The Kiskadee of Death

by Jan Dunlap

  What, exactly, cracked open Birdy’s head? Was it the impact of a fall, or the impact of a weapon?

  If the former, then I had nothing to offer Pacheco. If it was the latter, I knew two people who could have been carrying a concealed weapon in Estero Llano on the morning that Birdy Johnson was killed: Poppy Mac and Buzz Davis.

  Definitely not two of a kind. Aside from their mutual interest in birds, Poppy and Mac seemed as unalike as a… Plain Chachalaca and a Zone-tailed Hawk.

  Which, by the way, I’d hoped we might see ever since Schooner had mentioned it the other day. It would be a lifer for both Luce and me.

  Another lifer, I should say. We’d already added more lifers to our list during this trip than we’d found in the last three years back home in Minnesota. I guessed I was just being greedy.

  And human, right?

  Doesn’t everyone want to go for all the gusto they can get?

  Luce and I had jumped at an unexpected opportunity to visit the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and here we were, enjoying sunshine and birding in January.

  Lots of the MOBsters had decided to retire here and enjoy the climate and birding year-round.

  Buzz Davis had sold the family land and apparently made a fortune.

  Poppy Mac wanted to ride on the first spaceship to launch from SpaceX.

  Gusto. Life. Live it.

  I sounded like a beer commercial.

  I called Eddie back and asked him to show the chief the recording again. I explained what I’d been considering, and he agreed it was worth another look, and that he’d get right on it and call the chief. Luce woke up, we had an early dinner at Roosevelt’s in McAllen, then went out to the corner of Tenth and Trenton streets to watch the nightly performance that Rhonda, our Birds Nest hostess, had recommended we see: the amassing of the blackbirds along the telephone wires.

  Seriously, it was like a scene from that classic Hitchcock thriller “The Birds,” but longer in duration and in physical area. I parked the car in the Target store lot, and Luce and I got out to lean against the hood of the SUV. Four of the eight overhead wires were already crowded with blackbirds, who constantly shifted and hopped aside to allow room for more incoming birds. Gradually as the sun lowered in the sky and the night fell, the noise level of the gathering birds increased, until I had to raise my voice to speak with Luce beside me.

  “This is creepy,” I said, staring at what must have been thousands of blackbirds perched on the wires that ran in all directions. Silhouetted by the fading light, the birds seemed to grow in size and numbers, until the whole intersection was a study in black and white—black birds, black utility poles, white car lights and the white faces of people passing by in cars. It reminded me of an old black-and-white movie with sinister characters and gangland shootouts.

  Which got me thinking about the local MOB.

  They weren’t exactly sinister with their Hawaiian shirts, floppy hats, hearing aids and binoculars.

  But because of Eddie’s bottle of Aquavit and the fact that all the birders knew where Birdy would be on an early Wednesday morning, I was more convinced than ever that one of them had killed Birdy.

  And tried to shoot Eddie.

  And with that thought, I finally hit on why someone would target those two particular men and want me and Luce to get out of the area: the drone.

  Birdy asked Crazy Eddie to help him with the project. Eddie had joined the MOB when he arrived, and like any close-knit flock, the MOBsters all knew each other’s business, or at the least, thought they knew each other’s business. As Eddie had pointed out, some folks, like Rosalie, thought the drone project was all about immigration control, while others believed it was for cracking down on drug smuggling.

  If I had to pick which group might be more dangerous to tangle with over Eddie and Birdy’s drone work, I would guess drug dealers. Based on everything I’d ever read or heard about the illicit drug trade, I assumed huge amounts of money were involved, and the people running the smuggling rings weren’t always nice about it, to say the least. Think violence, shoot-outs, murder, gore and revenge. True, I didn’t know that for a fact, but I hoped I never had the occasion to, either.

  Nor did I have any personal experience with illegal immigrants, other than a few students who seemed to have slipped through the cracks of bureaucracy and ended up enrolled in our high school. The business of bringing in undocumented foreign-born individuals for profit was so far out of my worldview I couldn’t begin to grasp all the technicalities and legislation surrounding its prosecution; from a simple comparison of profit versus risk, it seemed like the drug dealers had more to lose from discovery by drones.

  Ergo, my choice of drug runners as the bad guys who were after Birdy and Eddie.

  As for our threatening note, I figured that was damage control of some kind because we were personal friends of Crazy Eddie’s. Maybe whoever was behind the attack on Eddie was warning us away so he, or she, wouldn’t have to add us to the target list.

  A considerate killer?

  That was an oxymoron, wasn’t it? Killers were supposed to be heartless, not kind. I seriously doubted that, in the annals of murderers, there was a page devoted to killers most likely to be named “Mr. or Ms. Congeniality.” For some reason, I just couldn’t picture a bunch of murderers hanging out together to confer titles on each other, like a bunch of student editors getting together to name classmates as “Best Athlete” or “Most Likely to Succeed” for the school yearbook. That would take a consensus, and…

  Oh. My. Gosh.

  A terrible possibility slipped into my head.

  What if the entire MOB was involved in Birdy’s death?

  What if the MOB was, in truth, a real mob dealing drugs, and Birdy had caught them in the act?

  Holy crap.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Even though we had another quiet night at the Birds Nest, I didn’t sleep very well. I needed to talk to Crazy Eddie and the chief and bounce my new theory off of them. I realized I had no concrete evidence to support any of my speculations, but I was sure I was onto the right track.

  My gut, you know. It talks, and I listen.

  And sometimes it’s even right.

  “Bobby,” Luce said when I told her of my new set of suspicions over our breakfast of Rhonda’s home-made granola and yogurt parfaits, “not that I want to discredit your ability to help the police solve crimes, but seriously, if everyone in the MOB is involved, there is no way Chief Pacheco could have missed a drug ring like that right under his nose. He knows all these people. His mother is one of them.”

  I gave Luce a noncommittal shrug. “So? Maybe he’s in on it.”

  My wife laid her spoon next to her empty dish and leaned forward, her elbows on the little bistro table. “Do you hear yourself? You sound like a conspiracy theorist. A conspiracy theorist gone nuts, if you want to know the truth.”

  “But that’s just it,” I countered. “I do want to know the truth. And I want to know it today,” I added.

  “Can you handle the truth?” she asked me, a smile starting, then growing, to light up her face. She caught my eyes with hers in a steady gaze.

  “I’m pregnant,” she announced.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I was really proud of myself. I didn’t faint, I didn’t jump up and down in a pure adrenaline rush, I didn’t roll my eyes, or anything.

  Anything.

  That’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t, couldn’t, do anything for a few moments. I just stared into Luce’s brilliant blue eyes, feeling my own face stretch into the biggest smile I’d ever had. Then, without a word, I got out of my chair, and knelt beside my wife’s knee, my hand sliding gingerly onto her belly.

  “That is the best truth I have ever heard,” I said, feeling a dampness rising in my eyes. “Marry me, Luce.”

 
; “I already did,” she reminded me.

  “That’s a good thing,” I said, wondering why I couldn’t seem to come up with something more memorable or romantic or… anything.

  “My brain has stopped working,” I told my wife, who was beginning to laugh at me.

  I threw my arms around her and pulled her into me for a long, happy, delirious kiss. When I let her go again, I rocked back on my heels.

  “Okay, I think my brain is working again now. I obviously needed oxygen. Thanks for the mouth-to-mouth,” I said. I snapped my fingers as I suddenly realized why Luce had been teasing me about dates yesterday morning.

  “The date—you missed your monthly cycle,” I said, then couldn’t help adding, “Mama Luce.”

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, early,” she said, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “You know what I feel like doing right now?”

  I eyed the door that led back to our bedroom.

  Luce gave me a light swat on my chest.

  “Wrong,” she said, laughing again. “I feel like a parade, and if we get going right now, we can stop in and offer that last minute help the MOB needs to make their Citrus Festival Parade float the very best it has ever been.”

  I stood and looked down at my wife. “Are you sure? I mean…”

  I nodded at her midsection.

  “I’m pregnant, Bobby, not terminal,” she clarified. “And there’s nothing like a parade to celebrate good news. Besides, as you yourself pointed out to the chief, the queen herself expects us to be there, and we don’t want to keep the queen in suspense.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I parked the car at one end of Buzz Davis’s long driveway behind a line of other vehicles. The MOB float had been moved out of the garage onto the brick-paved apron and to my surprise, the float looked pretty darn good. The front truck cab was clearly now the head of an enormous Green Jay, composed of spray-painted blue oranges, and the trailer behind it sported a citrus-studded map of Texas, along with a collection of a dozen six-foot tall photos featuring the Texas specialty birds. Clumps of people filled the apron around the truck, tacking up last minute grapefruit halves, talking with each other, drinking coffee, and in general, having a grand old time. Behind the float, I spotted a human-sized Great Kiskadee getting a pirate-style black eye patch fitted to his head by none other than the lovely, tiara-crowned Citrus Festival queen herself, Pearl Garcia.

  “Look,” I said to Luce, pointing at the resplendent Pearl and the costumed birder. “The One-eyed Kiskadee is here. He’ll be a local legend by the end of the parade, if he isn’t already.”

  “And there’s Mark’s Mustang,” my wife said, yearning in her voice, pointing at the classic car parked near the float. The Mustang’s convertible top was down and the white leather interior gleamed in the early morning sun. “I wonder if it’s going to be Pearl’s ride during the parade?”

  “Yo, Minnesota!”

  Schooner waved us over to where he stood near the truck cab door with Chief Pacheco.

  “I thought maybe you’d left us and headed home already,” he said when we got closer to him.

  The words of our midnight warning rang in my head. I threw a quick glance at the chief, but he seemed preoccupied, his gaze directed at his niece Pearl with the giant kiskadee. Could Schooner have been our intruder?

  As usual, he was wearing the local birding uniform—a floral print shirt topping a pair of khaki shorts. I almost asked him to turn around for me so I could inspect the shirt for rips, but I couldn’t come up with a good line. Hey, Schooner, I want to check you out just didn’t hit the right note for me.

  “We had to see the finished product,” I told Schooner, patting the cheek of the truck cab-turned-Green Jay. My hand came away with a tinge of blue on my palm. Okay, so that was one thing I’d gotten right about the MOB: spray-painting grapefruit was an inside job.

  “We’re leaving after the parade,” Luce told him. “We’re missing the Winter Carnival parade back home, but I have a feeling this one, in seventy-degree weather, will more than make up for it. It was nice meeting you, Schooner.”

  With that remark, Luce took my arm and steered me towards the back of the float. Pearl and the kiskadee were nowhere in sight, but Cynnie Scott,MOB president/conservation advocate/unlucky-in-love local legend, reached out to snag my sleeve and draw me into a conversation she was having with Poppy Mac.

  “Bob,” she said, excitement practically oozing out of her, “and Luce, you two have got to hear this. Buzz just told me he’s using the proceeds from his sale of the land to the SpaceX project to fund a new initiative for conservation of key migratory areas! Isn’t that fabulous? He’s the conservation start-up I mentioned to you yesterday!”

  “I knew he was one of the good guys!” Poppy interjected, her round cheeks flushed with pink over her wrinkles. “You can always tell. He’s just got that look, you know? Like a white knight. And he’s naming the initiative for Birdy in honor of all of Birdy’s lobbying with state officials to guarantee that the spaceport will implement bird-friendly directives. It’s just so exciting!” She clapped her hands together in delight. “And now I won’t feel guilty when I take my seat on the first space flight!”

  “You got your seat?” Luce asked.

  “Yes!!” the older woman exclaimed. “Paddy gave me the ticket last night—it was his early Valentine’s surprise for me!”

  I gave Luce’s hand a squeeze and planted a kiss on her cheek.

  “A lot of that going around, it seems like,” I whispered as a tingling sensation ran down my spine. I was going to be a father. I was going to take my child birding. Wow.

  I pulled Luce away from the women and headed into the garage. I wanted a moment alone to hug my pregnant wife again.

  And just as I wrapped my arms around her, a scream echoed in the garage and a giant kiskadee bolted by me, one hand slapping something hard into my stomach, its other hand dragging a screaming Pearl behind him.

  The kiskadee threw Pearl into the green Porsche in the far stall of the garage, vaulted the hood of the sportscar, jumped into the driver’s seat and reversed out at high speed. A screeching brake sound, a loud squeal of the tires, and the car went roaring away down Buzz’s long driveway.

  “Pearl!” Rosalie Pacheco screamed from the front of the garage. “He has Pearl!”

  Ignoring the yells and chaos that had erupted in the garage, I looked at the hard object the kiskadee had stuck into my stomach and which now lay in my hands.

  “What is that?” Luce asked, looking at the small weighted black sack I was holding.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “It’s a sap,” Chief Pacheco said, snapping a pair of handcuffs on my wrist. “And you’re under arrest, Bob White, for assault with a deadly weapon and maybe a murder, too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The next thing I knew, I was in the back of Pacheco’s squad car looking out at Luce, who was surrounded by a clutch of MOBsters trying to comfort her.

  Pacheco put on his lights and siren and roared out of the drive.

  “I didn’t do anything!” I yelled to the chief over the ear-splitting sound of the siren. “Luce was right there with me since we arrived. Ask anyone!”

  “I know that!” Pacheco yelled back. “We’re going after Buzz and Pearl!”

  He pushed a keyring back to me through the screen behind him. “It’s the key to the cuffs. Open ’em.”

  I reached forward and grabbed the keys. It took a minute or two for me to fit it in the lock—it’s not like I usually get a chance to practice that little trick when I’m on birding trips, you know—and free my hands.

  “So why am I here?” I shouted over the wailing that was still coming from the squad car. The chief took a corner, fast, and I had to grip the car door handle to keep myself from splaying out on my side.

&n
bsp; I wondered if this was what it was like to drive with me when I was speeding.

  “Because you were right there!” Pacheco called back.

  He cut the siren, but not his speed. “You had the sap in your hand, and I needed an extra pair of eyes to keep up with Pearl and the bird. Look for the green Porsche!”

  “There!” I shouted, “It hung a right two blocks ahead of us!”

  The chief obliged.

  “Gunnar,” he told me, his voice rushed while he tore after the Porsche, “you know, the birder with the bandana around his head. Someone found him crumpled on the ground, unconscious, just as Pearl screamed. I checked his pulse, could see blood on his head, and I started running in her direction, but the bird had her. Then, I see you’ve got the sap in your hand, so I grab you to come with me.”

  “What’s a sap?” I asked.

  He spun the wheel again, and I grabbed at the back of the front seats to keep myself erect.

  It didn’t work. I ended up banging my shoulder against the car door.

  “Put on the seat belt!” Pacheco commanded.

  “Now you tell me,” I complained, then complied, hurriedly locating the shoulder harness for the back right seat.

  “The sap is what hit Gunnar,” Pacheco shouted back to me. “It’s what killed Birdy—it cracked his skull. You had the murder weapon in your hand. I wasn’t about to lose it, so I took you along with it.”

  He pulled the squad car level with the Porsche. Luckily, most of the streets we’d flown through had been empty; the few cars on the road I had noticed in our mad dash had all pulled over when we came roaring by, courtesy of the blazing lights on top of the car. I looked out the window to see the back of the kiskadee’s head and noticed a black eye patch dangling against the nape of his yellow neck.

  Good to know that the kiskadee—Birdy’s killer! Buzz?—was conscientious enough to remove the eye patch before racing around town at breakneck speeds with a kidnapped girl in his front seat with him.