The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite Page B

appeared just a few minutes before.
    At a distance of three or four hundred feet, Ray
couldn’t be quite sure, but he thought the woman officer who had shown up was
the same who had been Tom’s deputy all those years before. The one who had
responded to his wife’s accident, telling Ray the news about his son, and the
way the car had rolled after being broadsided.
    Ray picked up the apple again. The flesh where he’d
taken his first bite already stained brown from the air. It was the first thing
he’d eaten since the diner, and he was staring at it like he might figure his
future from the thing like a mystic would from a glass ball. He finished the
apple and when he was done, took Sanchez’s pager off his hip and checked the
time. He’d been sitting in the Bronco now for the past five hours, waiting.
    The root of the problem, or at least what Ray had
been able to get out of Sanchez after they’d gotten back to the Sullivan house
from the Lucky Strike Diner, was that Sanchez just wasn’t built for the thing.
He could talk a good game. He could tell Ray all the things he would do if he
was given the chance, but Ray just couldn’t believe him.
    Sanchez hadn’t done what he was supposed to. He
hadn’t killed the boy and instead of making sure the boy was dead, tracking him
down as Ray would have done, he’d simply run off.
    “You’re telling me you shot him,” Ray said. The two
of them standing in the living room of the Sullivan house, a broken-down sofa
turned halfway out from the wall, and the cracked plaster of the place around
them on all sides. “Because I’ve already heard that, it’s all I’ve heard from
you all day and I’m getting tired of you lying to me about it.”
    Sanchez was leaning against one of the walls,
picking at the plaster, his fingers a chalk white and a small mound of detritus
developing on the floor at his feet. “I’m telling you I shot him,” Sanchez said.
“I’m not saying it was perfect, but I shot him and I saw him go down.”
    “And then what?” Ray said. They’d spent the last
hour eating their food in silence at the diner, Ray faced away from the door,
hoping he wouldn’t run into anyone who might recognize him. Sure at any moment
Tom would walk in or worse yet, his father.
    “The gun was so loud,” Sanchez said. “I wasn’t
expecting it to be that loud and I got scared. I didn’t know what to do. I was
looking to where he’d taken the shot and he was just lying there in the sand.”
Sanchez crossed and recrossed his hands, a white rim of plaster showing under
each fingernail. “I walked down and pushed the gun into his back. He was dead.
He was dead where I left him and the traffic was going by out on the
highway.”
    Sanchez seemed like he was going to cry and Ray
looked away. The sun had gone down out on the desert and there was a pink haze
left in its wake, followed above by a dark blue spreading upward into the sky.
“But he wasn’t dead, was he?”
    “I thought he was.”
    Ray went over and sat on the old sofa. He rubbed
his hands over his face and spread his fingers up into his hair. This close to
Coronado and he couldn’t avoid it, he was thinking about the day he’d come clean
to Marianne about who he was, about what he did. It didn’t go well. Marianne
telling him that he would ruin their marriage, that even then, as they stood
close together there in the kitchen of their house, he was ruining their
marriage. She wanted them to move. She said if the oil was gone and this was the
work he was doing, they should move. If this was their life, then there must be
more to it, to their life together. All of that only weeks before she died,
before the cartel tracked Ray down and took her from him.
    When Ray looked back over at Sanchez, he’d already
decided. Ray would do it, but he didn’t want anything to do with Sanchez
anymore. Ray would go to the hospital because it had to be done. There wasn’t
anything more to it than that. “Memo doesn’t