The Carrion Birds (28 page)

Tom stood there looking at the cool blue light
everywhere, enough light from the full moon above to make out the hoofprints ten
feet in front of him in the night.

“Let him go,” Luis said from the porch. “He’s gone
now. He’s not coming back.”

He didn’t respond to his father and he knelt closer
to the ground, examining the cut of the hoofprints, the edges slowly slipping
away in the wind. They headed away north in a low gallop. He didn’t know what to
do. The country ahead a flat wash all the way to the oil station and the
mountains, then growing rougher as the land became steeper. It was horse country
and he walked back inside the stables looking for a saddle.

K
elly
let herself into the department office and closed the door. Every one of the
overhead lights had been left on. The room feeling foreign to her in the night
with all five desks still arranged in rows through the office from when there’d
been money to pay for the deputies who sat in them. Hastings down at the bar
with the state police and no one inside the office now, though she’d hoped to
see Tom sitting there waiting for her the way he had been that first day at the
hospital, with his feet up, wanting to talk.

She went through to her office and looked in. From
beneath the desk she heard a clink of metal on metal and she almost jumped when
Jeanie popped her head around the edge of the desk and looked up at her.
“Hello,” Kelly said, bending down to put a hand out for Jeanie. “Where’s Tom
gotten to?” The dog simply looked up at Kelly where she knelt. “He’s not giving
you back, is he?”

Kelly left Jeanie in the office and sat at Pierce’s
desk. She put her head in her hands, taking three quick breaths, then holding
the fourth, feeling it burn deep down in her chest.

She picked up the phone and dialed the hospital,
watching Jeanie where she lay inside the office. The hospital had no update as
she listened to the doctor give her the rundown again on Pierce. She didn’t ask
about Dario and she didn’t care. It was out of her hands.

For a long time she just sat there. She wanted to
pull the phone line right out of the wall, break the phone on the floor, and
stomp on it till there was nothing left but bits of wire and plastic.

Outside she heard the whoop whoop of the DEA
helicopter moving in off the desert. Tollville would be looking for her now, and
soon they’d get out there to see what they could see. Tollville had said Tom had
been in the bar with him, that Tom had even worn a sheriff’s department vest and
helped out. It was a lot to take in, and she ran her eyes around the room,
searching for any sign, knowing that only an hour before, Tom and Tollville had
been inside the office, along with Pierce.

She heard the helicopter circle once over the town,
the spotlight moving past the office windows. And though Kelly knew she would
go, she wasn’t quite ready yet, and she picked up the phone again and dialed the
old familiar number.

She let the phone ring five or six times, waiting
as the machine clicked over and she heard Tom’s voice come on. She waited for
the tone but at the last minute hung up.

Out in the parking lot she saw Tollville—through
the light of the helicopter and the windblown dust the rotors were kicking
up—moving toward the office. He was inside the department by the time she got
Claire’s answering machine, and he was at the desk by the time she remembered
the crowd of people outside the bar and the faces she had seen there.

With one hand held up to quiet Tollville, she
radioed down to Hastings and told him to ask Claire if she’d seen Tom
anywhere.

When Hastings came back on he said Claire didn’t
know where Tom was, but she could identify the truck sticking through the front
of the bar, that she’d seen it earlier that day, and it belonged to Gus
Lamar.

Day 4

T
om rode
the brown mare north through the desert, a few minutes past midnight and the
moon above at its midpoint.

As he rode the light shifted, blue to black,
beneath what remained of the clouds. The trail lost and then found. The tall,
spiked fingers of ocotillo rising in places and the brittle scrub everywhere on
the plain like dust across the darkened valley. After a while he saw it clear,
the two burnished tire tracks left in the desert sand, where years before
there’d been a road leading north. The hoofprints leading on.

He didn’t know what he hoped for. Ray had shot a
deputy, he’d murdered more than ten men, and he was out there still. All of it
went against anything Tom could ever accept as a peace officer. But Ray was his
cousin, a month older than him, and they’d been like twins once, growing up
together and thinking for the longest time that they would always consider
Coronado home. Now, Tom didn’t know how he felt, and he rode north.

The old road leading on and the small dip to the
north where the Hermanos Range slipped almost to the surface of the desert
before rising again in a series of endless hills, covered in a web of pinyon and
locust. Then farther on, the white dusting of snow high up where last night’s
rainstorm had come across the peaks.

He saw jackrabbits stand on hind legs, then go
skittering off through the desert at high speed. He surprised birds, bedded down
beneath the creosote, sending them twittering into the night sky, circling until
he was safely past. Behind, the desert went on in a roll of blue hills all the
way to the state police roadblock. The cars trailing away from the mountains
like a necklace of precious stones along the highway.

Not a single cloud above now as he came up the
valley and saw the rusted tin roof of the old oil station sitting amid a hollow
enclave of desert sand. The station only one room, the windows broken from their
frames, and the old wood boards that made up the exterior looking worn and
petrified by the desert sun. A place that had at one time offered a bit of
protection for his father and the men he worked with. A memory now pulled loose
from his childhood of riding north through the desert with Ray, carrying meals
up from the ranch kitchen for the oilmen.

As they’d ridden north, they’d searched out
snakeskins, cast away on rocks and bits of brush. They’d made games out of it
all, chasing each other and turning up the dust. The road they’d used now
nothing but two tracks of open land, no more than a foot in width in places, now
often slipping completely from sight.

With the one-room building a hundred yards away,
Tom dismounted and moved on foot toward the closest window. Ahead, he saw where
the oil well once stood, now a heap of rusted scaffolding on the ground. The
moon behind him as he went and his own dark silhouette stretched out in front of
him, touching brush and sand seconds before he, too, passed the very same
spot.

He went with the pistol raised on the shack, the
road he’d followed through the night flush against the oil station. Peering in
through the first window, Tom saw nothing in there but shadow, dark corners, and
broken wood floors dusted with the fine sediment of time. No Ray. No horse. Not
a sign that his cousin had set foot in the place.

Tom looked back the way he’d come, the horse
standing there, tied into a growth of sagebrush. Nothing else around.

Just twenty paces farther on, he saw the water pump
he’d once used as a child. The iron rusted and flaky to the touch. Kneeling, he
examined the ground. The road ending here, not all at once, but drifting off
little by little, the desert eating it with time. Ray’s boot prints visible in
the sand where he’d circled the pump trying for water. Tom’s own hands stained
with small bits of rust as he tried the pump, cold and brittle under his palms.
The metal so eaten away it came off in his hand like scales.

For a minute or more he just stood there taking it
all in. The hillside rising a thousand feet up out of the desert, through barren
rock outcroppings and thick stands of pine and juniper. The high landscape above
and a million different places to hide. The road ending and the bare horse track
moving on, upward, over the crest of the mountain, and probably down again, on
toward the towns and cities beyond.

Tom moved back toward his own horse and untied the
reins. He mounted and pushed the horse on. He was about a hundred feet past the
oil station, riding through a small grouping of rock, when the bullet buzzed by
and hit the sand a few feet behind him. The horse skittered beneath him,
sidestepping. The crack of a rifle somewhere high above on the hillside. And
then the next bullet whizzed over the head of the horse, causing it to rise,
legs clawing the cool night air. Tom trying for a hold on the horse, his hands
gripped tight to the reins but nothing there as the horse bucked. No support,
and the brief uncontrollable terror as he fell, hitting the ground hard.

He came up with one side of his face covered in the
fine desert sediment, his gun out, and his eyes looking from one rock to the
next. Looking for anything that would offer the least bit of protection.

The brown mare he’d been riding now far behind him,
running, and the crack of the rifle again, the horse jumping, then surging off
through the desert in the direction she’d come.

Up the hill nothing moved. He looked behind him at
the shack, and then he looked up the hill again. Nothing there to see. Dead if I
do, dead if I don’t, he thought. The sand still clinging to his face.
Perspiration showing now on his brow. He got up and ran, straight on to the
hill, the cover of locust before him, the green tufted tops of a thicket of
pinyon up ahead.

The crack of a bullet three feet in front of him,
the sand jumping, and Tom sliding to a stop and then turning again for cover. He
was halfway to the protection of a large rock when another bullet hit just
behind him, clipping a stone, the echo of the ricochet carrying past him down
the valley.

K
elly
knelt in Gus’s living room, examining the blood dried in a rough pool beneath
the chair and spattered up on the wall, the indentation of a single bullet hole
in the frame of the door behind. Across the room Luis waited for her to say
something, his hand up on Billy’s shoulder, keeping him from wandering. The boy
dressed in his pajamas, his eyes turning from Kelly back over to Tollville, and
then across the room to where the television sat on mute, showing an old movie
on the screen.

Tollville stood a few feet away from the boy, near
the door, looking out through the wire on the white bulk of the DEA helicopter.
It was a quarter past one in the morning and they’d come up the valley with the
spot on and the pilot guiding them along the highway until Kelly herself had
shown them where to turn to the west.

Pierce’s cruiser sat in front of the house as if it
had just been parked there for the night, looking just as it did in the
department parking lot. The only difference a layer of blood soaked into the
driver’s seat.

“You should have called us,” Kelly said, turning
now toward Luis. There were a million different things she wanted to say to him,
but not a one of them appropriate to the situation at hand. Just a few days ago
she’d sat at a table with him and had a beer. The last couple days now feeling
to her like some sort of layer built deep down into her skin, strong as mortar
over brick, stopping her from saying all the things that might normally have
come to her in that moment. “You say this is Gus’s blood?”

Luis nodded, he was watching Tollville now, and
Tollville was watching him.

“And the blood in the bathroom?” Kelly said. “The
bandages on the floor?” She didn’t want to come out and accuse anyone just yet.
She knew time was a factor, that everything was a factor at this point. She
hoped to God that Tom had been smarter than all this, but she knew, too, that
he’d gone down this road before, and that she had probably been his only
salvation. “If you want us to help,” Kelly went on, “I need to know what
happened here, I need you to tell me the truth, Luis.”

Thirty seconds passed and no one said anything.

“You remember Raymond Lamar?” Tollville asked, his
voice cutting through the silence. He walked over to the mantel and pulled one
of the pictures down and handed it to Kelly.

Kelly stared down at the picture in her hand. It
was an old photo of Ray, Luis, and Gus out at Gus’s well up the valley. “Of
course I do,” Kelly said. “I was the one who brought the news about his
wife.”

Tollville walked past Kelly into the kitchen and
saw the smattering of blood that dotted the linoleum floor. “Tom came by your
office and he was looking to talk with you,” Tollville said. “Right now I want
to give him the benefit of the doubt. I want to say that he came by your office
to tell you about whatever has been going on down here, and what happened to
Gus.” He turned and went into the bathroom, where the bandages had been left on
the floor. Kelly and Luis exchanged a look.

“I’m not accusing Tom of anything, but I know how
this looks for him,” Tollville said from the bathroom. “Tom came into your
office because he had something to say and for whatever reason, he wouldn’t say
it to me.”

“I didn’t know about any of this,” Kelly said. She
was looking to Luis with desperation in her eyes, urging the man to say
something. To correct whatever it was that Tollville was implying.

“I’m not after Tom,” Tollville said. He had come
out of the bathroom and he was standing in the living room again, speaking to
Luis. “I know all about Billy over there, I know what was done to him, and what
that did to Ray. I know there’s a lot this family has gone through, but I need
to know anything you can tell me about Ray Lamar, and I need to know it now. You
understand?”

Luis glanced toward the boy and then back to
Tollville. “Tom always looked up to Ray,” he said. His voice low in the
room.

“Luis,” Kelly said, but she didn’t finish. She
wanted to tell him to stop, but she knew she couldn’t. She didn’t want to go
down this path with Tom again, she couldn’t.

“Can you give us a moment, Edna?” Tollville asked.
He was standing there just as he had been before, his eyes now on her, waiting
for her to leave.

She looked to Luis and he met her gaze and nodded.
“It’s okay,” Luis said. “Why don’t you take Billy out back to my place and turn
the television on for him.”

She was going out the door with an arm around
Billy’s shoulder when she heard Tollville ask, “Tom and Ray pretty much grew up
here, didn’t they?”

T
here
was a fine soot of dust on Tom’s face where he sat with his back to the large
rock. Five minutes ago he’d heard the steady beat of the helicopter come up the
valley toward Gus’s place. Then watched the red and green navigation lights over
the desert to the south. The helicopter circling the ranch, before drifting down
in a slow descent.

A couple minutes before he heard the helicopter,
he’d tried to look around the edge of the rock at the slope beyond. A bullet
passed no more than a foot from his face and lodged in the ground near his feet.
His body pulled back around the protection of the rock before he even heard the
shot.

He was breathing hard, and when he had time to
catch his breath, he yelled out, “Ray, goddamnit, stop shooting, it’s Tom.” He
wanted to think that Ray was messing with him, that he wouldn’t shoot him, and
that all of this was just a way of trying to slow him down—bucking the horse
like that and forcing him to the ground. Even if Ray didn’t mean to shoot him,
Tom knew Ray had been a good shot with a gun like that even when they were kids,
and he could only assume he’d gotten better with his time in the army.

He waited, listening to the desert. The
early-morning sounds of insects. The cold touch of the air on the skin of his
face. He straightened his back on the rock. A miniature dust devil set loose at
the heel of his boot, disappearing after a while as it moved off through the
creosote.

“You hear me, Ray?” he yelled, listening for a
response.

W
hen
Tollville found Kelly she was sitting on Luis’s small cot with her back against
the wall, the boy sitting beside her watching TV. The words almost sour in her
mouth as she asked about Tom, Luis, and what Tollville had been able to find on
Ray Lamar. Though she could guess already what had been said.

“I suppose I should explain myself,” Tollville
said.

“No,” Kelly said. “You don’t owe me that. You never
did. I didn’t mean to get in your way back there.”

“I meant what I said in there. I’m not after Tom. I
know he didn’t do any of this.”

“He helped though, didn’t he?”

“He had some part, but I know going after Tom would
only confuse this, it would put another layer between us and the men I really
want to see go to trial.”

“You’re saying you’re going to protect him?”

“Here,” Tollville said, and he handed her a cloth
he’d taken from his pocket with a metal slug inside. “It’s a .45 round,”
Tollville said. “Other than the shotgun we found, everything else has been from
a nine-millimeter, hasn’t it?”

“Everything since Gil Suarez.”

Tollville moved his eyes from where she sat to the
boy beside her. “Come outside with me,” he said.

After she’d risen and gone outside, she could see
Luis out in front of the house, his truck doors open and a few things from the
house gathered in the bed of the truck. “They’re going to go up the hill to the
neighbor’s place for a while,” Tollville said. “The call has already been made
and they’re expecting them.”

“What’s going to happen to Luis?”

“Nothing. I believe what he told me, and I’m going
to keep him out of this if I can. I don’t know if either Tom or Luis will come
out of this untouched, but I gave Luis a promise to do all I can.”