The Carrion Birds (4 page)

Pulling back onto the road, he felt his foot a
little heavier on the pedal. The old truck engine laboring with the speed,
clucking after the ambulance and cruiser like a bird in heat, a trail of smoke
behind them—visible in the rearview as the truck burned through oil and gas,
going on down the road.

Up ahead, a mile farther along, the accident came
into view, a big-bodied pickup truck turned partway across the centerline. The
ambulance pulled in beside it and the wavering flicker of lights from three
county cruisers parked alongside. Deputy Pete Hastings—a man Tom had trained
fifteen years before—shuttling cars around a blocked-off section of road.

He hadn’t said much to any of these old colleagues
in the years since he’d left the department, not more than to pass a few words
of conversation on the street. Every time he ran into any of them, whether he
was in town to pick up feed for his hogs or running errands for the Deacon
family, Tom acted polite enough, trying as best he could to get himself away as
soon as possible, feigning some urgent appointment. All the while fearing they
saw right through him, felt the hollowness inside him as he shook their
hands.

Tom was a big man, he’d always been bigger than
most, six foot four with wide shoulders. That hollowness inside him too much at
times to bear, while at other times, in the early years when he’d first left the
department, it had been shame that had filled him, compacted with guilt, layered
one on top of the other all the way up through him to the thick black hair he
wore close around his oblong head. He’d known people to call him handsome before
but he’d never truly believed them. His jaw rounded all the way from ear to ear,
hung low like a newborn’s fat-featured face. No matter how skinny Tom ever got
he always maintained the same jaw, covered now with a peppering of black and
white hair he could no longer stop from showing.

People had liked him. They’d always liked him and
it was the reason he thought, at times, he’d been elected for a job he’d never
truly believed he’d receive. Mexican as he was in a town filled up with white
oil barons and Texans brought west to work the oil fields, he was a bit of a
loner. It was the reason he still felt uncomfortable walking the streets of
Coronado and the reason he’d eventually thrown in with his own family, or gone
up against his own kind—depending how one saw it—in a bid for the town’s
approval. Only it hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped and he’d lost his job, as well
as a piece of himself, in the process.

He waited now in the line of traffic built up
around the accident. A big-bodied truck he could only partially see, blocking
half the road. His eyes resting on it for a long time, stirring up some
recognition as he waited his turn for the deputy to wave him past.

Straightening up in the seat, anticipating his
turn, he checked himself in the mirror. On his face the two-day growth of his
beard, coarse along his cheeks, showed the slow untangling of his former self. A
little more weight in his belly now, and the feeling that he was living a life
that he’d never expected.

The deputy waved his hand and Tom moved forward.
Almost the same height as Tom but twice as thin, Deputy Hastings was blond with
a hard round belly and the sallow skin of an inpatient waiting on some vital
transfusion. A distant cousin of Sheriff Kelly’s, he was the oldest in the
department now, one of the few left after the layoffs had come down from the
mayor’s office.

Tom slowed the truck and, with his arm out the
window, asked the deputy what happened.

“Can’t say,” Hastings said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, ‘Can’t say.’ ”

“Really, Pete?”

“On this one, Tom, I can’t.”

Up ahead, Tom saw the ambulance parked near a blue
Ford Super Duty, the bubble lights over the ambulance still flashing. Through
the small side windows he watched the two paramedics working on someone inside.
He looked back at the big Ford and knew for certain now that it was the same
truck he saw every day at his work. “Clint Deacon get into some sort of
accident?”

Deacon’s truck sat at an angle across the road, no
glass on the cement, not much of anything. “He’s a friend of mine,” Tom said. “A
neighbor.” He’d worked for Deacon for two years now, staking fence posts and
herding cattle. Tom’s father, Luis, putting him on when the money had run out of
Tom’s hog business. But still he preferred to call Deacon a neighbor rather than
his boss. Something shameful now attached to this distinction, that Tom had once
been the county sheriff, then a successful farmer himself, but now was just
another laborer like his father.

A car honked behind Tom. Looking over his shoulder
he recognized one of the roughnecks he saw from time to time when he went for
drinks with his father. The man honked again and Hastings waved him past.

Tom waited for the oil worker to pull around and
then went on, “Look, Pete, that ambulance went by me in a hurry. I’m just
asking.”

“I can’t, Tom.”

A hundred feet up the road, Tom saw Sheriff Edna
Kelly walk out from behind one of the cruisers, remove her hat, and wipe the
sweat from her forehead with a small white handkerchief.

Ignoring the deputy, Tom raised his hand and
hollered a greeting. Kelly looked up, and when she recognized Tom, she motioned
for Hastings to let him through.

Kelly had once been his deputy. She was athletic in
build with a runner’s thighs and the broad, rounded shoulders of a girl who had
grown up doing farm work.

“Tomás Herrera,” Kelly said after he’d drawn his
truck up next to where she stood. His name pulled long in mock disbelief. “You
know you can’t be here.”

Tom shrugged. “I was just driving by.”

Jeanie moved over across the bench seat and put her
head out the window, looking for a hand from Kelly. The old mutt a gift from
Kelly all those years before when Tom had been asked to step down from his
position as sheriff so that Kelly could take over.

Kelly let Jeanie get her scent before petting her.
“What are you really doing here?” Kelly asked, standing beside his truck looking
in, a nervous edge to her voice that carried with it the slightest hint of
warning.

Tom pulled the dog back from the window, feeling
the old girl fight him for only a moment before settling in on her side of the
bench. “Nothing, Edna. Just passing through on my way north.”

Kelly waited a moment, perhaps wanting him to say
more, and when nothing came, she said, “I can’t have you here. Not after
everything.” The words were hard, but the voice was soft. A lot of history
between the two of them and Tom wanted to believe it counted for something. He
wanted to believe that maybe Kelly didn’t mind his being here as much as she was
saying.

Still, Tom felt scolded. At thirty-six, she was
more than a decade younger than him, wearing the star he used to wear. The blond
hair he’d always felt an attraction for when she’d been his deputy now kept up
under her hat in a ponytail. All of her seemed new to him, like she’d never been
the person he’d known before. The stress and pressures of the job showing on her
face where new seams had formed in the skin, intensified now by whatever she’d
just walked away from.

“I’m not here to step on any toes,” Tom said,
reassuring her. “You know I’m helping out Deacon these days, trying to make a
little extra money to get my hog farm back on the level. I saw the truck. I just
thought—”

“Clint is fine,” Kelly said, cutting in. She gave a
sideways look toward Deacon’s Ford. “You can see him up there in Pierce’s
car.”

Tom put a hand over his eyes to shade them from the
sun. Up the road Clint Deacon was sitting in the back of one of the cruisers
with the door open. The young deputy Tom had seen around town recently standing
just beyond taking a statement from him. “I didn’t mean to press you,” he said,
trying to be apologetic.

“I know,” Kelly said. “I’m just worried is all. I
haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing.”

“This sort of thing?”

Kelly gave the truck another sidelong glance, but
didn’t say anything more.

“What are we talking about here?” Tom asked.

“We’re not talking about anything, Tom,” Kelly
said, stepping close as the ambulance’s reverse lights came on, and the driver
brought the big square body around toward Coronado. “We just need to hold
Deacon’s truck a little longer.”

Tom watched the ambulance go by, rising up, but was
unable to see who was inside. “For what?”

Kelly took the handkerchief from her pocket and
wiped her forehead again. Down the road the midseason heat played in waves
across the asphalt and under Kelly’s arms there were two dark crescents of
perspiration. “You’re not the sheriff anymore, Tom.”

“I know that. Believe me, I do.” Tom looked over at
his dog, ashamed by Kelly’s bluntness. Kelly and he had had a regular meal every
Thursday for years but it had slowly gotten away from them. Now, looking at the
dog she’d given him, Tom remembered all those Thursday night meals in his living
room, eating in front of the television with the then puppy biting on Kelly’s
fingers with her pinprick teeth.

“I’ve got the next two days off,” Tom said, trying
to ease the mood. “I was just going up the road on my way to see my goddaughter.
I see this up ahead and I think maybe someone is hurt, maybe I can help.” Tom
nodded toward Deacon’s truck. The tires had left marks on the asphalt. “What
happened up there?”

Kelly shook her head and grinned. Looking away from
Tom for a time, she turned back to him, her face now sober. “Sometimes I don’t
know about this job,” she said.

Tom mumbled his agreement. He’d felt the same all
through that last year he’d been with the department. Ray’s wife, Marianne, dead
from a hit-and-run accident, and Ray saying it wasn’t an accident, it was the
cartel. The pressures mounting for Tom to do something about Angela Lopez. A
woman rumored to be working for the cartel. Tom wondering all the while if any
of it was even worth it. Pissed off about the whole thing. He knew he’d taken it
too far, taken the job too seriously. He’d let his cousin Ray talk him into a
place too deep for even Tom to go.

Again, Tom mumbled a reply. Kelly on the verge of
telling him something she wasn’t supposed to, but that Tom was desperate to
know. All of his past now crushed up behind him like a stack of freight come
loose from its tracks. All of him feeling that longing for his former job, for
the weight of the star on his chest, and the purpose that went along with
it.

“I don’t want this to come back on me,” Kelly said,
finally.

“Okay,” he said, fearing if he said anything more
she might hold back.

“Okay,” Kelly said. “You were never here.”

Tom nodded.

“There was a man, a kid really. Mexican. He came up
onto the road. Shot so bad he looked whiter than me.”

“Dead?”

“I don’t know. Got the ambulance out here as soon
as we could, but I don’t know.”

“You think a coyote decided to turn him loose?” Tom
asked, feeling the possibilities begin to churn, the outcomes and story lines
that might have brought this boy up onto the road with a bullet through him.

“Don’t know anything yet, but it didn’t feel
right.”

“Why’s that?”

“The clothes, he didn’t look like someone who would
be out here, you know? He didn’t look like someone who’d spent the last couple
days crossing.”

“Drugs, then?” Tom said. “He could be one of
Dario’s boys. Maybe Dario was trying to settle something.”

“Don’t even say that,” Kelly said. “We don’t need
that kind of talk around here.”

“Well, why not?”

“You know why not,” Kelly said.

“You have to at least consider it.”

“Does this look like something Dario would have
done? In the two or three years since he showed up he’s been quiet. Why this?
Why now? We might throw his name around from time to time, but he’s more careful
than this.”

“Edna,” Tom said, offering up a stern face. “You
know what they’ve been saying about him in town.”

“I know the rumors.”

“He’s cartel, or as close as we’ve had to it since
Angela Lopez.”

“I don’t want to believe it,” Kelly said. “I can’t
afford to go around making accusations without merit. You should know that. It
just doesn’t go that way around here anymore.”

“Well, what, then?”

“Deacon just said the kid came up out of the
desert, just ran right onto the road,” Kelly said. “That’s all I have right
now.”

“Nothing else around?”

“Only a couple out from California, tourists
wanting to see the desert. Came along after Deacon stopped his truck. The woman
in the car was a nurse out of Los Angeles. She helped Deacon with the kid. He
had to use his own shirt to stop the bleeding.”

“And the bullet?”

“Something high powered, it went all the way
through. Once we get this road cleaned up I can get the deputies searching for
it with the metal detector.”

Tom looked up to the west where the hills flowed
down from the Hermanos Range like a long, smooth blade bent on its side.
Hillsides branched with arroyos, showed green where the locust grew up out of
the high desert in thickets. “Whoever shot this boy could just be sitting up
there watching. You need to send someone now, you understand,” Tom said, trying
to check himself. He wasn’t the sheriff anymore.

“You know what I’m working with here, Tom. We’re
not trained for this. We can do a traffic stop, chase a rattler off someone’s
porch, but this is a whole other kind of situation.”

“What about the state police?”

“The mayor wants this handled in-house—”

The breath burst from Tom’s nostrils before he had
time to stop it.

“He doesn’t want any outside attention,” Kelly
finished. “You know how things are around here. Oil’s gone. Nothing’s keeping
them here, and the mayor knows it.”