The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  “Ray,” Tom said. “I can’t go any farther with you.”

  The look on Ray’s face washed away slowly, then solidified. A blank expression Tom didn’t know how to read. Would he be murdered right there or set free?

  “I know I should want to go with you,” Tom said. “Gus meant a lot to me. I should want what you want on this, but I can’t just stand by for this one, pretending that other people won’t be hurt in the process.”

  Ray stood five feet away, the gun in his hand still, offering nothing but a blank, unreadable stare.

  “You’re not going to make it,” Tom said.

  “I can’t let you go.”

  “Shoot me if you have to, but I’m not going any farther.”

  Ray took Tollville’s Baby Eagle from where he’d stashed it in the waist of his pants. Replacing his own .45 in his waistband, he slid the magazine into his hand and then put it into his pocket. “You asked me to do the right thing once,” Ray said.

  “I wanted you to turn yourself in.”

  “I don’t have much left,” Ray said. “I’m not going to turn myself in, not anymore. I’m past that now. But I can try for once to do a good thing.”

  “Killing your boss?”

  “No,” Ray said. “It doesn’t matter much now, but maybe it will mean something down the road. If you go back to the Sullivan house, you’ll find what this has all been about, buried twenty paces straight out from the back stairs.”

  “You’re talking about the drugs?”

  “It’s not much,” Ray said. “But maybe it will help you get clear of all this.” From where they stood, five feet apart, Ray underhanded the Baby Eagle to Tom. “I hope it works out for you,” Ray said. “In everything.”

  “Don’t do this, Ray. You need medical attention. You need to come back with me at least.”

  “I’ve already come this far.”

  “You’re not going to make it.”

  Ray grinned. “Tell Billy I’m sorry and say hi to Luis for me.”

  “You tell Gus the same,” Tom said.

  The flash of a smile from Ray. “This it, then?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good-bye, Ray.”

  “Good-bye, Tom.”

  Tom watched Ray turn and leave, heading down the ravine, the rock tight around him on both sides, and the city lights from Deming shining below across the desert.

  Tom turned and walked up the ravine, feeling every step now and questioning whether he’d made the right decision leaving Ray like that. Perhaps he could have talked him out of it. Perhaps he could have helped Ray in some small way, trying to get him to let this go. There was no way now of knowing something like that.

  Pausing to catch his breath, he sat on a rock, the ravine walls not as tall as they’d been below. Those walls now seeming more like a canyon than any kind of ravine, and he imagined Ray now, heading down, taking his steps with care as he went on between the two sharp-faced walls.

  He waited, sweat cooling on his skin, until Kelly and Tollville showed a few hundred feet above him, working their way down.

  “Are you okay?” Kelly asked when she’d drawn even with Tom. A crescent of sweat under each of her arms, just like he remembered from their meeting on the road four days before.

  “Tired, but fine,” Tom said.

  Tollville stood behind Kelly, checking his watch and looking down the ravine. “Where’s Ray, Tom?”

  “How’s Pierce?” Tom asked. “Is he stable?”

  “He lost a lot of blood,” Tollville said, his gray hair matted with sweat at the sides of his temples. “I’ve seen people live through worse.”

  Tom nodded. He wanted to ask about Dario, but he didn’t want to hear the answer. Nothing mattered anymore and Tom knew now he would never wear the star again. His own hopes already given up and a certainty he would do time for what he’d done already to help out his cousin.

  “This has gone too far, Tom,” Kelly said. “We already talked to Luis. We know about Gus and everything else. You need to help us here.”

  “I know that, now,” Tom said. “He’s headed down this ravine, working his way toward the valley.”

  “I’m going on,” Tollville said. “Call us in to Hastings and tell them I’m going to drive him out onto the plain below.”

  Kelly turned to look at him, but he was already moving. When she turned back, Tom didn’t have anything to say. “You trusted him, didn’t you?” Kelly said.

  “Yes,” Tom said. “I always have.”

  Kelly watched him for a moment longer, then raised the radio to her lips and told Hastings their location, then where to set up the patrolmen below.

  Ray broke out onto the plain. He was limping badly now, still holding his side where the bullet had gone in. But he felt strong, stronger than he’d felt in a long time, and he knew all his training had been for this. There was a surety there, a certainty he couldn’t just give up on. He needed to believe all that had come before counted toward where he was now, crossing the plain in the early-morning light, with the low-lying shape of the city before him.

  All of it had led him to this—this moment, no one but him and the plain and the pulse of the wound beneath his hand, driving him forward. His training, all those years he’d worked for Memo, trying to be as quiet as possible, letting that life take him over, and grow around him like a vine.

  He stumbled over a rise and then went down into the depression beyond, his thighs surging with the weight of his body, pulling him up one rise, then easing him down into the shallow before the next. No thought other than to move forward. His stomach long since locked up into itself. Layer upon layer built into his skin, thick as any armor.

  He stopped when he came up the next rise. The sun glowing there on the horizon, the light just enough to see the black figure. Looking close he saw it was not one figure but a whole group of them. The dark shapes of men out there in front of him. Who they were and how they’d found him, he didn’t know. He took a step, heard them call out to him, heard their voices carried on the air like something from another realm.

  He looked down at the wound in his side. With one hand he raised his shirt. No blood now, only the slick, clear ooze of plasma running down the skin of his stomach. He was okay, he was just fine, and he knew nothing could stop him, not these men or their words. He felt beyond himself, far out, already coasting down city streets toward his last victim.

  Someone called his name, a voice much louder than the others, amplified in his mind. He was glad to have left Tom behind. Tom telling him he wouldn’t make it, trying to get Ray to stop, to just slow down and look at where he was. But Ray knew he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t let that happen. He was stronger than this, feeling it now as he took one step, then another, the voice there again, loud as it was before. Telling him to stop, to just stay where he was.

  They heard one shot far below. Tom raised his eyes from where he sat, then stood and listened. They’d waited forty-five minutes already, the wind in the short pines all around them. Low, slanted light falling everywhere through the trees with the motes of dust embedded in the ground like fallen spears. All around the early-morning calls of birds as they came awake in the surrounding pines.

  It had been a single shot. Something loud, a .45 Tom knew was Ray’s. Then close behind the volley from the patrolmen. They waited still longer, Tom still standing, still listening as the echo of gunfire died away in the valley below. Then, only a few secon
ds later the hiss of Kelly’s radio as it came back on, and Hastings gave her the news.

  Day 365

  Dario arrived on the six o’clock bus from El Paso. A scar on his neck and a history marred with violence now visible to anyone. In the trial that followed he’d been cleared of any indiscretions. The only men willing to testify against him, Ray’s cousin Tom and Tom’s father, Luis, both easily discredited by Dario’s lawyer. Tom for his own troubled past and Luis for his constant drinking. The judge even going so far as to say Dario was the victim. Singled out for being an outsider in a closed-off town. Dario’s own .45 found in Ray Lamar’s hands, and the death of his father, Gus Lamar, still inconclusive.

  As he stepped down from the bus he could feel the heat in the air. The linen suit he wore blowing open for a second in the wind, and a small leather case carried in his hand. The case was as wide and tall as a ream of paper, with a zipper running along one edge.

  His first time north of the border in almost ten months, and as he’d remembered from his years in the state, the air tasted dry and clear as the surrounding desert. The weather unseasonably hot for that area of New Mexico and a thin veneer of dust hanging over the plain in a haze.

  As he got down off the bus Dario wiped at his forehead with a handkerchief. The small white cloth was still in his hand as he looked around at the empty lot he’d been let off in. Nothing around except a small diner across the street and a gas station.

  The big man he was there to see was waiting for him under the shade of the gas station awning, a black Chevrolet two-tone parked in one of the spaces close by.

  When they were seated in the car, the man, six feet tall, dark skinned, with acne scarring around his neck and a week’s stubble, turned and looked at Dario. “You’re not what I was expecting.”

  Dario unzipped the top of the case, reached in and took out four stacks of bills—ten thousand dollars in each—and handed them over. “Think of me as an extension of the man I work for,” he said. His voice darker in tone than it had ever been in Coronado, a result of the surgery that removed a sliver of his vocal cord. “When you look at me, you’re looking at him,” Dario went on. “I’m just here to see the work is done.”

  The man was examining the money in his hand, more money, Dario thought, than he’d seen in one place at one time. “And the rest?” the man said.

  “When the work is done.”

  They drove across the flatlands, watching the scrub pass by a mile at a time. The lines of the road rarely veering left or right, but rather just going on toward the mountains some two hours away across the flat bajada.

  An hour passed before they turned down off the road and wallowed through a small creek running low with the season’s first snowfall far away in the mountains. They came up out of the creek bed, Dario listening to the headers sucking up air as the engine pulled the car forward over the small rise.

  They went on for another thirty minutes, the sun fading down in the west, the light slanting away into cross-sections of pale pink and purple stratifications.

  The house, when it appeared, was built in the old style of the Spanish missionaries who had populated the land a hundred years before but had now abandoned it. One room in all, walled with mud and hay, a series of long wood beams over the top as a sort of roof. The wood grayed from age, missing in places, and worn and dried by years of sun. Getting out of the car, Dario could smell mesquite and sage. As at the bus stop an hour before, there was little to greet them but the dry wind.

  Dario stood looking at the small house for a minute or more and then asked, “You said on the phone his sister in Las Cruces turned him over?”

  “That’s how I found him, yes.”

  “And the sister?”

  “She said she didn’t want to know.”

  Dario stood there now, listening to the desert. Not a sound. The pink light everywhere, and all of it bound up together somehow as if they were all part of the same being. “You use this place often?” Dario asked.

  “Your boss wanted it discreet,” the man said.

  “Yes,” Dario said.

  “Ready?” the man asked.

  “Yes.”

  They went on inside. Roof beams half down into the room, no light anywhere but what managed to reach down from above, hanging there before them like a thin filament. The interior nothing but shadow, cut up in places by the fall of the light.

  On the dirt floor before them, a man’s head was faced away from them, so that he couldn’t see them enter.

  “You dug him into the ground?”

  The big man beside him nodded. “Wanted to make sure he’d be here when we got back.”

  Dario breathed in. The smell of urine everywhere, so strong he had to blink it away.

  Noticing Dario’s nostrils flare, the big man said, “Before, when I was holding him for you, before I put him in the ground, I gave him a bucket, but he tried to throw it at me whenever I brought his food, so I took it away.”

  Dario walked around the room keeping an arm’s length from the wall as he went. The man buried up to his neck in the ground, a savage open cut along his cheek, running below his eye. The pus in a line down along his face crusted to the underside of his jaw. His eyes closed, and his skin sunburned so bad it was peeling away from his face. “Is he alive?” Dario asked.

  The big man walked over and kicked sand at the head there on the ground. The buried man groaned, blinking away the sand. His mouth bound with a piece of cloth.

  “Has he said anything since you picked him up?”

  “I was told you wanted his mouth bound.”

  “Even when he eats?”

  The big man smiled, looking down at the welts that showed everywhere on the man’s face. “He learned quick enough.”

  “Would you mind going out to the car?” Dario asked. He waited while the big man left, giving him time to walk away from the building before squatting down. “Memo?” Dario said. “It’s been a long time.”

  Memo tried to focus his eyes, one lid drooping much lower than the other.

  “You caused a lot of trouble for me in Coronado,” Dario said, removing the cloth from Memo’s mouth so they could talk.

  “Just go on and do it,” Memo said. “Get it over with.”

  “After the trial it was pretty hard tracking you down. What type of deal was it you made? Didn’t seem to take them long to make up their minds in your favor. We were wondering what you might have said.”

  Memo slanted his eyes upward till Dario could see the irises. “You know the offer I made you is still good,” Memo said. “I can still help you. I can still get you out from under them.”

  “Raymond Lamar trusted you, too, didn’t he? Trusted you right up until the end.”

  “It’s different,” Memo said. “You’re different. Can’t you see I can help you?”

  “No,” Dario said. “I don’t think that’s what you’re going to do.”

  “I never said anything about you. I wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “In the end it didn’t seem like I needed you at all, did it? No drugs in my bar, and Ray Lamar’s fingerprints on my .45,” Dario said, then held his voice for a time. “Whatever you might have told them, it didn’t matter in the end.”

  “I wouldn’t say anything to anyone about you.”

  “I know,” Dario said, “but you’ve already said too much as it is. A lot has changed since we talked last year, a lot of water under the bridge. Many different experiences to draw from.” Standing, he looked down at Memo there on the ground.

  With the case still in his hand, Dario unzipped the top and brought out a small scalpel he’d bought in El Paso, just after crossing the border out of Juarez. Seeing the blade, Memo began to work his head back and forth, desperately trying to defend him
self.

  “I don’t enjoy this work,” Dario said. “But I’ve gotten used to it. And you’re going to be our messenger.” With one hand Dario reached down and pinched Memo’s nose closed, waiting as his face reddened. When Memo’s mouth opened, Dario inserted the blade and drew it across the tongue, letting the sharpness of the blade do the work.

  Acknowledgments

  Sometime in 2008, when I still lived in Boston and worked in a restaurant in Kenmore Square, I took my friend James Ferguson up on his offer of a ride home. A week before, James had been to an auto auction in New Hampshire. The car he’d bought was a late-model Jeep Cherokee. We’d just finished up one of the long brunch shifts where we would sit in the back and read the Sunday papers or play dice games in the little drawer beneath the Micros screen. Needless to say we were feeling a little dispirited from a long day of work that didn’t really involve any work, and therefore didn’t really involve any money. Plus James had won all the dice games, so I wasn’t feeling all that lucky.

  When we got into the Jeep, James told me to flip open the glove and look inside. He pulled out into traffic and by the time we were headed down Commonwealth Avenue I held a little black box in my hands with a single red button on the top and wires leading back into the glove. It was the type of box that made me think that maybe if we got the Jeep up to eighty-eight miles per hour something truly special might happen. So of course I pressed the button and for about a block the headlights flashed like we had somewhere we really needed to be, and everyone on Comm Ave. got out of our way. It was a flasher box and it was going to take me into the future just like Marty McFly and Doc Brown. (Oh, and if anyone’s wondering, the bet I lost on that dice game was that I had to work Back to the Future into my acknowledgments.)

  The real truth to this story is that the ideas for a novel come from a variety of different places and owe thanks to a variety of different sources. James gave me the beginning of a novel that I didn’t know existed until many years later. Thanks, James.