The Kiskadee of Death (7 page)

 

Chapter Seven

A
s it turned out, Luce opted out of going to dinner in favor of taking a nap at Eddie's and heating up a can of minestrone she found in his kitchen cupboard. She insisted she'd be fine, and Eddie and I should go enjoy tamales and burritos at the Tex-Mex restaurant around the corner from the Inn. By the time we got back, she had color in her cheeks again and felt a lot better, so all three of us hopped into my car and headed for the Frontera Audubon Society to see the nightly vulture show.

A short time later, I pulled into the long driveway off South Texas Boulevard that led to the headquarters of the society. Set on fifteen acres of what used to be a family citrus orchard, the preserve was a surprise to first-time visitors with its native thornscrub, wetlands, and butterfly gardens almost in the middle of the city of Weslaco. Luce and I had walked the thicket trail at the preserve on our second morning in the Valley and seen a score of different warblers, along with several hummingbirds and a couple of Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks. Now, as we parked the car in front of the closed wrought-iron gates, I spied a White-tipped Dove perched in one of the trees on the other side, with two Inca Doves nearby.

“You sure we can park here?” Luce asked Eddie.

“No problem,” he said. “The gardens and visitor center close at 4:00 p.m., but there are generally a few cars here to watch for the vultures coming to roost for the night. Although I think the stink of all the droppings from the birds discourages some birders from coming to see it.”

Eddie waved a hand in the direction of the grove of tall dead trees silhouetted against the sky in the growing dusk.

“Perfect habitat for Turkey Vultures,” he said. “Not so great for all the houses around it, though. I can't imagine that hundreds of noisy smelly vultures roosting near your home is good for resale value.”

I looked up and a Turkey Vulture glided over me, only about twenty feet off the ground. With another beat of its wings, it sailed toward the dead trees. In a wide circle around the vultures' roost, house lights were beginning to come on. As Eddie had noted, the scavengers' gathering place was practically in the middle of a city residential area.

As more vultures sailed in and the dark flock grew to include hundreds of the birds, the noise level increased until the air seemed filled with the cries of the vultures, and the trees were shrouded in black forms.

It would have made a great scene for a slasher movie.

“Creepy,” Luce observed, echoing my own evaluation. “Definitely creepy.”

The sound of shots punctured the vultures' chorus and I instinctively ducked behind the car, pulling Luce down with me.

“Are those gunshots?” she asked, total disbelief in her voice. “We're in the city, for crying out loud.”

“This is Texas,” I reminded her. “Guns are household appliances.”

More shots rang out. A flurry of black wings flew out of one of the dead trees.

“Somebody's shooting at the vultures,” Eddie called above the din.

I smacked my forehead with my hand. “That's right,” I said. “When we visited here yesterday morning, the director told us some of the residents in the area hate the vultures so much, they occasionally shoot BB guns at them.”

Luce stood up. “It's still being irresponsible, firing BB guns in a neighborhood. Someone could get hurt.”

Another barrage of shots sounded. Luce ducked back down beside the driver's door of the car where I was still crouched.

“I got news for you,” she said. “We're not in Kansas, anymore, Dorothy, and those last rounds were not BBs, either.”

Great. Just what I didn't want to hear. I was taking cover by my car while a bunch of gun-happy lunatics were waging a turf war with a flock of vultures.

“Eddie?” I called out. “You okay?”

There was a moment of silence, and then a string of curses erupted from the other side of the car.

I bolted, hunched over, around the front of the car and found Eddie sitting near the front tire, his hands wrapped around his right calf. A dark stream ran down his jeans.

“Some idiot shot me,” he said, still swearing. “Do I look like a vulture to you?”

 

 

Chapter Eight

C
hief Pacheco stood in the headlights of his cruiser watching the paramedics from the ambulance tending to Eddie's gunshot wound in the back of their van. Luckily, Eddie had only sustained a bullet graze across his upper calf and the emergency personnel were able to clean and wrap it sufficiently. Nevertheless, I'd already told him Luce and I would be taking him straight to the local emergency room for a thorough exam as soon as the paramedics finished with him.

“That gunshot wasn't meant for a vulture,” Pacheco said when I joined him in the glare of his headlights. “The vultures are up in the trees, not down by a car door.”

I glanced at Eddie and the medics in the back of the open van. Luce stood off to the side of the van, talking with another police officer.

“Yup, I kind of figured that out,” I said.

The chief crossed his arms over his chest and looked towards the vultures' roost. I waited for him to say something else about Eddie being a target, but the silence lingered.

And lingered.

Since I highly doubted Pacheco had developed a sudden interest in observing the habits of roosting buzzards, I guessed something else was occupying the man's thoughts. And since he was standing only a few feet away from where Eddie had landed in a shooter's sights, I also guessed the chief was mulling over the coincidence of two violent acts in one day that involved two men who knew each other.

I knew that's what I was mulling over.

Okay, maybe not “mulling,” exactly.

More like
Holy crap! someone was just shooting at Eddie, and this morning, a friend of Eddie's, got his head cracked and a canoe turned over on top of him
.

Needless to say, this was not how I envisioned my third day of birding in the Valley to turn out.

“Who knew you three were coming out here to see the vultures tonight?” Chief Pacheco finally asked, his gaze still on the dead trees of the vultures' roost.

The question hit me in the gut like a sucker punch. For a moment or two, I couldn't speak. When air returned to my lungs, my voice came out with a squeak.

“You think whoever shot Eddie… you think we talked with him?” I tried to force my words into coherent sentences. “We know the shooter? Are you kidding me?”

Pacheco turned his head towards me and despite the dark of the falling night, his eyes were sharp and glowing. They reminded me of the eyes of the Barred Owl that I'd spotted one evening in early November from my bedroom window. It was already dark outside, and I'd walked into our bedroom, which was upstairs, to pull the curtains before turning on the room's overhead light, but just as I reached for the curtain cord, I glanced through the window and froze. On the other side of the glass, maybe ten feet away at my own eye level, sat a full-grown Barred Owl. His implacable dark eyes latched onto mine, and I felt an almost palpable chill run down my spine.

This must be how a rodent feels just before it suddenly becomes dinner
, I thought.

Then, in the blink of an eye, the owl flew away, its big broad wings gliding into the darkness.

I blinked my own eyes then at the memory, and focused on Pacheco's question.

Who knew that Eddie, Luce and I were going to be here tonight?

“Birders,” I said. “The birders staying at the Alamo Inn. Schooner, Gunnar and Paddy Mac.”

“They tell anyone else?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea. Why would they?”

I felt Luce's hand slip into mine. “What are you talking about?”

I repeated the chief's question for her.

“I think we may have said something to the naturalist here at Frontera when we visited yesterday morning,” she said. “She was the one who first told us about the vultures' roost and some of the trouble they've caused. I think we told her we would try to see them tonight.”

“Cynnie Scott,” Pacheco said. “She's a local legend when it comes to birding. She's probably the most outspoken bird conservationist along the Lower Rio Grande Valley. She's also the president of McAllen's seniors' birding club.” He glanced away for a minute in Eddie's direction. “They like to call themselves the MOB,” he added.

“We know,” I said. “We were recruited today to help them with the float for the parade. We were going to head over there after seeing the vultures, but now we're taking Eddie to the hospital instead.”

The chief lapsed into silence again, his gaze back on the vultures in the trees. He wasn't exactly given to idle chitchat, I decided.

Luce squeezed my hand. “Eddie's about ready to go, by the way.”

“I'll take Eddie to the hospital,” Pacheco informed us, returning his attention to our conversation. “You go work on the parade float. And do me a favor—talk about this shooting tonight. See what kind of reactions you get from the other people there.”

He paused and pinned his sharp eyes on me again. “I'd be curious to know.”

I held his gaze for a moment or two, measuring the man's intensity.

“Curious” was putting it mildly. I had the feeling he would have liked to strap a hidden microphone on me and listen in on every word I heard for the next few hours. Someone—or somebodies—in the MOB must have been added to his suspect list since Eddie had been grazed by a bullet. And since I was the new kid in town, who better to send into a crowd of suspects than an innocent bystander just passing through?

Great. So now I was not only going to be a member of the MOB, but I was going to be a snitch, too.

“Are you serious?” Luce asked Pacheco. I had no doubt she had come to the same conclusion I had: the chief was hoping I'd do a little undercover work for him. “You want my husband to gather information for a police investigation for you?”

“Only if he wants to,” Pacheco replied. “I said it was a favor, not a requirement.”

I looked from the chief to my wife and thought about Eddie crouching behind my car and getting shot. This time around, it was me giving her hand a squeeze. “If I can find out anything to help Eddie, I'm going to do it, Luce. You know that.”

She nodded in the dim light coming from the surrounding vehicles and gave me a wink.

“Your reputation as a sleuth must have preceded you,” she said.

“Or my reputation as an idiot,” I replied. “Either way, let's do this.”

I offered my hand to Pacheco for a handshake to seal the deal. “I'm on your team, Chief. Me and the doll,” I added in my best B-grade movie gangster voice, “we're going after the MOB. We've got a score to settle and a grapefruit to nail.”

Pacheco shook my hand uncertainly.

“Does he always joke like this?” he asked Luce.

“Oh, no,” she told him. “Only when he's involved in murder investigations.”

The chief gave me another dark look, and I knew exactly what he was going to say.
You've been involved in other murder investigations?
I bumped my wife's shoulder to thank her for opening that particular can of worms.

“You've been involved in other murders?” Pacheco asked a moment later.

Okay, so I was off by one word.

“A few,” I admitted. “Maybe… five. Or six. I've sort of lost count now.”

“It's an occupational hazard for him,” Luce explained. “He's a birder who happens to find bodies.”

Pacheco looked from Luce to me. “Not that I'm trying to discourage you from birding here, but the next time you're thinking about heading south from Minnesota?” His face was deadly serious. “Consider Florida instead.”

 

Chapter Nine

W
ow,” I said. “That is probably the ugliest parade float I have ever seen.”

Luce and I were standing just outside the open doors of the well-lit three-car garage in a well-to-do neighborhood in the city of Mission, where the MOB's float was being constructed. From what I could see, the float consisted of a flatbed truck with a bunch of chicken wire fencing sticking up near the truck cab. In front of the fencing were mounds of yellow grapefruit and a clotheshanger draped with what looked like a terminally emaciated six-foot tall Great Kiskadee with a broken neck and only one eye.

“Bob!” Luce hissed at me. “Someone will hear you!”

“That's sort of the idea,” I whispered back. “Better they hear it now when they can still do something about it, rather than when the float starts down the street in the parade and everybody runs away screaming. That kiskadee looks like a refugee from a teen slasher movie.”

Any further comments I wanted to make on the float's lack of aesthetic appeal were cut short by Schooner's welcoming greeting called out to us via a loudspeaker mounted on the top of the truck cab.

“Yo, Minnesota!” his voice boomed from the garage. “Let's show these Texans how to build a float!”

That remark earned him a chorus of outraged voices from inside the garage, asserting that real Texans needed no one's help, that nobody does anything better than a Texan can, and that, if the rest of the country followed Texas's lead, we'd all be a lot better off.

I held up my hands in surrender. “We're just the hired help,” I assured the crowd of older birders that converged on us in front of the garage. I nodded at Paddy Mac and Gunnar the Bandana Man, and let my eyes rove over the other faces, thinking one or two looked familiar from the deck at Estero Llano that morning. “If we haven't met yet, I'm Bob White. Hi, kids.”

A flurry of handshakes and quick introductions followed as each of the MOBsters said hello to us before returning to their construction tasks on the float.

“I said the same thing about that kiskadee costume,” a short and round older lady said to me, patting my arm in a motherly way.

It took a moment or two, but then I recognized her as the straw-hat lady from our morning disaster. I'd had no idea that her hat had been hiding a too-red hair dye job, but I sure couldn't miss it now.

It was almost fluorescent.

“I'm Poppy Mac,” she introduced herself, “and I heard what you said. You'd think with all the money this club has in its pockets, we could spring for something fresh. But you know these old men, they'll be darned if they'll spend two nickels for something new if they can jimmy-rig it out of something old.”

She smoothed a strand of red hair behind her ear.

“Tightwads,” she confided in me. “Bunch of old tightwads. Take my husband, for example. He won't buy new batteries for his hearing aid because he says that it works most of the time. MOST of the time isn't good enough, but he won't replace them until he's stone deaf.”

Paddy Mac came up beside her and wrapped his arm around his wife's shoulder. If he'd heard her criticism of his financial habits, he didn't show any sign of it, or maybe Poppy was correct.

He hadn't heard a word because his batteries were on the fritz again.

“Ah, I see you've met my darlin',” he said, giving his wife a loud smacking kiss on her wrinkled cheek. “If she had her way, we'd only be slicing up top grade citrus to use on our float instead of the bruised leftovers. Not that anyone can tell the difference when you've got ten thousand orange halves covering the sides of a truck, mind you, but for my Poppy, it's first class all the way or not at all.”

“Oh, get to work,” Poppy said, pushing Paddy back towards the garage. “I'm not seeing any sides of a truck covered with chicken wire, let alone citrus, yet.”

“Don't be rushing us, darlin'. Haste makes waste,” he reminded her. “We don't need any accidents in building this float.”

Paddy turned to me and winked. “I spent some time in insurance, and you wouldn't believe the money that gets poured into accident settlements, including parade claims.”

He toasted me with the beer can in his right hand. “Safety first, Minnesota.”

A giggling Poppy pushed him back to work on the float.

“Bob, you remember Cynnie Scott, don't you?”

Luce was beside me, gesturing towards the woman with whom she'd been chatting. “We met her yesterday morning at Frontera Audubon.”

I nodded to Cynnie. “Of course,” I said. “But at the time, I had no idea you were involved with this motley crew. I also didn't know you were a local birding legend,” I added.

Cynnie, a striking woman with a heavy braid of silver hair swinging down her back, laughed. “That's a polite way of saying I've been around a long time. Which I have. Which also means I should know better than to get roped into the annual frenzy of building a float for the Citrus Parade, but here I am.”

She glanced around to see if any of the other MOBsters were nearby, then leaned into me and said, “Luce told me you saw the vultures tonight at Frontera, and that there was a shooting. I hope your friend will be all right.”

Before I could say anything, Cynnie shook her head. “I can't believe it, but at the same time, I can't say I'm completely surprised. Tensions have been running awfully high here in the Valley the last few months since the politicos approved the SpaceX installation. Conservation activists are furious, while the economic development people are drooling in anticipation. People are taking sides: conservation or SpaceX.”

She leaned in again and dropped her voice lower.

“Between you and me,” she confided, “I've been expecting somebody to start taking pot-shots at the vultures, figuring no one would complain if he killed them, since our legislature seems bent on selling out our natural resources to big business. It only takes one step in that direction to set off a stampede.”

Cynnie's disgust with her lawmakers was clear, and her words reminded me of what the chief had said about the locally revered birder—that she was the most outspoken bird advocate in the area. In a place like the Lower Rio Grande Valley where birding tourism generated big bucks for the community, I assumed that made Cynnie Scott the darling of all the merchants and businesses who shared in that profitable industry. On the flip side of that community coin, she may have been a thorn in the side of groups that championed causes contrary to her own. Whether it was the preservation of a vulture roost or rerouting a road to conserve breeding areas, the staunch bird lovers I'd met over the years weren't afraid to take their concerns into public arenas.

To be even more blunt about it, Cynnie Scott may have made serious enemies among local community leaders with her advocacy of birding and birds. It wouldn't be the first, and certainly not the last, time a birder didn't flinch at ruffling the feathers of powerful people.

“Where exactly is this SpaceX base going to be built?” Luce asked her. “From what you're saying, it sounds like it's more than another economic development that will be impinging on natural habitat. Which is bad enough,” she quickly added, “but I think that, these days, all birders know of at least a few projects in their own areas threatening habitat.”

Luce was voicing my thoughts as well. Birds and economic development were always at odds, it seemed to me. Of course, that made perfect sense since they both wanted use of the same pieces of land (or air space), but for radically different reasons. Developers wanted to use natural resources for human purposes. Birds needed those resources for their survival.

Some people think that activism on the behalf of protecting bird species began in the 1990s with the very public battle over preserving habitat for the Northern Spotted Owl in the face of logging operations in the Northwest of the United States. But the truth is that a concern for birds' survival surfaced in the last years of the nineteenth century, when the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and the alarming decline in the population of Whooping Cranes led to a reappraisal of human impact on wildlife populations. In 1900, America's first conservation legislation was signed into law by President William McKinley. Known as the Lacey Act, it charged the Secretary of the Interior with the responsibility to safeguard game and wild bird populations from commercial exploitation. Over the years, other wildlife conservation legislation was enacted, including the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1966. Finally, in 1973, President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act, which continues in force to this day.

That doesn't mean our national mandate to protect endangered species isn't challenged, or circumvented, by special interest groups.

Two years ago, a wind turbine project along the shores of Lake Erie sparked national headlines with the confrontation it caused between energy companies and the American Bird Conservancy over bird deaths that resulted from birds flying into turbines. In Minnesota, a proposal for a similar wind energy project was defeated by state conservation activists out of concern for safeguarding Bald and Golden Eagles that nested in the area. From what we'd already heard about the SpaceX project since our lunch at Fat Daddy's, it appeared to be the lightning rod of the moment for birding issues around this part of Texas.

Cynnie's expression morphed from disgust to astonishment.

“You don't know where the spaceport's going in?” she asked. “I just assumed you did, even if you are new to the area. This disaster has been brewing for a while.”

Luce and I both gave her blank looks.

“We only learned about it earlier today,” I explained. “It's like a lot of commercial developments—if it's not directly impacting your part of the country, you don't hear about it.”

“Well, this one should be making the national news big-time. It's in Boca Chica Beach,” Cynnie said. “East of Brownsville, near the U.S.-Mexican border, five miles south of South Padre Island. It's next to a state park in the Boca Chica subdelta of the Rio Grande.”

Okay, I could see why people might be upset about developing a beach. Proximity to beaches was probably jealously guarded in a hot and dusty state like Texas, but in this particular area of the state, you practically bumped into a state park boundary every time you turned around. The airport in Harlingen, in fact, was about a stone's throw from Hugh Ramsey Nature Park, which formed part of the Harlingen Arroyo Colorado, one of the nine World Birding Center sites in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Heck, you could almost bird in Hugh Ramsey from your plane seat while waiting for take-off.

Cynnie must have read the lack of understanding on my face, because her next comment hit me like a knock-out punch.

“It's on the flyway,” she emphasized. “THE flyway that branches into the Mississippi and Central flyways. If they build a space launch complex on that piece of land, you can bet it's going to disrupt the migration patterns of hundreds of thousands of birds. That particular beach area is vital to the health of the migratory corridor into North America. We're talking about over 500 species of birds being impacted.”

Holy crap.

Cynnie looked at my stunned face.

“Now, does that sound like a stupid idea or not?” she asked me.

Again, holy crap.

“How did they get past the Endangered Species Act?” Luce asked. “Or the Migratory Bird Treaty Act? They both charge the federal government with conservation responsibilities mandated by law.”

Whoa. My wife had obviously recovered from her shock faster than I had from mine if she was referencing federal guidelines.

“That's what we had working for us in Minnesota,” Luce continued. “The Treaty Act helped us put the heat on the Vikings football organization to modify the construction of their new stadium. Their original design called for about two football fields' worth of glass, which is really attractive to people, but deadly for all the birds that fly right into the glass because they don't realize it's there. On top of that, the stadium isn't far from where the Mississippi River cuts through downtown Minneapolis, which meant all that glass would be a deadly hazard for birds migrating along the flyway.”

Oh yes.

The Vikings.

Their defense of the stadium project had brought new meaning to the word “oblivious.” After the initial outcry from bird lovers about the non-friendly bird design went nowhere, the local city councils took up the cause. They passed resolutions calling for bird-safe glass to be used, only to be equally ignored by the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority, the group established by the state legislature to oversee the construction and operation of the new stadium.

(And did I mention that the stadium was being built with almost a half billion of taxpayer dollars? Too bad we, the taxpayers, can't cough up that kind of money for the purchase of more state nature preserves, but I guess that's a bone that I—and my fellow conservation advocates—will just have to keep gnawing on.)

Anyway, birders' protests got louder, a citizens' group was formed, the media jumped in, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was invoked, the Minnesota Legal Defense Fund for Migratory Birds was organized, until finally, the sports authority began working with 3M to develop a product to use on the glass to make it bird-safe.

Cynnie nodded. “I followed that fight. We've got the same problem here, basically, but even worse. We've got two flyways in jeopardy, and building glass is the tip of the iceberg. We're looking at a huge building project that'll reconfigure the landscape, deafening spacecraft launches that'll drive away species, and masses of people in what is currently one of the most important birding sites in the western hemisphere. ”

“But the environmental guidelines,” I protested. “Even the Federal Aviation Administration has to comply. How can SpaceX get the approval to build a commercial spaceport where two major flyways converge?”