The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Blocking his face.

  Billy Cobb.

  Ken put Mindy Sesno back down on her bed, gently, as if she could tell. He reached for his radio, but then stopped himself. The coroner would need to examine the scene at some point, but Ken didn’t need a complete crime scene investigation. It didn’t matter what traces there were of DNA evidence, hairs or saliva or semen or bits of fuzz from the carpeting in his car—which, he realized, would be from the Bronco anyway since Billy had been driving that—because Billy Cobb would never stand trial for this crime.

  He wouldn’t live that long.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Kelly moved from window to window like a gangster in a bad hostage movie, a second-rate Bogey checking for John Law to come sneaking up on him. Rock’s windows were covered with curtains made from torn strips of fabric: old sheets, a Gold Medal flour bag that must have been older than he was, a flattened cardboard box he’d simply taped over the window with masking tape. But in the movie the gangster would have worn a gray suit and hat, not stained and torn desert camo trousers with a sweat-rimed olive drab tee, and he’d have carried a snub-nosed .38 instead of the utilitarian killing machine that was Kelly’s M-4.

  “She’s out there,” Kelly said. “I know she is.”

  “How do you know she hasn’t just called the cops?” Terrance asked him. Vic thought it was wishful thinking on Terrance’s part—with everything their Dove had put them through, it might have been easier to just deal with the criminal justice system.

  “She wouldn’t have barged in on Ray’s wife if she were going to do that,” Kelly replied. “No, she’s gone vigilante on us.”

  “So you guys are just gonna camp out in my place until she comes after us?” Rock asked.

  “We’re staying put until full dark,” Kelly said. “At which point I’m going to go out and kill Hal Shipp, that traitorous bastard. After that we’ll figure out what to do about the bitch.”

  Vic didn’t like that idea. He’d always been friendly with Hal, even though the man was so much older than him. But he couldn’t see any flaw in Kelly’s reasoning—it pretty much had to be Hal who had planted the skull. Hal’s mind was going, this last year or two, and he supposed Hal hadn’t even remembered that he was supposed to keep the Dove Hunts a secret. Although, in that case, why wouldn’t he have just gone to the law or started talking about it to his friends and neighbors? Sticking the skull in a fire pit sounded like someone trying to tip people off while still keeping his own identity secret, and that didn’t point to a person who couldn’t think clearly. Downright clever was what it was.

  But he was already losing his patience with Kelly, and didn’t want to open up another can of worms with the man. They were both on edge—all of them were, and they were all armed, and it wouldn’t take much, he thought, penned up in this tiny trailer, to start a firefight.

  That was the last thing any of them needed.

  ***

  Carter Haynes stared in the rear-view mirror of his Town Car, his attention suddenly caught by motion in the far distance. Behind him, lost in darkness now, was the Salton Sea. But what had struck him was an enormous flock of birds—egrets, maybe, what looked like thousands of them—taking wing from its surface and flying up to where the sun’s last rays, angling in over the hills of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, on the Sea’s west side, caught their white feathers, an explosion of light on an otherwise dark backdrop.

  It had taken him and Nick Postak all day to pull together the men and machines they needed. Now they all rolled in a convoy, up the low grade toward the Slab, the huge tires of flatbed trucks chewing up the dirt road, two rented vans full of men leading the way and Carter’s Town Car bringing up the rear. Bright headlights illuminated the desert scrub, brutalized and dirt-caked by the amount of vehicle traffic this stretch of road carried. As the pink of the western sky purpled toward indigo, they arrived at their destination.

  Many of the Slab-dwellers had heard the trucks approaching, and some, seeing what was coming, may have figured out its goal. Carter didn’t care. That’s what the men in the first van were for. The men in the second van would drive the big machines—two massive 939C Hystat track loaders, with cabs, and two smaller but more maneuverable 277 Multi Terrain loaders outfitted with industrial grapple buckets, all rented from Williams Caterpillar in El Centro. In the harsh glare of headlights, Carter could see people lined up at the edge of the Slab, as if to step off the concrete was the same as walking off the edge of the world. So far, there was nothing more threatening in their hands than beer bottles and maybe the occasional flame-cooked hot dog.

  The men in the first van, armed with .44 caliber Magnums and Remington shotguns, would keep it that way.

  ***

  Diego Alvarez cocked his head toward the north wall of Eddie Trujillo’s shitheap of a mobile home. “Mobile,” in this case, Diego thought, meant that a good stiff wind could move the whole thing a mile away. A tornado wouldn’t even give this place the time of day.

  “What’s that noise?” he asked.

  “Sounds like trucks or something,” Eddie said.

  “That common, around here?” Jorge asked him. Diego and Jorge were both anxious about Henry Rios’s threatened visit, anticipating police choppers and SWAT teams to show up looking for them at any moment. Their guns—including Raul’s, which he’d decided he wanted out of the house when Rios came over—were leaning up against a table Eddie had made by laying half a door across the top of an old wooden crate.

  Eddie shook his head and fished another cold one out of the ice-filled cooler of beer the Alvarez brothers had bought him, as thanks for letting them hide out with him for a while. “No, it’s usually pretty quiet.”

  Eddie was plenty strong and healthy, a handsome guy in his mid-thirties with long straight hair and only a hint of a bulge at his gut, but he hated to work. Every now and then he disappeared for a while, and he told them he was off doing just enough seasonal labor to keep himself in beer and food for the rest of the year. Diego had never seen him working, though, and had never known anyone else so utterly lacking in ambition. He couldn’t even figure out what Eddie did around here all the time—his place had no electricity, there never seemed to be books or magazines around, he had no hobbies that they knew of. When he’d asked, Eddie usually said he played cards with “the guys,” meaning the old retirees who populated the Slab.

  “You think we should see what’s up?” Diego asked. The noise grew louder, and Diego began to recognize it as trucks. Maybe a bunch of them. Big ones.

  “If you want to,” Eddie offered. “Up to you.” He sounded as if he’d be just as happy staying put. He tilted his head back and poured beer down his throat, and Diego thought maybe he’d just do the same. If the noise was anything important, they’d know soon enough.

  ***

  Lucy had used the afternoon’s last light to make her way far from the Slab, then down, cross-country, past it. Cross-country wasn’t difficult in this region—the yuccas and cacti, greasewood and mesquite didn’t grow so thick that one couldn’t negotiate a path around them, and it was only unexpected ravines now and again that slowed her down. When she felt like she’d gone far enough to be well beyond the downhill, western side of the Slab, she turned and doubled back. As she had hoped, she was now coming up from downslope of it, on the side nearest the trailer into which the men she was hunting had gone. Of course, they could have left in the interim, but it really looked like they were there to stay for a while. Anyway, she had passed a truck parked in a nearby gully, which she suspected was the vehicle that had brought them here.

  The new difficulty was that she had to get much closer to the Slab than she had been, and from this side she didn’t even have the advantage of altitude. She had to stay low, running at a crouch from the scant shelter of one bush to the next. Getting in close was good—she was no marksman and her ammo was probably very limited. At close range, though, she might at least have a hope of killing some of them be
fore they got her.

  Lucy had given up thinking that she’d have to face legal charges when this was done. What she was determined to do now went well beyond self-defense. She was out for vengeance, no use kidding herself about that, and this vengeance would cost dearly. The chance that she’d be alive when this was finished was minuscule, barely worth considering. She had come to accept that this was her final day on Earth, and that her final act would be trying to take out as many of those men as she could. Her revenge would have the additional benefit of ensuring that those men couldn’t do to any other women what they had tried to do to her, and part of her was comforted by the knowledge that she was paying them back for thirteen previous victims as well.

  When she was close enough to see light through the windows of the trailer they had gone into, she settled down, once again finding a little cover behind a dense creosote bush. Sooner or later they’d show themselves. When they did…well, judgment day was here.

  ***

  Hearing the sounds of the trucks, Billy Cobb started walking across the Slab to the far north side, where the road up from Salton Estates narrowed and turned into a vague set of ruts that threaded between the individual concrete slabs that comprised this desert community. When he got closer and glimpsed men on trucks pulling out stops and preparing to guide bulldozers off their beds, he walked faster. When he saw men emerging from a van with shotguns in their fists, he started to run.

  As he approached them, the men closed ranks in front of Carter Haynes. But Carter seemed to recognize him. “Let him through,” he told them, and they parted. Billy stopped in front of Carter, working to catch his breath. Before he spoke he brought himself up to his full height and rested his right hand on the grip of his gun.

  “Mr. Haynes, what—”

  “This is all legal, Deputy.”

  “—the fuck is—legal?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Those guys have shotguns!”

  “That’s right, and they’re permitted. They’re a security team.”

  “And those bulldozers?”

  “They call them loaders, it turns out. I made the same mistake, at first. Those big ones are track loaders. Because of having tracks, I’d guess, instead of wheels.”

  Billy began to sense that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Carter Haynes. Rich bastard was used to getting his way, no matter what. The bitch of it was people like him usually did.

  “What do you think you’re—”

  “I’m sure you’ll agree that this is my land, Deputy Cobb. I hold title to it, legally and fairly, transferred to me by the government of the United States of America. And these people are trespassing. I’ve tried to work it out with them, but they are belligerent and recalcitrant and they won’t leave. Tonight, they’ll leave.”

  “You’re—” Billy looked back at the Slab, at the people standing and watching him argue with Haynes. He waved a hand at them. “You’re just going to demolish their homes?”

  “That’s a pretty generous term for what these are, but yes. That’s the general idea.”

  “And you think they’re just going to stand back and let you?”

  Haynes gestured toward the men with the guns. His “security team.” They were uniformly big men, wearing flak vests and combat trousers. They looked tough, like they knew how to handle the shotguns but didn’t necessarily need them to raise hell. Billy began to feel glad that Haynes was doing this legally. If, in fact, he was. That wasn’t his call to make, though.

  “Looks like you’ve got your bases covered, Mr. Haynes,” he said.

  “I certainly do.”

  “Mind if I try to get these people to back off, maybe pack up what they can?”

  “If they hurry,” Haynes said. “We’re just about ready to roll here.”

  “Okay,” Billy said. “Give me five minutes, okay? Five minutes.”

  Haynes glanced at the progress the men were making getting the loaders down off the truck. “You probably have that,” he said. “But not much more.”

  ***

  Lettie Bosworth was in the trailer’s cramped galley trying to put together a dinner that her husband Will would both eat and not notice the rat poison in. She’d put tiny doses into his food for a couple of days, but so far, except for him maybe being a little less obnoxious than usual, she hadn’t noticed any change in his health or overall demeanor. She didn’t know if the rat poison accounted for the improvement, but if it did that was just one more reason why using a bigger dose this time was a good idea.

  A radio was playing big band music from down in El Centro, and she swayed gently to the beat as she—wearing rubber kitchen gloves—worked the poison into Will’s seasoned chicken breast. Because of the music she didn’t really notice the truck noises at first. But when Will’s voice started calling to her, its familiar timbre caught her attention and she turned down the volume on the portable boombox.

  “Lettie!” he was hollering. “Get my gun! I need my gun!”

  Without hesitation, she went to the shelf over the settee where he kept his hunting rifle and reached for it. He was still screaming, and now she heard other voices raised in alarm, and the trucks idling and some other kind of heavy machinery moving toward the Slab, and she levered a cartridge into the breech. When he appeared in the doorway, yanking open the spring-closing screen and bursting inside, he was red-faced, winded from the run.

  “They’re trying to mow us down!” he shouted.

  Lettie stared at him, feeling nothing. His face changed as he looked at her, rifle in her hands, pointed at him. His eyes went wide, and white splotches appeared on his red cheeks. His mouth worked for a moment, with only a small, strangled sound coming out. Then she pulled the trigger and he flew backward, through the screen door, tearing it from its hinges as he went, and landed on the concrete outside. The interior of the trailer seemed to ring with the noise, and a cloud of acrid smoke burned Lettie’s nostrils.

  The first shot had been fired.

  Part Four

  Triad

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  By the time Ken’s Bronco rolled up to the Slab, the four big Cats were making their way across the cement. Their head- and roof-lights illuminated the dwellings, picking out run-down trailers and jerrybuilt additions against the dark sky. Between the machines, the armed men walked, shotguns held at the ready.

  Ken stopped the SUV and jumped out, running up to Carter Haynes, who leaned on his Town Car, speaking almost casually into a cell phone. His hired muscle—Postak was his name, Ken remembered—stood next to him, at attention, a SIG Sauer P226 looking miniature in his beefy hand. “What in the hell is going on here?” Ken demanded. Somehow those caterpillars might as well have had HAYNES plastered across them.

  Carter closed his phone slowly and turned to face him. “I’ve already explained to your deputy, Lieutenant, that I’m simply exercising my right as the landowner to evict those who are illegally encamped on my land.”

  “Billy’s here?” Ken’s eagerness to find Billy Cobb had been only briefly sidelined by the sight of bulldozers closing in on Slab trailers. “Where?”

  “He was around a few minutes ago,” Carter explained. “He said he was going to try to get people to pack their things and move out while they still could.”

  “So those ‘dozers are yours?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Men with the guns too?”

  “Yes,” Carter affirmed.

  “They shoot anybody yet?”

  Carter shook his head. “I’ve heard one shot fired,” he said. “Not by my guys, and apparently not at them, either. I haven’t heard anything about who was shooting at whom. But as you can see, my men aren’t the only ones with guns.”

  Ken looked across the Slab. The developer was right; silhouetted through clouds of dust kicked up by the big machines were men and women Ken recognized as Slab residents, their own guns in their hands, facing down the heavy equipment as it rolled toward their homes. He thought he
could make out the enormous bulk of Jim Trainor, the lanky form of Darren Cook, maybe Dickie Rawlingson and some others.

  “You’ve got to call off your guys,” Ken said. “Or there’s gonna be a bloodbath.”

  “If that’s what it takes, so be it,” Carter replied. “They could always just choose to get off my land. If they don’t, they’re trespassers, and here illegally, and if they attack my people we have every right to defend ourselves and our property.”

  He said it with such finality that Ken was sure he meant it—and just as sure that the man had completely lost his mind.

  “What’s going on?” Hal asked from behind him. Ken had been so involved in thinking about Mindy and Billy—so mentally wrapped up in his revenge scenario—that he’d practically forgotten he still had Hal and Penny with him. They must have followed him over from the Bronco, because both were here now.

  “Trouble,” Ken said simply. Before he had a chance to elaborate, one of the big track loaders plowed into a trailer that an old couple named Vassallo had lived in for years. Metal screamed as the loader pushed through aluminum walls and steel infrastructure. Beneath the unstoppable blade of the earth-moving machine, the trailer collapsed, folding in on itself as it if had fallen into a trash compactor. Sparks flew, but the huge machine just kept advancing.