The Carrion Birds Read Online Free PDF Page A

where it
hung in his hand. He put the barrel to the man’s heart. “Viejo,” he said, “they
don’t make them like you anymore.” And then he pulled the trigger.
    Ray looked up from the dead man at his feet and
watched the wind come down through the branches and then go away again. The
lights on the Bronco still on, still flashing, leaving a pale indentation over
the land, skewing the fall of the morning light, letting it spread thin over
everything in a ghostly shade not of this world.
    When he looked down at the man laid out beneath
him, he knew that it might well have been him. What Burnham had said was
probably true: the rules had changed—there were no more rules. He could see that
now. Perhaps he’d known it all along. Perhaps he’d been the one to change them.
It wasn’t hard to see. It had been a mistake to take the job. He’d never wanted
this again, not this.
    He turned from the man and went to the door Gil had
left standing open. Burnham’s hat sitting there on the dust-stained floor. The
dope somewhere beneath the seat, nothing left to do but get it up out of the
bench and take it to Memo. The thought in his head that he was done with this
business, that—standing there with the dead man behind him and another on the
run—he was exposed once again, just as he’d been ten years before.
    He brought out a knife from his back pocket.
Leaning into the cab he stuck the tip into the bench and ran it across the
fabric. Tufts of white padding came forward through the cut. Beneath, he saw a
red and black gym bag with the shape of the bricks visible through the fabric.
Inside he knew he would find the brown kilos of heroin.
    He put the knife aside and pulled the bag up out of
the bench cushion, and set it on the seat. With the zipper undone he saw there
were twelve bricks of heroin, all of them the color of molasses.
    In the ten years since he’d lost Marianne, he’d
tried to get out of this business more times than he could remember, painting
houses in the summers or filling in on a construction crew when there was work.
None of it paying anything close to what Memo would pay him for this job. But it
had been safe. And no one would die for twelve bricks of heroin.
    He was burying the old man when he heard the rifle
shot far off in the valley like distant artillery. Ray knew one way or another
it was done now, and that the younger man who had been riding shotgun with
Burnham was dead, and that the job he and Sanchez had set out to do would soon
be over.
    T he
ambulance came up over the rise behind them. The dog spinning around on the seat
as Tomás Herrera pulled his truck to the side of the highway. The sound of the
siren flowing by in one complete sweep, followed only seconds later by one of
the county cruisers doing about eighty on the narrow double lane. Both gone down
the road as swift as they’d come up behind, leaving his truck rocking lightly on
its springs. The flat desert the only thing to be seen out the cab windows, the
dirt wash off to the side of the pavement where the rains came a handful of
times a year, and the dried-up arroyos farther on toward the wind-scraped peaks
of the Hermanos Range. The ambulance and cruiser gone by now, far enough along
the highway that they were distinguished from all around as only a muted pulsing
of light in the distance. His dog, Jeanie, stood stiff pawed on the bench seat,
barking after the two emergency vehicles as they went north up the highway.
    Pulling back onto the road, he felt his foot a
little heavier on the pedal. The old truck engine laboring with the speed,
clucking after the ambulance and cruiser like a bird in heat, a trail of smoke
behind them—visible in the rearview as the truck burned through oil and gas,
going on down the road.
    Up ahead, a mile farther along, the accident came
into view, a big-bodied pickup truck turned partway across the centerline. The
ambulance pulled in beside it and the wavering flicker of lights from three
county