The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  “I know,” Kelly said. “I’m just worried is all. I haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing.”

  “This sort of thing?”

  Kelly gave the truck another sidelong glance, but didn’t say anything more.

  “What are we talking about here?” Tom asked.

  “We’re not talking about anything, Tom,” Kelly said, stepping close as the ambulance’s reverse lights came on, and the driver brought the big square body around toward Coronado. “We just need to hold Deacon’s truck a little longer.”

  Tom watched the ambulance go by, rising up, but was unable to see who was inside. “For what?”

  Kelly took the handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her forehead again. Down the road the midseason heat played in waves across the asphalt and under Kelly’s arms there were two dark crescents of perspiration. “You’re not the sheriff anymore, Tom.”

  “I know that. Believe me, I do.” Tom looked over at his dog, ashamed by Kelly’s bluntness. Kelly and he had had a regular meal every Thursday for years but it had slowly gotten away from them. Now, looking at the dog she’d given him, Tom remembered all those Thursday night meals in his living room, eating in front of the television with the then puppy biting on Kelly’s fingers with her pinprick teeth.

  “I’ve got the next two days off,” Tom said, trying to ease the mood. “I was just going up the road on my way to see my goddaughter. I see this up ahead and I think maybe someone is hurt, maybe I can help.” Tom nodded toward Deacon’s truck. The tires had left marks on the asphalt. “What happened up there?”

  Kelly shook her head and grinned. Looking away from Tom for a time, she turned back to him, her face now sober. “Sometimes I don’t know about this job,” she said.

  Tom mumbled his agreement. He’d felt the same all through that last year he’d been with the department. Ray’s wife, Marianne, dead from a hit-and-run accident, and Ray saying it wasn’t an accident, it was the cartel. The pressures mounting for Tom to do something about Angela Lopez. A woman rumored to be working for the cartel. Tom wondering all the while if any of it was even worth it. Pissed off about the whole thing. He knew he’d taken it too far, taken the job too seriously. He’d let his cousin Ray talk him into a place too deep for even Tom to go.

  Again, Tom mumbled a reply. Kelly on the verge of telling him something she wasn’t supposed to, but that Tom was desperate to know. All of his past now crushed up behind him like a stack of freight come loose from its tracks. All of him feeling that longing for his former job, for the weight of the star on his chest, and the purpose that went along with it.

  “I don’t want this to come back on me,” Kelly said, finally.

  “Okay,” he said, fearing if he said anything more she might hold back.

  “Okay,” Kelly said. “You were never here.”

  Tom nodded.

  “There was a man, a kid really. Mexican. He came up onto the road. Shot so bad he looked whiter than me.”

  “Dead?”

  “I don’t know. Got the ambulance out here as soon as we could, but I don’t know.”

  “You think a coyote decided to turn him loose?” Tom asked, feeling the possibilities begin to churn, the outcomes and story lines that might have brought this boy up onto the road with a bullet through him.

  “Don’t know anything yet, but it didn’t feel right.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The clothes, he didn’t look like someone who would be out here, you know? He didn’t look like someone who’d spent the last couple days crossing.”

  “Drugs, then?” Tom said. “He could be one of Dario’s boys. Maybe Dario was trying to settle something.”

  “Don’t even say that,” Kelly said. “We don’t need that kind of talk around here.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “You know why not,” Kelly said.

  “You have to at least consider it.”

  “Does this look like something Dario would have done? In the two or three years since he showed up he’s been quiet. Why this? Why now? We might throw his name around from time to time, but he’s more careful than this.”

  “Edna,” Tom said, offering up a stern face. “You know what they’ve been saying about him in town.”

  “I know the rumors.”

  “He’s cartel, or as close as we’ve had to it since Angela Lopez.”

  “I don’t want to believe it,” Kelly said. “I can’t afford to go around making accusations without merit. You should know that. It just doesn’t go that way around here anymore.”

  “Well, what, then?”

  “Deacon just said the kid came up out of the desert, just ran right onto the road,” Kelly said. “That’s all I have right now.”

  “Nothing else around?”

  “Only a couple out from California, tourists wanting to see the desert. Came along after Deacon stopped his truck. The woman in the car was a nurse out of Los Angeles. She helped Deacon with the kid. He had to use his own shirt to stop the bleeding.”

  “And the bullet?”

  “Something high powered, it went all the way through. Once we get this road cleaned up I can get the deputies searching for it with the metal detector.”

  Tom looked up to the west where the hills flowed down from the Hermanos Range like a long, smooth blade bent on its side. Hillsides branched with arroyos, showed green where the locust grew up out of the high desert in thickets. “Whoever shot this boy could just be sitting up there watching. You need to send someone now, you understand,” Tom said, trying to check himself. He wasn’t the sheriff anymore.

  “You know what I’m working with here, Tom. We’re not trained for this. We can do a traffic stop, chase a rattler off someone’s porch, but this is a whole other kind of situation.”

  “What about the state police?”

  “The mayor wants this handled in-house—”

  The breath burst from Tom’s nostrils before he had time to stop it.

  “He doesn’t want any outside attention,” Kelly finished. “You know how things are around here. Oil’s gone. Nothing’s keeping them here, and the mayor knows it.”

  Tom couldn’t help it. He was thinking about the Lopez woman he’d shot ten years before, how he and Kelly had come through the door looking for evidence to convict her, to send her back down to Mexico. Nothing there and Angela Lopez running to protect her infant daughter, Tom making the split-second decision he would never be able to take back. No drugs on her at all, nothing to say she was guilty of anything. “If this thing turns out to be drug related it could get complicated.”

  Kelly took a moment with her words, thinking it through. “Yes,” she said, wiping at her forehead again. “I know that.”

  Tom knew just by being there he was putting Kelly at risk. He wanted to apologize for the things he’d said, for trying to give Kelly orders he no longer had the right to give.

  “Look,” Kelly said after a time had passed. “You can’t repeat any of this.”

  “I know. I was just passing by on my way up to see my goddaughter.”

  “That’s good of you,” Kelly said. “But maybe now you should be going. I don’t want this getting back to Eli.”

  “The mayor?” Tom said, disappointment any time he heard the man’s name.

  “If this thing does turn out to be a murder—and it looks like it will—I don’t need him questioning how you happened on us.”

  To
m said he understood. There had been a hearing after Angela Lopez had died. The mayor, Eli Stone, pushing for the judge to punish Tom. He’d been looking for jail time. The judge called it a freak accident. The woman, out of Nogales, had ties to the south. She was known to hold drugs. She was dangerous. Sheriff Herrera had just been doing his job. The only other officer on the scene, Deputy Edna Kelly, had given her statement at the hearing, agreeing with everything Tom had said.

  There was no excuse, and Tom knew it. There never would be. Not for any of it. He glanced up and caught Kelly’s eyes on him.

  “All these years and you still go up to visit that kid?” Kelly said.

  “Sometimes I don’t know why I take the time. Why I think to even do it. Someday I know they’ll tell Elena all about me and I worry about how that will seem, how I will look after all these years. Sometimes I think it’s best to just leave it alone,” Tom said. He was looking up the road now, planning his course.

  When he turned back he saw the shift that had come over Kelly’s face, showing the disappointment at what he’d just said. He knew she saw what had happened to the Lopez woman differently—all of it. Everything was different for her. His cousin Ray wasn’t Kelly’s cousin, it wasn’t as personal for Kelly, none of it ever was, and he knew she’d never understand—not fully—all that had come before and led them to that house where Elena sat on the floor as a baby and her mother rushed to protect her.

  Kelly shook her head in that slow way she did sometimes, the way she had always done when she thought she knew something better than Tom. The way she did when she saw everything in a brighter light than Tom could see, that he wouldn’t permit himself to see. And Tom knew all this, knew he couldn’t see any of it because he wouldn’t let himself. So he said again, just to nail the facts down, “I don’t know why I go up there anymore.”

  The smile cracked on Kelly’s face. “You know why you go.”

  “Yes, I guess I do,” he said, knowing it was guilt, knowing there were a million different reasons he needed to go up that road to visit the girl who had once sat, just eighteen months old, on her mother’s floor.

  “You tell Heather and Mark hello for me.”

  “I’ll do that,” Tom said.

  “How old is Elena now?”

  “She’ll be eleven this coming March.”

  “Give her a kiss for me, too.”

  “I will.” He was about to leave, then stopped and asked, “You going to be okay out here?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Just get on before the mayor finds out you were up here.”

  There was the faint beginning of a smile on Edna Kelly’s lips as she walked over to talk with Deputy Hastings. She didn’t know how Tom had come across them on the one highway leading north out of the valley. The story about Elena could have been true. The questions he’d been asking were not only on her mind, but probably on the minds of all her deputies as well. Ten years since they’d had a death like this and no saying how it would be treated by the mayor.

  All she could hope for was that none of this blew up on her. The boy coming up onto the road, blood all down his shirt and the gaping hole in his chest where the bullet had gone through. She didn’t know what to make of it. All of it so close to her own history when she’d been the deputy and Tom the sheriff. Ten long years to dig herself out from under that, to dig herself out from what could have easily been called a murder, but, in the end, wasn’t.

  Her one real worry was that she’d get thrown in with Tom. She saw the way everyone treated him now. Like he was some sort of troubled kid come in off the street looking for a job. It was a sad way to look at a man who had given his life to a town, and then received nothing in return. All those years and he made one mistake. Kelly hated them for it sometimes. She hated the mayor, the judge, and the people in the town who looked at him that way, like he wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.

  Kelly knew that whatever Tom did these days, raising hogs or helping out over at the Deacon property, his thoughts were never far from what was going on in town. She didn’t blame him for that. She knew he’d been cut loose over what had happened to the Lopez woman, that he had to be let go. As she walked the yellow line of the road to talk with her deputy, it was just that, though, that worried her about Tom. He’d never truly stopped being the sheriff, even though everyone had stopped believing in him.

  “Rumor has it Tom has got one of our old radios at his house,” Kelly said to Hastings, trying to get him to smile.

  Hastings removed his hat and wiped his forehead. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said. “He has some amazing timing.”

  A car approached and Hastings waved it by. “His timing is what got him into trouble.”

  “Yes,” Kelly said. “It did.”

  She was the sheriff because of Tom. Ten years ago he’d asked her to come with him. Said he’d gotten a tip about Angela Lopez, about something she was up to. Kelly knew the tip had come from Tom’s cousin, Ray Lamar. She knew, too, that Tom wouldn’t have told her about Ray but she could see it clear as day. Ray had grown up in Coronado just like the rest of them. He was the son of Gus Lamar, one of the original oilmen who owned fields north of town. And, more importantly, she knew Ray was looking for a way to settle things up without completely going to war.

  There wasn’t anything wrong with a law officer going over to a woman’s house to ask a few questions, to get to the bottom of things, and to check out the tip she was holding drugs for the cartel.

  What was wrong about that day, about following that tip, was that Kelly knew that Ray and Tom were looking for someone to blame, had been looking for a long time. The hit-and-run death of Ray’s wife was still fresh on everyone’s minds in those days.

  The news of the accident coming to them one day as they sat in the department office, the phone on Tom’s desk ringing, and all of them—six deputies at the time—looking up as they always did, anticipating what trouble might be on the other end of that line.

  It had been Kelly who’d eventually gone out to Ray’s house, out of town a ways on Perimeter Road, one of a hundred new houses built all in the same fashion to house the oil workers coming west out of Texas, to tell him about the accident, to bring Ray to the hospital where his two-year-old son, Billy, had been taken. The boy surviving only because he’d been thrown free from the car. Ray’s wife hadn’t been as lucky. Tom himself told Ray that Marianne had died while Ray waited outside the operating room doors.

  In the weeks that followed, Ray’s business, or the premise of one, slowly disappeared as he pitched himself against the cartel like a man slamming his fist into a wall, hitting at it till the bones in his hands went to jelly, calling in to the sheriff’s office daily.

  Perhaps Ray had put his family in disaster’s course, led them into the canyon as the shadow closed in above them. Perhaps he’d done that, and perhaps the outcome—what had happened to his family, what had happened to Ray—was all there was left for him. Kelly didn’t know. She didn’t know anything about it, but she could say without a doubt that afterward Ray didn’t let it go, the phone in Tom’s office ringing every day as, little by little, Ray began to feed Tom information and Tom’s suspicions about the Lopez woman began to grow.

  Beside her, Hastings nudged her elbow. Down the same road on which she had watched Tom drive north toward Las Cruces, a news van was now approaching.

  “Shit,” Kelly said, lifting her hat back up onto her
head and feeling the sickening wash of an ocean rolling through her insides. “Eli isn’t going to like this.”

  “No,” Hastings said. “I don’t think we’ll like it much, either.”

  The two of them stood there watching as the van grew bigger, moving south toward them, the waves of heat playing across the road.

  “That true?” Hastings said.

  “About what?”

  “About Herrera? About the radio?”

  “If he has one,” Kelly said, “he’s obviously not the only one listening in.” About a hundred feet in front of her the news van slowed, then pulled off the road onto the shoulder, gravel popping under the tires.

  Ray Lamar sat on the top step of the porch watching the desert. The house, two stories in height and constructed of clapboard siding, had been painted yellow at one time but now appeared dirty and wind-worn in its coloring. It was a forgotten place, sun-bleached pale as an Easter egg. A house Ray knew only as the Sullivan house when he’d grown up here, one of the old abandoned homes outside of Coronado, long forgotten after the big oil companies came through, buying up the land. So many of them outside the town that Ray and Sanchez had had their pick, trying as they were to find a place to hide the bag of heroin and Burnham’s pickup truck.

  Looking out on the land that sat before him, rolling hills populated by creosote and burro bush, the mountains to the east and north scraped clean to their rocky surface, he was aware that he had lived a life complete in itself before this one. And that he was now left here in a sort of afterlife of his own making, which he shared with the memory of his wife, alone.

  They had married after they found she was pregnant, Ray working in the fields for his father after he’d come back from Vietnam. Oil the only thing he’d known his whole life and the only skill he had to rely on here in the world he had left and to which he had returned, wanting simply to put those years he’d been away behind him. He was young then, in his early twenties when he’d left, and midway through his twenties when he’d returned.