times, aiming beneath the patrol car
door, for the deputy’s feet. The young deputy called out as one of the bullets
hit, and he rolled out into the street.

Ray lurched to life. Pulling himself up, he limped
forward. Warm blood now soaking down into Ray’s jeans, the gun faced out on the
deputy while the other hand held tight to the wound as his frayed muscles ground
like sandpaper against his movements.

No time for the shotgun. Nothing left in Ray but
the desire—pure as anything he’d felt in his life—for escape.

As Ray came closer, the deputy raised his own gun
and Ray shot him once in the shoulder. The deputy’s gun flying and Ray moving
forward till he was standing over the young boy. The deputy sucking in hoarse
breaths of air, his lungs gone shallow and the pain evident on his face.

Ray bent and whipped him across the temple with the
butt of the .45, hard enough to knock him unconscious.

T
om
was already on the office phone with the paramedics when he heard the single
pistol shot outside. Tollville looking up from where he crouched, holding a
handkerchief to Dario’s neck. The white cloth beneath Tollville’s hands a
blood-red color and the thin glistening of liquid shimmering in the dim office
light.

Dario long since gone unconscious and Tollville
with his hands held to the man’s neck as he looked up toward Tom. “You know I
can’t leave,” Tollville said. “I can’t leave him here.”

Tom hadn’t said a thing to Tollville about Ray. How
could he? Every minute he was in there—every minute he didn’t say something he
fell a little farther down a rabbit hole of his own making. There was simply too
much to explain now and he hoped with every second that he could somehow find
his own way out.

Outside they heard three more shots, loud as the
first but with a wild urgency. Tollville’s eyes fixed on him till he couldn’t
take it anymore and he went running out of the office and through the bar. He
had no plan but to get outside, away from Tollville and the stink of blood.

What he saw was worse than he expected, and he
found himself moving fast, up the street and toward the receding taillights of
the county cruiser as it went north. A body in the street that he hoped was not
Ray’s and in the same scope of time knew was Pierce’s.

The boy there in the street with his gun fallen on
the cement a few feet away. He was shot through the flesh of his shoulder and
through the foot. The boy stiff where he lay on the street and a surge of fear
through Tom that he might be dead. Guilt strong and fluid as it washed over
him.

Kneeling, Tom felt Pierce’s slow breathing. A welt
on the boy’s face that was now beginning to swell and that Tom knew must have
been where Ray had hit him. Pierce was shot twice, but in places that Tom hoped
would spare his life.

Up the street the taillights could now be seen only
as a small blinking beacon of light far ahead. He looked behind him toward the
bar, then farther still, south toward Mexico and all that lay along the highway.
A blue and red shimmer of light he knew was Kelly.

In a little over a minute she would be there with
him, asking questions Tom couldn’t answer. So he left Pierce there in the road
for Kelly. She would be there soon enough and in the meantime, Tom knew he would
run, chasing after those taillights, Luis’s truck keys in his hand and no idea
whatsoever of what was to come next.

K
elly
stopped her cruiser just a few feet shy of the bar. A pickup truck with missing
plates sitting there with its rear wheels on the sidewalk and the front hood and
cab of the truck all the way through the wall of the bar. Her eyes lingered on
this for only a moment. Hastings got up out of the cruiser with the wash of the
lights now seen on his skin as he closed the door and Kelly searched ahead of
them for Pierce’s cruiser.

No sign of the bubble lights anywhere down the line
of cars parked on Main and no radio contact from Pierce at all. Farther up, an
ambulance rounded the corner, where the cross street for the hospital sat, with
the wail of the sirens reverberating down the street.

Shielding her eyes from the red and white flash,
she reached for the center console and brought up the radio again, repeating
Pierce’s name several more times and listening for a response.

It was only when the ambulance slowed several
hundred feet ahead of her, its wheels turned sideways, that she saw the dark
shape of a body lying in the street.

R
ay
pushed the cruiser past eighty, the speedometer climbing, the needle cresting
ninety and still moving. All around nothing but the empty desert. The lights of
Coronado behind him, and the terrible pain in his side where the bullet had gone
in. Blood soaking its way up through his shirt, and the sweat showing on his
forehead as he drove.

In forty-five minutes he’d hit the interstate, and
then, if he didn’t pass out and roll the car, he’d get himself to Deming. Ditch
the car and find a place to heal before he made his move on Las Cruces. Going
after Dario had been a rash decision, he could see that now. Still, it hadn’t
been the cartel men who had shot him, but some deputy, half his age. There was
some comfort in that, and he went on with the pain in his side pulsing beneath
the skin every time he shifted in his seat.

Looking down at himself in the dim interior light
of the cruiser he saw the dirty hole where the bullet had punched through the
shirt. With his free hand he raised the cloth and surveyed the damage, a slick
sparkle of blood high on his skin, like a fine, dark syrup over everything.

He was a mess and there was no way he would get
past any motel clerks looking the way he did. Shirt stained with blood. Smelling
of gunpowder, sweat, and murder. There was barely a chance he would make it to
the interstate driving the way he was in a stolen county cruiser, swerving into
the opposite lane to pass cars and the long semis heading north.