The Carrion Birds (27 page)

He just had to keep going. The cruiser feeling
smooth and powerful beneath him. He hoped the deputy wouldn’t die. The boy just
a child really, probably one year out of high school. Too young for something
like this. For this mess.

He swerved out into oncoming traffic, passing
another big truck. Almost clipping an oncoming car as he swerved back into his
lane and heard the semi’s air brakes squeal behind him. Jesus, he thought. Stay
focused. You still have a chance, just forty-five more minutes and you can put
this all behind you.

W
hen
Kelly made it to Pierce, his skin was already brittle and flimsy as wax paper.
His breathing gone shallow and labored. Blood all over the cement. But the
paramedics were telling her there was someone down at the bar in far worse shape
with a critical neck wound. They gave her a compress and moved on, leaving her
there with Pierce.

She knelt next to him, pressing the compress to his
shoulder, trying to wake him any way she could. Hastings, who had followed her
at a run, had already gone back down the street, going for the patrol car,
intending to bring it up the street so that they could get Pierce into the back
and take him to the hospital.

There had been training for this type of thing, but
all that just didn’t seem to register. Raising her voice, Kelly realized she was
yelling now, trying to get the boy to wake. Her voice carrying down the street
with no one around.

Blindly, without thinking or really knowing what
she was doing, she began to drag him up the street toward the hospital. A
nasty-looking welt at the side of his temple and bullet wounds in his shoulder
and foot. His shoes scraping on the cement as they went.

Where was Tom? Where was Tollville? Not a single
person on the street, and Kelly dragging the boy beneath his armpits. Her own
muscles beginning to ache with the effort. And Tollville now beside her, telling
her to stop, to just put him down, that another ambulance was coming. He’d been
on the phone to the state police, asking them to block the roads.

O
ne
hundred miles an hour over the blacktop and the bleeding hadn’t stopped. Ray
reached down and pushed his palm into the flat at the side of his ribs. Sudden
pain and his vision drifting.

He didn’t know if he would make it. Shot just above
the gut like that. Blood all over him. Driving a stolen county cruiser right on
into a major southwest city. He just couldn’t see how it would play.

Up ahead the slight red and blue glimmer he knew
was a state police cruiser, cresting the hill ten miles down the road. The
highway leading on toward the Hermanos Mountains, no other roads to take, and a
certainty the state police would block the highway off in the coming minutes,
leaving Ray no way of making it to the north.

The turnoff for his father’s place coming up fast,
just two hundred yards away. He eased off the gas, taking the turn at a rough
forty miles per hour, the back tires of the cruiser spinning in the gravel and
the headlights sweeping the desert. A searing pain as he braced himself against
the door.

He righted himself and went on.

T
he
brake lights were just barely visible in front of Tom as he followed the cruiser
up the highway. No idea how fast he was going, his father’s old pickup vibrating
with the speed as the wind sloughed off and whistled past his mirrors. Even
after five minutes the truck hadn’t gotten any closer. The cruiser brake lights
were barely visible in front of him. Then nothing.

Tom slowed the truck, rolling down his window as he
came up on the spot he’d seen the brake lights go off the road. Cool air and a
full moon above slipping through a series of dark clouds.

Nothing out there in the flatness but the dim shape
of desert brush. Darkness beyond.

He drove on, taking it slow now, not wanting to
miss anything. All around him the open blackness of the desert and a feeling of
bewildered solitude. He had lost Ray and run from Kelly. There was little he
could do now but go on and hope it would somehow turn out for him.

In the glove compartment he found a flashlight, and
he pulled it out now and played it over the creosote and chuparosa growing off
the bank of the road. Somewhere to the south the night air lit up bright with
the flash of lightning, the thunder following a few seconds behind.

When he came to the intersection, he knew exactly
where he was, and where the cruiser had gone. He pulled the truck down off the
highway, feeling the tires leave the cement, and the dirt begin. The Lamar ranch
just up the road.

T
he
room had the metallic taste of blood in the air. Kelly crept over the hood of
the truck and slid into what was left of the barroom. Holding her gun out in
front of her, she brought her flashlight up from her belt and flicked it on. The
room was a complete mess. Chairs and tables upturned, walls broken up with
gunfire—glass and wood splinters everywhere on the floor.

Behind her, she heard Tollville’s feet touch down
on the brick rubble beside the truck tires. The crunch of his footfalls loud in
the stillness of the bar. A light fog of dust still hanging there in the room.
Pierce taken away to the hospital, while Hastings went north to help out with
the state police roadblock. In the aftermath, a crowd of town people now
gathered outside the bar waiting for news from inside.

Tollville came up beside her and motioned her on,
the two of them moving around the bar on opposite sides. She recognized Medina
where he lay on the floor, his eyes open, staring up at her, and a slick layer
of blood everywhere on his face.

“I was just in this bar, I had a drink with Dario
just a couple hours ago. I recognize every one of these men.”

“I recognize some of these men, too,” Tollville
said, looking at the deep grooves of buckshot everywhere on the walls. “I think
we can say this has officially become a federal investigation. The DEA office is
sending a helicopter and we’ll get up in the air as soon as we can.”

Kelly looked around the bar, stopped, and with the
foot of her boot, turned bodies over until their faces showed.

“Easy,” Tollville said.

“I recognize every one of these men,” she said
again. Not raising her eyes to meet Tollville’s, but simply standing there
looking down at one of the dead men at her feet. Mexican like the others. It was
amazing to her that in the three days since all this had started, she could feel
so at home, almost casual, in a room full of dead bodies.

A
s he
came down the road toward the ranch, Tom turned his headlights off and navigated
the slender dirt road in the overhead moonlight that remained, pale blue over
everything. The bushes and fence posts, dulled in the light, seemed unfamiliar
and ghostlike.

He crossed over the cattle guard and pulled in
behind the sheriff’s department cruiser. No sign of Ray. Lights on in the house
and the pale trunks of the oaks up the valley just showing out of the
darkness.

He turned the ignition off and the night came at
him out of the dark in a million different sounds. The engine ticking, the call
of insects, the wash of air over the surrounding brush. From the glove
compartment he brought out the flashlight again and flicked it on, testing it
against the palm of his hand.

Far out on the highway, he saw the line of cars
building toward the red and blue pulse of a state police roadblock. A single
cruiser going past—Hastings or Kelly heading north, flying down the highway
toward the lights. Tom watched it go. A radio in the abandoned cruiser, but no
intention of calling in anything till he found Ray, a slick shimmer of blood on
the driver’s seat as he moved past, Tollville’s Baby Eagle held out in front of
him.

He didn’t know what was happening with Pierce, even
if he was still alive. He wondered if Kelly or Hastings were looking for him
now, trying to track him down. Everything Tom had built for himself in the last
ten years, the credibility he’d had to build back for himself in this small
town, now worth nothing if they found out he’d been helping Ray all along.

Tom couldn’t do anything about Gus’s death. Perhaps
those men down at the bar had it coming. Maybe they deserved every bit of Ray’s
revenge, but looking now at the stolen cruiser and the blood on the seat, he
knew Pierce hadn’t deserved any of it.

Taking care with his steps, Tom came to the porch.
Darkness all around him and the soft light of a lamp somewhere toward the back
through the screen door. A slight breeze working past, moving over the land and
running on into the house, where Tom stood on the porch. The wind chime sounding
in the darkness and the creak of the screen door’s hinges, followed by a slight
tremor of fear all down Tom’s spine, the door bouncing light against its frame.
Thunder and the wet-stone smell of rain from the south all around him in the
desert.

One foot after the other he went forward across the
porch until he was standing in front of the screen door looking in on the living
room, where his father was waiting, and Billy sat across the room watching
television on the small thirteen-inch black-and-white.

“He’s not here,” Luis said.

Tom stepped through the door and nodded to Billy
where he sat near the bloodstain on the wall, and where he could see Luis or
someone had thrown a sheet over the chair in which Gus had died.

“Ray shot a deputy,” Tom said, watching his father
where he sat, wanting to know if his old man knew this already or if it was news
to him.

“I figured as much,” Luis said. He got up from the
chair and walked to the window where they both could look out and see the
cruiser sitting there. “Your cousin wasn’t going to let this go and I think you
knew it just as well as I did.”

“You just let him go into town?” Tom lowered his
voice. “Knowing what he was going to do?”

“I didn’t know anything,” Luis said. “I wanted to
assume the best just like you did. But assuming the best doesn’t mean that’s how
it will turn out. It rarely does.”

“He’s not here?”

“He was here just long enough to take his rifle and
give his wound a rough clean. In and out in less than four or five minutes, he
didn’t say much except that we should be expecting you and maybe some others. He
said his good-byes to me and Billy and then he was gone.”

“Where was he shot?”

“In the side. There was a lot of blood on his
shirt. I can’t say how bad it was but when he came out of the bathroom he made
it sound like he wasn’t going to be back.”

Tom went through the house room by room. The dim
light he’d seen from the front of the house a mix of the living room lamps and
the flicker of the television, and farther back a wall sconce left on in the
bathroom. Nothing there except the remains of a roll of surgical tape, a large
box of gauze, and some iodine left out on the bathroom floor.

K
elly
left Tollville inside the bar and stepped out the back. She was standing in the
parking lot, the sound of the crowd out front now a low murmur of voices. From
her belt she raised the radio and depressed the talk button. When Hastings came
on she told him what they’d found.

“It’s difficult,” Hastings was saying. “None of
these patrolmen have any idea who we’re looking for up here.”

“What do they have to go on?”

“Whatever we got out of Pierce before we lost
contact.”

“You’re telling them to look for a man carrying a
shotgun.”

“Pretty much,” Hastings answered. “What about the
Mexican border?”

“Tollville put in a call to the Border Patrol and
the Mexican authorities.”

“We’re going to catch him,” Hastings said.

“We don’t know anything about this guy. The border
is only ten miles away,” Kelly said. “And if he’s from the south he could have
crossed already and gone on from there.”

Nothing but silence for a moment, and then
Hastings’s voice on the radio. “The state police say they’re sending two cars
down your way to help. I’ll bring them to the bar.” His voice sounded cold and
distant through the radio. “Edna,” Hastings said a moment later, “have you heard
anything about Pierce?”

“He’s in surgery still, we won’t hear for a while
yet.”

“And Dario?”

“The same,” Kelly said. “There’s nothing I can tell
you.”

“I hope we catch this guy,” Hastings said, his
voice lower now, and the sound of the state police in the background lessened.
Kelly knew Hastings had walked off a ways and was talking to her in a place
where he wouldn’t be overheard.

“I know,” Kelly said. “I know.” They finished the
conversation, Kelly telling him that the DEA was sending a helicopter back down
for Tollville and then they’d get out and shine the spotlight around, but the
hope of finding anything in the night was slim.

T
om
came out of the house and stood looking around at Gus’s property. Nothing for
him to see. He crossed from the house to the barn and found one of the horse
stalls empty. If Ray had been there, he was gone now, and Tom came out of the
barn looking for a sign in the sandy hardpack. The only bit of information his
father had been able to tell him was that Ray had come out of the house and
walked to the stables.

Working as quickly as he could, Tom found the
indent of the horse’s hooves in a little under five minutes. The hoofprints
heading north up the valley toward the old Lamar oil station and possibly beyond
to Deming. Luis waited on the porch as Tom searched.

For a moment Tom thought about Claire, that she
might be more his family than even his father was. Luis and Billy all that were
left to Tom now. Gus the only one in his life who had ever really been a father
to either Billy or him, but Luis trying now, knowing that he had to at least for
Billy’s sake.

Tom knew Ray wouldn’t come back, that he’d gone
north and given them up. Whatever plan Ray was following, Tom knew it would end
in disaster, just like the bar in Coronado, and that other people would be
hurt.