The Carrion Birds (19 page)

On the other side of the line he heard the voice,
scrappy with distance, bouncing up out of the receiver as if pulled up through
the desert itself. “No,” Dario answered as he thought about the night before and
the skill of the gunmen and what might happen if they came through that door
after Dario and the men inside. He needed more time. He needed more of
everything. The only real fun he’d had in the town since he arrived, he’d had
the night before in the rain and then again that morning in Gus Lamar’s living
room. He wanted to test himself, needed it like the fix to a sickening
addiction. “No,” he repeated, “no tengo las drogas.”

The only response Dario could hope for now was that
Juarez would send more men.

T
ogether they listened to the messages on the machine. Deacon’s voice
growing tighter as the time ticked by and the messages came to their end. The
scent of his clothes burning in the barbecue out back coming to Ray through the
screen, acrid as burning tires—Sanchez’s shoes and wallet thrown in on top of it
all. He hadn’t known he’d ask for help until he’d done it. And now he wore a set
of Tom’s jeans and a dark woolen button-up, to replace his own. He still didn’t
know what he was going to do but they’d laid out enough for Ray to know they
were heading to his father’s place, where Tom said Ray would still be
welcome.

The pager on his hip had vibrated several times
already and Ray had looked at the number and put it away again. No time now to
call Memo back. No idea what he would say to the man, or how he would tell him
about his nephew. A doubt in Ray’s mind that it would change anything. Memo
would want the drugs regardless. What happened to Sanchez wasn’t on Ray, though
he feared somehow Memo would find a way to blame him for the boy’s death.

From the start, when Claire had opened the door,
Ray didn’t really know how it would go. He’d forced himself inside, worried that
someone might see him. The fear built up in a way he hadn’t felt in years. The
feeling that he was at an end, his end, or possibly even Tom’s—not knowing what
he might do if Tom had been there and pushed him back out into the wilds.

All through the desert he’d worried about being
caught, and even as he’d come to the porch, the sound of the highway behind him,
fourteen-wheelers and tankers moving past on their way from one job to another.
His fear lessened now that he was around people who knew him again, who’d grown
up with him, known him before his life had gone the way it had. An uneasy
certainty going through him the whole time, since coming down the road toward
Coronado three days before, that he would be found, and all that he had done in
the time since he’d left, in order to escape his past in this town, would be
stacked against him.

The tape spun to a stop and he heard the machine
click and rewind. Deacon’s voice still fresh in Ray’s memory and Claire waiting
there behind them on the couch as Tom looked up at Ray and asked why there would
be a message on the phone from Deacon, asking where his father, Luis, was. Why
he wasn’t at work, when so many days in a row he’d never been late, never missed
a day. Tom’s eyes searching Ray’s, looking for some answer, and Ray with no
answer to give but to shake his head, looking from his cousin to the answering
machine there on the table by the phone. Dropping his eyes away, if only for
something to do, to break off his cousin’s stare, because Ray knew now why Luis
hadn’t shown up to work that day, and had known since this morning when he’d
changed out of his clothes, looking for his prescription bottle of pills.

T
he
Bronco sat in the flatlands about three or four miles off from the big mountains
farther on to the east. Accessible only by an offshoot of the gravel road that
quickly turned loose and empty, crumbling away at the edges, and cut through by
large open areas of wash.

Kelly got up out of the cruiser, taking in the
landscape, the dull brown of the creosote and burro bushes running all the way
out across the flatlands. The smell of the rainstorm hanging fresh in the air as
the sun dried the land. Overhead the wide circle of the Border Patrol plane was
audible as it looped across the sky above, its wing tip pointed down at them
like a finger. From where she stood it was clear the Bronco’s rear windows had
been blown out. The metal pockmarked by the same automatic fire they’d seen that
morning at the Sullivan house.

Through her open cruiser window, she heard the
pilots come on the radio and as soon as Pierce gave them the go-ahead they cut
for El Paso.

“You smell that?” Kelly said, her nostrils picking
up the scent leaking from within the Bronco.

“Worse than this morning.”

“Much worse,” Kelly added. She walked over to the
Bronco, careful with the placement of her feet. The rainstorm had erased much of
what she could see on the dusty surface of the desert, where the grasslike sedge
grew up through the cracks, and the brush cast a thin veneer of color to the
land.

She came around to the passenger side and pulled
the door open. The man inside had been shot in the side of the abdomen. For a
long while Kelly stood there staring at him.

Except for the blood, he looked as if he had just
sat down for a nap and not woken. Barefoot with his chin resting forward on his
chest, he seemed oddly comfortable.

“What do you think?” Pierce asked.

“I think it’s strange he would be sitting in the
passenger seat like this.”

“All this,” Pierce said, moving his arms to
encompass the bullet-riddled sides and shattered windows of the truck. “And
that’s what you think is odd.”

“Where are his shoes? Why would he be sitting here
in the passenger seat like this?” Kelly said again, running each thought down to
its source.

Pierce put a hand up over his nose and leaned in
close to look at the body. “There’s somebody missing, isn’t there?” Pierce
asked.

“There’s a whole lot missing,” Kelly said.

T
om
had seen the way the messages from Deacon changed Ray. The downturn of his lips
and the constant shift of his eyes to Tom’s front windows and the land beyond,
looking as if he wanted to be anywhere but where he was. “Should I be worried?”
Tom asked.

“Is Luis usually late for work?”

“No,” Tom said. “Not usually, but sometimes he goes
on benders and he’ll miss a day. Judging from when I saw him last, just a couple
nights ago, there’s a good chance he’s home in bed, sleeping it off.”

Ray was looking out the window again and Tom knew
it was time to leave. Every minute they spent here at his place was another
minute Kelly or someone else might stop by for a visit and find Ray there.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to say to
Billy?” Tom asked.

“I’ve been thinking about it for ten years,” Ray
said. “I still don’t have the answer.”

“You’re going to be fine,” Tom said. “He’s a good
kid. He’s more of an adult at the age of twelve than maybe even my father
is.”

Ray smiled a little. He was still looking out the
window toward the highway. “I’ve thought a lot about coming back here,” Ray
said. “I’ve wanted it for a long time, and before all this I thought maybe I’d
make a go of it, but I just don’t know if that’s possible anymore.”

“Give it some time,” Tom said. He didn’t know what
else to say and he could see his cousin had been living with the guilt of what
he’d done, leaving Billy the way he had, leaving them all. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

They went out to the Volkswagen and got in. The
hope in Tom’s mind that all would be okay, and they would drive over to Gus’s
without anything going wrong and then somehow they would drive Ray north. Tom
with no idea what they would find. The message from Deacon and the memory of
driving Luis home only two nights before still fresh in his mind. A hope in
Tom’s gut that his father would be there, passed out and smelling of
alcohol.

Tom drove the Volkswagen and Claire sat in the
front with the dog held between her knees so that the mutt wouldn’t growl at Ray
in the back. In Tom’s hands, the Beetle felt like it skimmed over the road’s
surface like a boat over water, a wake of dust rising up behind them as they
came off the valley highway. In the distance the Hermanos Range sat like teeth
around the valley floor, bowed out toward the north where the highway went
through. Each peak covered in a gloss of snow where the storm had come the night
before and shaved it clean.

When they came out into the flatlands that had held
the Lamar oil fields twenty years before, Tom could see Gus’s house sitting
there as it had all through his childhood, the stables off to the left and the
staff houses behind. He pulled the Beetle in, his eyes searching back toward
Luis’s place, where he saw his father’s truck was missing.

From the backseat Ray leaned forward. “How long has
it been since you’ve been here?”

“I was here a couple days ago,” Tom said, looking
to the porch where the screen door sat against the frame. “Strange as it now
seems, we talked about you.”

“You see anything—” Ray paused. “You see anything
that doesn’t look right?”

Again Tom leaned forward, scanning the landscape
with his vision. A swirl of dust kicked up far down the valley and then blew
itself out, pushing a dry weed before it. He elbowed the car door open and
stood. “You have a reason you’re asking?”

“No reason,” Ray said, sliding the driver’s seat
forward so that he could get out of the small car to stand next to Tom. “I’ve
just gotten cautious, that’s all. The last few days haven’t gone as well as I’d
hoped.”

Tom gave Ray a sideways glance but didn’t say
anything to him. Gus should have been there by now, standing at the doorway to
invite them in, spit at Ray or hug him, he should have been there to say
something. Their relationship never a good one but Gus’s words to Tom only a few
days before suggested Ray would be welcome. Gus saying how he still cared for
his son even if he knew Ray had chosen badly in life.

The sun felt hot on his skin. A bright yellow orb
above them, passed over its half point. The shadow of the porch roof, slightly
canted away from them, hit the ground at an angle. Looking back at Claire, he
told her to wait there. “Let the dog out and watch her to make sure she doesn’t
get too far. Ray and I are going to go in for moment and talk with Gus.”

Ray paused as they came to the porch, an orange
prescription bottle there on the first step. Bending, Ray took it up and looked
at it, the dosage written in clear print along the side but the name concealed
beneath Ray’s fingers.

Tom heard his cousin curse under his breath and
then watched as Ray slipped the bottle into his pants pocket.

“You not telling me something?” Tom asked, his
voice low.

With his right hand, Ray had brought up the Ruger
from his belt and he was looking to the house. “You know when the curtain comes
down at the end of the show, and you get that sick feeling that life—real
life—is waiting for you outside?” Ray said. “I have that feeling now and there’s
nothing I can do to stop it from crawling all over me.”

Tom didn’t like the feel of it at all and he went
up the stairs with Ray next to him on the steps, the rifle strapped over Ray’s
back and the Ruger held close at his side. That bottle on the porch had meant
something to Ray, but Tom couldn’t say what. Ray moving up the stairs now like
he was expecting trouble inside.

“Wait here,” Ray said. With the gun raised toward
the door he gestured for Tom to get the screen.

Tom reached a hand out and pulled the door open,
the wide desert behind them and Jeanie now out in the dust at the bottom of the
porch, standing stiff-legged looking up at him.

A passage of time working over Tom that he couldn’t
identify. Jeanie and Claire waiting for him on the stairs while Ray went inside.
Nothing for Tom to do but stand there hoping for some signal from Ray. Nothing
about it feeling right, and a loud keening soon heard from within, abrupt in the
silence.

When Tom found Ray, his cousin stood across the
room, a rough splatter of blood on the wall and Gus slumped forward in one of
his living room chairs. The face a mash of blood and bone, skin cracked like a
spiderweb across the old man’s face, where the nose had been smashed in at its
center. The only thing to tell Tom he was looking at Gus the wedding ring that
he still wore on his finger.

D
eputy
Hastings stood three feet away from the open door of the Bronco, looking in on
the dead man in the seat. “No footprints leading away?” he asked.

“You heard that rain last night,” Kelly said.
“Pierce and I drove out here and didn’t even see a tire track till we were a
hundred feet out.”

“And this one?” Hastings said, still looking at the
gut-shot man in the passenger seat.

“No ID, no wallet, nothing,” Kelly said. “We won’t
know who he is till we can get him into the morgue and run his prints.”

“It doesn’t make much sense, does it, Sheriff?”

“A man sitting gut-shot in the middle of the desert
with his shoes missing, no it doesn’t.”

“None of this scares you?” Hastings asked.

“Scares the shit out of me,” Kelly said, turning to
look back at her cruiser, where Pierce sat inside on the radio, guiding the
ambulance that would take the body back to the morgue. “We don’t have the
resources for this.”

“You talked to the mayor though, didn’t you? Didn’t
he tell you to go ahead with whatever you needed to do?”

“Not in those words exactly.”

“At times I wish I didn’t have this job,” Hastings
said.

“Let me guess,” Kelly said. “This is one of those
times.” From a little ways out she caught the sound of tires running up over the
desert and the creak of springs. Turning, she saw the ambulance come into view.
“You still have Agent Tollville’s number over at the DEA?” she asked.