The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  To top it all off, she could “see,” in her mind’s eye, glowing red spots on the ground ahead of her. Each of those spots, she believed, was a buried mine. She put the big truck into its lowest gear and crawled across the desert floor. There was enough room to negotiate between the mines if she was cautious and precise. Her hands gripped the wheel hard and turned it without letting go, hand over hand as she inched to the right to avoid one of the red spots and then corrected back to the left immediately. The other two trucks followed in her tracks, and Tippetts stared at her in amazement as she picked out her course.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded after about fifteen minutes of torturous progress.

  “Avoiding the mines,” Penny answered matter-of-factly, as if anyone should be able to see the luminous markers that she did. Sweat poured off her body, soaking the truck’s bench seat.

  “I can tell,” Tippetts said. “What I want to know is how.”

  “Hard to explain,” Penny said. “But I kind of have to concentrate, you know? So if you’d just let me—”

  “I’ll take over now, soldier.”

  “What?”

  “I said, I’ll take over.” She hazarded a glance at him, and he wasn’t kidding. The set of his jaw and the glare in his eyes told her that. She’d offended his male ego or military tradition or something, and he wasn’t going to let her drive them all the way across this minefield.

  Penny argued, but it did no good. Tippetts outranked her and he had given an order. Rather than risk being brought up on charges, Penny surrendered the wheel. Tippets climbed out of his seat and walked around, while she slid over to the passenger side. He hauled himself up behind the wheel, released the brake, and started forward.

  “On the left,” Penny warned. “Avoid the left.”

  “I’ve got it under control,” he growled at her.

  Fine, she thought. He had it under control. Maybe he really did—maybe they both shared the same gift, and he really could see the mines under the buff-colored earth. After all, if she could, what was to keep the same thing from happening to him? She had never felt the kind of power running through her body that she did today. What if it was the place, imbuing her with its magic? Then Tippetts would be just as likely to feel it as she did. She sat back in the seat and wiped her dripping head on a bandanna.

  It was then, when she closed her eyes and put the cloth over them, that he hit the mine.

  Her first indication that something had happened was a soft whump sound, as if a big hammer had struck thick sand. Then a bright flash, like the sun itself exploding in her eyes, and she felt herself flying into the air. She was blinded by this point, but she felt the air rushing all around her body, felt the heat of the blast wash over her like an ocean’s wave.

  She didn’t feel the impact. She hit the ground a hundred feet from the truck—or the flaming, twisted wreckage that had once been the truck. She must have hit hard, and she should have been hurt—broken ribs, fractured skull, concussion. By all rights, the explosion should at least have left her bleeding from the eyes and ears. But no. She had a gash in her upper chest, which she later figured must have been from windshield glass cutting her as she flew away from the truck. She was sore, and bruised in several places, but otherwise uninjured. The cut left a scar that she kept to this day.

  Sergeant Tippetts was blown into such small pieces there was hardly enough to scrape back and put in the reefer truck. Their first bit of human cargo.

  That truck and the other five-ton turned around and returned to the route that had been mapped out for them, arriving at the front a full day behind schedule. The metallic taste in Penny’s mouth and the strange sensation of power went away. She had almost forgotten about it, until the day it came back. The day that she sat down at a table in a coffee shop, which she’d entered hoping to wash away the odd, but somehow familiar taste. Someone had left a newspaper at the table, open to the classifieds, and an ad for office help at the Wilderness Peace Initiative had caught her eye. She had been thinking a lot about the connection between environmental degradation and war, and this ad seemed to hit home. She applied that day. By the end of the week she had an offer. And the magic went away again.

  Only twice, she thought. Not so often that it couldn’t be coincidence. But both times she’d felt this way, major events happened that had shaped her life. Saved her life.

  Until today, when she had taken a life. That is not how it’s supposed to work, she thought. Who do I complain to?

  ***

  Ken knew he should be exhausted, but somehow the magic still thrummed inside him, keeping him fresh and alert. He sat behind his desk, filling out some of the paperwork that El Centro would need about his overnight missing persons hunt. Hal had taken a visitor’s chair by the window and entertained himself flipping through a news magazine—if cover-to-cover information about the thousands lost in the World Trade Center attacks could pass for entertainment.

  Ken recognized the sound of the Bronco’s engine from blocks away, even before he could see his beloved vehicle. Leaving the paperwork behind for the moment, he went to the door and watched Billy Cobb drive up to one of the slanted parking spaces in front of the storefront office. Billy shot him a wide, innocent grin as he stepped down from the Bronco. Ken held the door open for him, and Billy walked inside, with a glance at Hal.

  “Hey, Mr. Shipp,” he said. “What’s up, Boss?”

  “Hello, Billy,” Hal replied.

  Ken didn’t bother with the pleasantries. “Where the hell have you been, Billy? I haven’t heard from you in eighteen hours, probably.”

  Billy’s face registered surprise. “Doing my job, Lieutenant Butler. Looking for that missing girl—except last night, we got a notice that she had contacted her family and she’s fine. Last night I caught Jake Bell driving drunk, took him home and gave him a warning. A couple of kids from over in Holtville were parking over on the abandoned streets, trying to find enough privacy to do the deed, but I put the fear of God in ‘em. Stuff like that, you know?”

  “Out of radio contact?”

  “I’ve been in radio contact with El Centro. Haven’t heard anything from you, though. Maybe your radio’s busted.”

  Kid had a point there. The only times he’d talked to El Centro in the past day or so had been from the office and in the Crown Vic. His portable Motorola had been silent the whole night, and he’d been so involved in trying to mentally track Hal that he hadn’t really thought about it. Since finding Hal, his mind had been racing and he hadn’t given any thought or effort to trying to locate Billy.

  “Yeah, maybe it is,” he admitted.

  “I’m just glad to see you’re okay, Lieutenant,” Billy said. “I kind of had a busy night, taking care of everything by myself.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It okay if I go home and get some sleep, then?”

  “Couple hours,” Ken told him. “Then I want you out at the Slab. There’s something going on up there, I think. And Carter Haynes is going to be back up there today, with his bodyguard. It’s all too touchy to not have one of us around most of the time.” Plus he was worried about what Hal had said—he had every reason to believe that when the old man said he could hear trouble brewing on the Slab, he was correct.

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll be there later on, too,” Ken said. “I’ve got some other stuff to take care of first, but I’ll be up by this afternoon.”

  “Okay, then,” Billy said. “I’ll get two hours of shut-eye and then get over there.”

  “And take the Crown Vic,” Ken instructed. “Leave my Bronco here.”

  Billy nodded and touched the brim of his Smokey hat. “Good to see you, Mr. Shipp.”

  “You too, son,” Hal said. Billy left, pulling the door closed behind him with a bang. Ken shook his head in bemusement. He guessed Billy would never change. His idea of working all night had probably meant that he hadn’t bothered to punch out before going off duty at six, because
Ken hadn’t been here to make him.

  “There’s something not right about that boy,” Hal announced.

  “You aren’t kidding about that,” Ken agreed.

  He hadn’t even made it back to his desk when he heard the sound of another vehicle approaching. He glanced out the window and saw a van that looked somehow familiar, a mud-red Dodge Ram 250, pulling into the space next to the Bronco, from which Billy had just taken the Crown Vic. Ken tried to remember vehicles—not too many strange ones really passed through here, at least compared to what a city cop would face, and he knew he’d seen this one before.

  A tall brunette, maybe pretty but you couldn’t tell, her face all twisted by emotion, climbed down from behind the wheel. She’d been crying, and while she’d brought her tears under control, her face still carried a frantic aspect. This isn’t going to be good, he thought. Not good at all. Once again, he held the door open, and she brushed past him as if looking for whoever was in charge. Inside, she stopped in the middle of the room, swiveling to look at Hal and back at Ken.

  “Something I can do for you, ma’am?”

  She blinked a couple of times and stared at him with eyes that looked like they’d seen more than they wanted to. He’d seen eyes like that before, haunted by unexpected horrors. If that was indeed the case, no amount of blinking would clear them.

  “Yes. Yes, I…” She stopped as if the right words just wouldn’t come to her. “Yes,” she said again. “I…I’ve killed someone.”

  Yeah, that would do it, he thought. “Why don’t you come over here, ma’am, and have a seat.” He touched the bare skin on her forearm, to direct her to the guest chair nearest his desk, and he felt the charge again, just like when he touched Hal. He almost yanked his hand away in surprise.

  In the same instant, the expression on the woman’s face changed from shock and remorse to one of almost pure bliss. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow.” She reached out to him, linked her fingers with his. Ken allowed it to happen, as hungry for the rush as she seemed to be. “Oh, man,” she said. “We have got to have sex sometime.”

  Ken let go again and felt his face going crimson. “Now, ma’am, you could be in a bit of a situation here, and talk like that isn’t going to help anything.”

  “I know, but…just imagine what it would be like.”

  “You could have a point,” Ken said. “But let’s take care of this first, why don’t we?” He noticed Hal observing them with some interest.

  “She’s one of us too, isn’t she?” Hal asked.

  Ken nodded. “Yep,” he said. “Ma’am, that’s Hal Shipp. I’m Ken Butler. We’re thinking that the three of us have something in common—something most folks don’t share, or even know about.”

  The woman took the seat Ken had indicated, in front of his desk. He sat down in his regular chair and watched her. She looked at Hal, then back at Ken, understanding seeming to be reflected in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Magic days, right?”

  “That’s right, that’s what I call them. Hal too, I guess. Now, why don’t you tell me what happened.”

  ***

  Lupe Alvarez hung up the phone quietly, as if to make any excessive noise with the receiver would somehow magnify the bad news. Raul watched her from his chair across the room, gazing out over the tops of his glasses. He could tell by her posture, slightly hunched and withdrawn, that the phone call hadn’t been a good one.

  “Lucia?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Henry Rios.”

  “You told him to stop looking for her, right? That she called last night and she’s fine?”

  “I told him. But he says he needs to talk to her anyway, and the sooner the better. He wanted to know if she has been home, or if I know where she is.”

  “What did you tell him?” Raul asked.

  “You were sitting right there, weren’t you? I said she hasn’t called since last night, and we haven’t seen her. But he’s coming over anyway.”

  “But she’s not here. What good will that do?”

  “Not to talk to her, not right now. He wants to talk to the boys.”

  Raul felt his stomach churn. “About what?” He tried to keep his voice firm, his lip from quaking.

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  “Did you tell him they were here?”

  “He said he—”

  “Did you tell him they were here!” He came out of his chair at her. She shrank away from him, and he backed off, suddenly ashamed of himself. For that, for scaring Lupe, and for so much more.

  “Hey, hey,” Lupe’s father said from his chair. He waved an old, liver-spotted hand at them “Not so much noise, eh?”

  “Yes,” Lupe admitted, looking at the floor.

  “They won’t be,” he said “Not by the time he gets here. They’ll be out of the county.”

  “But Raul—”

  “We don’t know where they are. Do you understand?”

  A single tear traced her cheek, and she nodded, lips clamped together tight as if to prevent a single word from escaping. Raul felt terrible. But it had to be done. The boys needed to get out of the county fast, someplace they couldn’t be found for a while. Two weeks ago, he’d have sent them to Mexico, but not now, not since September eleventh. The borders were being watched closely now. No, they’d have to go someplace local, but out of Henry Rios’s territory. Someplace they could hide out.

  He would take his own chances.

  ***

  The first woman Kelly Williams had killed had almost turned him off to the joy of it altogether.

  She barely qualified as a woman. She was seventeen, he recalled, and he was eighteen. She was a blonde of Norwegian descent. It was a Michigan springtime, the frozen ground had thawed and new green leaves were beginning to sprout on tree branches, and they’d walked home from school together, flirting, stopping in a culvert beneath the roadway for a spirited make-out session. She’d let him slip a hand up under her sweater, outside her bra, and his other hand had, almost by its own accord, gone to her neck, caressing the tender flesh there. When he put a little pressure on her throat, closing his hand on her, she moaned with pleasure and pressed her breast against his other hand. He squeezed it, then took that hand away from her breast and added it to the one at her throat.

  Her eyes had opened wide, then, and the pleasure noises stopped, and she started to say something but by that time he was really putting on the pressure, and all she could make were inarticulate choking sounds. She kicked and hit and bucked against him but couldn’t break his grip, strengthened as it was by weight training and school athletics. Almost sooner than he expected, she was still, and she stank, and his heart was pounding as he realized what he’d done. What if people had seen them leaving school together? What if they found his fingerprints on her body? The act of murder had been an interesting sensation, almost fun—borderline erotic, in fact, but not worth spending the rest of his life in jail.

  Trying hard to keep his cool, he’d gone home for a shovel. Fifty yards from the culvert was the tree line of the local woods. He found a spot where he was screened by trees from the road and dug a shallow grave in the hard earth. During a long break in the sparse traffic, he hauled her body out of the culvert and carried her to the grave. He tossed dirt over her and left her there. Because their friendship was well known, he was later questioned by the cops, but he denied having seen her after school that day, and the questions eventually stopped. By spring, when her body was finally found, there wasn’t enough left of it to give the cops any incriminating evidence at all.

  It wasn’t until El Salvador, seven years later, that Kelly realized what had been lacking. Blondes had never held much attraction for him. But when he saw a raven-haired beauty on her knees, begging for her life, her dark eyes imploring him not to pull the trigger of the pistol he had jammed against her temple, full lips pleading in Spanish…that was heaven. That was when he really knew what it was all about—life, death, the whole enchilada, as it were. It was about powe
r: getting it, keeping it, using it. Love, sex, wealth, the rest of the things for which the unenlightened strove, were only outward indicators of the real goal. Only power, applied in the right way, with the proper erotic/fetishistic attributes, was ultimately fulfilling.

  Kelly remembered every woman he’d ever killed, though the number was at thirty-one now. They were each, in their own way, special to him, even sacred. The ones who had died from bullets, from strangulation, from knives, from being beaten to death, from asphyxiation…there were almost as many ways to die as there were people to kill, and each woman’s face stayed locked in his memory with her means of death, kept there like precious mementos.

  He realized he’d driven the last stretch of road to the Slab almost on autopilot, his attention focused on the women he’d known. The other guys were quiet, as they often were at this stage of a Dove Hunt. But this one, he knew, was different. They’d never come home unsuccessful before. Not only had they failed miserably, but some of their friends were dead and the bitch was out there somewhere, hunting them. He almost laughed at the injustice of it. Hunting them!

  Not far from Rocknowski’s trailer, which perched on the West-facing edge of the Slab like a vulture on a cliff, there was a deep gully not quite big enough, Kelly supposed, to be called a canyon. The dirt tracks that spiderwebbed around the Slab led into it. At Rock’s suggestion, he stopped the stolen truck there and nestled it up against one of the gully’s walls. Since they’d gone out in Cam’s Navigator, they had left their own vehicles at his farm, and since they were supposed to be out looking for him no one wanted to face Cam’s wife yet. They all piled out, weapons and packs in their hands, glad to have some space to move around again. From here, it was just a short scramble up the dirt face to Rock’s place. Kelly shouldered his M-4. The Desert Eagle had gone into the Salton Sea, up near Bombay Beach. Damn, he’d miss that gun. They’d stopped at a gun store in Palm Desert on the way down, since Kelly was convinced that they’d need more ammo, before this was all over and done with, than they had carried with them, and he’d considered buying a new handgun. But he thought it might be wiser not to have one on him for a while.