The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite

Author:Urban Waite
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction Suspense
ISBN: 9780062216892
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Day 4

Tom rode the brown mare north through the desert, a few minutes past midnight and the moon above at its midpoint.

As he rode the light shifted, blue to black, beneath what remained of the clouds. The trail lost and then found. The tall, spiked fingers of ocotillo rising in places and the brittle scrub everywhere on the plain like dust across the darkened valley. After a while he saw it clear, the two burnished tire tracks left in the desert sand, where years before there’d been a road leading north. The hoofprints leading on.

He didn’t know what he hoped for. Ray had shot a deputy, he’d murdered more than ten men, and he was out there still. All of it went against anything Tom could ever accept as a peace officer. But Ray was his cousin, a month older than him, and they’d been like twins once, growing up together and thinking for the longest time that they would always consider Coronado home. Now, Tom didn’t know how he felt, and he rode north.

The old road leading on and the small dip to the north where the Hermanos Range slipped almost to the surface of the desert before rising again in a series of endless hills, covered in a web of pinyon and locust. Then farther on, the white dusting of snow high up where last night’s rainstorm had come across the peaks.

He saw jackrabbits stand on hind legs, then go skittering off through the desert at high speed. He surprised birds, bedded down beneath the creosote, sending them twittering into the night sky, circling until he was safely past. Behind, the desert went on in a roll of blue hills all the way to the state police roadblock. The cars trailing away from the mountains like a necklace of precious stones along the highway.

Not a single cloud above now as he came up the valley and saw the rusted tin roof of the old oil station sitting amid a hollow enclave of desert sand. The station only one room, the windows broken from their frames, and the old wood boards that made up the exterior looking worn and petrified by the desert sun. A place that had at one time offered a bit of protection for his father and the men he worked with. A memory now pulled loose from his childhood of riding north through the desert with Ray, carrying meals up from the ranch kitchen for the oilmen.

As they’d ridden north, they’d searched out snakeskins, cast away on rocks and bits of brush. They’d made games out of it all, chasing each other and turning up the dust. The road they’d used now nothing but two tracks of open land, no more than a foot in width in places, now often slipping completely from sight.

With the one-room building a hundred yards away, Tom dismounted and moved on foot toward the closest window. Ahead, he saw where the oil well once stood, now a heap of rusted scaffolding on the ground.

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