The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite

for a long time, till Tom picked the bottle off the floor
and they went into the living room and watched television. Billy sitting on
Tom’s lap and Ray drinking another beer.
    The next day Tom would go over to Angela Lopez’s
house and shoot her point-blank. Knowing the whole time—as he went up those
stairs to her house—that what he was doing wouldn’t solve a thing. His own
inability to help Ray with his problems, to bring Marianne back and make
everything better. Tom had known it wouldn’t get any better, but he’d hoped all
the same that it would. So many years gone by now. All that time spent thinking
about what had happened and he’d never been able to figure out if he’d done it
on purpose or, as everyone said, if it was an accident.
    When he called over to Ray’s soon after, there was
no response, and in the days that followed he’d learn that Ray had left Billy
with Gus and gone north.
    Holding the picture in his hand now, ten years
later, Tom looked down on a face that hadn’t changed one bit from when he’d
known his cousin all those years before. Before everything that had happened,
before the Lamar wells had gone dry and the money had gone out of the family and
Ray had left his son in Gus’s care.
    “You hear anything from Ray lately?” Tom asked,
raising his voice a little so it might carry into the kitchen.
    “You know the answer to that just as sure as I do,”
Gus said.
    Tom carried the picture over to the kitchen
doorway, where he watched Gus fill the pot with water, then walk back over and
fill the machine. “You ever feel like you were meant to do something else, Gus?”
Tom asked.
    Gus waited, watching the coffee begin to percolate,
then turned to look at Tom where he stood in the doorway. “I’m too old for you
to be asking me something like that,” Gus said. “I’m stuck with whatever I’ve
already done. There’s no going back.”
    “I went up and saw Elena today,” Tom said.
    “Banner day for you, isn’t it?”
    “I guess you could say that. I’ve certainly been
making my way down memory lane.”
    “You want to go back?” Gus said, the water in the
machine falling dark into the pot. “Is that it? Do it all over again, have
yourself investigated again by the DEA because you took some advice from Ray
that really didn’t pan out. Is that what you want?”
    “Honestly? Yes, sometimes I do. Sometimes I think I
could have come through this thing all right.”
    Gus gave Tom a sad smile. “You only got off because
the judge went easy on you, Tom. I’m not saying what happened deserved the
punishments they were going after you for—I’m not saying that. But I do think
you should consider yourself lucky.” Gus poured the coffee and led him into the
living room again. “We have this conversation every couple years, don’t we?
Sometimes I think you come over here and you want to talk it out, but other
times, like tonight, I think I’m just standing in for Ray because he’s not
here.”
    Tom took a sip of the coffee, hot and bitter as it
slid past his tongue. “Did I ever tell you I tried to track him down through a
friend in the DEA?”
    “I didn’t think you had any friends left in the
DEA.”
    “I don’t really,” Tom said. Telling Gus how Agent
Tollville was an old acquaintance who’d helped him out with some work in the
eighties, but whom he hadn’t talked much with since. When Tom called—a month
after Tollville had come down to testify at Tom’s hearing—Tollville had been
more than a little surprised.
    “You want me to look into Raymond Lamar?” Tollville
had said. Disbelief coated thick through his voice. “You think we haven’t
already? There’s nothing there.” What Tollville did have was a roster of tours
Ray had done all over Southeast Asia in the late fifties and early sixties,
special ops, most of it before the war even officially started. Most just
recently declassified. No current address or number for him. The only thing that
came up a