The Carrion Birds (7 page)

Mark let out a low whistle and took a swig from the
beer. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen them go to the trouble of sending a
news van to Coronado.”

Tom leaned back in his chair, still looking at the
screen as young high school basketball players ran offense across a wooden
floor. “About ten years,” Tom said.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Mark said.

“I know.”

“It just came out.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tom said. He drained the
beer back in one pull and got up to take the bottle into the kitchen.

“Do you think Edna will be okay?” Heather
asked.

Tom stood there in the middle of the living room.
“You know how it goes, they’ll have forgotten about it all by tomorrow. It’s not
like she was the one to shoot him.”

S
heriff Edna Kelly paused over the blood, dried and balled in the sand
at her feet. Kneeling, she pulled a pen from her pocket and with the tip rolled
the bead over once, then stood looking at it. A slight pull felt now in her
stomach, hard and tight against the muscle, threatening some unknown danger.

Out on the highway pavement there was a stain of
blood where the kid had lain down in front of Deacon’s truck, hoping he would
stop. Now, hours later, she could see the news vans waiting for her, waiting
while she and the deputies followed the blood trail back across the plain. The
skewed footfalls of the kid’s erratic pace, a bullet already passed through him,
and the trail showing where he tried to find his footing, stumbled, fell several
times in quick succession, then kept going.

Out on the highway the news vans waited. Three of
them altogether, the last arriving only thirty minutes before while many of the
others had already come and interviewed her, rushing their stories north up to
Las Cruces or Albuquerque. Each of them wanting her to speak the same words into
their cameras that she had said too many times already. She looked down at the
bead of blood in the sand. Perfect in the way it had been preserved. Somehow
standing there in the kid’s path like a rough-hewn jewel simply waiting to be
retrieved.

She’d never wanted this job. Just twenty-six years
old when Angela Lopez died and Eli came to her with the idea of setting her up
as the interim sheriff. Only a week after Tom’s hearing, after he’d stepped
down, and Kelly, whether Eli had his say or not, had started to run the
show.

She was thinking this all through, following the
trail of blood through the desert lowlands. The footprints going on ahead of
her. The gait of the victim pressed into the desert landscape where sand and
blood stood fixed behind him as he ran. The occasional touch of the kid’s hand
as he’d lost balance, teetering onto his fingers to push himself up. A long
divot the length of a body where she saw he’d fallen and moved the earth
forward.

Each step telling its own story until there was no
blood left to follow. Hastings sweeping the sand with a metal detector while
Pierce took pictures of the blood splatter. A thick coating of red soaked into
the ground at his feet. The news vans and camera crew watching them wherever
they went, the portable lights shining a glare over the landscape, creating dark
pools of shadow between the dunes.

When they came to the place the kid had been shot,
they saw how he’d rolled, taking the shot at the top of the dune, then spotting
the hillside all the way down.

They had come to the edge of the flatlands, the
highway a quarter mile behind them and the hills stretching on to the west.
Kelly and the new recruit, Pierce, just standing there looking down.

“Strange to think this is human,” she said, not
knowing why she’d even thought to say something like that. Perhaps just
searching for anything to say, to take the edge off and make it seem, against
all odds, like some small piece of normality.

Deputy Pierce repositioned himself over the blood
splatter, clicked the camera, then advanced the film. The youngest of the three
of them and the newest hire, he was underpaid and fresh out of high school.
Looking at him, she knew he wasn’t going to say anything, not here, not about
this. He was just doing his job, and she could tell right now, he wanted his job
to be over as soon as possible.

He was still a boy in many ways, but old enough to
have the job, taking pictures and helping out the best he could. Hastings still
circling with the metal detector and Kelly listening to the low sonar blip of
the thing as it sought out what lay beneath the sand.

Hastings was already kneeling when the metal
detector gave off a low, long beep. Pierce and Kelly turned toward him, where he
knelt close to the ground with a small plastic bag in his gloved hand.

At the age of thirty-eight, Hastings was just two
years older than Kelly. They had grown up together throwing rocks at empty beer
cans and sketching out intricate games of hide-and-seek throughout the town.
During high school they’d drawn apart, separated by age or sex or something else
Kelly herself still couldn’t quite figure. The aftereffects of those times
lasting into their early twenties as Hastings had gone off to tour the western
states, working first as a bull rider on the circuits and then a rodeo hand as
his back worsened through the years. He returned to Coronado in his late
twenties, flecks of gray already shining in his hair.

Now, Kelly watched as he dug around in the earth
with a gloved hand, removing something and dropping it into the bag. Kelly
standing over him to see what he’d found.

“It looks like a .308,” he said, handing the
plastic Ziploc up to her.

She took the bag from him and turned it in the palm
of her hand. The bullet was almost two inches in length, the metal inside
already corroded. Sticky with blood, punched in slightly from the force of the
impact. She’d seen a million of these at the shooting range, the back hill built
up in sand and the bullets that came out of it looking warped and disfigured. “A
hunting round?”

Hastings nodded.

“Doesn’t feel right, does it? Not this close to the
highway.”

“You think this was an accident?”

“I hope it was. It’s better than the alternative.”
She gave the bullet back to him and told him to run it north after they were
done. “What about a casing?” she asked.

“Still looking.”

Kelly walked on, knowing that the news vans were
waiting behind. The light from their cameras reaching out toward her. She picked
up the boy’s track on the other side of the small rise. His gait more controlled
there. One foot in front of the other. No bullet in him yet. In her mind she was
starting to put it back together. The boy moving up over the rise, running for
the road, in the distance the silver flash of a car window and the sound of a
semi truck downshifting as it ran on toward the mountains to the north.

Even now, as far as she was from the highway, the
sound of sporadic traffic could be heard as a far-off rush of air. All of what
she was looking at now, the boy’s footfalls, his wobbling uneven steps up one
rise and down the other, seeming so out of place.

When she came down over the second rise, the plain
came to an abrupt stop at the edge of the hill country. She studied the boy’s
track for a long time, checking the angle, seeing how deep his shoes had sunk
into the soft earth. Something not right about any of it, about how deep and
wide the track was, each footfall seeming too big, too pronounced in form, like
a man slogging through a field of snow. Now she realized she was looking at not
one track, but two. The boy’s and then in the same space, following, another
track altogether, erasing the boy’s as it came.

Whoever had shot this boy had followed him out onto
the plain to finish the job. Above, the hillside went on, climbing through the
locust on its way up out of sight. Nothing but the green and brown brush all the
way up the slope and the call of birds deep within the thicket, so dense she
could see no more than a foot within. The boy’s trail ending at the bottom,
where the hillside met the plain. The ground harder here, mud dried stiff as
cement in the small wash fed by the hillside gullies. The dash of two or three
motorcycle treads preserved in it from a rain two weeks before, but otherwise
nothing. No tracks at all.

R
ay
put his head against the glass. He was standing in the phone booth outside the
Lucky Strike Diner, six miles north of town. “The kid’s alive?”

“Unless the news was lying to me,” came the
response from Memo.

Ray didn’t have anything to say. He was thinking
about Memo sitting there at his desk in Las Cruces, the dark eyebrows that stood
out on his shaved head and the phone held to his ear. The kid was alive. Ray was
thinking about what this meant, about all that it could mean and all that would
soon result. Memo as hardheaded as they came. But he was smart, too, and Ray had
never known a plan of his to go wrong, not if Ray was involved and there was
blood to be spilled.

“Where are you?” Memo asked.

“Just outside Coronado.”

“Home sweet home,” Memo said. His voice slowing
into a singsong rhythm, the same Memo who had sweet-talked him into this corner,
the same who had sweet-talked him into this life so many years ago, offering him
money for what, at the time, seemed only a simple job.

“I did what I was supposed to, I have what you
wanted me to get, everything else is extra, you understand?”

“You have a problem,” Memo said. “You don’t fix
this problem, then it becomes mine. I don’t want that to happen, and I’m sure
you don’t.”

“You set me up,” Ray said. “You knew what would
happen to Burnham as soon as I saw him. You knew from that moment he would be
dead.”

“Yes,” Memo said. “But I thought you’d do a better
job of it.”

“You’re telling me to kill this kid.”

“I’m telling you to handle this problem.”

“It’s not on me,” Ray said. He ran a hand through
his hair, resting his scalp in his palm. It was already late enough in the day
that the sun began to stretch the shadows long and thin across the parking lot,
constructing a stilted world that teetered toward the point of falling. Inside
the Lucky Strike he saw Sanchez talking with a young waitress. “Your nephew is
the one who got us into this mess. He’s the one with the problem here, he’s the
one who fucked up, who lied to me about killing that boy. He’s the one with the
job to finish.”

“You think he knows what he’s doing? He’s down
there with you because you’re supposed to know how to handle yourself. I know
you can’t let this go. That boy talks they’re going to find you out and it will
be just like it was ten years ago. I can’t protect you this time, not like I did
before when it was your cousin who did the killing for you. This is on you. If
that boy in the hospital identifies you, or even comes close to it, there’s
nothing I can do. They’ll come for you and there’ll be no stopping them. You
should know that.”

“They?” Ray said.

“The cartel.”

“What’s left for them to take from me?” Ray said.
He was angry and his voice was beginning to show it. “Besides,” Ray said,
holding his breath for a moment before going on. “Burnham wasn’t cartel. He was
just an old white man who’d stayed in the business too long.”

“No,” Memo said. “Burnham wasn’t, and neither was
the kid my nephew shot and told you was dead. But that heroin was, the stuff you
took out of that seat, that was pure cartel import and they’re going to want it
back. I suggest you don’t leave any witnesses.”

Ray was thinking about what Burnham looked like
there on the ground, the lingering seep of blood from the wound in his cheek.
The old man’s words whispered up out of his bloodied mouth.

He wanted to just put the phone down and walk away.
He wanted to be done with Memo and his lying nephew. All this, being here, doing
this job, had been a way for him to return to Coronado, to set himself up for
the years to come. He’d cut himself loose from that past, from his father, from
his son, from his cousin and all that he’d left behind, now all he wanted was to
go home.

Ray had lied to himself all those years before.
He’d lied to Marianne, promising her he would be more than just an oil worker,
that he was capable of more. But this wasn’t it. Standing in a phone booth
outside his hometown, listening to Memo tell him how to solve this problem. No,
Ray thought, there was nothing here that would ever make him better, or would
ever satisfy his promise to Marianne.

“You want to tell me what’s going on here?” Ray
said. “You want to tell me how you knew where Burnham and this kid would be and
what they would be carrying?”

“Control the town, control the flow,” Memo
said.

“That’s what you’re saying? That’s how you’re
explaining this to me—this situation.”

“It’s not a problem,” Memo said.

“Was it Burnham who tipped you off?”

“I’m sorry about the situation we find ourselves
in, but you really just need to concentrate your efforts on the present.”

“You want me to finish what your nephew
started?”

“You’re from Coronado. It shouldn’t be a problem
for you to find your way around.”

“I was from here, I’m not anymore,” Ray said.

“Easier for you than us.”

“I haven’t been back in ten years—”

“You’re also not like us, not quite,” Memo cut in.
“You’re the son of an oilman who married his Mexican cook. You’re half-white.
You’re not like us at all.”

Ray watched a car go past out on the highway on its
way into town. A pounding beginning somewhere deep inside his head, the whole
world beginning to come off its axis, threatening to roll.

“You didn’t think I knew all that?” Memo said, the
sound of a laugh lingering at the back of his palate, like Ray had joined in on
some joke halfway done in the telling. “You thought we didn’t check you out when
you first started working for us? That we didn’t start asking about you when you
got into all that trouble down there? When we kept you hidden and protected
you?” Ray heard Memo shift the phone from one ear to the other. He pictured Memo
sitting there in the Las Cruces office. The dark wood desk where Memo sat, the
chair on the other side of that desk where Ray had received his first job. “And
now you think you can come back to us any time you like, pick your jobs, and
then move on,” Memo said. “That’s not how we do things anymore.”