Just in case they had to answer any awkward questions.
And speaking of law enforcement, as they dragged their weary asses up the last rise to the Slab, Kelly saw Deputy Cobb watching them with interest. He couldn’t lower the M-4 into firing position without drawing attention, but he figured out how he’d make his move if it came to it—tossing the backpack he carried in his left hand toward the deputy to distract him, then continuing the motion, bringing his left up to grip the underside of the M-4, drawing it down and into position as he squeezed the trigger with his right. Cobb would have to be fast to stop him—faster than he believed the young Deputy was.
“Hey, guys,” Cobb said. He didn’t act like he was here to arrest them, or had any suspicions whatsoever. “Back from the big hunt?”
Everyone pretty much knew about their annual hunts—though no one except those who took part knew their real nature—and it didn’t seem to bother most people that they took place a week or two out of dove season, since they never really came home with much in the way of dead birds. Rock stepped up onto the concrete slab. “Yeah,” he said. “We’re just stoppin’ off at my place for a couple of final beers to commemorate.”
“Get any?” Cobb asked.
Rock shrugged. “Just couldn’t seem to find ‘em this year,” he said. “What about you, what are you doin’ up here?”
Cobb’s turn to shrug. “That crazy old Carrie Provost found a skull in the fire pit. Turns out it’s human and killed with a bullet, so Ken Butler’s been on a tear ever since, trying to find out whose it was and how it came to be up here. He’s off with Hal Shipp now, doing God knows what, so I’m supposed to be here. In case a clue comes around and bites me on the ass, I guess.”
“Human skull, huh?” Kelly repeated. “Guess that is kind of a mystery.”
“Yeah. You see Sherlock Holmes, you send him my way, okay?”
“You got it, Billy,” Rock said.
Cobb wandered off then, stepping on his own shadow, foreshortened by the overhead sun, maybe in search of that wayward clue. In the distance, the Slab’s concrete wavered from heat distortion. Kelly turned away from the hapless Deputy and led the way toward Rock’s trailer, accompanied by the other three, one of whom most likely carried the gun that had killed the person whose skull had been found. And Kelly had an idea who had planted the skull in the fire pit.
Rock’s trailer was fifteen years old, powered by solar panels on its roof, and with a kind of patio built from found two-by-fours and sheets of plywood in front of it. He’d done a half-assed job of painting an American flag on it in the days immediately after September eleventh. The number of stripes was right, Kelly noticed, but the fifty stars had turned into twenty-some blobs.
Inside—this was Rock’s place, after all—the walls and cabinets were covered with cheesecake photos, nudie mag centerfolds, and pages ripped from hardcore porn magazines. At least they were carefully applied. Rock was surprisingly tidy for a bachelor and pervert, Kelly thought. The floors were picked up, the surfaces of the galley and the little washbasin were clean, as was his chemical toilet. Rock was a scrapper—when the military did bombing practice in the mountains, Rock jumped on his ATV and raced out into the range, looking for scrap metal—bomb parts, or the remnants of whatever had been targeted—and hauled it down to a junk dealer in Calipatria to sell. Some days he could make as much as six hundred bucks, but others—most days, in fact, he made nothing.
As soon as they were inside, Rock switched on a battery-operated radio, which somehow, even here in the middle of nowhere, pulled in a heavy metal station from Los Angeles. As soon as he had it on, Kelly went behind him and turned it down. Rock shot him a glare but didn’t protest.
“Fucking hot in here,” Terrance complained.
“Yeah, well, I forgot to pay the air conditioning bill,” Rock replied. “Live with it.”
“You all heard what Deputy Dawg said out there, right?” Kelly asked.
“About the skull, you mean?” Terrance said.
“Yes, about the skull.” He figured Terrance would get it, since Terrance was the one who found the open grave missing a skull, outside the cabin. Vic and Rock, he wasn’t so sure of.
“You think it’s one of ours?” Rock asked.
“Do I think it’s one of ours?” Kelly echoed, sarcasm dripping in his tone. “Of course it is. And I know how it got here. So would you, if you thought about it for ten seconds.”
Again, Terrance came through. “Hal Shipp?”
“Got to be,” Kelly said. “We know a grave was dug up and a skull taken. We know a skull turned up here while we were all out on the Hunt. Who else could have planted it?”
“Jeez,” Vic said. Kelly didn’t think he’d heard Vic’s voice in hours. “Old Hal finally grew him some.”
Kelly spun on him. “Grew some? That’s what you think it is? Turned traitor on his friends, and you think it means he’s got balls?”
Vic just shrugged, which infuriated Kelly all the more. “Sometimes I wonder about you, Bradford,” he said. “I hope you’re not thinking about growing some. Wouldn’t really fit you.”
“What are we gonna do about Hal?” Rock asked. He opened an icebox powered by his solar panels and took out some cans of Bud.
“We’ll wait until it’s dark,” Kelly said. “Then we’ll kill the fucker.”
***
Sitting in the shade of a creosote bush up on the hill overlooking the Slab, Lucy lined up the sights of her stolen gun on the four men. She wasn’t good enough to hit them from here, she knew. And anyway, they were talking to a cop. As soon as the cop left they headed inside a trailer, and a corner of another trailer blocked her view of that trailer’s door from here.
What she needed was to get closer. The trailer they’d disappeared into was at the far edge of the Slab from her, the side facing the Salton Sea, and she was on the inland side, on the highest hill around in hopes of spotting them when they showed up. That part, at least, had worked. Now she just had the hard part ahead—killing four men, all of whom were probably better with guns than she was.
She had checked all the addresses on her list—Cam Hensley, who she didn’t see here and hoped had died from her attack with the fork, Terrance Berkley, Kelly Williams. All empty. But two names remained, Vic Bradford and R. J. Rocknowski. No street addresses were listed for them, just “the Slab.” Lucy knew what that meant, of course, anyone who lived near the shores of the Salton did. And her brothers had a friend, Eddie Trujillo, who lived on the Slab—they’d taken her down to his place a couple of times, a crappy mobile home with no roof, only sheets of corrugated metal lashed on top to keep the very occasional rain out. So she knew her way there. But she didn’t know how to find her prey, short of asking people, and she figured that if she did that, they’d hear about it. She tried this approach instead, claiming the high ground, waiting and watching. Staying awake had been a challenge, and it was hotter than hell, but the creosote offered some shade and also provided cover in case anyone looked up this way. And it had worked.
As reluctant as she was to give up what shade the creosote offered, she needed to start working her way around the Slab—crossing it was out of the question. When it was dark, maybe they could be lured out of the trailer. It could catch on fire or something, she supposed. That might work…
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lieutenant Butler seemed reluctant at first to accompany Penny back to the Aerial Gunnery Range. But the connection they’d made when they touched—she was still tingling from it, in a kind of pseudo-orgasmic afterglow—had somehow convinced him to trust her. She wasn’t even sure why she felt so adamantly about not involving the Marines. Sure, she’d been hiding from them for a couple of days, but that all changed the minute she killed Mick. Suddenly, the political action receded in importance. Recovering Mick’s body, without the military catching them, did seem vital, though. She also wanted to find out what had happened to Dieter and Larry, but she believed they’d be showing up on the
evening news, soon enough. Most likely in shackles.
So Butler and the older man, Hal Shipp, accompanied her back to the break in the fence, and then the three of them trespassed together. Hal, it turned out, had spent the previous night on the range himself, though he wasn’t quite sure why or how he had ended up there. And Ken had spent the night looking for him. Neither man looked the worse for the experience, a fact that she attributed to the beneficial effects of the magic. They told her they’d felt the same thing, upon touching, that she felt when she touched Ken—that sense of power, like a battery getting an instant recharge, and a nearly exultant sense of well-being.
They spent a little time getting acquainted on the trip in—both men were, like her, combat veterans, both had moved here to the Imperial Valley from points east—but mostly, they passed the time in a comfortable silence, as if they were old friends who were rarely apart. The only moment of conflict occurred when she tried to explain what she and Mick and the others had been doing inside the bombing range in the first place.
Hal had taken offense. “So you don’t support going to war against people who killed six thousand of your own countrymen?” he challenged.
“I don’t support going to war, no,” she said.
“We should just leave them alone? A rap on the knuckles?”
“I don’t think they should just get away with it, but there must be some other way to punish them, don’t you think? Y’know, if it is bin Laden, and we find him and kill him, how do we know that won’t just make him a martyr and breed ten thousand new terrorists?”
“Maybe we have to hit them with enough firepower to make anyone who might want to become a terrorist change his mind,” Hal offered. “We can’t just sit back and do nothing, though. And this isn’t something the FBI can fix. We need to use military force, and we need to do it soon while our resolve holds.”
“Do you really think it’ll do any good?” she asked him.
“I think sometimes there comes a time in world events when military force is the answer. I think that’s why nations have armies. Even good nations. To stand up for those who are at risk. Unless we do something, and right away, every American is at risk from these people.”
“I see your point, I guess,” Penny relented. “But I don’t agree. From what I’ve seen, war is never the best answer. It’s often the easiest answer, but it’s not the best.”
“You believe what you want,” Hal said. “You’re wrong. But you just go ahead and believe it.” He chuckled, and that was the end of the conversation. No raised voices, no frayed tempers, no insistence upon changing the other person’s point of view. Had Mick been here he’d be red-faced and screaming by now, hoping to persuade Hal by sheer volume if nothing else. Hal’s face, shaded from the cruel sun by the brim of a baseball cap left behind in Ken’s office by some long-forgotten miscreant, was red, but just from the heat and exertion.
Somehow, through all this, Penny had managed to keep her own soft, wide-brimmed hat, and Ken had his Smokey hat and, thankfully, several canteens full of water. The shared magic strengthened them all, but didn’t make them entirely immune to the effects of heat and sun and thirst.
At the top of the rise that led down to the cave, Ken insisted they stop while he scoured the landscape with binoculars. Penny thought she’d die in those few minutes—knowing precious shade lay below, and yet standing here in the punishing sun as he carefully combed every inch of the desert. When he was finished, he capped the lenses. “Nothing,” he said. “Anybody’s watching the cave, they’re doing it from a satellite or a damn good hiding place.”
“Let’s go, then,” Penny said.
“Slow, though,” Ken warned. “When we get closer I want to stop again, see if there’s any footprints around the outside besides yours and the boy’s.”
“His name’s Mick, and he’s no boy.”
“Mick, then. Whatever. I just don’t want to be surprised if they found the cave and are waiting inside.” He started down the hill, and Penny, thankful to be almost to the shade, went right behind him. Hal followed her, beaming as if this were some great adventure.
True to his word, Ken slowed again when they were able to make out the disturbed dirt at the cave’s mouth. Her footprints going away were clearly evident, and there were scuffled marks that could have been the two of them going in the first time. Just the night before, she realized. Eighteen hours or so, maybe. Lifetimes.
“Looks okay,” Ken announced. “I got to tell you though, I don’t much care for tunnels and caves and such.”
“Think how I feel about it,” Penny said. “At least you haven’t killed anybody in there.”
“No, that’s true. But when you’ve been in law enforcement for long enough, you look at every situation as a possible ambush. Once we go inside that cave there’s no back door that we know of, no escape route. Anything’s laying for us in there, we’ll be walking right into it.”
She had the sense that there was something he was leaving unsaid. But then he pulled a mini-Mag flashlight from a pouch on his leather belt, switched it on, ducked his head and went into the cave opening. Penny clicked on her own flashlight and followed. She had told Ken and Hal about the mushrooms, the writing on the walls, the whole story. It sounded unbelievable coming out of her mouth, but she knew that when three people had shared an experience that most other people on earth would find just as outlandish, their tendency to trust one another’s perceptions was raised quite a bit. Having experienced the magic for themselves, each was more open than the average person to new experiences and the not-quite-explicable. Hell, she thought, Martians could land now and we’d just take it in stride.
Inside, the air was considerably cooler than out in the merciless desert sun. But the goosebumps that rose on Penny’s flesh as they made their way through, away and down from the opening on a course that seemed as if it might lead ultimately to the Slab or the Salton, weren’t just attributable to the drop in temperature. She was nervous about what they would find. Ken’s ambush theory hadn’t helped.
Worse, she couldn’t “see” anything—not even the mushrooms she had keyed into before. The cave looked vaguely familiar, but she didn’t know for sure what was around the next corner.
Or the one after that.
“We ought to be getting close,” she said after a while. They had passed the spot where Mick’s backpack was abandoned on the ground, and the cave walls continued to narrow, closing in like some kind of trap. Lieutenant Butler had to walk with his head bowed to keep from scraping it on the ceiling. His hat was held in his left hand, his flashlight in his right.
“I was thinking that too,” the Lieutenant said. “Then I thought I must be wrong, because I haven’t been here before.”
“It’s the connection between us,” Hal observed. “Haven’t you noticed that we don’t even need to be touching anymore? Just proximity is good enough to link us up.”
Penny thought the old man was right. It wasn’t like mind-reading—or what she thought mind-reading must be like. More like sharing, she believed, shared perceptions—again, like three people might experience if they had been together for a long time, and constantly, so that they looked at the world from very similar viewpoints.
This was a day for new experiences, she guessed.
Notwithstanding that, she wasn’t prepared for what she saw when they finally rounded the bend and came into the stretch where she’d left Mick’s body.
It wasn’t there.
“He’s gone,” she said, surprised and not a little scared. She pointed at the base of the wall, amidst the glowing mushrooms. “He was there.”
“What do you mean, gone? You think he wasn’t really dead?”
“He was dead. When I checked him my finger slipped inside his skull. I think I felt brain. He was definitely dead, trust me.”
“Then where is he?” Ken toed through the mushrooms and shining his flashlight’s beam down. “I don’t even see any blood here.”
“I
don’t know,” Penny replied. The same sense of panic that had attacked her when she first realized Mick had died threatened to return. “He was there, that’s all I know.”
Then she looked again at Ken’s boot pushing the mushrooms around, and a ghastly realization came to her. She tried to blink it away but it wouldn’t let go. “But…but there are more mushrooms now,” she said. “A lot more.”
“More mushrooms?” Hal echoed.
“Yeah, like four or five times more.” They had been confined to the wall before, she remembered. Now they had spread to the cave’s floor, and grew thicker, closer together. In fact, their pattern of growth seemed to follow the same basic line as Mick’s body, filling in the space where she’d left him. The obvious thought came to her. “They were just up on the wall before, not down here, where his body was. Not on the floor. It’s almost like they’ve replaced him.
“Or like they’ve been fed.”
Ken made a face at that idea. “Well, he’s not here now,” Ken said. “So what do we do? Keep looking? Give up?”
“Ken, I killed somebody.”
“So you tell me, Penny. I don’t have a body, I don’t have anybody claiming that someone’s missing. There’s some blood on your clothes, but that’s the only evidence I see. Not a drop of it in this cave.”
She shrugged. She had played her light across the opposite wall and saw the writing again, and remembered the argument with Mick that had preceded his attack. “Do you see that?” she asked. “The writing there?”
The Slab Page 28
