The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Terrance had spent most of the morning so far on the north side of the cabin, where the rocks combined with the natural rise of the valley to make the elevated bluff from which he’d stood guard. But to the southeast of the cabin the ground fell away rapidly, a rocky slope that bottomed out in a tangle of thick brush at the bottom, edging a wash where water ran during the rare winter rains.

  This was where they dug the graves.

  Terrance went that way, because it wouldn’t be impossible for someone to hide down there in the brush until the cabin was empty, and if she had gone that route, he wouldn’t have been able to see her from his earlier perch. He used the barrel of the rifle to push aside thorny branches as he plucked his way down the slope. At the very bottom the growth was thickest, almost as if the branches had been woven together by hand, but when he was all the way through the worst of it, he stepped out into the wide, sandy wash.

  The sand was a bitch to dig in, he remembered. You’d dig and you’d dig but the sides would continually cave in on you. Fortunately they didn’t have to dig too far down—just enough to make sure animals didn’t get at the bodies. And the graves almost filled themselves in, once the bodies were down here. A few shovels of sand, then they all stomped around on top to flatten it out. By the next year, it was impossible to know for sure where a body had gone. Once, in fact, they had accidentally dug up a Dove from a couple of years before when trying to bury a new one, so they’d just shoved the new corpse in with the desiccated old one.

  But it only took a moment for Terrance to know that something was very wrong. The floor of the wash was disturbed, with a big pile of sand next to a depression. He hurried over to it and could see in an instant that someone had been digging there. And he was sure that whoever it was had been digging over one of the graves—he remembered the position of the paloverde tree just beyond it, one of the immovable landmarks of the wash. None of the guys had been down here during this trip, Terrance knew.

  Which had to mean that someone else had been in the wash, snooping around. Someone who knew where to dig. It couldn’t have been too long ago, or the winds and occasional flash flood would have leveled the ground again. No rain had fallen out here for months, but wind was a constant factor.

  Terrance had no shovel with him, just a hunting rifle. He knelt in the sand and scooped up double handfuls of earth, throwing it to the side. Whoever had dug this hole hadn’t worried about refilling it at all—in just a few minutes, he had found the skeletal remains of one of their Doves, from five or six years ago if he remembered right. She’d been buried nude, as they all were, so there were no clothes in the pit, just bones.

  There was also no skull.

  Breathing faster, feeling the onset of panic, he dug around some more, in case the skull had somehow become separated from the rest of the skeleton. Sand and dirt sprayed from the hole like splashes of water; Terrance got grit in his eyes and mouth, and ignored it.

  No skull at all.

  This isn’t good, he thought. Kelly needs to know about this. Everybody needs to know.

  He scrambled back up the hill, shoving through the brush, mindless now of the thorns that tore his clothes and skin. By the time he reached the cabin he knew his skin was flushed, his heart slamming. All’s I need’s a fucking heart attack now, he thought. That would put a capper on a fine day. He stumbled into the cabin. He had a cell phone in his bag, but it wouldn’t work here, there was never any signal here, so even if Kelly’s was receiving, which was unlikely, he still couldn’t get through.

  He dug it out anyway, just in case. No signal. He shoved it into the pocket of his pants and stalked from room to room as if an answer would present itself in their gear, in the D-rings set into the floor to hold down the Dove, in the coolers of drinks and meat.

  Hidden on the back of one of the kitchen’s drawers, though, they always kept a key to whichever vehicle they’d come out in, just in case there was some sort of emergency. It wouldn’t do for the only key to be in the pocket of one of the guys if that guy happened to be at the bottom of a cliff with two broken legs. Terrance tugged the drawer out and snagged the key. The path the girl had taken had—at least initially—followed the track of an old mining road. Terrance could make up some ground by taking the SUV, if they’d stuck close to the road. And if they hadn’t, he’d see what the thing’s real off-road capability was. He ran outside, threw the rifle into the passenger seat foot well, and cranked the engine.

  ***

  Diego had the wheel, his father cramped between them on the bench seat, legs straddling the gearshift, and Jorge against the other window, trying to keep the three rifles between his legs from rattling too much.

  The law had done nothing, which wasn’t surprising but was upsetting anyway. Henry Rios had forgotten what it meant to be a Mexican in this world—it was like when he put a uniform on, his skin turned white. So they were out again, in Diego’s truck, looking for any sign of their sister. No one would help them; they had to help themselves. The way it was, the way it had always been.

  They’d all skipped work that day. If they got fired, they’d just find other work. Lucy was more important than any construction job. But they’d been out for hours—and they’d cruised for hours the day before, too, as long as it stayed light out—and so far, nothing.

  They worked their way north now, having gone south before. They covered the roads away from Mecca, up through Thermal and Indio, then into the strip of wealth that became Palm Desert and Palm Springs. The guys had driven a luxury SUV, according to the witness, so it made sense that they might be up this way. But mostly they’d seen pick-ups, Explorers, Jeep Cherokees, a couple of old Toyota Land Cruisers. Except for the islands of excess in Palm Springs, where Mercedes and Lexus became the standard, they saw nothing fancy and dark, like they were looking for. None of the expensive ones in the rich neighborhoods carried the right assortment of passengers, and they didn’t really think that kidnappers would hang out in one of the more heavily populated areas of the county.

  “They’re in a garage by now,” Jorge said. “There’s no way they’d leave it sitting around in the open, not after someone saw them.”

  “They don’t know anybody saw them,” Raul argued. “They think they’re clear.”

  “Even if they garaged it, they might go out for something,” Diego insisted. “We stay out long enough, we’ll find them.”

  “There!” Raul shouted suddenly, grabbing Diego’s right arm as he did. Diego fought to maintain control of the truck. “Don’t do that,” he said. “What?”

  Raul was pointing forward, and then Diego saw it too, a quarter-mile or so ahead. A big, black luxury SUV pulling out of a dirt drive onto the paved road, turning to travel the same direction they were. “What is that?” Diego asked.

  “I don’t know, Expedition, Lincoln, Lexus, something like that,” Jorge said. “I can’t tell from here. But it’s one of those expensive ones. Look at the way it shines.”

  The windows were darkened, too, which fit what the witness had told Sheriff Rios. Diego mashed the accelerator to the floor.

  “Those guns are loaded, right?”

  “You shot anything today?” Jorge came back. “I haven’t.”

  “Just checking.” Diego leaned forward as if doing so could squeeze every ounce of speed from the old GMC. It wasn’t much of a truck but it had been built to last and it had served the family well for many years. He was pretty sure that Lucy had lost her virginity in its bed—he knew he had—but he’d never been able to find out to whom, so he hadn’t been able to beat the guy up.

  Ahead of them, the SUV picked up speed, as if suddenly aware that it was being chased. Its burst of speed was tentative, though, while Diego’s was sustained. He had already made up most of the ground between the two vehicles. The SUV’s tail was right ahead of him now. Diego flashed his headlights and honked, but the driver refused to pull over, and instead leaned on the gas more. The other vehicle started to pull away.

  “C
ome on!” Jorge pleaded. “Catch it!”

  “I’m trying,” Diego said.

  The SUV leaned into a blind curve, and its brake lights flashed. The driver didn’t want to lose control of the big car. Diego had no such compunctions. He pulled out into the oncoming lane to go around the thing, block it off.

  Only there was a farm truck, loaded with sugar beets, barreling at them in that lane. Raul let out a scream and grabbed Diego’s arm again. Shaking him off, Diego heard his father muttering prayers in rapid Spanish.

  Diego pushed farther to his left, going around the truck on its right shoulder. The truck’s horn blared in his ears, and his pick-up’s tires slipped when they hit the dirt on the shoulder, kicking up a blinding plume of dust. But within seconds he was back on the highway, farm truck past him, rocketing toward the SUV. The driver of that vehicle had either thought he was dead, or had been watching the near-miss instead of the road, because Diego had hardly lost any ground at all. A minute later Diego had pulled ahead of it, and he stomped on the brake, fishtailing to a stop across two lanes. Smoke coming from tires and brakes, the SUV screeched to a halt just behind it.

  Diego, Raul, and Jorge threw open their doors and jumped to the ground, rifles raised and pointed at the SUV.

  Inside, a young couple sat, hands over their heads. The guy looked like an accountant or a computer programmer, right down to the pens in the pocket of his blue Oxford shirt. The woman seemed a little hardier, dressed in a denim jumper over a white cotton blouse. Both had tears streaming down their cheeks.

  “It’s not them,” Diego said. He spat onto the hot pavement. “Shit, it’s not even them.”

  Jorge gave the couple a friendly wave. “Sorry,” he said. “Drive safely.”

  As the couple sped away, Diego jabbed with the toe of his snakeskin boot at a strange-looking mushroom growing in the shade of a scraggly tree. He bent over it and examined it more closely, then picked it up for a closer look. “Check this out,” he said. The mushroom was that shade of sickly pale white reserved for things that never see the sun, but its surface was dotted with red spots, like it had measles or maybe like someone had dripped blood on it, Diego thought. Connecting the spots was a network of fine red lines that could have been capillaries.

  “It’s a fucking mushroom, that’s all,” Jorge said. “Let’s go.”

  Diego crushed the thing in his hands and tossed it to the side of the road, then got back in behind the wheel.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Well?” Colonel Wardlaw asked. He looked out his office window at the base’s dusty parade ground. Everything in Yuma is dusty, dry and hot, he thought. Some soldiers get Europe, some get Hawaii for Christ’s sake. Even Pendleton would be better than this. He was from Michigan originally, where nature was green unless it was covered with snow, and he couldn’t get used to how different the landscape was here.

  Behind him, he knew, Captain Yato stood at attention. “Sir, we landed at each of the three target locations. The messages our aircraft had observed were written with rocks, so we erased them by moving the rocks.”

  Wardlaw turned around to face the young officer. It was a different Corps when a Japanese-American could be a Captain. Wardlaw wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that. “Did you find whoever wrote the messages?”

  “No, sir. Not yet, sir.”

  “At ease, Captain.” Yato spread his legs a little, but otherwise his posture remained rigid.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I want them, Captain,” Wardlaw said. He had seen photos of the messages. WAR NO MORE my ass, he thought. The Pentagon would almost certainly see photos within a matter of days. Probably only the fact that the brass back in Arlington was occupied with more important things had kept them from seeing satellite pictures already. He had to keep a lid on this, and the only way to do that was to get the perpetrators in custody before they could repeat themselves. Yuma was a shithole, but it was his shithole and he didn’t want to lose it. “There are traitors in my gunnery area. I want them in my brig instead, and I want them today.”

  “We’re continuing to search for any parties who might have been involved, sir.”

  “Will, I know we’re short-handed. There’s a Goddamn war effort going on out there, so we can’t be expected to commit a lot of man-hours into finding what could charitably be described as a few vandals, right?”

  “Basically, sir.”

  “Except for one thing.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “I want them!” Wardlaw roared. “Anyone writing messages like those in a time of war is guilty of treason, and I won’t have it on my land!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get back out there, William. And don’t come back until you can bring me some traitors.”

  ***

  Ken finished his lunch and threw the wrappers in the metal wastebasket that stood at the end of his desk. He needed to get back up to the Slab, though so far no one he’d spoken to had known anything at all about the mystery skull. He didn’t have anything to go on in the way of forensic evidence, though, so he had to go with what he had, which was the hope that someone might have seen someone else put it in the fire pit.

  Risa at the Coroner’s Office in El Centro had called with some more details on the skull during the morning. The victim was Mexican, from the interior, maybe Oaxaca, judging from the dental work. She was having a facial reconstruction done so they’d be able to get a reasonable likeness, though that kind of thing was always largely guesswork and didn’t take into account scars, piercings, tattoos, or any number of other ways people could alter their appearance without disfiguring their skulls. She believed the victim was fairly young—late teens, early twenties. She’d call again when she had more.

  Ken was on his feet and halfway to the door when he saw his Bronco pull up outside. He went back to lean against his desk and wait for the deputy to enter.

  Billy’s face was flushed and tense when he came in. “What’s up, boss?”

  “Bad day?” Ken asked him.

  “Now I know why Osama bin Laden’s so damn hard to find,” Billy said. “I can’t find one stinking Navigator in a county I know like my own back yard.”

  “It’s a challenge,” Ken agreed.

  “But I was thinking,” Billy went on. “With all that shit back East. Do you think we ought to come up with some kind of terrorist safety plan? Preparedness, and all that?”

  Ken made an effort not to laugh. “Billy, on the list of targets terrorists might have in mind, I think the Imperial Valley would come near the bottom.”

  Billy mulled on that. “I guess so. But there is lots of agriculture here, you know? Someone could fly over with a crop duster full of anthrax gas or whatever and really cause some problems.”

  Ken drummed his fingers on the edge of his desk. “Anthrax is a biological agent, not a gas, to begin with. Maybe it could be spread with a crop duster, I don’t know.”

  “Maybe I should check it out,” Billy suggested. “Go look at all the crop dusters in the area, make sure there’s no ragheads flyin’ ‘em.”

  Ken came up off his desk and stood close to Billy, his expression no longer one of bemusement. “You check it out,” he said. “Then you report to me, and don’t approach anyone or take any action on your own. And don’t use terms like that—it’s disrespectful and it reflects badly on me and the entire Imperial County Sheriff’s Office. One more racial slur and you’re looking for a new job, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Billy said. “Sorry, Ken.”

  “I don’t think we have but a dozen or so Islamic families in the whole county, that I know about,” Ken said. “But those that are here are American citizens, and don’t forget that.”

  “In World War Two we put Japanese-Americans in camps,” Billy reminded him.

  A historical fact coming from Billy Cobb, Ken thought. That was kind of like watching a pig do math. It didn’t so much matter whether or not his answer was right, just watchi
ng him hold the pencil was impressive. “That’s right,” he said. “And it was a mistake. But we’ve learned better since then. Anyway, that was a different kind of war. I don’t think we’ll see an effort like that put in here.”

  “You don’t think we’re really going to war?” Billy asked. He sounded surprised.

  “We declared war on crime, on racism, on poverty and on drugs,” Ken said. “We haven’t won any of those yet.”

  “But this is different,” Billy said. He took off his hat and scratched his sweaty scalp. “They attacked us.”

  “Yes, they did,” Ken agreed. “And killed six thousand of us or so, and they need to be brought to justice for that. But remember, firearms kill thirty thousand Americans every year. Alcohol kills four hundred thousand. Is it really about how many people were killed?”

  “Then what is it about?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Ken said. He went back to his desk, scooted out the chair and sat down. Trying to educate Billy might be a long process. “It’s partly that, and partly the fact that we believe we should be safe within our own borders. But as far as it being a real war—well, I don’t claim to be an expert, but as far as I’m concerned, there are three things any military action needs to be successful.”

  “What are those?” Billy asked. He leaned forward, hands resting on the back of Ken’s guest chair.

  Ken counted off on his fingers. “You need to know who the enemy is, that’s number one.”

  “Bin Laden.”

  “He’s one of many. Thousands, probably. He’s a target, but he’s not the only terrorist or even the king of all terrorists by any means. It’s a much bigger fight than that. And if you stretch it to cover everyone who’s ever provided his network aid and support, then do you launch strikes at Ronald Reagan and President Bush’s dad? William Casey’s already dead, but those three armed and trained bin Laden’s troops if anyone did.”