The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  It was poison because the Salton was a lake without an adequate means of water exchange. Water flowed in from the Alamo river and the New River that came up from Mexico, bringing with it untreated or barely treated sewage, industrial wastes, and who knew what else. A truck had fallen into the river once and its paint had been stripped by the New River’s toxic sludge by the next day. The truck’s cargo—human waste—hadn’t even added enough toxins to the water to be considered a problem.

  Locally, run-off from irrigated Imperial Valley farmlands trickled in, carrying with it large amounts of fertilizer that could poison the Sea even more. With nowhere to flow to, though, the water in the Sea only evaporated, leaving behind massive amounts of salt and concentrating the other chemicals in the lake. The Valley provided a third to a half of all the winter vegetables consumed in the country, so there was probably some merit to irrigating the place, but the cost to the Salton was high.

  In addition to those who tried to profit by controlling the flow of water, there were others trying to pull gold from the ground. At the southern end of the Chocolate Mountains, below the military Impact Area, a foreign gold mining operation took millions of dollars out of the earth while paying only a tiny fraction in lease fees and nothing in royalties. Farther east, near the Arizona border, another company was trying to start a gold mining operation on land sacred to the Quechan Indians—the only stretch of earth on which windows existed, or so they claimed, which enabled them to walk to other worlds, or ten thousand years into their own past. But in spite of those ten thousand years of history, a century ago the Bureau of Land Management had taken away the part of their reservation that included that sacred ground. In its final days, the Clinton administration had denied the mining company’s application, but now it was being reconsidered—and since the new Interior Secretary had hired members of the gold company’s law firm for her staff, chances were good that the short-term profit of the powerful would win out over the religious beliefs of the Quechans.

  Ken hoped that Carter Haynes had carefully considered the difficulties that the Valley often threw at those who would profit from it, though. As the California Development Company had learned in the twentieth century’s first decade, the desert had a way of subverting the will of mere humans.

  He drove for an hour, covering the main road and the side streets, but there was no Navigator to be seen, no crew of white guys in any SUV with a Hispanic hostage. Finally giving up, he turned around in the parking lot of the Corvina Café, just below the Riverside County line, and headed for the office, hoping that Billy had made it back.

  Chapter Four

  Billy found the corner that had been described to him, and standing on the corner—just back from it, actually, leaning against the wall of a liquor store, windows plastered with signs advertising ICE COLD BEER and CHEAP CIGS and GOD BLES AMERICA, he found the woman. He assumed she was the one, anyway, or that there were more than one but they’d all provide the same service. All that he’d been told was the where, not the who.

  But she looked the part. She could have had more meat on her bones and she could have been better looking and she for damn sure could have been younger, he supposed. She was stick thin, a meth-head, he guessed, or a heroin addict. Her wispy hair looked like limp straw, and her skin was dried-out from the sun. She wore a miniskirt that showed off scrawny legs that could have been attached to a chair, and a tube-top over breasts that barely dented it. He thought streetwalkers usually wore high heels, but this one had on faded red sneakers, so he figured maybe that only applied to city girls.

  Well, he thought, no promises had been made about quality. Just price.

  Making sure that no one was watching, he pulled the squad car over, opened the passenger window, and beckoned to her. She eyed him for a moment, spat once onto the hot sidewalk, and then ambled over to the cruiser, taking her time. Billy’s fingers drummed on the back of the seat. The longer he sat here the more likely someone would come down the road. El Centro in September was pretty quiet because when the heat raged, people stayed inside as much as possible. But all it would take to bust him was one car.

  Finally, she reached the street, leaned into the window.

  “I don’t know you,” she said.

  “You don’t need to. Get in.”

  “You arresting me, officer?”

  “Should I? Is that the way you like it?”

  She laughed, a cackle that turned into a hacking cough.

  “Just get in, for God’s sake,” he said, agitated. He leaned over and tugged on the door handle.

  She pulled the door open and climbed in, sitting down and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Before she was even settled, Billy hit the gas and lurched away from the curb.

  “Jesus,” the woman said. “You in a hurry or something?”

  “You ask a lot of questions for a whore.”

  “Who said whores ain’t curious?” she replied. “Anyway, if you’re not arresting me, where you taking me?”

  “You tell me,” Billy said. “Where’s a good place?”

  “Oh…” she said, as if just now catching on. She was a tease. Billy kind of liked that—teasing was fine as long as the payoff was there at the end. And it didn’t take a detective to figure out that this woman knew all about the payoff. “Well then, make a right at the corner.”

  Billy made the right. “Where we going? Your place?”

  She made a huffing noise that he figured was probably a laugh. “There’s a carport in that alley up ahead,” she said, pointing to a rutted dirt track behind a faded brown apartment complex. “It’s usually quiet back there. Nobody’s going to bother us, and your car’s invisible from the street.”

  “You sure?” He was still nervous about this whole thing. His heart hammered in his chest and he could feel sweat running down his ribs. He’d never done anything like this, but he had to admit that there was a thrill to it. The lure of the forbidden or some shit, he thought. He turned into the alley. She was right; the carport was deserted, the dozen or so apartments above it silent. And it wasn’t like he was planning to take a long time.

  He pulled into the shade of one of the carport slots and killed the engine. “This good?”

  “This is fine,” she said. “Cash first. Forty unless you want something more complicated than head.”

  “Head’s fine, but…in case you didn’t notice, I’m a Sheriff’s deputy.”

  “I noticed,” she said.

  “So I was thinking you’d do me for nothing.”

  “You thought wrong, stud. Girl’s got to earn a living.”

  “I could run you in right now. You solicited me.”

  “You could. Of course, I could talk about how you made me get in your car and drove me here. Look, I don’t want no trouble, handsome, I just want to make some bank.”

  Billy felt himself filling with an unexpected—and unfamiliar—rage. His face felt hot. “I don’t pay for it,” he snapped. “Ever.”

  “Then you should get it the same place you usually do,” the woman replied. “Your right hand, probably.” She pulled on the door handle, opened the door, and left the car.

  “Hey!” Billy shouted. “Get back in here!”

  Instead, she broke into a run. Billy scrambled from the car, nearly slamming the cruiser door into the stucco carport wall as he did. Squeezing between car and wall, he dashed into the alley. She was already out of sight. Her footsteps still echoed in the silent town, though. Billy ran into the street and spotted her rounding a corner. She’d lost one of her red sneakers but was making still remarkably good time for a woman, much less a woman with one foot bare on pavement that was at least a hundred degrees, probably more like one-fifteen or twenty.

  He sprinted down the middle of the street toward the corner. Besides the apartment building there were small single-family homes here, all stucco, all dark and quiet. It was like he’d wandered into some kind of ghost town. The only thing he could hear now was a distant air conditioner hum
ming and the buzz of a fly that strafed him. In sequence, he realized three things: he’d lost the hooker, he was very exposed out here in the street, and he had his service weapon in his hand.

  That last was particularly troubling.

  He holstered it and jogged back to the alley. How had a simple urge to put his cock in somebody’s mouth ended with his Glock 22 drawn? He knew that he’d have shot her if he’d seen her there on the street—the mental image of her flying forward, a spray of blood and skull spewing out ahead of her, came to him, and he shivered.

  Back in the squad car, he sat for a minute with his hands gripping the wheel, shaking uncontrollably. As soon as he felt like he could control the vehicle, he backed out of the alley and headed for home.

  ***

  Sitting in his favorite chair, windows on both sides of the RV open to catch a breeze that was more wish than expectation, Harold Shipp had fallen asleep. He awoke an hour later, alert and clear-headed. He rose and went to the window, looking out at the gray slab under its coating of sand and debris. A tiny bird hopped around, then took wing for the brush surrounding the slab.

  Harold turned around and saw Virginia watching him. “It’s September,” he said.

  “That’s right. All month.”

  “They’re out there. The boys.” He looked back out the window, as if trying to see beyond the brush, as if trying to grow wings so he could rise up into the air where he could see over the miles. Behind him, Virginia said something. He could hear her voice but not her words. It didn’t matter, though. He had only been making an observation, not really seeking confirmation. After this many years, he knew what the Dove Hunt schedule was.

  What he didn’t know—couldn’t know—was how much Virginia was aware of. Harold knew about his own condition, knew he suffered Alzheimer’s, even had a vague idea that it meant that plaque deposits had built up on his brain that made him forgetful, confused, lost. Times like these, when he could remember and process information, were rare and getting more so. But after he had his spells—could they still be called “spells” when they had become the norm? he wondered—he retained none of what had happened while he was gone. He could have told Virginia everything, or nothing. To ask her would only mean opening a door he didn’t want to go through, and since the possibility remained that he had told her nothing, he wanted to leave that door shut as long as he possibly could.

  He had sworn to secrecy, as they all had. If it was within his power, he’d keep that vow.

  He found that he was suddenly excruciatingly thirsty. He hoped Virginia had some iced tea or lemonade made, but if not, a tall glass of water would do. It would taste funny—and he was clear-headed enough to know what that meant—but right now that didn’t matter as much as getting some liquid into him.

  He turned back to the kitchen, where Virginia waited.

  ***

  Desert Storm had taught her a thing or two about desert camouflage, so by the time Penny had finished setting up her camp, she was convinced that it would be all but invisible from the air or from the ground, unless someone happened to come right up to it. A large camo ground cloth, in uneven browns and tans with a scattering of green, was spread on the ground, anchored with rocks and a couple of stakes. All her gear was stowed on the ground cloth. Above that, and overhanging by several feet in all directions, she’d raised camo netting, through which she had twined bits of local vegetation. The netting would, she believed, prevent people flying overhead from seeing her even when she sat at the low, flat boulder before her ground cloth that she had determined would be her kitchen. A series of big rocks shielded her from the rear, and she’d made camp on the west side of a rise above a wash, out of flash flood danger. From here, she could keep an eye on the wash. If anyone came in that way, she’d see them long before they saw her. She had cut cross-country away from the jeep road for almost a mile, and put two hills between it and her base camp.

  She was brewing a celebratory cup of herbal tea—which she suspected would taste just as wrong as her water had—when she heard the crunch of a footfall, not far away. She instantly shut off the propane burner and listened for it to repeat. To be caught before she even started would just suck too much to be believed.

  Hearing another footstep, Penny left her cooking gear where it was and slipped into the wall of rock at her back, standing between two of the biggest boulders and watching her own back trail. From the sound of it, someone was dogging her path. She’d already scouted the rocks and knew that, if it came to it, she could duck between these two big chunks of sandstone and go up and over the ridgeline behind her. That would give her a head start back out of the gunnery area.

  After another couple of minutes she saw a head come into view, and then the rest of the body. She was already leaving her hiding place among the rocks, though, because she recognized him as soon as his long yellow dreadlocks appeared. His broad, simple features were arranged in a strange smile, like a kid who thinks he’s putting something over on Mom. His tie-dyed shirt was about the farthest thing from camouflage a human could choose to wear.

  Mick Beachum.

  Who was supposed to be, at that moment, setting up a command center in a motel in Salton Estates or Niland.

  “The fuck are you doing here, Mick?” she demanded loudly.

  He stopped in his tracks, startled for a moment, and the oddly juvenile grin vanished. Mick was a big man with long, gangly arms and legs, ending in huge hands and feet. His face was almost totally without guile, every thought or emotion etching itself there with utter transparency. Penny wouldn’t have described him as handsome, but there was an innocent, puppyish quality to him that she supposed some people might find kind of endearing.

  If only, she thought, he could keep his mouth shut. And make some better decisions. And learn to take no for an answer.

  “Looking for you,” he said. “I followed your trail. You didn’t exactly hide it.”

  “I didn’t realize I needed to. No one’s going to know where I came into the range except you.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

  “Which still doesn’t answer the real question,” she reminded him. “Why did you follow me?”

  “I got to thinking,” he began. Anytime that happened, trouble wasn’t far behind, she knew from long experience. “I realized that I didn’t need to be in a motel.” He shrugged his shoulders, hefting his backpack. “Everything I need is in here. We can have a mobile command center, right out here, and I can be around to help out if you need it.”

  “If I’d needed help we’d have planned for that from the beginnin’,” Penny said. When she was upset or anxious, the Southern accent she had otherwise squashed after the Gulf War crept back into her voice. Her “I’d” became “Ah’d,” she dropped ending sounds, even the rhythm changed to one with more of a musical lilt. Just now, she was plenty upset. One thing about puppies—you could talk to them and talk to them, but that didn’t mean they learned until you rubbed their noses in it and gave them a swat. “What if there’s an emergency? You’re supposed to be someplace central so y’all can cover all of us if somethin’ happens.”

  “I’m only an hour from the van, if I hustle,” he said, trying his hardest to be reassuring but not quite pulling it off. “And here, I’m closer to you and to Dieter.”

  “But without wheels. And on the wrong side of the line. You’d best go back.”

  “I just hauled all this crap in here, Penny.” His tone edged dangerously close to whining. He seemed to realize it, and dialed back the drama a couple of notches. “I thought you’d be glad. It seemed like a really good idea to me.”

  “Yeah,” Penny sighed. “The thing about a plan, though, is that it’s best to stick to it unless there’s an overwhelmingly good reason to change it. ‘Because I felt like it’ doesn’t count.”

  “Look, I can go back, Penny, if you want.” Mick looked up at the sky and Penny followed his gaze. The sun perched above the hills to the west, ready to slide behind them
. It would be dark before he made it halfway.

  “No, don’t try to do it tonight,” Penny finally said. “Crash here, then tomorrow morning you can help me set up before you go back.”

  His face broke into that big, goofy smile, revealing an array of uneven teeth. “Okay,” he said. “Anyway, the view here is a lot better than…well, anywhere else.”

  She chose to ignore the comment, tossing him an icy glance but nothing else. He was, in his own awkward way, trying to compliment her looks. She’d heard it before, from him, but it did nothing for her.

  Penny had always been realistic about her own looks. She wasn’t willing to put much effort into appearance, but she did have a thick mane of light brown hair that was usually pulled back into a ponytail and tied with a rubber band or scrunchy. It was unruly, though, and tended to strike out on its own with no notice. Her face was okay, she thought. It worked, its parts were in the right places and there was nothing misshapen about any of them. Her eyes were an unusually light green that contrasted nicely with the brown hair. She had always kept fit, more through being outdoors than in a gym, so her body was as toned as it was going to get: strong legs, probably too muscular in the calves to be really shapely, firm ass, breasts a little on the large side but enhanced by strong pecs. And with a shirt on, no one could see the five-inch scar across her abdomen, her permanent souvenir of the Persian Gulf.

  ***

  On the Slab, Lettie Bosworth made dinner for her husband Will.

  She worked over a propane stove in their mobile home, making a casserole out of various leftovers and canned meat. With a very few exceptions for restaurants or visits to friends’ homes, she had made dinner for Will every night for the past thirty-four years. He never cooked, not even barbecue. He never skipped a meal. She had heard about men who traveled for business, but when Will had been in business he’d been a barber. There was no travel involved, and he was home in time for dinner every night. Since he’d retired six years before, he’d been home for every meal.