The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  Mark let out a low whistle and took a swig from the beer. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen them go to the trouble of sending a news van to Coronado.”

  Tom leaned back in his chair, still looking at the screen as young high school basketball players ran offense across a wooden floor. “About ten years,” Tom said.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Mark said.

  “I know.”

  “It just came out.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Tom said. He drained the beer back in one pull and got up to take the bottle into the kitchen.

  “Do you think Edna will be okay?” Heather asked.

  Tom stood there in the middle of the living room. “You know how it goes, they’ll have forgotten about it all by tomorrow. It’s not like she was the one to shoot him.”

  Sheriff Edna Kelly paused over the blood, dried and balled in the sand at her feet. Kneeling, she pulled a pen from her pocket and with the tip rolled the bead over once, then stood looking at it. A slight pull felt now in her stomach, hard and tight against the muscle, threatening some unknown danger.

  Out on the highway pavement there was a stain of blood where the kid had lain down in front of Deacon’s truck, hoping he would stop. Now, hours later, she could see the news vans waiting for her, waiting while she and the deputies followed the blood trail back across the plain. The skewed footfalls of the kid’s erratic pace, a bullet already passed through him, and the trail showing where he tried to find his footing, stumbled, fell several times in quick succession, then kept going.

  Out on the highway the news vans waited. Three of them altogether, the last arriving only thirty minutes before while many of the others had already come and interviewed her, rushing their stories north up to Las Cruces or Albuquerque. Each of them wanting her to speak the same words into their cameras that she had said too many times already. She looked down at the bead of blood in the sand. Perfect in the way it had been preserved. Somehow standing there in the kid’s path like a rough-hewn jewel simply waiting to be retrieved.

  She’d never wanted this job. Just twenty-six years old when Angela Lopez died and Eli came to her with the idea of setting her up as the interim sheriff. Only a week after Tom’s hearing, after he’d stepped down, and Kelly, whether Eli had his say or not, had started to run the show.

  She was thinking this all through, following the trail of blood through the desert lowlands. The footprints going on ahead of her. The gait of the victim pressed into the desert landscape where sand and blood stood fixed behind him as he ran. The occasional touch of the kid’s hand as he’d lost balance, teetering onto his fingers to push himself up. A long divot the length of a body where she saw he’d fallen and moved the earth forward.

  Each step telling its own story until there was no blood left to follow. Hastings sweeping the sand with a metal detector while Pierce took pictures of the blood splatter. A thick coating of red soaked into the ground at his feet. The news vans and camera crew watching them wherever they went, the portable lights shining a glare over the landscape, creating dark pools of shadow between the dunes.

  When they came to the place the kid had been shot, they saw how he’d rolled, taking the shot at the top of the dune, then spotting the hillside all the way down.

  They had come to the edge of the flatlands, the highway a quarter mile behind them and the hills stretching on to the west. Kelly and the new recruit, Pierce, just standing there looking down.

  “Strange to think this is human,” she said, not knowing why she’d even thought to say something like that. Perhaps just searching for anything to say, to take the edge off and make it seem, against all odds, like some small piece of normality.

  Deputy Pierce repositioned himself over the blood splatter, clicked the camera, then advanced the film. The youngest of the three of them and the newest hire, he was underpaid and fresh out of high school. Looking at him, she knew he wasn’t going to say anything, not here, not about this. He was just doing his job, and she could tell right now, he wanted his job to be over as soon as possible.

  He was still a boy in many ways, but old enough to have the job, taking pictures and helping out the best he could. Hastings still circling with the metal detector and Kelly listening to the low sonar blip of the thing as it sought out what lay beneath the sand.

  Hastings was already kneeling when the metal detector gave off a low, long beep. Pierce and Kelly turned toward him, where he knelt close to the ground with a small plastic bag in his gloved hand.

  At the age of thirty-eight, Hastings was just two years older than Kelly. They had grown up together throwing rocks at empty beer cans and sketching out intricate games of hide-and-seek throughout the town. During high school they’d drawn apart, separated by age or sex or something else Kelly herself still couldn’t quite figure. The aftereffects of those times lasting into their early twenties as Hastings had gone off to tour the western states, working first as a bull rider on the circuits and then a rodeo hand as his back worsened through the years. He returned to Coronado in his late twenties, flecks of gray already shining in his hair.

  Now, Kelly watched as he dug around in the earth with a gloved hand, removing something and dropping it into the bag. Kelly standing over him to see what he’d found.

  “It looks like a .308,” he said, handing the plastic Ziploc up to her.

  She took the bag from him and turned it in the palm of her hand. The bullet was almost two inches in length, the metal inside already corroded. Sticky with blood, punched in slightly from the force of the impact. She’d seen a million of these at the shooting range, the back hill built up in sand and the bullets that came out of it looking warped and disfigured. “A hunting round?”

  Hastings nodded.

  “Doesn’t feel right, does it? Not this close to the highway.”

  “You think this was an accident?”

  “I hope it was. It’s better than the alternative.” She gave the bullet back to him and told him to run it north after they were done. “What about a casing?” she asked.

  “Still looking.”

  Kelly walked on, knowing that the news vans were waiting behind. The light from their cameras reaching out toward her. She picked up the boy’s track on the other side of the small rise. His gait more controlled there. One foot in front of the other. No bullet in him yet. In her mind she was starting to put it back together. The boy moving up over the rise, running for the road, in the distance the silver flash of a car window and the sound of a semi truck downshifting as it ran on toward the mountains to the north.

  Even now, as far as she was from the highway, the sound of sporadic traffic could be heard as a far-off rush of air. All of what she was looking at now, the boy’s footfalls, his wobbling uneven steps up one rise and down the other, seeming so out of place.

  When she came down over the second rise, the plain came to an abrupt stop at the edge of the hill country. She studied the boy’s track for a long time, checking the angle, seeing how deep his shoes had sunk into the soft earth. Something not right about any of it, about how deep and wide the track was, each footfall seeming too big, too pronounced in form, like a man slogging through a field of snow. Now she realized she was looking at not one track, but two. The boy’s and then in the same space, following, another track altogether, erasing the boy’s as it came.

  Whoever had shot this boy had followed him out onto the plain to finish the job. Above, the hillside went on, climbin
g through the locust on its way up out of sight. Nothing but the green and brown brush all the way up the slope and the call of birds deep within the thicket, so dense she could see no more than a foot within. The boy’s trail ending at the bottom, where the hillside met the plain. The ground harder here, mud dried stiff as cement in the small wash fed by the hillside gullies. The dash of two or three motorcycle treads preserved in it from a rain two weeks before, but otherwise nothing. No tracks at all.

  Ray put his head against the glass. He was standing in the phone booth outside the Lucky Strike Diner, six miles north of town. “The kid’s alive?”

  “Unless the news was lying to me,” came the response from Memo.

  Ray didn’t have anything to say. He was thinking about Memo sitting there at his desk in Las Cruces, the dark eyebrows that stood out on his shaved head and the phone held to his ear. The kid was alive. Ray was thinking about what this meant, about all that it could mean and all that would soon result. Memo as hardheaded as they came. But he was smart, too, and Ray had never known a plan of his to go wrong, not if Ray was involved and there was blood to be spilled.

  “Where are you?” Memo asked.

  “Just outside Coronado.”

  “Home sweet home,” Memo said. His voice slowing into a singsong rhythm, the same Memo who had sweet-talked him into this corner, the same who had sweet-talked him into this life so many years ago, offering him money for what, at the time, seemed only a simple job.

  “I did what I was supposed to, I have what you wanted me to get, everything else is extra, you understand?”

  “You have a problem,” Memo said. “You don’t fix this problem, then it becomes mine. I don’t want that to happen, and I’m sure you don’t.”

  “You set me up,” Ray said. “You knew what would happen to Burnham as soon as I saw him. You knew from that moment he would be dead.”

  “Yes,” Memo said. “But I thought you’d do a better job of it.”

  “You’re telling me to kill this kid.”

  “I’m telling you to handle this problem.”

  “It’s not on me,” Ray said. He ran a hand through his hair, resting his scalp in his palm. It was already late enough in the day that the sun began to stretch the shadows long and thin across the parking lot, constructing a stilted world that teetered toward the point of falling. Inside the Lucky Strike he saw Sanchez talking with a young waitress. “Your nephew is the one who got us into this mess. He’s the one with the problem here, he’s the one who fucked up, who lied to me about killing that boy. He’s the one with the job to finish.”

  “You think he knows what he’s doing? He’s down there with you because you’re supposed to know how to handle yourself. I know you can’t let this go. That boy talks they’re going to find you out and it will be just like it was ten years ago. I can’t protect you this time, not like I did before when it was your cousin who did the killing for you. This is on you. If that boy in the hospital identifies you, or even comes close to it, there’s nothing I can do. They’ll come for you and there’ll be no stopping them. You should know that.”

  “They?” Ray said.

  “The cartel.”

  “What’s left for them to take from me?” Ray said. He was angry and his voice was beginning to show it. “Besides,” Ray said, holding his breath for a moment before going on. “Burnham wasn’t cartel. He was just an old white man who’d stayed in the business too long.”

  “No,” Memo said. “Burnham wasn’t, and neither was the kid my nephew shot and told you was dead. But that heroin was, the stuff you took out of that seat, that was pure cartel import and they’re going to want it back. I suggest you don’t leave any witnesses.”

  Ray was thinking about what Burnham looked like there on the ground, the lingering seep of blood from the wound in his cheek. The old man’s words whispered up out of his bloodied mouth.

  He wanted to just put the phone down and walk away. He wanted to be done with Memo and his lying nephew. All this, being here, doing this job, had been a way for him to return to Coronado, to set himself up for the years to come. He’d cut himself loose from that past, from his father, from his son, from his cousin and all that he’d left behind, now all he wanted was to go home.

  Ray had lied to himself all those years before. He’d lied to Marianne, promising her he would be more than just an oil worker, that he was capable of more. But this wasn’t it. Standing in a phone booth outside his hometown, listening to Memo tell him how to solve this problem. No, Ray thought, there was nothing here that would ever make him better, or would ever satisfy his promise to Marianne.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on here?” Ray said. “You want to tell me how you knew where Burnham and this kid would be and what they would be carrying?”

  “Control the town, control the flow,” Memo said.

  “That’s what you’re saying? That’s how you’re explaining this to me—this situation.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Memo said.

  “Was it Burnham who tipped you off?”

  “I’m sorry about the situation we find ourselves in, but you really just need to concentrate your efforts on the present.”

  “You want me to finish what your nephew started?”

  “You’re from Coronado. It shouldn’t be a problem for you to find your way around.”

  “I was from here, I’m not anymore,” Ray said.

  “Easier for you than us.”

  “I haven’t been back in ten years—”

  “You’re also not like us, not quite,” Memo cut in. “You’re the son of an oilman who married his Mexican cook. You’re half-white. You’re not like us at all.”

  Ray watched a car go past out on the highway on its way into town. A pounding beginning somewhere deep inside his head, the whole world beginning to come off its axis, threatening to roll.

  “You didn’t think I knew all that?” Memo said, the sound of a laugh lingering at the back of his palate, like Ray had joined in on some joke halfway done in the telling. “You thought we didn’t check you out when you first started working for us? That we didn’t start asking about you when you got into all that trouble down there? When we kept you hidden and protected you?” Ray heard Memo shift the phone from one ear to the other. He pictured Memo sitting there in the Las Cruces office. The dark wood desk where Memo sat, the chair on the other side of that desk where Ray had received his first job. “And now you think you can come back to us any time you like, pick your jobs, and then move on,” Memo said. “That’s not how we do things anymore.”

  Ray leaned forward and rested his head on his forearm, putting his weight onto the glass of the booth. He sucked at the insides of his cheeks until he could feel the flesh between his teeth. He was done with Memo. He knew it now. “I’m staying,” Ray said. “I’m not coming back after this. I’ll send your nephew north with the dope and I’ll do what you’re asking, but I’m done after this. I’ve spent too long hiding from the past. No one will be looking for Burnham’s truck if your nephew goes now. If he leaves now it will work and I’ll do what you’re asking of me and then I want my money and I don’t want to hear from you again.”

  “No,” Memo said. “I can’t trust my nephew. He’s messed too much up already. I need you on this. I need you to finish this for me. Keep my nephew’s pager and send him north, but don’t send him with the drugs. I can’t trust him. I want you to hide the drugs and when you’re done with everythin
g I’ll send someone to pick them up.”

  “I can do that,” Ray said. “But you hear me on this, I’m not coming back.”

  “If that’s what you want,” Memo said. “If that’s what you think will solve this problem for you. But you should know it’s all on you. If for some reason the drugs aren’t where you say they are, it’s all on you.”

  “You’ll get your dope,” Ray said. “You’d have it today if you let me send it north with Sanchez.”

  “You know just as well as I do that my nephew isn’t right for this work. His balls are too big. Thinks he’ll run the business someday. You’re untouched, you’ve never done a bit of time, and except for ten years ago you’ve kept yourself clean. You’ve done a good job for us over the years but staying there isn’t going to solve any of this. Coronado will never be the same as it was when your wife was alive. It’s simply been too long to go back.”

  Ray unwrapped an antacid and put it into his mouth. He knew Memo was right, nothing would ever be the same, though he hoped somehow it would. He would send Sanchez north and he would stay.

  “Antacids?” Memo asked. “All these years and you still eat those things?”

  “Heartburn,” Ray said.

  “I told you to see a doctor about it.”

  “I did.”

  “He tell you to take antacids?”

  “He told me a bunch of stuff, only I wasn’t listening.”

  “That’s not good,” Memo said. “That’s never good. You should listen to what doctors tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re usually trying to save your life.”

  Ray looked across the parking lot at Sanchez sitting there in the diner, then looked away, the pumice taste of the antacid still on his tongue. Burnham had been right—everything had changed. None of it was the way it used to be, and now Ray was stuck in this life, one leg thrown over the fence that divided this new world from the old, knowing he should never have come back to Coronado for this job.