The horizon below glowed golden now and the smaller stars began to blink out. A breeze stirred and overhead the dark roiling clouds at the edge of the storm front crept toward the coming dawn as if racing the sun to its rise. Thunder rumbled. A song sparrow peeped nearby and fluttered past Elijandro's head, finding a high spot on the stalk of bramble to clear its throat and offer up the first song of the morning. After that, the other birds woke, too. First slowly, like an orchestra tuning its instruments, but growing in number and volume until they produced a crescendo of chirping and trilling and whistling that ignored the coming storm entirely.
The time had come. Elijandro cupped his hand to his mouth and uttered a sharp hen cluck, then a staccato of high-pitched clucks as he twisted his hip and slapped his hand in a flutter against his rump: the sound of the first hen flying down from the roost. He heard the answering cluck from a real hen awakening on the ridge, then he called to the tom, a raspy, longing sound that rose and fell. The gobble of the big bird was so immediate and so close that Elijandro started and grinned and couldn't help but glance back to see if his boss was ready. The birds weren't on the top of the ridge, but much closer, immediately inside the woods at the end of the field.
His boss had been on enough hunts to know what it all meant and he fumbled with his shotgun, raising it and resting it across his knees, ready to shoot. Elijandro called again, and again the dawn exploded with the vibrant gobble of the trophy bird. The clouds began to spit fat drops of rain and the current of air became a steady breeze. Thunder clapped and the turkey gobbled angrily back at that. Two real hens flapped, clucked, fluttered, and then floated down from the high oaks toward the decoys, gliding in and milling among them, calling now themselves. The tom went crazy, gobbling at his hens and warning the storm clouds to stay away.
Elijandro brimmed with glee and excitement. He bit his tongue to keep himself from bursting into laughter as the big bird barked and pounded his wings against the air and drifted from the sky like a dirigible coming to land among his flock. Puffing out his feathers in full strut, clicking and drumming and fanning his tail, he appeared to be five times the size of his mates. More hens poured down from the trees like a pack of hussies.
The tom, an enormous ball of feathers no more than twenty yards from the edge of the field, slowly turned away and Elijandro knew his boss had the perfect chance to raise his gun and aim, then wait for the naked head and neck to reappear since the thick feathers of a turkey were better than a Kevlar vest. Thunder rumbled again and lightning flashed. As the tom rotated back and his head came into view Elijandro held his breath, anticipating the gunshot.
It came, but in an odd way. Elijandro felt the roar of the gun. Something flew out and away from above him, a dark chunk of bark, but then he realized there was no tree trunk above him and he reached for the top of his head as he felt himself tilting sideways and spilling toward the ground. The spit of rain became a faucet, water spilling down his face as if he were directly under the spigot. It didn't hurt, but as his fingers came to rest on the spot above his brow, he realized the firm fruit he felt protruding from a jagged capsule was his own broken skull and brains.
The liquid streaming down his face was a torrent of blood.
His body rested against the ground and it annoyed him that he couldn't remove his hand from the mess that had been the top of his head. His eyes focused in and out, like a quick zoom, then fixed on the flock of birds struggling up into the air, away from the danger, frantic for the safety of the woods. Elijandro saw the big Tom among them, dragging his long beard as he disappeared into the trees all in an instant. It was the same instant that the day was born.
The sun appeared bright in Elijandro's eyes, blinding him and washing over him until all was lost.
CHAPTER 2
UP MAPLE AVENUE HALFWAY TO LOVE FIELD WAS A SUNOCO filling station. One day, one of two partners disappeared with all the money he could carry. The weather-worn building sat empty long enough to lose half its windows to vandals and the cinder-block south wall facing the street caught a new shellacking of graffiti every other week. The pumps stood like upright corpses, dead to the world beneath a metal roof built to entice patrons in out of the sun or a thunderstorm to fill up.
When Casey rounded the corner she wasn't surprised to see every bit of the shadow under the roof occupied. From the rectangular crowd, a single line of people connected the pump area to the filling station like a human umbilical cord. It was 8:57 in the morning and people knew Casey's clinic opened at nine. Monday was the day they interviewed people for new cases. Like a school of fish, they turned in a single motion when her Mercedes rocked up over the lip of broken asphalt from the street, groaning and yipping on shocks gone bad twenty thousand miles ago.
She pulled around to the back of the building, thankful she'd laid down the ground rules over a year ago, when she first moved into the neighborhood. Unlike the shoppers at Neiman Marcus, these people had a quiet dignity and respect for others that superseded even their own tragic lives. They would wait for her to open the front door for business.
As she unlocked the back door, she heard a muffled flush from the exterior bathroom she shared with her clientele. The doorknob rattled and an overweight woman with long dark hair hanging from the fringes of a dirty white cowboy hat let herself out with a red-faced frown, hurrying around the corner to regain her place in the line.
Casey gave her Mercedes a fleeting look. Hubcaps and hood ornament had been stolen in her first week on Maple Avenue, and without the protection of a garage, the Texas sun had overcome German engineering, blistering the midnight-blue paint in several places, giving the car a leprous quality. Inside the filling station she bolted the door behind her and flicked on the AC unit in the boarded window. The burst of rank air that ran until the unit got going made her seek refuge in the outer room. There she breathed deep the smell of fresh-made coffee, then poured a cup.
Casey had known from the little red Fiesta out back that her two associates, Sharon Birnbaum and Donna Juarez, had beaten her to the clinic, but the coffee was proof positive. Casey sighed and surveyed the little storefront room where people had once purchased unhealthy snacks and paid for their fuel. It now served as the reception area for the Marcia Sales Legal Clinic for Women. The old single-bay garage, partitioned into three offices and a conference room by a friend from Habitat for Humanity, was where the women sat, as would a third associate if they could ever find another lawyer willing to work so hard for so little.
Casey's lawyers sat waiting at the plastic picnic table in what they called the conference room, poring over some documents, each with a laptop in front of her and each clutching her steaming coffee with two hands.
"Full slate this morning," Casey said, nodding toward the garage door and the crowd she couldn't see through a sheet of plywood put up over the broken glass. " Sharon, you've got court at two, right? Let's skip the meeting. Just remember, don't get into it with traffic violations. Tell them to check the guilty box and pay the fine. We'll get going as soon as Tina gets here."
Tina served as the clinic's interpreter.
"We can start," Sharon said.
"Right," Casey said. "I can start when Tina gets here."
"You gotta learn the language."
All three of them turned. In the doorway stood Jose O'Brien in faded jeans, wearing a denim shirt over his white tank top to cover the Glock he carried under his arm and the little nickel-plated snub-nosed.38 he kept tucked into the back of his pants.