The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  But after they’d married, Dag had changed. He lost his job, for one thing, when the Palm Desert restaurant he’d been managing had closed its doors. Lucy was working retail in a poster gallery at the mall there, so they weren’t broke, but they were suddenly much less flush than they had been. As the money crunch continued, Dag’s temper started to flare, revealing a side of him that she hadn’t encountered before. His drinking, once seemingly part of his social life but lately more and more common at any time or opportunity, exacerbated the problem. The first time he’d struck her she had tried to excuse it, blaming stress, blaming herself. The second time she blamed the booze. The third time, he had reminded her of his guns, and she’d moved out.

  She was born and raised a good Catholic and good Catholics didn’t divorce, but Lucy decided that her safety and sanity were more important than decisions made long ago by men who would never understand what it was to be female and vulnerable, and she’d divorced him anyway. He had pleaded and wept and promised to change, scolded and threatened, called her every name in the book, but eventually he had agreed to the divorce and had signed the papers that freed her.

  Lucy hadn’t spoken with him since that day, though it took some doing. At night she went out with high school friends, or sometimes a couple of people from the insurance agency she worked at. Drinking, shooting pool, partying by the Salton on hot weekend days. She’d grown up in the tiny community of Mecca, and so far seemed to be stuck there, though she couldn’t imagine that she would stay forever. But being in such a small town made it hard to avoid places where she might run into Dag again.

  She made the effort, though. She didn’t want to risk falling in love with the physical perfection of him all over again; couldn’t risk being blinded to his dark side. Avoidance was her best bet.

  Guns? No friends of hers, but no strangers either.

  She heard the man coming when he was still halfway down the canyon. He moved slowly, and he thought that translated as quietly, but he was wrong. The desert was truly quiet, with only the occasional breeze and the distant cries of a raven disrupting the silence. From where the man was, down-canyon, every sound was captured by the stone walls and funneled up-canyon to where Lucy waited, safe within her indentation atop the canyon’s wall. His breathing, slow and steady. The scrape of his foot on sand, of equipment, maybe his backpack, against the canyon walls. The occasional clink of his gun or creak of its strap. The shuffling when he rearranged his grip on it. He broadcast his location every step of the way.

  Waiting was hard, especially when he moved so slowly, but she forced herself. She kept telling herself that he’d pick up speed, move past her. She needed to pee but she tried to force that out of her mind, promising herself that when he was dead she’d drop her pants and have the most satisfying pee of her life.

  Finally, she could tell, he reached the spot where she had stabbed his friend. She remembered the spurt of blood when she’d driven the fork into his face—there was still a brown streak of it on her hand and up her arm—and knew that it must have splashed the canyon walls as well. And there would be remains of his glasses—she was pretty sure he’d lost the whole deal, frame and all, so that would be on the ground. The location would be easy to determine and even the method would be clear. He’d be able to look up and see the shelf upon which she’d waited. If he ventured up there, it wouldn’t take much more climbing to bring him to a point where he could look down into the indentation she hid in now. She held the stolen rifle pointed in that direction, though, and if he showed himself, she would fire.

  But she didn’t hear him climb. She heard him pause and move around the site, his clothes rustling as he did. He even kicked at the glasses, it sounded like, sending them scuffing over the ground. But then he kept on, heading up the canyon at a slightly faster clip, as if he’d already decided that’s where she had gone.

  Lucy’s heart started to pound. She’d almost hoped that he would climb, because that would force the issue. Now, though, she had to make the decision, and fast, before he was out of sight around a bend. She would have to choose to kill him—no longer in legitimate self-defense, but out of a longing for justice. Or revenge.

  She realized she’d already made the decision, long ago. He was a rapist and a killer and there was nothing she could do to him that was worse than what he intended for her. She rolled out of her indentation in the stone and flattened herself against the upper rim of the canyon. Now she could see him. They’d sent the black man, the short, muscular one after her, the one who looked like a soldier in his buzz cut and rigid bearing. He carried a mean-looking weapon, a semiautomatic or automatic rifle. A military weapon, she thought.

  Lucy sighted down the barrel of the rifle. She aimed at the mass of his back. A shot there would probably prove fatal, if not immediately, and the target was bigger than his head. All she really had to do was drop him, and she’d be able to finish him off, as long as he was wounded badly enough that he couldn’t turn his gun on her. High in the upper back, that’s where she needed to take him. If she missed a little she might get the neck or head of the small of his back or the ribs, and any of those would do. He wore a small day pack, slung low on his back, and it could be a problem, she thought, if she hit that, but there really was nothing to do but try to miss it.

  He was no beer can or soda bottle, no household appliance, but a flesh and blood man. And he wasn’t sitting still on a rock or a fence, but moving away from her, fairly quickly now. He wouldn’t remain a target for long. She sighted the way she had been taught to do, getting a bead on him, and she blew out her breath and she squeezed the trigger.

  In the canyon, the shot echoed like thunder.

  She missed.

  She saw the man throw himself to the ground, flattening himself, but the bullet had torn out a chunk of wall six feet from him. Lucy threw herself back into her hidey-hole before her target was able to look up and behind him—at least, she thought it was before, unless he’d caught a glimpse of her as he fell. She didn’t think that was likely, but it was possible, and since he would be hunting her now, she had to accept that if it was even remotely possible then it was probable.

  Her heart had been pounding before but now it jackhammered inside her, making it hard to even catch her breath. She tried to still herself so she could hear him, but now he really was silent.

  She could only assume the minutes were ticking by. Time seemed to both stop and stretch—she felt like it had already been an hour since the echo of her shot had died off, but she still hadn’t heard the slightest sound from the man she’d fired at. She wore no watch, and the upper edge of the indentation blocked the sun from her view. She could judge time only by the shadows she could see, and they were long, making it late in the afternoon, but she didn’t know how much they had changed since she had come out of hiding to shoot a man.

  More time passed, and still, not the faintest sound. She began to wonder if in fact she had killed him after all—if maybe the bullet had passed through him and then hit the wall, or if he’d been killed by a ricochet. She could well be stuck in here, still needing to pee, forever if she waited for a dead man to make noise.

  She waited what seemed like another long stretch and then decided she had to find out. There was every likelihood that he was simply waiting her out, watching for her to show herself so he could unload that wicked-looking automatic rifle at her. But she’d die anyway if she never came out of hiding.

  It was her turn to move silently. She scooted from the impression in the rock, weapon in her hands held just inches above the stone so it wouldn’t scrape. Keeping her head low, she inched out onto the rim—not as far as she’d gone before, just enough to raise her head to the level from which she’d be able to spot him if he was still flat on the canyon floor where she’d last seen him.

  He wasn’t there.

  She raised a little more, just in case she’d misjudged where he’d fallen. Still no sign of him.

  Which could only mean that he was o
ut there somewhere, on the move, no doubt closing in on her.

  She was lowering her head again when a brown-skinned hand came over the rim, quietly flattening itself on the rock, four feet from her face. A gun barrel, black and ominous, followed, sticking up into the air. She watched the barrel rise like a shark in the sea, knowing that there would be another hand coming along behind, finger on the trigger guard, ready to slip inside and fire. The barrel shifted, lowering, pointing almost straight at her, and she stifled a gasp of surprise. But it was just a natural shift as the man continued to hoist himself up. She saw the hand, knuckles paling with exertion against the rock as it bore most of its weight. Then the top of his head, the short, razor-cut dark hair, the skin of his forehead. Then his eyes, brown as those glass bottles she and her brother had shot so long ago. As the eyes cleared the rim of stone, they saw her and widened in surprise.

  She pulled her trigger.

  The gun boomed and the face exploded, a red haze filling the air where his head had been a moment before. A fine spray of blood spattered against the rock rim, and then a louder sound, his body thudding to the canyon floor below. As before, the gunshot’s echo bounced among the canyon walls for a while before it finally faded away.

  She waited on top of the canyon wall for several minutes, letting herself settle again, before she tried to climb down. Reaching the ground, she hiked around a bend, not wanting him to see her even in death, and took down her pants for her long-delayed pee. She’d probably get a urinary tract infection because of this bastard, she knew, but compared to what he’d had in mind for her, that was something she could live with.

  When she was finished, she fastened her jeans again and went to investigate the body. He had landed on his back, facing the sky. Just below the spot where his nose met his brow, and a little to the left, was a neat round hole, red with black edges. Blood had pooled under his head, and she imagined that there was an exit wound back there considerably larger than the entry wound.

  The rifle’s strap had been wrapped around his wrist so the gun remained with him when he fell. He also had a hunting knife in a sheath on his belt. She almost couldn’t bring herself to do it, but she knew she had to so she forced herself to dig through the pockets of his camouflage fatigue pants.

  Inside his right rear pocket, she found a wallet. Ray Dixon, his name was. And he lived in Brawley.

  Now she had a starting point.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In the desert, a distant rainfall can set off a flash flood miles away. Rain hits hard-packed earth that is unused to absorbing water and runs along the surface, seeking a low point, rather than soaking in. As it goes, it’s joined by more rain. Finally, in a stream channel or road bed or wash, it turns into a raging flood until it finally finds ground willing to allow it to penetrate.

  Hal Shipp felt like he was faced with a flash flood of memories, as if all the ones he hadn’t been able to grasp for the last couple of years, since his Alzheimer’s had really set in, were rushing through his brain at once. At the Slab, he’d been unable to unleash the flood—the noise from everyone’s disturbed and violent daydreams had blocked it—but now that he’d wandered off into open desert, far from the world, the dam was breached.

  Not surprisingly, given his vivid recall earlier of the events at St. Fromond-Eglise, the times that limned themselves most clearly in his mind were the magic days. He had lived a long time since 1944, and there had been plenty of those days. Few had seemed as significant, in the living of them, as that day in France, but taken as a whole, he knew, they had shaped his life, pointed him in a certain direction and kept him on track. Does anyone ever know which days are really the telling ones? he wondered. You figured your wedding day, the day you landed the job you kept for most of your adult life, maybe the day you retired from it, the days your kids were born. But maybe the wedding day was a foregone conclusion, part of the arc of a relationship but not the key to it. Maybe the really significant day was the day you found out she was cheating on you and went ballistic, or the day you realized you didn’t care if she did, because either of those days could set the course for the rest of your time together. When you landed that job, you couldn’t have known it would last longer than all the rest—couldn’t the significant day be the one on which it suddenly occurred to you that you hadn’t been looking for a new career and weren’t going to bother?

  Probably you never knew, even on the day you died, which days really counted and which were just marking time. But at least Hal could point to certain days, magic days, and know that they had made a definite impact on his life.

  The first postwar magic day had been the day he’d met Virginia. That strange electric taste had been in his mouth that morning, and while it tasted familiar he didn’t, at first, connect it to the day in France. He wondered, instead, if he was getting a cold or something—the sensation was not unlike having a mouth full of metal or blood, and he thought it signified something wrong with him. It was a Saturday, he knew, a day off for him, and he was scheduled to drive into the hills outside Albuquerque for a picnic with a young lady named JoAnn Perski. They had dated several times, and seemed already to be falling into a kind of semi-domestic arrangement, as if both were ready to be married and were willing to accept the other as spouse material.

  But looking out the window of his boarding house room that morning, Hal, tasting the familiar yet strange flavor in his mouth, had noticed that the sky had clouded over dramatically during the night. As he watched, the heavens opened up and an Olympian rainfall drenched the city. By the time Hal got downstairs, people were already talking about building arks.

  The rain continued through the morning. Picnic cancelled, Hal was still in the boarding house when a call came in for him. A half-mile of recently-completed highway had collapsed, and the whole road gang was needed to get out and help contain the damage. Hal met his crew at the site, took a look around, and retreated to a nearby diner to get out of the rain and plan a strategy.

  Inside the diner, he met Virginia Winfield. An apple-cheeked young blonde, applying for a post-high school job, she had looked at the dripping wet road crew foreman and burst into peals of infectious laughter. Hal found himself drawn to her on the spot and fished a wet quarter out of a pocket to buy her a cup of coffee.

  After they had talked for a while and made a dinner date for later, Hal had his conference, then went back outside to find that the rain had stopped as quickly as it had appeared, and the damage wasn’t as bad as it had first seemed. He had never dated JoAnn Perski again, and never looked back.

  Definitely a magic day, Hal thought. And one of the best ones.

  Another one he remembered fondly was the day that Tim was born. Timothy Braddock Shipp, named for Hal and Virginia’s fathers, respectively, had come into the world on a brilliant June day in 1953. June fourteenth, that had been. Hal, by now out of the road-building field and instead selling business machines across the Southwest, had needed to make an unexpected trip to Austin. Knowing that his wife was due any time with their first child, he hadn’t wanted to go, but the client considered their situation an emergency, and if he wanted to support his wife and new baby in decent style, he couldn’t afford to write off a customer who added several hundred thousand dollars a year to the company’s bottom line. He and Virginia had settled just outside Albuquerque, so he made the trip by car, dealt with the situation, and then set off for home all on the same very long day.

  He hadn’t been able to get very far from Austin that night, but he’d stopped in a small motel by the highway to catch a few hours of sleep. When he woke up, just after four in the morning, the now-familiar metallic taste was in his mouth and the motel room was bathed in an odd, golden light. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew what was on his mind so he went to a pay phone outside the lobby and called home. No one answered.

  Leaving the motel key and twenty dollars in the room, he got back into his Buick and stepped on the gas. He was still hundreds of miles from home,
and the only reason he could imagine that Virginia wouldn’t answer the phone was that she’d gone to the hospital to have the baby.

  As he drove, he gradually realized something—his Buick’s speedometer needle remained poised at the sixty-five mark, but he was passing every car on the road. Not just passing, but flying past, like an Indy 500 driver tearing past a bunch of grandmothers out for a Sunday drive in the country.

  He must have been doing a hundred miles an hour. More. Maybe close to one-twenty, he thought, watching the other cars blur as he tore past them. If it was even possible for the old Buick to travel so quickly, it should have been shaking apart, as it tried to do when he pushed it up to seventy on a normal day. But it gave no sign of any strain. As far as the car was concerned, he might have been cruising at fifty. Not only did it not seem to feel the speed, but it didn’t handle like a car going double the speed limit. He never even came close to losing control or running into anything. And no one seemed to take note of him, not even the Highway Patrol cars he rocketed past. It was as if he were invisible, hidden inside a pocket of motion.