The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  Sliding from the stool, he went to the window and looked out on the street, where over the buildings he saw a growing trail of smoke rising into the air. Unlatching the heavy wood door, he went out onto the street where several cars had already stopped in the middle of Main, the drivers out of their vehicles looking to where the black smoke crested the edges of the buildings to the west.

  He wore a thin linen suit on his slim frame, and as he turned the corner off Main and came within view of the hospital, his jacket billowed behind him. His shirt open at the neck and a sheen of sweat already showing on his ashen skin. The only thing left of the county cruiser a charred and black body in the hospital drive, still smoldering, the tires and the last of the oil burning away. A crowd grown around the carved-out wreckage as the first group of volunteer firemen made an effort against the flames.

  Dario had heard about Gil the night before, waiting as he usually did for the oil workers to come in while the newscaster gave his report on the television overhead. All of it like the news was being reported just for him. Telling him everything he didn’t want to know.

  On the other side of the bar Medina raised a glass to the light, checking for imperfections. Finding none, he put the glass down on the back bar and grabbed for another. He was working on a third by the time Dario caught the bartender’s eye and told him he was going into the office to make the call.

  Medina put the glass down. Overhead Dario saw the news had exhausted the local sports and gone on to the national weather. A fat green blob of weather coming in across California and bunching up along the Sierras. No idea who he would call when he reached the office.

  “¿A quién vas a llamar?” Medina called after him, as if sensing Dario’s doubt.

  “Quién te crees,” Dario said over his shoulder. The certainty he’d felt in his voice fading as he closed the door to his office and saw the phone there on his desk.

  With the phone held to his ear, Dario listened to the message repeat itself again and again. The number Memo had given him two weeks before, now disconnected. The deal they’d made now seeming less and less of a deal. The sweat beading at the edge of his hairline as he thought about what this meant, and where he might find himself in a day or more.

  How long had it been since they’d talked last? Just two or three days? Dario was having a hard time remembering. A tightness in his lungs creeping up the back of his spine into his throat. What had Memo promised him? A way out, a new life away from the cartel, Dario eager for anything that offered a change, but there wasn’t going to be any of that and he cursed himself now for ever believing there might.

  All he could do was wait. He tried Memo’s number again, thinking perhaps he’d misdialed. But he’d already tried it ten, twelve times, reading the numbers off to himself as he pushed the buttons, and every time the same answer. All Dario had wanted was a way out, an escape from the violence he knew would now soon be coming. Two minutes had passed already and he wasn’t going to get through. He wasn’t going to get an answer.

  A knock came at the office door. Dario sat forward and put the phone in its cradle. He was hunched up at the desk with the phone pulled close toward him by the time Medina came into the office wanting to know if Dario had made contact with their bosses down south in Juarez.

  “¿Nada?”

  Dario shook his head.

  Burnham and Gil, neither of them was supposed to die over a thing like this. Memo had told Dario how it would go, a roadside robbery on the bluff overlooking the highway, nothing more. None of this was what it was supposed to be.

  He would try Memo later, he would keep trying, and if he never got through he would make the call down to Juarez. It was a call he should have been making that very moment, a call he knew Medina was expecting him to make. “Nada,” Dario said.

  All of it had been adding up as the sheriff came into the bar that night and the oil workers drank away their savings, putting off whatever would come tomorrow. Sitting in his office with the phone, Dario could appreciate that, he could understand it, and if it wasn’t for the sheriff out there he might even have joined them.

  Now, with the cruiser still burning in the hospital drive, he backed away from the growing crowd, smoke rising still from the charred body of the car, and turned up toward Main, a few coins in his hand, looking for the nearest pay phone. All the time wondering if it was his own men out of Juarez who had come for the boy in the hospital, or if it was some other.

  Tom watched Kelly where she stood looking over the burned-out cruiser. He’d gotten the call in the morning and by the time he was on the highway headed south, the dark smoke was rising above the town. He wasn’t sure what had changed inside Kelly between telling him to leave it alone last night at the bar, and this morning, but he knew one thing as they stood there looking the cruiser over: Gil Suarez was certainly dead.

  From where he stood, only feet away from the blackened hulk of the car, Tom smelled the acrid remnants of the tires. The fire burning so hot that the shotgun, resting upright between the driver and passenger seats, stood up like a long matte black pipe, the pump handle melted all the way down to the floor, where it pooled against the metal. The patrol car a complete loss and the interior paint peeled away in a thousand little black scales. Kelly knelt and ran a hand through the ash. The history of what had happened now stained into the tips of her fingers.

  “Road flares and some sort of accelerant,” Tom said, as he caught the smell of gasoline and gunpowder. He stood on the driver’s side of the car, looking in through the frame of the front windshield to where Kelly knelt on the other side.

  Kelly wiped her hands on the knees of her uniform and stood.

  “That’s the smell,” Tom said. “You get that? Something like cordite mixed with a chemical base.”

  “You ever see anything like this?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen some bad accidents,” Tom said. “But never like this. Not arson, not anything at this level.”

  “Scares you, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t envy you this one,” Tom said. “You called me out here for a reason and I’m happy to help, but I’ll need to know what you do. What are you thinking on this?”

  “Officially?”

  “Unofficially.”

  “Sometimes you hear of things coming out of Mexico that make you want to move up north, just to be ahead of it,” Kelly said.

  “You think that’s what this is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tom watched her.

  “Sometimes you just have to ask the who, when, and where of the thing and hope it doesn’t turn out to be the what you were thinking it was the whole time.”

  They were in the elevator, on the way up to the third floor and the boy’s hospital room, when Tom said, “How bad is it up there?”

  “Broke his neck and nearly popped the boy’s head right off his shoulders,” Kelly replied.

  “Scares the shit out of you sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does,” Kelly said.

  Ray dropped the Bronco down into the wide bottomland before the mountains. As he drove he looked out on the tall blue mountains to the northeast, the crownlike spires of lechuguilla and sotol growing all around him on the gray desert hills. The road winding on and the Sullivan house visible ahead of him with its yellowed wood boards and dull cream trim.

  The instructions he’d received from Memo were to stay at the house, lie low, and wait out any attention he might have received on the highway. One more day and Memo would send a man to pick up the drugs. Counting back, Ray estimated he’d been awake nearly thirty-six hours, his eyes feeling sanded over in their sockets. The thought of Tom out there still bothering him just as it had all through the night.

  Coming up the drive Ray found Burnham’s truck parked outside the house. Pausing, he scanned the road behind. Only the stillness of the broad desert to see be
fore he turned to the house again, the truck still sitting there and Ray knowing it should have been anywhere but here. He brought the Bronco forward till it was parked alongside. Nothing to tell him it was anything but the same truck he had sent Sanchez north in the day before. He opened the Bronco door and went on ahead to the house.

  With the Ruger pulled from his belt, he ran a hand along the metal of the hood, feeling the receding warmth of the engine. No idea what the truck was doing back here, but a rising certainty in his mind that Sanchez had been unable or unwilling to do as he’d been told.

  It was only after sweeping every room that Ray found Sanchez sitting out back of the house, with a beer in his hand and five more at his feet. “You get lost?” Ray said, shoving the Ruger back down into his belt.

  “No,” Sanchez said, turning halfway around in the chair to look up at Ray where he stood on the back steps of the house. “But I thought I should see the job through. I thought I’d earn my uncle’s trust.”

  “You’re drunk,” Ray said, a feeling thick as oil coated to his insides and just as suffocating. “You should have gone north.”

  Sanchez took a drink from his beer. It looked to Ray like he’d had several more than just the one in his hand, his body loose in the chair and Burnham’s wide-brimmed cowboy hat dangling from Sanchez’s neck.

  “You’ve been here all night?”

  “Personally, I thought you’d be dead by now.”

  “And if I was, you were going to save the day?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Let’s get something straight,” Ray said. “Just so you and Memo know, I’m done after this. Memo wants this town, I don’t want anything to do with it, and I don’t want to be associated with him or you after this.”

  “My uncle will have this town.”

  Ray smiled. He couldn’t help it. He was angry and exhausted and all he could think about was just lying down for a moment and forgetting about everything Memo had told him yesterday and all Sanchez was saying to him today. “How many of those have you had?”

  Sanchez looked at the beer in his hand, dreamy with alcohol and the count going on in his head. “Seven,” Sanchez said. “I bought some for us last night and then when you didn’t show up, I bought us some more.”

  “I told you to leave yesterday,” Ray said, the hoods of his eyes and the glare from the sun giving his face a weathered, worn-out look.

  “No,” Sanchez said. “Like I said, I’m surprised you’re still alive, and that it worked, whatever you did. I thought maybe you’d need me.” He put the hat up over his head and tipped it back, feigning something perhaps he’d once seen in a film.

  “What about doing your job? Doing what you were told to do.” Ray could feel little cracks beginning to form in his voice and he wondered what exactly might come through. “Your uncle asked me to send you north. Why didn’t you go?”

  “Coronado.”

  “I don’t care,” Ray said. “You shouldn’t be here. No one but the cartel wants Coronado.” He still hadn’t moved off the back stairs and he was wondering how quickly he could get to Sanchez if he needed to. He didn’t like that Sanchez was there, that he’d come back.

  “Relax,” Sanchez said, breaking one of the beers from the plastic and tossing it to Ray. “The job’s done. You killed that boy, didn’t you?”

  Ray ignored him. He stood there with the beer in his hand, looking at the lawn chair on which Sanchez sat.

  “Did you do it?” Sanchez asked. He was all the way turned on the seat with his spine bent and the aluminum chair creaking beneath him.

  Ray walked over and stood watching the mountains. “It’s done,” Ray said. “I finished it for you. We’ll spend tonight here and you’ll leave in the morning.”

  “Have you talked with my uncle?”

  “Yes.”

  “He knows it’s done?”

  “He knows.”

  “Did he ask about me?” Sanchez said. “When you called up there to tell him about the boy, was he worried about where I was?”

  “He didn’t say anything about you.”

  Sanchez took a long sip off his beer and then set it down between his legs. “My uncle told me I’d learn something working with you.”

  Ray pulled the tab on the beer in his hand, and the aluminum opened with a loud crease of gas and foam. “I guess I should have showed you how to work that rifle,” Ray said, drinking the beer and then just cradling the can face-out in front of him like he was assessing its worth. “You certainly didn’t learn to listen. Memo would have never told you to go anywhere near Coronado. You buy this beer and that chair at the grocery store?”

  Sanchez studied the mountains, not saying anything. He wouldn’t look over at Ray. “My uncle told me not to let you do all the work.”

  “You think not listening, going to the grocery store—showing your face in town—is work? You think that kind of thing helps either of us?”

  Sanchez ignored this. He was watching the rolling plain where it met the mountains farther on. “My uncle told me you’d teach me something.”

  “That what he said I was going to do? Teach you something?”

  “Yeah, he said it was going to be just like old times down here.” Sanchez finished his beer. Tipping the can all the way back until the sun was full on his face. The cowboy hat fallen back, lopsided and unnatural, on his head.

  “That’s a dead man’s hat,” Ray said.

  “I know,” Sanchez said. “I figured Burnham wouldn’t need it anymore.”

  “It’s not a good look for you,” Ray said. “You should take it off.”

  Sanchez finished the can he’d been drinking and leaned forward to break a new beer from the plastic. “Memo said it would be good fun down here,” Sanchez said. It was perhaps the second or third time Ray had heard the phrase from Sanchez since they’d met.

  Sanchez opened the beer, waiting on Ray’s response. A cold wind rolled past them and Ray heard the grains of sand hitting away on the siding of the house. “You should be happy about what you’ve done,” Sanchez said. “The killing.”

  “Happy?”

  “Burnham and the kid. Cartel boys like that. Thought it would help you,” Sanchez said, smiling up at Ray with the beer in his hand, the ropy looseness of alcohol rolling through his voice. “Salud.”

  “Why would that help me?” Ray asked.

  Sanchez retracted the beer, sipped it, the cold bubbling liquid at the corners of his mouth. “Memo told me what you did when you got out of here, after he covered for you and hid you from the cartel and the law. He said you went house to house, making visits, killing anyone you thought was cartel.”

  “Before this,” Ray said, ignoring Sanchez and his silly alcohol-filled grin, “you ever kill anyone?”

  “Sure,” Sanchez said. “I’ve killed.”

  “You have?”

  “You saw me yesterday,” Sanchez said. “I did all the work. Caught that kid on the run, shot him from about three hundred feet out, right through the crosshairs.”

  “Should have killed him,” Ray said. “You don’t finish, and it can end up hurting you.”

  “I would have finished,” Sanchez said. “I should have been the one in that hospital room. It was my kill.”

  “You ever kill someone up close? With your hands? No gun?”

  “I have.”

  “You have?”

  “Sure.”

  “Lots of men?” Ray asked.

  Sanchez looked out on the desert. “Enough,” he finally said. “I’ve killed enough.”

  Ray finished his beer in one long drink. “You haven’t killed anyone,” Ray said. “I don’t know what you thought you were going to learn down here or what Memo said I was going to teach you.”

  “Pick someone,” Sanchez said in a rush. “Pick someone and we’ll see how
I do.”

  “Pick someone?”

  “Sure,” Sanchez said. “Pick someone for me. I’ll show you how it’s done. I’ll show you how easy I can do what you do.”

  Ray felt disgusted. Not waiting for Sanchez to offer, he reached down and grabbed another beer from the plastic. He stood there for a few seconds longer. Out on the plain a rain shower was moving across the desert before them in a sweep of gray-blue light. “I’m tired,” Ray said. “I can’t talk about this anymore.” With the beer in his hand he went back inside the house, leaving Sanchez to sit alone in his store-bought chair.

  Kelly looked in through the open door. The kid could have been sleeping. Gil’s head turned away toward the window, the crime scene just as it had been found. Sheets pulled up over his chest, his arms resting on either side. The only thing to indicate what had happened a deep bruise on his neck that seemed to grow deeper while she looked in on him.

  “He never woke up?” Tom asked, standing beside her and Hastings.

  “Not that we know,” Hastings said.

  “Pierce stepped away from the room for a minute when his cruiser went up. Walked down to the end of the hall to that window,” Kelly said, pointing toward the front of the hospital. “He was probably only gone from the room for thirty seconds.”

  “And the staff?”

  “Did just the same,” Hastings said.

  Down the hall the elevator opened up and Kelly watched the mayor move out through the doors. Halfway up the hall he was already speaking to her. “You had a nineteen-year-old kid guarding the victim,” Eli said. “It should have been you or Pete up here, not Pierce.” The closer he came the more he slowed, looking behind Kelly to where Tom stood. “What’s he doing here?”

  “I called him.”

  “Called him?” Eli’s eyes gone small in his large head, a yellow oxford wrinkled up at the waist and the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. “Come here with me a minute.” He reached a hand out and took her elbow, leading her away. “What do you think you’re doing? That man is not your friend anymore,” Eli said in a low hiss. “He could have ended your career just like he did his. You need to be smarter than this. You need to understand there’s no good reason to bring him in on this, no matter what you may think.”