The Carrion Birds (9 page)

“You want me to look into Raymond Lamar?” Tollville
had said. Disbelief coated thick through his voice. “You think we haven’t
already? There’s nothing there.” What Tollville did have was a roster of tours
Ray had done all over Southeast Asia in the late fifties and early sixties,
special ops, most of it before the war even officially started. Most just
recently declassified. No current address or number for him. The only thing that
came up a job working for some land company in Las Cruces that turned out to be
bogus.

Gus finished his coffee. He looked over at Tom and
waited, but then when nothing came, Gus said, “Your cousin was never a good man.
Never was going to be and never will be.”

“Harsh words from his father.”

“I’m not saying I don’t love him, but I think you
know he made some bad decisions after the wells went dry.” Gus got up from his
chair and went into the kitchen. Ray had been gone for ten years now and there’d
been nothing from him in all that time. The only things left of Ray his son,
Billy, and his wife’s grave up the valley under the big oak, a little apart from
that of Gus’s own wife. A place where Gus, nearly eighty years old, said he’d be
buried someday as well. “You done?” Tom heard Gus say from the other room.

“With the coffee?”

“No,” Gus said, coming back to look in on Tom where
he still sat in Gus’s living room chair.

“I’m sorry about this, Gus, I just thought—”

“I can’t keep going on with you about this. I just
can’t. You understand?”

Tom stood and brought his coffee cup into the
kitchen and put it in the sink. He sprayed water on his hands and then dried
them on his pant legs. “I’ll go now,” he said. “I suppose it’s getting
late.”

When he got home there were several messages
waiting for him on the machine. One was from his father, giving him a start time
for the day after next, the other two were from Claire. Tom rewound the tape and
listened as Claire’s voice came on the machine again. “Tom? You there?” A long
pause and then, “Call me when you get this message.” He pressed delete and then
listened to the most recent message, left only twenty minutes before. “I know
you must have seen the story tonight, Tom. They just replayed it on the ten
o’clock news,” Claire said. “I know we didn’t leave things in the best light,
but if you want to talk, I’m around.”

Tom deleted the message, then walked into the
kitchen and took out a beer. He was standing with the door of the fridge open
when the phone rang. The message clicked on and he listened for a while to the
silence of the machine and then, “I’m getting worried about you, that’s all.
I’ve left messages and you’re not calling me back. I’m just going to come by and
check up on you, Tom. That’s all. I’d feel better about it if I did.”

Tom stared at the machine. The light of the open
fridge on him as he stood in his kitchen, expecting the answering machine to
click on any moment and keep talking to him. “Jesus, Claire,” he said under his
breath, taking another long pull from the beer and then putting it down on the
counter. He closed the fridge and then called to Jeanie, “You want to get out of
here for a while?” watching the mutt where she lay on the cool tile floor at the
far end of the kitchen.

R
ay
raised the apple to his mouth and took a bite. He was sitting in the Bronco,
watching the front drive of the hospital. The hospital was three floors in
total, built of a beige sandstone composite, with a side entrance for the
emergency room and the bright gleam from the front glass emanating all down the
block.

The air had turned cold with the night and with the
windows up, he could see his own breath as he exhaled, the moisture in the air
beginning to condense against the glass.

He set the apple down on the dash and took the
white paper napkin out of his jacket pocket. The room number written there in
blue ink. Memo had given him all there was to know about the kid up there and
the state of their affairs. Ray knew that if the kid lived, he was a liability
to them. He didn’t need to hear it again from Memo, though Memo had been
insistent on telling him.

From where he was parked, three-quarters of the way
down the block and one block in from Main, he could see the two county cruisers
sitting there in the drive. One had been there most of the day, and the other
had appeared just a few minutes before.

At a distance of three or four hundred feet, Ray
couldn’t be quite sure, but he thought the woman officer who had shown up was
the same who had been Tom’s deputy all those years before. The one who had
responded to his wife’s accident, telling Ray the news about his son, and the
way the car had rolled after being broadsided.

Ray picked up the apple again. The flesh where he’d
taken his first bite already stained brown from the air. It was the first thing
he’d eaten since the diner, and he was staring at it like he might figure his
future from the thing like a mystic would from a glass ball. He finished the
apple and when he was done, took Sanchez’s pager off his hip and checked the
time. He’d been sitting in the Bronco now for the past five hours, waiting.

The root of the problem, or at least what Ray had
been able to get out of Sanchez after they’d gotten back to the Sullivan house
from the Lucky Strike Diner, was that Sanchez just wasn’t built for the thing.
He could talk a good game. He could tell Ray all the things he would do if he
was given the chance, but Ray just couldn’t believe him.

Sanchez hadn’t done what he was supposed to. He
hadn’t killed the boy and instead of making sure the boy was dead, tracking him
down as Ray would have done, he’d simply run off.

“You’re telling me you shot him,” Ray said. The two
of them standing in the living room of the Sullivan house, a broken-down sofa
turned halfway out from the wall, and the cracked plaster of the place around
them on all sides. “Because I’ve already heard that, it’s all I’ve heard from
you all day and I’m getting tired of you lying to me about it.”

Sanchez was leaning against one of the walls,
picking at the plaster, his fingers a chalk white and a small mound of detritus
developing on the floor at his feet. “I’m telling you I shot him,” Sanchez said.
“I’m not saying it was perfect, but I shot him and I saw him go down.”

“And then what?” Ray said. They’d spent the last
hour eating their food in silence at the diner, Ray faced away from the door,
hoping he wouldn’t run into anyone who might recognize him. Sure at any moment
Tom would walk in or worse yet, his father.

“The gun was so loud,” Sanchez said. “I wasn’t
expecting it to be that loud and I got scared. I didn’t know what to do. I was
looking to where he’d taken the shot and he was just lying there in the sand.”
Sanchez crossed and recrossed his hands, a white rim of plaster showing under
each fingernail. “I walked down and pushed the gun into his back. He was dead.
He was dead where I left him and the traffic was going by out on the
highway.”

Sanchez seemed like he was going to cry and Ray
looked away. The sun had gone down out on the desert and there was a pink haze
left in its wake, followed above by a dark blue spreading upward into the sky.
“But he wasn’t dead, was he?”

“I thought he was.”

Ray went over and sat on the old sofa. He rubbed
his hands over his face and spread his fingers up into his hair. This close to
Coronado and he couldn’t avoid it, he was thinking about the day he’d come clean
to Marianne about who he was, about what he did. It didn’t go well. Marianne
telling him that he would ruin their marriage, that even then, as they stood
close together there in the kitchen of their house, he was ruining their
marriage. She wanted them to move. She said if the oil was gone and this was the
work he was doing, they should move. If this was their life, then there must be
more to it, to their life together. All of that only weeks before she died,
before the cartel tracked Ray down and took her from him.

When Ray looked back over at Sanchez, he’d already
decided. Ray would do it, but he didn’t want anything to do with Sanchez
anymore. Ray would go to the hospital because it had to be done. There wasn’t
anything more to it than that. “Memo doesn’t trust you,” Ray said, looking up at
Sanchez. “He wants you to go north in Burnham’s truck tonight. Tomorrow, after
the job is done, he’ll send someone for the drugs.”

Sanchez’s face fell. “He didn’t say that.”

“He said that exactly.”

Ray asked for the pager and when it was given, Ray
had to wait only a moment before Sanchez went out the door.

Now Ray sat in the Bronco watching the hospital
entrance. The white napkin he’d taken from the diner in his lap and the air
condensing all around him on the Bronco’s windows.

Five hours had passed since he’d driven into town.
On his way he passed RV lots where the trailers never moved and broken-down cars
sat on deflated tires. He passed houses where he could still remember the names
of the families that had lived there twenty years before. He passed areas, too,
where lots that had once held two-story clapboard houses now held only the
craterlike indentations of cement foundations, damaged with time and standing
alone.

After Sanchez left, Ray walked out a ways in the
desert with the shotgun he’d killed Burnham with and the bag of heroin. Counting
his steps as he went, the shovel in his hand, he made sure that he’d be able to
find the spot again if he needed to. Taking his time as he dug the hole, pausing
to wipe the gun clean, then burying both the bag and gun. By the time he was
done, the sun had set and there was only the pale light to be seen in the west.
He walked back to the house and sat on the couch trying to figure a plan.

Out on the street there was nothing moving and Ray
pulled himself up on the wheel. Sitting straight-backed in the driver’s seat, he
pulled at his pants where the jeans had ridden up his crotch and tightened at
his waist. He wore the nine-millimeter Ruger at the back of his belt and he
brought it out and looked it over, checking the slide on the gun before placing
it beneath the seat.

He was dying for a piss. Turning to look into the
backseat for a cup or a bottle, he saw the case for the hunting rifle. He’d
thought for a moment about burying it along with the shotgun and drugs, but then
thought better of it, knowing he still didn’t have a plan for the kid up there
in the hospital room.

With his bladder beating a constant rhythm against
his belt buckle, Ray got down out of the Bronco and urinated against one of the
chain-link fences nearby. He kept himself in the shadows, the only thing to tell
he was there a steady rising of steam from the piss on the ground at his feet.
He zipped up and looked back at the hospital.

It was then, standing there in the cold of the
desert night, that he saw the truck go by on the street before the hospital. The
reverse lights came on and then the truck backed up to the curb. All of this Ray
watched, fascinated after all these years to be back in the same town. His
cousin Tom, there before him with his truck door open to the street. Ray
watching as Tom clapped the door shut and walked up the drive toward the
hospital.

I
t was
past midnight when Kelly came out of the hospital and saw Tom Herrera sitting on
the hood of her cruiser with his feet on the bumper. “Careful,” Kelly said, “you
wouldn’t want to damage county property.”

Tom grinned. “I don’t know if the county quite
knows how much damage I’ve already done.” He slid off the hood and stood waiting
for her. At the bottom of the drive she saw his truck and his mutt, Jeanie,
sitting inside with her window rolled down.

“You two are getting to be a regular occurrence,
aren’t you?” Kelly said.

Tom looked back to where he’d parked his truck, the
street all the way down a dark lane of shadow. “I guess we are,” Tom said. “I
was going to see if you wanted to come out for a beer with me.”

“Tomás Herrera,” Kelly said, with a lift of her
eyebrows. “Are you trying to ask me out on a date?”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

“Let me guess,” Kelly said, walking around him to
her door, “you want to go by Dario’s bar and see what the mood is like
tonight?”

“I always knew you’d make a fine sheriff,” Tom
said. He watched her where she stood, waiting for her to say something, and when
she didn’t, “I guess we could drive separately. I wouldn’t want anyone thinking
we were becoming a thing.”

Kelly smiled at him. She opened her door and got
in. She hadn’t planned on having a beer or going in to see Dario tonight, but
she would if Tom wanted to go with her. Dario’s wasn’t exactly the type of place
she liked to spend her evenings. Low ceilinged, with a central bar that cramped
all the tables and chairs close to the wall, the only light in the place from
the neon beer signs that hung behind the bar and against the windows.

Down on the street in front of the hospital she saw
Tom start up his truck and pull it around toward Main. Following him out she saw
the empty parking spots all down both sides of the street, a good collection of
cars outside Dario’s bar. Dark storefront windows running parallel to her as
they came down the block and parked just across the street.

“A lot of cars for a weeknight,” Tom said as they
crossed the street toward the bar.

“Looks like a roughneck convention might be going
on inside.”

Tom led as they crossed the street, looking back
over his shoulder at her. “I didn’t think there were that many oilmen left in
this town.” He gained the curb and in three quick steps had the door to the bar
open. The smell of wet dish towels and spilled liquor leaked out onto the
sidewalk, followed close by the thick billow of tobacco smoke from inside.

“Wonderful,” Kelly said. But Tom didn’t seem to
hear as he went in ahead.