by Jan Dunlap
“She’ll be fine,” Eddie said, obviously reading the look of concern on my face as I watched my wife leave the room. “She wouldn’t be the first Minnesotan to be felled by the hot chile peppers down here.”
“We didn’t have any chiles today,” I told him. “We had barbeque at Fat Daddy’s. Good barbeque, and plenty of it.”
I returned to our conversation before Luce had made her entrance and quick exit.
“So,” I summarized, “Chief Pacheco not only has your bottle of Aquavit, which was found near Birdy’s body, but he also has eyewitnesses to a fight you had with him?”
“Shoot!” Eddie said, sounding annoyed. “I bet that’s where I lost my Aquavit. At the MOB’s garage. I was passing it around to everyone there before I insulted Birdy.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. Eddie was telling me too much at once for me to keep it all straight. “You insulted Birdy? I thought you said you were trash-talking the drone.”
Eddie walked over to his little kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. He pulled out an unopened bottle of beer and offered it to me, but I shook my head.
“Suit yourself,” he said and uncapped it. “Birdy designed the drone, Bob. He’s an avionics engineer from way back. He used to work at NASA.”
The framed wall photo of Birdy and Buzz at Fat Daddy’s popped into my head, and I began to connect some dots.
“That must be why Birdy was involved with the SpaceX program, then,” I said. “He used to work in the space program when it was all government-owned. Now that it’s spawned private industry looking to establish a profitable business, the companies probably love getting experienced ex-NASA folks on board to help develop the whole idea of commercial space tourism.”
I described the framed photo to Eddie, and another connection occurred to me. “Do you know if Birdy was at NASA while Buzz was an astronaut?”
Eddie nodded again. “That’s where they met,” he said. “But I don’t think Buzz was an astronaut, or at least, he never made it into space as one. If I’m remembering this right, Buzz Davis was kicked out of the astronaut program just before he was scheduled for his first flight. He had a drinking problem.”
“But Luce said she recognized him from a parade in St. Paul when she was a kid,” I recalled. “She said he was an astronaut.”
“He was. He trained as an astronaut decades ago,” Eddie conceded. “Those guys were the cream of the crop back then. Heroes in the making. But even so, a few of them never made it into space, because of medical disqualification at the last minute or because a space launch was scuttled. If Buzz Davis was in a parade back then, the organizers must have decided not to hold his disqualification against him.”
I thought about the man I’d met that morning on the park deck. He could have been the poster boy for healthy retirement with his tanned skin, clear eyes and athletic stride.
“He must have gone through rehab and changed his evil ways,” I said to Eddie. “Buzz Davis glows with healthy living.”
“And he wouldn’t take a sip of my liquor the other night, either, now that I think about it. Unlike Paddy Mac and Schooner.” Eddie shook his head. “Those boys could be world-class professionals when it comes to boozing, let me tell you.”
I picked up a few pieces of equipment from the table and turned them over in my hands while I digested Eddie’s observations about Buzz Davis and my new-found colleagues of the MOB. “So how are we going to get you off the chief’s list of suspects, Eddie?”
“Find out who did kill Birdy Johnson,” he replied. “But let’s have some dinner first. I’m starved. And then I’m taking you and Luce to watch the biggest flock of ugly buzzards you’ve ever seen.”
Oh, good. If anything could instantly restore my wife’s spirits, it would be a flock of birds.
Although, I had to admit, vultures might be a stretch, even for Luce.
Chapter Seven
As it turned out, Luce opted out of going to dinner in favor of taking a nap at Eddie’s and heating up a can of minestrone she found in his kitchen cupboard. She insisted she’d be fine, and Eddie and I should go enjoy tamales and burritos at the Tex-Mex restaurant around the corner from the Inn. By the time we got back, she had color in her cheeks again and felt a lot better, so all three of us hopped into my car and headed for the Frontera Audubon Society to see the nightly vulture show.
A short time later, I pulled into the long driveway off South Texas Boulevard that led to the headquarters of the society. Set on fifteen acres of what used to be a family citrus orchard, the preserve was a surprise to first-time visitors with its native thornscrub, wetlands, and butterfly gardens almost in the middle of the city of Weslaco. Luce and I had walked the thicket trail at the preserve on our second morning in the Valley and seen a score of different warblers, along with several hummingbirds and a couple of Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks. Now, as we parked the car in front of the closed wrought-iron gates, I spied a White-tipped Dove perched in one of the trees on the other side, with two Inca Doves nearby.
“You sure we can park here?” Luce asked Eddie.
“No problem,” he said. “The gardens and visitor center close at 4:00 p.m., but there are generally a few cars here to watch for the vultures coming to roost for the night. Although I think the stink of all the droppings from the birds discourages some birders from coming to see it.”
Eddie waved a hand in the direction of the grove of tall dead trees silhouetted against the sky in the growing dusk.
“Perfect habitat for Turkey Vultures,” he said. “Not so great for all the houses around it, though. I can’t imagine that hundreds of noisy smelly vultures roosting near your home is good for resale value.”
I looked up and a Turkey Vulture glided over me, only about twenty feet off the ground. With another beat of its wings, it sailed toward the dead trees. In a wide circle around the vultures’ roost, house lights were beginning to come on. As Eddie had noted, the scavengers’ gathering place was practically in the middle of a city residential area.
As more vultures sailed in and the dark flock grew to include hundreds of the birds, the noise level increased until the air seemed filled with the cries of the vultures, and the trees were shrouded in black forms.
It would have made a great scene for a slasher movie.
“Creepy,” Luce observed, echoing my own evaluation. “Definitely creepy.”
The sound of shots punctured the vultures’ chorus and I instinctively ducked behind the car, pulling Luce down with me.
“Are those gunshots?” she asked, total disbelief in her voice. “We’re in the city, for crying out loud.”
“This is Texas,” I reminded her. “Guns are household appliances.”
More shots rang out. A flurry of black wings flew out of one of the dead trees.
“Somebody’s shooting at the vultures,” Eddie called above the din.
I smacked my forehead with my hand. “That’s right,” I said. “When we visited here yesterday morning, the director told us some of the residents in the area hate the vultures so much, they occasionally shoot BB guns at them.”
Luce stood up. “It’s still being irresponsible, firing BB guns in a neighborhood. Someone could get hurt.”
Another barrage of shots sounded. Luce ducked back down beside the driver’s door of the car where I was still crouched.
“I got news for you,” she said. “We’re not in Kansas, anymore, Dorothy, and those last rounds were not BBs, either.”
Great. Just what I didn’t want to hear. I was taking cover by my car while a bunch of gun-happy lunatics were waging a turf war with a flock of vultures.
“Eddie?” I called out. “You okay?”
There was a moment of silence, and then a string of curses erupted from the other side of the car.
I bolted, hunched over, around the f
ront of the car and found Eddie sitting near the front tire, his hands wrapped around his right calf. A dark stream ran down his jeans.
“Some idiot shot me,” he said, still swearing. “Do I look like a vulture to you?”
Chapter Eight
Chief Pacheco stood in the headlights of his cruiser watching the paramedics from the ambulance tending to Eddie’s gunshot wound in the back of their van. Luckily, Eddie had only sustained a bullet graze across his upper calf and the emergency personnel were able to clean and wrap it sufficiently. Nevertheless, I’d already told him Luce and I would be taking him straight to the local emergency room for a thorough exam as soon as the paramedics finished with him.
“That gunshot wasn’t meant for a vulture,” Pacheco said when I joined him in the glare of his headlights. “The vultures are up in the trees, not down by a car door.”
I glanced at Eddie and the medics in the back of the open van. Luce stood off to the side of the van, talking with another police officer.
“Yup, I kind of figured that out,” I said.
The chief crossed his arms over his chest and looked towards the vultures’ roost. I waited for him to say something else about Eddie being a target, but the silence lingered.
And lingered.
Since I highly doubted Pacheco had developed a sudden interest in observing the habits of roosting buzzards, I guessed something else was occupying the man’s thoughts. And since he was standing only a few feet away from where Eddie had landed in a shooter’s sights, I also guessed the chief was mulling over the coincidence of two violent acts in one day that involved two men who knew each other.
I knew that’s what I was mulling over.
Okay, maybe not “mulling,” exactly.
More like Holy crap! someone was just shooting at Eddie, and this morning, a friend of Eddie’s, got his head cracked and a canoe turned over on top of him.
Needless to say, this was not how I envisioned my third day of birding in the Valley to turn out.
“Who knew you three were coming out here to see the vultures tonight?” Chief Pacheco finally asked, his gaze still on the dead trees of the vultures’ roost.
The question hit me in the gut like a sucker punch. For a moment or two, I couldn’t speak. When air returned to my lungs, my voice came out with a squeak.
“You think whoever shot Eddie… you think we talked with him?” I tried to force my words into coherent sentences. “We know the shooter? Are you kidding me?”
Pacheco turned his head towards me and despite the dark of the falling night, his eyes were sharp and glowing. They reminded me of the eyes of the Barred Owl that I’d spotted one evening in early November from my bedroom window. It was already dark outside, and I’d walked into our bedroom, which was upstairs, to pull the curtains before turning on the room’s overhead light, but just as I reached for the curtain cord, I glanced through the window and froze. On the other side of the glass, maybe ten feet away at my own eye level, sat a full-grown Barred Owl. His implacable dark eyes latched onto mine, and I felt an almost palpable chill run down my spine.
This must be how a rodent feels just before it suddenly becomes dinner, I thought.
Then, in the blink of an eye, the owl flew away, its big broad wings gliding into the darkness.
I blinked my own eyes then at the memory, and focused on Pacheco’s question.
Who knew that Eddie, Luce and I were going to be here tonight?
“Birders,” I said. “The birders staying at the Alamo Inn. Schooner, Gunnar and Paddy Mac.”
“They tell anyone else?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. Why would they?”
I felt Luce’s hand slip into mine. “What are you talking about?”
I repeated the chief’s question for her.
“I think we may have said something to the naturalist here at Frontera when we visited yesterday morning,” she said. “She was the one who first told us about the vultures’ roost and some of the trouble they’ve caused. I think we told her we would try to see them tonight.”
“Cynnie Scott,” Pacheco said. “She’s a local legend when it comes to birding. She’s probably the most outspoken bird conservationist along the Lower Rio Grande Valley. She’s also the president of McAllen’s seniors’ birding club.” He glanced away for a minute in Eddie’s direction. “They like to call themselves the MOB,” he added.
“We know,” I said. “We were recruited today to help them with the float for the parade. We were going to head over there after seeing the vultures, but now we’re taking Eddie to the hospital instead.”
The chief lapsed into silence again, his gaze back on the vultures in the trees. He wasn’t exactly given to idle chitchat, I decided.
Luce squeezed my hand. “Eddie’s about ready to go, by the way.”
“I’ll take Eddie to the hospital,” Pacheco informed us, returning his attention to our conversation. “You go work on the parade float. And do me a favor—talk about this shooting tonight. See what kind of reactions you get from the other people there.”
He paused and pinned his sharp eyes on me again. “I’d be curious to know.”
I held his gaze for a moment or two, measuring the man’s intensity.
“Curious” was putting it mildly. I had the feeling he would have liked to strap a hidden microphone on me and listen in on every word I heard for the next few hours. Someone—or somebodies—in the MOB must have been added to his suspect list since Eddie had been grazed by a bullet. And since I was the new kid in town, who better to send into a crowd of suspects than an innocent bystander just passing through?
Great. So now I was not only going to be a member of the MOB, but I was going to be a snitch, too.
“Are you serious?” Luce asked Pacheco. I had no doubt she had come to the same conclusion I had: the chief was hoping I’d do a little undercover work for him. “You want my husband to gather information for a police investigation for you?”
“Only if he wants to,” Pacheco replied. “I said it was a favor, not a requirement.”
I looked from the chief to my wife and thought about Eddie crouching behind my car and getting shot. This time around, it was me giving her hand a squeeze. “If I can find out anything to help Eddie, I’m going to do it, Luce. You know that.”
She nodded in the dim light coming from the surrounding vehicles and gave me a wink.
“Your reputation as a sleuth must have preceded you,” she said.
“Or my reputation as an idiot,” I replied. “Either way, let’s do this.”
I offered my hand to Pacheco for a handshake to seal the deal. “I’m on your team, Chief. Me and the doll,” I added in my best B-grade movie gangster voice, “we’re going after the MOB. We’ve got a score to settle and a grapefruit to nail.”
Pacheco shook my hand uncertainly.
“Does he always joke like this?” he asked Luce.
“Oh, no,” she told him. “Only when he’s involved in murder investigations.”
The chief gave me another dark look, and I knew exactly what he was going to say. You’ve been involved in other murder investigations? I bumped my wife’s shoulder to thank her for opening that particular can of worms.
“You’ve been involved in other murders?” Pacheco asked a moment later.
Okay, so I was off by one word.
“A few,” I admitted. “Maybe… five. Or six. I’ve sort of lost count now.”
“It’s an occupational hazard for him,” Luce explained. “He’s a birder who happens to find bodies.”
Pacheco looked from Luce to me. “Not that I’m trying to discourage you from birding here, but the next time you’re thinking about heading south from Minnesota?” His face was deadly serious. “Consider Florida instead.”
Chapter Nine
> Wow,” I said. “That is probably the ugliest parade float I have ever seen.”
Luce and I were standing just outside the open doors of the well-lit three-car garage in a well-to-do neighborhood in the city of Mission, where the MOB’s float was being constructed. From what I could see, the float consisted of a flatbed truck with a bunch of chicken wire fencing sticking up near the truck cab. In front of the fencing were mounds of yellow grapefruit and a clotheshanger draped with what looked like a terminally emaciated six-foot tall Great Kiskadee with a broken neck and only one eye.
“Bob!” Luce hissed at me. “Someone will hear you!”
“That’s sort of the idea,” I whispered back. “Better they hear it now when they can still do something about it, rather than when the float starts down the street in the parade and everybody runs away screaming. That kiskadee looks like a refugee from a teen slasher movie.”
Any further comments I wanted to make on the float’s lack of aesthetic appeal were cut short by Schooner’s welcoming greeting called out to us via a loudspeaker mounted on the top of the truck cab.
“Yo, Minnesota!” his voice boomed from the garage. “Let’s show these Texans how to build a float!”
That remark earned him a chorus of outraged voices from inside the garage, asserting that real Texans needed no one’s help, that nobody does anything better than a Texan can, and that, if the rest of the country followed Texas’s lead, we’d all be a lot better off.
I held up my hands in surrender. “We’re just the hired help,” I assured the crowd of older birders that converged on us in front of the garage. I nodded at Paddy Mac and Gunnar the Bandana Man, and let my eyes rove over the other faces, thinking one or two looked familiar from the deck at Estero Llano that morning. “If we haven’t met yet, I’m Bob White. Hi, kids.”
A flurry of handshakes and quick introductions followed as each of the MOBsters said hello to us before returning to their construction tasks on the float.