The Carrion Birds Read Online Free PDF

cruisers parked alongside. Deputy Pete Hastings—a man Tom had trained
fifteen years before—shuttling cars around a blocked-off section of road.
    He hadn’t said much to any of these old colleagues
in the years since he’d left the department, not more than to pass a few words
of conversation on the street. Every time he ran into any of them, whether he
was in town to pick up feed for his hogs or running errands for the Deacon
family, Tom acted polite enough, trying as best he could to get himself away as
soon as possible, feigning some urgent appointment. All the while fearing they
saw right through him, felt the hollowness inside him as he shook their
hands.
    Tom was a big man, he’d always been bigger than
most, six foot four with wide shoulders. That hollowness inside him too much at
times to bear, while at other times, in the early years when he’d first left the
department, it had been shame that had filled him, compacted with guilt, layered
one on top of the other all the way up through him to the thick black hair he
wore close around his oblong head. He’d known people to call him handsome before
but he’d never truly believed them. His jaw rounded all the way from ear to ear,
hung low like a newborn’s fat-featured face. No matter how skinny Tom ever got
he always maintained the same jaw, covered now with a peppering of black and
white hair he could no longer stop from showing.
    People had liked him. They’d always liked him and
it was the reason he thought, at times, he’d been elected for a job he’d never
truly believed he’d receive. Mexican as he was in a town filled up with white
oil barons and Texans brought west to work the oil fields, he was a bit of a
loner. It was the reason he still felt uncomfortable walking the streets of
Coronado and the reason he’d eventually thrown in with his own family, or gone
up against his own kind—depending how one saw it—in a bid for the town’s
approval. Only it hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped and he’d lost his job, as well
as a piece of himself, in the process.
    He waited now in the line of traffic built up
around the accident. A big-bodied truck he could only partially see, blocking
half the road. His eyes resting on it for a long time, stirring up some
recognition as he waited his turn for the deputy to wave him past.
    Straightening up in the seat, anticipating his
turn, he checked himself in the mirror. On his face the two-day growth of his
beard, coarse along his cheeks, showed the slow untangling of his former self. A
little more weight in his belly now, and the feeling that he was living a life
that he’d never expected.
    The deputy waved his hand and Tom moved forward.
Almost the same height as Tom but twice as thin, Deputy Hastings was blond with
a hard round belly and the sallow skin of an inpatient waiting on some vital
transfusion. A distant cousin of Sheriff Kelly’s, he was the oldest in the
department now, one of the few left after the layoffs had come down from the
mayor’s office.
    Tom slowed the truck and, with his arm out the
window, asked the deputy what happened.
    “Can’t say,” Hastings said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, ‘Can’t say.’ ”
    “Really, Pete?”
    “On this one, Tom, I can’t.”
    Up ahead, Tom saw the ambulance parked near a blue
Ford Super Duty, the bubble lights over the ambulance still flashing. Through
the small side windows he watched the two paramedics working on someone inside.
He looked back at the big Ford and knew for certain now that it was the same
truck he saw every day at his work. “Clint Deacon get into some sort of
accident?”
    Deacon’s truck sat at an angle across the road, no
glass on the cement, not much of anything. “He’s a friend of mine,” Tom said. “A
neighbor.” He’d worked for Deacon for two years now, staking fence posts and
herding cattle. Tom’s father, Luis, putting him on when the money had run out of
Tom’s hog business. But still he preferred to