The Carrion Birds (10 page)

Walking into Dario’s was like walking into a cave.
The streetlamps outside blocked by the tinted windows. The back was lit only by
the light of the bathrooms, shining out into the barroom from far down the back
hall. The only dependable light in the place from the green and red beer signs
along the walls.

“Find us a table. I’ll be back with a couple
beers,” Tom said before disappearing into the crowd of oilmen that surrounded
the bar.

Kelly looked around at the place. It was her first
time inside since Dario had come into town and taken it over almost three years
before. She didn’t much care for places like it and until tonight there hadn’t
been much cause for her to come in. All down the bar now, the men were turning
to look at her, one after the other as they noticed her standing close by the
door.

To the right of her, someone called her name and
turning she saw Luis, Tom’s father, sitting at one of the wooden tables close by
the window. In front of him he had a tallboy of Coors and an empty shot glass.
His eyes already glossed from the alcohol.

“You driving tonight, Luis?” she said, pulling a
chair up to the table and then another for Tom.

Luis rolled his head around and gave her a grin.
“You going to be a buzz-kill tonight, Edna?”

“Never with you, Luis. You know that.”

“Sure,” Luis said. He took a sip from his beer.
“They laid off thirty men from the Tate Bulger well today.” Luis put the beer
down. “Seems like a good enough reason to have a few drinks.”

Kelly looked around at all the men in the bar. Some
were going at it pretty good, while others sat quietly to themselves in the
corners of the bar. It was the fifth layoff in about the same amount of months
and it wasn’t getting to be much of a surprise to Kelly or these men. “You
worried at all, Luis? All these young roughnecks out there looking for work, and
you at the boyish age of eighty-one.”

“Boyish, huh?” Luis smiled over at her. “Buy me a
drink before you start sweet-talking.”

“You know I love you, Luis, but not in that
way.”

“Worth a try,” Luis said. His eyes shifted away
from her as Tom came back with the drinks.

“Here you go, old man,” Tom said, sliding a shot of
brown liquor across the wood to his father. For himself and Kelly he’d brought
two beers in glass bottles. “I guess they laid off a few more,” he said after he
sat. The three of them circled up to the table, their backs to the window,
watching the crowd.

“Your father just mentioned that,” Kelly said.
“They seem to be doing all right, though.” She leaned to the side, looking the
men over, trying to see past them toward the bar. Many of the men she knew by
name, but about half of them she thought she’d never get to know. “You see Dario
anywhere?”

Tom shook his head.

Next to her, Luis put back the shot of liquor and
then finished it with a drink of his tallboy. Kelly watched him till he was
done, his Adam’s apple beating a constant rhythm beneath his weathered skin.
“Kind of hard to tell the mood of the place when there’s a party going on,”
Kelly said.

“More like a wake,” Luis added.

Tom smiled across the table at Kelly. “I guess
that’s one way to look at it.” He raised a hand and motioned for the bartender
to come over.

The bartender was a thick man named Medina who
spoke little English. From what Kelly had been able to put together on him, he
knew about thirty words and they all had to do with liquor or beer. “¿Su jefe?”
Tom asked, Medina standing there, looking from Kelly back to Tom.

Medina wore a liquor-stained white T-shirt with a
picture of a buck on the front of it and a pail of icy Milwaukee’s Best printed
on the back. When he turned to look around for his boss, his wide belly followed
a split second later. “La oficina,” he said. “You want?”

“No,” Kelly said. “We just wanted to see if he was
here.”

Medina kept staring at her like he didn’t
understand. His pupils, very big in the dim light of the bar, shone green and
bright with the reflection of the beer sign above. Sensing there would be
nothing more, he turned back to the bar, where the oil workers were calling
him.

“You didn’t want to talk with Dario?” Tom
asked.

Kelly laughed. “Probably better if he just knows
we’re here. Might be nice if he felt a little pressure from us.” She tipped her
beer back and drank, watching Tom. “Besides, unlike Luis, this isn’t what I’d
call a usual night.”

“Baby steps,” Luis said to Tom.

“You’re the expert,” Tom said to his father. Then
to Kelly, “You don’t think the talk of the town hasn’t been all about that boy
you have in the hospital now?”

“I’m sure it has, and now everyone is wondering why
I’m in here and why Dario is hiding in the back office on one of his best
nights. At least I’m wondering that myself.”

“Everything all right with that boy in the
hospital?” Tom asked.

“His name is Gil Suarez,” Kelly said. “We got the
printout on him late this afternoon. He served three months in county on a
possession charge when he was nineteen.”

“How old is he now?”

“Twenty-one.”

Tom sat back in his chair. “Does he have a PO?”

“Up in Albuquerque, but they hadn’t heard anything
about him in a year till I called up there this evening.”

“What are his chances?” Tom asked.

“He hasn’t woken up yet. Pete is with him now and
then the new kid, Pierce, will take over for the night.”

Tom held his beer halfway to his mouth but didn’t
drink. “What are the chances Gil wakes up and has something to say?”

“According to the doctors, if he keeps going the
way he does, things look pretty good. Whether he has something to say is another
story altogether.”

Tom stayed quiet and they watched the oilmen at the
bar for a time and then Tom said, “You think that boy needs to be scared like
that? You think he wouldn’t want to say anything against anyone, even if we
could protect him?”

Luis grunted something under his breath, but Kelly
just kept staring at the men by the bar. There was a discussion going on about
burning down one of the well trailers to get even with the Tate Bulger bosses.
It was drunk talk but still Kelly listened, knowing how easily drunk talk moved
from the bar out onto the street. The voices rising for a moment and then dying
away as the men drank. She watched and listened, trying to identify those who
were the loudest. A big man named Andy Strope seemed to talk the most, his voice
carrying above the rest. Mike Shore was also there and Steve Herman, but the
rest of the men in the group either stood with their backs to her or she didn’t
know them. After a while she said to Tom, “You don’t have to worry about
protecting anyone, Tom.”

“Everyone has to make a choice,” Tom said, his
voice low against the background noise from the bar.

“I know,” Kelly said, “but your choice has already
been made.” She looked at him to see how he’d taken it. She was about ready to
call it a night. All she’d meant to do was come by and let Dario know she was
still around, that she hadn’t forgotten about him, or what he might represent.
Whether the boy lived or not, it didn’t matter in the bigger scope of things. If
Dario was cartel, there was no way a boy like Gil was going to speak out against
him.

Tom finished his beer and looked over at his
father. “You about ready, old man?” Luis nodded, he put his hand out on the
table and steadied himself for the move. “I know you don’t need any looking
after,” Tom said, watching Kelly where she sat, “but I’m looking out for you all
the same.” He put a hand under Luis’s armpit and pulled him up, the old man
wobbling a bit as he found the floor.

Kelly nodded to Luis and the old man nodded back.
She watched Tom go and then, when the door closed behind them, she finished her
beer and brought the bottle over to the bar.

Medina broke away from the group of men and came
over. He was looking at the empty beer bottle in her hand. “¿Otra?”

“No, not tonight.” Kelly handed him the bottle.
Past the group of roughnecks, she saw Dario standing just inside his office
door, watching her or the door behind. When she looked over her shoulder and
then back at the office, Dario had closed his door.

Day 2

I
t was a little past nine when the sound of the explosion came to Dario where he sat at the bar drinking his morning coffee. The windows rattled in their casings and he looked toward the street, from which the sound had come, and from where he could see the morning sun falling through the dust-stained glass onto the barroom floor, as if through a diffuse curtain.

At the age of thirty-four he was still alive, even though he’d never expected as much, and he thought constantly of his death and how it would occur. All of it, the bar, the town, the shipments he held and then sent north, like any other place he’d been while working for the cartel. It was all the same to him, the same job, filled with the same thrills and boredom, the same highs and lows. He couldn’t have said it any other way, because, as he saw it, there was only this—there was only this life, this present. Though he hoped almost every day for something more.

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.

T
om 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.

R
ay 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 before 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.