The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “You know,” Carter said, “it’s very important to the people who’ll be buying homes here to know that they won’t be hit by any flying shrapnel or anything.”

  Wardlaw smiled at that, and his teeth were every bit as straight and white as if they’d been specially constructed by a Marine dentist. “They don’t need to worry about that. We keep a wide berth from the civilian population. Sometimes they can see the drops, but they can’t feel them.”

  “There’s kind of a safety zone, right?” Carter asked.

  “That’s right,” Wardlaw assured him.

  As they spoke, Carter led Wardlaw off to the side, away from his aide, a tall African-American marine Wardlaw had introduced as Jenkins. “Would you be willing to travel a little? Attend sales presentations, from time to time, in L.A. or San Diego? Some of these people might need a bit of convincing, and it sure sounds good coming from you. Of course,” he added, before the Colonel could object, “your expenses would be covered, you’d be put up in first class accommodations, and we’d arrange a generous stipend for you.”

  “A stipend, you say.”

  “That’s right. We don’t need to talk numbers right here, but I’m sure you’d be happy with it. This is a very crucial aspect of the sales pitch, and not one I want to take any chances with.”

  Wardlaw didn’t look at him, but worried with the toe of his dress shoe at a strange-looking mushroom that had grown up in a crack in the cement slab. “I’m a busy man, as I’m sure you understand,” he said. “But I’ve always believed that the military and private enterprise have to be fair and helpful with one another. I’m sure we can make some sort of mutually satisfactory arrangement.”

  They shook hands again, and Carter excused himself to head back to the platform. Used to urban functions, he had visited Eddie Bauer before this trip and wore a new yellow cotton duck shirt with khaki slacks and deck shoes. He was surprised to see the locals showing up in rags, virtually—torn T-shirts, overalls, ancient stretch pants, filthy, grease-stained jeans. These people, he realized suddenly, were poor. He had known that but not really processed what it meant, before. Now, faced with the reality of it, he understood.

  What he was offering them would seem like a fortune.

  Lieutenant Butler gave him a heads up. “Reckon that’s all you’re gonna get,” he said. “Most folks are here, and the ones that aren’t probably aren’t coming.”

  “I guess I’ll get to it, then,” Carter said. He nodded to Butler and Corn and mounted the stage, feeling the warmth as the lights bathed him. Crossing to the podium, he switched on the microphone and pulled it from its stand. Better to hold it like a rock star or an evangelist, he thought, than like a CEO at a sales conference. This would be, he knew, his one opportunity to get these people on his side.

  He looked out at the crowd of about seventy with a solemn expression and waited for them to quiet.

  “Good evening,” he began. “And thanks for coming out tonight.”

  “Didn’t have to go far,” someone in the back mouthed off. The rest laughed. Carter allowed himself to crack a smile.

  “Yes, that’s true,” he continued. “Nevertheless, I appreciate it. I know that you people, like all Americans, were stunned and horrified by the cowardly attacks on New York and Washington nine days ago. Life isn’t back to normal yet—I don’t know, frankly, if it’ll ever be back to what we consider normal. But life has to go on. Progress continues. Our economy is strong and it can take a few hits. The American people aren’t as soft and weak as those terrorists believe.”

  He paused for applause, and there was scattered clapping but no outburst. The Lieutenant had warned him that these people had a strong independent streak. The Slab was, some said, practically a country to itself, where the laws of California and the U.S. barely applied.

  “Let me get one of those rag-heads in my sights!” someone shouted. There were whoops and hollers at that one.

  “We’d all like to get our hands on those terrorists,” Carter said. “And in our audience we have a distinguished military guest who some of you know, Col. Wardlaw from the Yuma Air Station. Colonel, maybe you can nail a few terrorists for all of us!” Another burst of applause and whoops met this comment. Wardlaw nodded and smiled politely.

  “But before you get the wrong idea, I’m no politician and I’m not here to talk about the attacks. What I am is a businessman. Business, capitalism, the profit motive, that’s what made America great. That’s what the terrorists are fighting against, but capitalism is stronger than whatever they would replace it with. And tonight, I’m here to share the proceeds of capitalism with all of you.”

  He paused to let that sink in. The crowd was quiet, now, waiting for an explanation.

  “I know you all love living out here, on the Slab. Free of rules, maybe free of taxation, able to do your own thing without making mortgage or rent payments. Sounds good to me too, let me tell you.” He tossed in a chuckle there, and had it returned by his audience. But he knew he was on thin ice here. “But things change, and we have to roll with those changes. So here’s the deal. My company has purchased the land we’re all on—the whole Slab—from its previous owners, the federal government. Our intent is to build a real Salton Estates—not the one that failed, down along the shore, but a workable one right here in one of the loveliest spots in the world. We’ll be putting up luxury homes with one of the best views in the best state in the union, of our own Salton Sea, backed by the Chocolate Mountains.”

  From the crowd he heard definite grumbling now, so he pressed on quickly. “Now, legally, I could just have each and every one of you evicted from the premises. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m sure Lieutenant Butler doesn’t have any interest in enforcing something like that, either, even though it would be his job to do so. No, I think you’ll like my idea a whole lot better.”

  “You sayin’ my Jayco ain’t a luxury home?” someone shouted.

  Carter ignored him and went back to the podium, replacing the microphone in its stand and letting the suspense build for a moment. Before he spoke, he gripped the podium’s sides. “We’re expecting to make a profit from this deal, or we wouldn’t do it. So, in the interests of fairness, we’re going to share that profit with you, up front, out of our own pockets, before we even see a dime.”

  This drew some approval from the crowd—a few claps, a couple of shouts.

  “That’s right,” he went on. “Because I know you’ll have to move somewhere, pick up stakes, as it were, I will be coming to visit each of you personally over the next several days. And I’ll be bringing two thousand dollars to every household on the Slab.”

  More applause at that. He’d been right—to these people, two grand was a significant amount of change. His sources told him there were fewer than seventy separate permanent households on the Slab, so the payoff wouldn’t be too expensive. And it’d save money over the long run—if he’d gone the eviction route, there would be legal costs, security costs, the risk that some disgruntled ex-Slabber would come back and torch or vandalize the houses after he’d put some real money into them. Everyone would have to sign a release to get their money, agreeing not to badmouth the new Salton Estates Corporation and to move at least ten miles away from the Slab—to make sure they didn’t just set up a new camp right next to the planned resort—but when he was dangling cash in front of them, he thought that process would go smoothly.

  On a high note, Carter wrapped up quickly and got off the stage, promising to answer questions individually when he visited each home. The lights were killed, the generators shut down, and Sheriff Butler walked him to his Town Car. A hotel room waited in Palm Desert, and he couldn’t wait to get there and shower the grit of this place off him.

  This had gone more smoothly than he’d expected, but he still hated the Slab.

  Chapter Six

  Ken’s house—a wood-framed bungalow at the edge of Westmorland, on a corner lot framed by scraggly oleander but also sporting some particularl
y healthy, jagged-leafed ocotillo that bloomed flame red in spring—was quiet that night. The smell of the steak he’d broiled still hung heavy in the kitchen. But in the bedroom he’d converted into a kind of den, he had a window open and a fan going so the air just carried the rich, fertile odor common to most of the Imperial Valley.

  The fan was the only sound Ken could hear, drowning out even the insistent buzz of insects from outside. He’d had the TV on for a while but couldn’t take it any more. Either there were entertainment programs that didn’t seem to have any connection to the world as he now knew it, or there was bad news. The President had addressed Congress and made demands that were unlikely to be met. Planes and ships had been deployed to the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan’s ruling religious zealots, the Taliban, had so far refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, and Ken had the distinct impression that the world was slipping toward a war that could never really be won.

  As much as he was opposed to the idea of declaring a war that could ultimately result in the deaths of millions, he thought that part of what bothered him was just the knowledge that the world had been changed, permanently, and no one, including him, had any idea what the new world would look like.

  Ken’s job was keeping the people of Salton Estates safe. He took it very seriously. At night, emergency calls went to the main Sheriff’s office in El Centro, but Ken was on call twenty-four/seven. Suddenly, though, Americans everywhere were faced with a threat he couldn’t do anything about.

  He logged on and checked out some of the chat on the internet for a while, but every room he went into was the same. People talked about the war, about the attacks, about their anger and feelings of helplessness. Frustrated, he signed off after just a few minutes and sat in the dark den. Bookshelves surrounded him, mostly containing the Western history books that were his only real hobby, but somehow he didn’t think he could focus on reading right now.

  Carter Haynes, the real estate developer, had compared his office to Mayberry. Ken was old enough to remember having watched Andy Griffith as a boy, and he had always been fond of Andy’s basic approach to law enforcement. He’d been the Sheriff who refused to carry a gun, and yet he managed to keep the peace in Mayberry. Ken knew that had been fictional, though with some basis in reality, and a very different time and place. He carried a gun because he had to, and he would use it if necessary to keep the peace in Salton Estates. So far he hadn’t needed to. He hoped that would continue to be the case.

  But not only was there terror in the skies, he now knew there was a killer in his own territory. Shortly before leaving to meet Haynes up at the Slab, he’d had two disturbing phone calls. One was from Henry Rios up in Mecca, confirming that there had now been a missing persons report filed—a young lady named Lucia Alvarez, who went by Lucy, was missing, and she matched the description of the victim in the snatch job Henry’s eyewitness had reported. The other call was from Risa Emerson in the Coroner’s office. She had confirmed that the skull Billy had taken down had come from a female human, and certainly the victim of a homicide. The skull had taken a .45 slug in the back of the head at short range. She would keep working on it, she promised him, and she’d let him know more when she could. But she wanted him to know right away that he had a murder on his hands.

  Tomorrow, the fire pit would become a crime scene. He could have done it tonight, but to what purpose he didn’t know—by the time Risa had called, it was already burning. By morning it would be cool enough to look at.

  He switched on a floor lamp and picked up the Stegner novel again. He knew he’d have a hard time sleeping tonight. Nights like this were the worst, the kind that made him feel Shannon’s loss like a man sometimes feels pain in a long-since amputated arm. That was the first thought that struck him on that Tuesday morning when he watched the planes slamming into the World Trade Center again and again—that the people who had loved ones in the twin towers were the ones who were truly going to suffer, going to sleep alone and waking up alone and always, always, remembering what it had been like to lay in bed listening to the one you love breathing beside you.

  The day he lost Shannon had been a magic day, too. He’d tasted it as soon as he’d awakened, thick as a mouthful of blood, charged like an electric current in his brain.

  It was in 1989, in the spring. The kind of April day when the locals in San Diego try to skip work and go to the beach, because they know that when the tourists come in June, the beaches will not only be overcrowded but socked in with low clouds, overcast for most of the day. He was a cop then, getting up in years but still able to buckle his Sam Browne belt on every day, able to keep up with all but the fittest of the young breed. A Montana native, he’d settled in San Diego after Vietnam and had met his wife there.

  Shannon taught fifth grade in a public school in Chula Vista, but now it was spring break and Ken worked a night shift so they were spending time together running errands. On this sunny morning, they had gone to a suburban supermarket and bought bulging bags of groceries for a barbecue later in the day. Ken carried several rustling plastic bags to the car, but Shannon had stopped to chat with one of the cashiers. He had known all day that something strange would happen, something close to miraculous, because that’s what it meant when he could taste the magic. He waited for it with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension—more the former than the latter, because generally when the magic came it proved helpful, a positive thing.

  On this occasion—and all these years later, he remembered it as clearly as if it had just happened moments before, the pictures as sharp in his mind as HDTV—he had stopped at the trunk and turned back to see where Shannon was, and he saw her, just stepping off the curb with a grocery bag cradled in her arms, still laughing at something the checker had said.

  He saw Shannon there, and he saw the truck, an eighteen-wheeler with the logo of the supermarket on its side, engine roaring as it picked up speed, bearing down on Shannon.

  The bags fell from his hands and he turned to run toward his wife. But then the truck sped past her and he saw Shannon emerge on the other side, bag still in her hand, a funny half-smile on her face, as if she was saying, “That was a little close, wasn’t it?” the way she would.

  But a moment later, he realized that the magic was showing him things that weren’t there, because the truck hadn’t passed by. It was still closing on her, and now he saw it all in slow motion—the driver, face a rictus of terror, fighting the wheel and the brakes but with no results; Shannon, looking up finally at the truck and realizing that it was coming straight at her, faster than she could move. Ken ran, but the magic slowed him down, held him back, as if running through deep water or peanut butter. His arms and legs couldn’t get any speed up and he was still a dozen feet away when the truck clipped her—Shannon diving backward to dodge it, but a fender still catching her in mid-air, and that was enough, she was picked up and thrown into the air, and by the time Ken’s muscles worked right again Shannon was hitting the ground twenty feet away and sliding, hard pavement scraping the flesh off her cheek down to the bone.

  Sixty-seven bones were broken, the doctors told Ken. Death was almost instantaneous. No one wanted him to think that she’d been alive the whole time she’d flown through the air, seeing the supermarket and the parking lot and her husband whipping around in dizzying circles as she tumbled to her death. She didn’t suffer, they told him, though they couldn’t have known.

  And that didn’t even begin to speak to his own suffering.

  The magic had failed him—worse, it had betrayed him, this time. It had taken the woman he loved from him—the only woman he had ever loved. This had been no freak accident. The truck driver said afterwards that his truck seemed to have a mind of its own, that his foot had been nowhere near the accelerator, but the brake hadn’t responded to him, the wheel wouldn’t turn, there was nothing he could do to avoid hitting Shannon. Ken believed him. The magic had come back, and the magic had attacked that which was most precious in the world.

 
; Ken didn’t respond well. He’d started drinking heavily, even on duty. He’d volunteered for dangerous assignments. He found himself tempting fate, leaving the squad car and walking around, alone, in San Diego’s toughest neighborhoods. The magic hadn’t protected him then, but something else had, fate or pure dumb luck had kept him alive long enough to get fired.

  That was, finally, the event that had sent him into the desert. He couldn’t stay in San Diego. Its streets and beaches and palm trees and parks reminded him of Shannon and what they’d had together. He couldn’t get a job, and for a long time he’d just stayed in his house, in the dark, drinking and avoiding the world. Finally, though, when it seemed that he could sink no lower, when the depression threatened to rob him of every ounce of humanity, the magic came back again, for the last time until today.

  This time it was barely noticeable—he couldn’t even tell for sure if it was a magic day or something else entirely, maybe a summer cold that left a slight metallic taste in his mouth. But on this July day, three years later, the world had seemed somehow bright and new and inviting, so he’d gone for a walk around his neighborhood. He’d been inside so much that some of his neighbors probably thought he was a hermit or a myth, a story to scare kids with. This day, this glorious summer day, though, he felt renewed. He walked and walked, and didn’t stop until a sudden breeze plastered a sheet of paper to his leg. Ken reached down and peeled it off, and glanced at it before he threw it away.

  It was a flyer announcing a job opening in the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office.