The Carrion Birds (5 page)

Tom couldn’t help it. He was thinking about the
Lopez woman he’d shot ten years before, how he and Kelly had come through the
door looking for evidence to convict her, to send her back down to Mexico.
Nothing there and Angela Lopez running to protect her infant daughter, Tom
making the split-second decision he would never be able to take back. No drugs
on her at all, nothing to say she was guilty of anything. “If this thing turns
out to be drug related it could get complicated.”

Kelly took a moment with her words, thinking it
through. “Yes,” she said, wiping at her forehead again. “I know that.”

Tom knew just by being there he was putting Kelly
at risk. He wanted to apologize for the things he’d said, for trying to give
Kelly orders he no longer had the right to give.

“Look,” Kelly said after a time had passed. “You
can’t repeat any of this.”

“I know. I was just passing by on my way up to see
my goddaughter.”

“That’s good of you,” Kelly said. “But maybe now
you should be going. I don’t want this getting back to Eli.”

“The mayor?” Tom said, disappointment any time he
heard the man’s name.

“If this thing does turn out to be a murder—and it
looks like it will—I don’t need him questioning how you happened on us.”

Tom said he understood. There had been a hearing
after Angela Lopez had died. The mayor, Eli Stone, pushing for the judge to
punish Tom. He’d been looking for jail time. The judge called it a freak
accident. The woman, out of Nogales, had ties to the south. She was known to
hold drugs. She was dangerous. Sheriff Herrera had just been doing his job. The
only other officer on the scene, Deputy Edna Kelly, had given her statement at
the hearing, agreeing with everything Tom had said.

There was no excuse, and Tom knew it. There never
would be. Not for any of it. He glanced up and caught Kelly’s eyes on him.

“All these years and you still go up to visit that
kid?” Kelly said.

“Sometimes I don’t know why I take the time. Why I
think to even do it. Someday I know they’ll tell Elena all about me and I worry
about how that will seem, how I will look after all these years. Sometimes I
think it’s best to just leave it alone,” Tom said. He was looking up the road
now, planning his course.

When he turned back he saw the shift that had come
over Kelly’s face, showing the disappointment at what he’d just said. He knew
she saw what had happened to the Lopez woman differently—all of it. Everything
was different for her. His cousin Ray wasn’t Kelly’s cousin, it wasn’t as
personal for Kelly, none of it ever was, and he knew she’d never understand—not
fully—all that had come before and led them to that house where Elena sat on the
floor as a baby and her mother rushed to protect her.

Kelly shook her head in that slow way she did
sometimes, the way she had always done when she thought she knew something
better than Tom. The way she did when she saw everything in a brighter light
than Tom could see, that he wouldn’t permit himself to see. And Tom knew all
this, knew he couldn’t see any of it because he wouldn’t let himself. So he said
again, just to nail the facts down, “I don’t know why I go up there
anymore.”

The smile cracked on Kelly’s face. “You know why
you go.”

“Yes, I guess I do,” he said, knowing it was guilt,
knowing there were a million different reasons he needed to go up that road to
visit the girl who had once sat, just eighteen months old, on her mother’s
floor.

“You tell Heather and Mark hello for me.”

“I’ll do that,” Tom said.

“How old is Elena now?”

“She’ll be eleven this coming March.”

“Give her a kiss for me, too.”

“I will.” He was about to leave, then stopped and
asked, “You going to be okay out here?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Just get on before the
mayor finds out you were up here.”

T
here
was the faint beginning of a smile on Edna Kelly’s lips as she walked over to
talk with Deputy Hastings. She didn’t know how Tom had come across them on the
one highway leading north out of the valley. The story about Elena could have
been true. The questions he’d been asking were not only on her mind, but
probably on the minds of all her deputies as well. Ten years since they’d had a
death like this and no saying how it would be treated by the mayor.

All she could hope for was that none of this blew
up on her. The boy coming up onto the road, blood all down his shirt and the
gaping hole in his chest where the bullet had gone through. She didn’t know what
to make of it. All of it so close to her own history when she’d been the deputy
and Tom the sheriff. Ten long years to dig herself out from under that, to dig
herself out from what could have easily been called a murder, but, in the end,
wasn’t.

Her one real worry was that she’d get thrown in
with Tom. She saw the way everyone treated him now. Like he was some sort of
troubled kid come in off the street looking for a job. It was a sad way to look
at a man who had given his life to a town, and then received nothing in return.
All those years and he made one mistake. Kelly hated them for it sometimes. She
hated the mayor, the judge, and the people in the town who looked at him that
way, like he wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.

Kelly knew that whatever Tom did these days,
raising hogs or helping out over at the Deacon property, his thoughts were never
far from what was going on in town. She didn’t blame him for that. She knew he’d
been cut loose over what had happened to the Lopez woman, that he had to be let
go. As she walked the yellow line of the road to talk with her deputy, it was
just that, though, that worried her about Tom. He’d never truly stopped being
the sheriff, even though everyone had stopped believing in him.

“Rumor has it Tom has got one of our old radios at
his house,” Kelly said to Hastings, trying to get him to smile.

Hastings removed his hat and wiped his forehead.
“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Kelly said. “He has some amazing
timing.”

A car approached and Hastings waved it by. “His
timing is what got him into trouble.”

“Yes,” Kelly said. “It did.”

She was the sheriff because of Tom. Ten years ago
he’d asked her to come with him. Said he’d gotten a tip about Angela Lopez,
about something she was up to. Kelly knew the tip had come from Tom’s cousin,
Ray Lamar. She knew, too, that Tom wouldn’t have told her about Ray but she
could see it clear as day. Ray had grown up in Coronado just like the rest of
them. He was the son of Gus Lamar, one of the original oilmen who owned fields
north of town. And, more importantly, she knew Ray was looking for a way to
settle things up without completely going to war.

There wasn’t anything wrong with a law officer
going over to a woman’s house to ask a few questions, to get to the bottom of
things, and to check out the tip she was holding drugs for the cartel.

What was wrong about that day, about following that
tip, was that Kelly knew that Ray and Tom were looking for someone to blame, had
been looking for a long time. The hit-and-run death of Ray’s wife was still
fresh on everyone’s minds in those days.

The news of the accident coming to them one day as
they sat in the department office, the phone on Tom’s desk ringing, and all of
them—six deputies at the time—looking up as they always did, anticipating what
trouble might be on the other end of that line.

It had been Kelly who’d eventually gone out to
Ray’s house, out of town a ways on Perimeter Road, one of a hundred new houses
built all in the same fashion to house the oil workers coming west out of Texas,
to tell him about the accident, to bring Ray to the hospital where his
two-year-old son, Billy, had been taken. The boy surviving only because he’d
been thrown free from the car. Ray’s wife hadn’t been as lucky. Tom himself told
Ray that Marianne had died while Ray waited outside the operating room
doors.

In the weeks that followed, Ray’s business, or the
premise of one, slowly disappeared as he pitched himself against the cartel like
a man slamming his fist into a wall, hitting at it till the bones in his hands
went to jelly, calling in to the sheriff’s office daily.

Perhaps Ray had put his family in disaster’s
course, led them into the canyon as the shadow closed in above them. Perhaps
he’d done that, and perhaps the outcome—what had happened to his family, what
had happened to Ray—was all there was left for him. Kelly didn’t know. She
didn’t know anything about it, but she could say without a doubt that afterward
Ray didn’t let it go, the phone in Tom’s office ringing every day as, little by
little, Ray began to feed Tom information and Tom’s suspicions about the Lopez
woman began to grow.

Beside her, Hastings nudged her elbow. Down the
same road on which she had watched Tom drive north toward Las Cruces, a news van
was now approaching.

“Shit,” Kelly said, lifting her hat back up onto
her head and feeling the sickening wash of an ocean rolling through her insides.
“Eli isn’t going to like this.”

“No,” Hastings said. “I don’t think we’ll like it
much, either.”

The two of them stood there watching as the van
grew bigger, moving south toward them, the waves of heat playing across the
road.

“That true?” Hastings said.

“About what?”

“About Herrera? About the radio?”

“If he has one,” Kelly said, “he’s obviously not
the only one listening in.” About a hundred feet in front of her the news van
slowed, then pulled off the road onto the shoulder, gravel popping under the
tires.

R
ay
Lamar sat on the top step of the porch watching the desert. The house, two
stories in height and constructed of clapboard siding, had been painted yellow
at one time but now appeared dirty and wind-worn in its coloring. It was a
forgotten place, sun-bleached pale as an Easter egg. A house Ray knew only as
the Sullivan house when he’d grown up here, one of the old abandoned homes
outside of Coronado, long forgotten after the big oil companies came through,
buying up the land. So many of them outside the town that Ray and Sanchez had
had their pick, trying as they were to find a place to hide the bag of heroin
and Burnham’s pickup truck.

Looking out on the land that sat before him,
rolling hills populated by creosote and burro bush, the mountains to the east
and north scraped clean to their rocky surface, he was aware that he had lived a
life complete in itself before this one. And that he was now left here in a sort
of afterlife of his own making, which he shared with the memory of his wife,
alone.

They had married after they found she was pregnant,
Ray working in the fields for his father after he’d come back from Vietnam. Oil
the only thing he’d known his whole life and the only skill he had to rely on
here in the world he had left and to which he had returned, wanting simply to
put those years he’d been away behind him. He was young then, in his early
twenties when he’d left, and midway through his twenties when he’d returned.

His relationship with his wife, Marianne, started
long before he’d even come back. Before he’d set foot in the States again and
taken work with his father. Marianne, small in stature, five foot four at the
most, with pale translucent skin and sharp green eyes. In Ray’s memories her
hair tied, dark and brown, behind her in the day, always hung loose at night for
dinner. She was the sister of one of his old buddies from the war. They had
stayed in contact after his buddy had passed, writing letters to each other,
sending them from one world to the next. Those letters getting Ray through his
last few months, writing to her almost as if he were a piece of the brother she
had lost, an extension of the same man, with the same fears and shared
experiences.

Marianne and his son were the reason he’d started
to work for Memo in the first place, wanting to provide for them as the oil went
out of his father’s property. All of Coronado infused in some way by Marianne.
His memory of her drifting by him like a wind, there and then gone again in its
wanderings.

Ray ran a hand up through his hair. He sat on the
porch looking out at all he’d left and now had returned to. Burnham dead at his
feet only hours before and the thought in his head that he hadn’t wanted to pull
the trigger but that he had all the same because it was his job. It was what he
was paid to do, and if it came to it, he knew he would do it again like he had
done it so many times before.

Behind, he heard the porch door open. Casting a
glance over his shoulder, he saw Sanchez standing there, the tips of his white
athletic shoes red as desert dust, and the black sweatshirt and jeans a size too
large on his frame.

“Done?” Ray asked.

“I found a place for the bag inside one of the
walls upstairs.”

“Hidden?”

Sanchez smirked, the look young and arrogant on his
face. Raising his hand to take in the desert and heat-blurred shape of Coronado
farther on, Sanchez said, “This place is falling apart. No one is going to be
surprised if there is a little extra plaster on the floor.”

Ray’s family had been one of the original oil
families to populate the valley before all the big oil companies came through.
Ray’s childhood caught somewhere between the boom and gradual bust. His mother a
Mexican cook and his father, Gus, one of the richest private oilmen in the
valley at the time. White haired even at a young age, with a crooked nose and
the white skin that always burned too easily in the desert sun.

All Ray could see of Coronado from the porch laid
low across the horizon to the south. A town constructed out of memory, barely
visible in the midday heat. But a town that Ray knew was there all the same. The
wooden church with its black iron steeple, the brick courthouse where he’d been
married, and the hospital where he’d been born, all of it in a line off Main,
where the road ran south to north with grain and feed shops, restaurants, and
bars. All of it, even in the years Ray had lived there, slowly creeping off the
edge of the map. In twenty years he doubted it would even exist; a hundred years
more and there would be nothing but foundations and a few iron fence posts.