The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  But he dropped back into his seat as glass sprayed and metal tore. “That’s her,” he said. “Got to be.”

  “All the gunfire around here tonight, it could be anyone,” Terrance countered.

  “No one else would target us,” Kelly said. “Let’s go put an end to this.”

  “You go,” Rock said. “I don’t want it anymore. None of it. Go ahead, just don’t come back. I don’t want to see you as long as I live, Kelly.”

  “I can arrange that,” Kelly said. He snatched up his rifle, knowing there was already a round in the chamber, and squeezed the trigger. The slug tore through Rock’s throat and blew out the back of his neck with a spray of blood. Rock dropped face down on the trailer’s formerly immaculate floor, and made gurgling noises. But Kelly didn’t hang around to listen to him die, much as he’d have liked to.

  “Get going,” he said to Terrance. “We’ve got to kill that bitch.”

  ***

  By the time Ken Butler reached the first of the slabs, there was almost nothing left of it.

  The earth moving machines had flattened every dwelling that had stood there, fifteen or sixteen of them, Ken thought. Rubble was strewn over the concrete surface, but the smaller machines scooted this way and that, scraping up the smoldering mounds and shoving it off the slab into the desert brush beyond.

  The two bigger track loaders idled at the edge of the slab, their headlights shining toward the second one. Most of the shotgun-toting guards stood behind the machines, guns trained across the narrow dirt space toward the welcoming committee that waited for them.

  The majority of the Slab’s residents were out now. Many wept openly, women and men alike. Others, men mostly, and most of those elderly, in their late sixties or seventies, held guns: hunting rifles and small handguns, .22s and the like, that were no match for the military quality of the shotguns that faced them. Their bullets would likely not even penetrate the flak jackets their opponents wore. But they lined up at the edge of the second slab, a human wall, bravely facing the smaller but better-equipped force that had already felled a number of them. Ken had seen some of the bodies, and even now, as he watched, saw the bulk of a man who could only be Jim Trainor, the Slab’s fattest male resident, scooped up with the remains of someone’s home and pushed off the concrete.

  Dogs, at least a dozen of them, barked at the noisy machines, but even they had learned to keep their distance. Some of them sat and scratched or whimpered, noses in the dirt and tails up, for their lost owners. A kid who couldn’t have been more than eleven stood with a couple of the dogs, fumbling with a rifle nearly as big as he was.

  Ken forced his way through to the front of the line and called across to Haynes’s goons. “You men have got to stand down!” he shouted. “I’m the law here and I’m tellin’ you to put down those weapons and shut off those vehicles!”

  One of the goons took a half-step forward. He was a burly guy with upper arms the size of one of Ken’s thighs. Even the shotgun looked small in his hands. “Can’t do it, Lieutenant!” he called. “Mr. Haynes owns the land. He has a paper from his attorney saying he’s got a legal right to evict trespassers from it.”

  “Not by committing murder,” Ken replied. “There’s no law says you can do that.”

  “Every shot we’ve fired has been in self-defense,” the goon called. “And in defense of our employer’s private property!”

  “We’ll let the courts decide that,” Ken said. “But in the meantime, I want you men to put down those weapons.”

  The goon looked at him across the dirt divide, as if from the other side of a bottomless chasm, without a bridge in sight. Finally, he shrugged and turned back to the drivers sitting in the big machines. He cocked a thumb toward the second slab, and the operators put their loaders into gear and started forward.

  Ken fought back a moment of panic. He couldn’t tell these people not to defend their homes. But they had little or no chance against those well-trained men with their modern weapons and giant equipment. And to throw away their lives for a few hundred square feet of land they didn’t even own, instead of just picking up their few possessions and moving elsewhere, seemed the height of lunacy to him. Looking at the faces that surrounded him, he saw their determination displayed in every crease and wrinkle of sun-leathered skin. These were people who faced the desert every day, who summered in hundred-and-ten degree heat that would melt softer, more civilized folks, who lived life on their own terms instead of society’s.

  There was a bloodbath coming, and nothing he could do would stop it.

  At least, nothing he could do alone. What was it Penny had said as he’d left? Something about not trying to do everything by himself. That was the way he had lived his whole life, certainly since Shannon had died, and maybe even before that.

  He pushed his way back out through the throng of people willing to stand together against their common enemy, and broke into a run once he was free of them.

  Halfway across the second slab, on his way back to Hal Shipp’s RV, he spotted Billy Cobb crouched behind a low wall, his Glock held out sideways, elbow locked. He looked like an idiot, and if he fired the gun that way, he’d be as likely to snap his elbow as hit his target. Looking at him, Ken’s run slowed to a walk and the fury ebbed back into him like a rising tide.

  He closed to within a few feet without Billy noticing. “Billy,” he said.

  Billy’s head swiveled toward him. “Ken, am I glad to see you! This whole place has gone nuts. I’ve been tryin’ to do what I can, but someone in a trailer over there took some shots at me.”

  Ken kept walking, closing the gap. He wasn’t even thinking clearly now, just feeling, remembering the terror that Mindy Sesno had felt in her final moments and the rage that had filled him back at her house.

  “You killed her,” he said, his voice low and menacing.

  Billy gave him back a look of newborn innocence that just infuriated him all the more. “What are you talking about, Ken? Who’s been killed?”

  “Mindy,” Ken said, and now he finally stopped his forward advance, just on the other side of the low wall from the deputy. Close enough to smell Billy, the acrid tang of his sweat, tainted by fear.

  “No,” he insisted. “I didn’t do any such—”

  “Yes,” Ken said, and Billy stopped arguing. He stood, bringing the gun to waist height, not with as much subtlety as he probably thought.

  Ken gave him no chance to use it. He let his left hand take the weight of his shotgun and jabbed with his right, his fist driving into Billy’s gut as if trying to reach right through the deputy. Billy made a whooshing sound as the wind blew out of him. Ken dropped the shotgun on the pavement then, and followed up with a left jab to Billy’s jaw. The wedding ring he still wore, Shannon’s gift to him, caught flesh and tore it, spraying blood.

  Billy rocked back against the trailer behind him, shook his head and brought his pistol up again. Ken reached forward and caught Billy’s gun hand and pulled it toward him, yanking Billy off balance. With the gun safely pointed past him Ken gripped the weapon beneath the barrel and twisted up. Billy grabbed Ken’s throat with his left hand, trying to choke him, but Ken’s pressure on his right hand brought tears to the younger man’s eyes and he let go of the gun before his fingers broke. Ken threw the gun to the ground and punched Billy again, staggering him and breaking his grip on Ken’s neck.

  Billy fell back against the trailer again. But this time he’d planned it, and when he came back at Ken he scooped up one of the bricks from the loosely-constructed wall and slammed it into Ken’s chest. Ken fell back a couple of steps. Billy took advantage of the chance to swing the brick in a roundhouse aimed at Ken’s head. Ken dodged it, though, and when Billy’s brick-laden fist whistled past him, he followed up with a hard right hook to Billy’s chin. He felt bone give under his fist; Billy spat blood and teeth, but brought the brick back for another try. He was slowing, though, and Ken sidestepped easily, attacking Billy’s chin and jaw again with a lef
t uppercut and another right hook. Billy’s head bounced off the trailer once more, and this time he staggered drunkenly as he tried to regain his balance.

  Ken didn’t let up. Feet apart for stability, he pounded Billy again and again. His deputy’s face was cut in half a dozen places; blood flowed from his mouth and nose, his right eye swelled toward shut, a flap of skin on his cheek revealed white bone underneath when he moved his head.

  Billy flailed back, but his blows carried less and less force. He connected with Ken’s ear and once with Ken’s stomach, but Ken was able to shake off both punches without trouble. He continued hammering on Billy, his own fists getting numb from the pounding.

  Finally, Billy fell forward, against Ken’s chest, knocking over the low wall between them. Ken closed his hands on the man’s throat, meaning to strangle the life from him just as he’d done to Mindy. He watched, almost as if he was dissociated from the act, outside his own body, as Billy’s face reddened, eyes starting to bulge from his skull. The drumming of the deputy’s fists against his back and ribs grew weaker.

  And then he sensed, rather than heard, the aircraft coming.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Eddie Trujillo punched the arm of his couch. “Man, I can’t believe you shot at a cop!” he complained loudly. “Are there any more of ‘em out there?”

  Diego stood at the edge of the window, risking the occasional peek outside. “I haven’t seen any since that one ran away,” he said.

  “If he’d come in here we’d all be in some deep shit,” Eddie said.

  “If he’d come in here we’d have shot him,” Jorge replied. “But what do you got to worry about, Eddie? If you got some dope or something in here, I don’t think the cops would give a shit considerin’ what all else is breakin’ loose outside.”

  “Ain’t dope I’m worried about,” Eddie said. His face held a kind of knowing smile, and Diego realized that he’d been keeping secrets, even from them.

  “What, then?” he asked. “What are you hiding, dude? What are you into?”

  “Hey, you think I live up here cause I got to?” Eddie asked them. “I like it here. It’s quiet, peaceful, there’s no law to speak of. And I got a solid customer base.”

  “For what?” Diego wanted to know. “Solar panels?”

  Eddie just sat back smiling, and held a hand up to his ear as if listening to something far away. Diego listened to, but all he could hear was the intermittent pop pop of gunfire.

  Then it dawned on him, leaving him feeling like an idiot for being so blind. “Guns? You deal guns?”

  “Not a lot,” Eddie confessed. “Just enough to pay the bills, you know?” He rose from the couch and went to the table in the old camper’s dining area, which had been made by laying a piece of a door over a long wooden crate. Pulling aside the door, Eddie opened the hinged lid and reached into the crate’s depths. When he brought his hands out, they were filled with something Diego had only seen in movies.

  “The fuck is that?” he asked.

  “Is that loaded?” Jorge demanded.

  “All that shooting going on outside, it will be in a second,” Eddie replied calmly. The way he held the thing, gingerly but with confidence and a touch of pride, reminded Diego of the way some people held their babies. He reached back in and brought out a belt of ammo, huge bullets, to Diego. Maybe .50 cal. “Heckler & Koch,” he said. “HK21.” It looked to Diego like some kind of futuristic space gun. All the usual parts were there, in a kind of olive drab color that made it look intended for military use: stock, trigger, barrel, sights. But it came with additional knobs and buttons and attachments, and a bipod hung down from the slotted barrel. “Hundred round belt,” Eddie went on. “Available only to military and law enforcement customers. In this country, anyway.”

  “That’s not legal, is it?” Diego asked him. He moved over to the crate and looked in. There must have been a dozen guns in their, mostly flat black steel, mean-looking weapons such as nothing he’d ever seen.

  “Whatever you done that got you so scared you’re hiding out at my place, shooting at cops, is that legal, Diego? Didn’t you guys maybe break a teensy little law somewhere along the line?”

  “Yeah,” Jorge said, “but—”

  “Shut up,” Diego snapped. “None of us needs to know any more about what the others done, okay? I think maybe that’s best all the way around.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Jorge agreed.

  Eddie flopped back down on his couch, but he kept the HK21 in his hands. “Anything you say, man. It’s all okay by me.”

  ***

  Ken didn’t want to go back into the home that Hal and Virginia Shipp shared. When he’d touched Virginia, he had flashed back to the vision he’d seen earlier, the lined, aged hands on a shovel’s handle, digging up a grave to find the skull that had found its way to the fire pit on the Slab. But this time, he knew that the hands belonged to Virginia, and he, through her eyes, looked up to see Hal holding the flashlight in shaky hands, causing the light’s circle of illumination to wobble this way and that. If they had dug up the skull and secretly planted it on the Slab, then they had some guilty knowledge of the victim’s death, he surmised. It was hard to believe of either of them—both gentle people, as far as he knew. But then, he had never known them well.

  The worst part was that Ken could, to some degree, feel what Virginia felt at that gruesome moment—his muscles ached with hers as she pushed the shovel’s blade into the earth with arms and shoulders, then lifted a weary foot that wanted nothing more than to be propped up and massaged and pressed down on the back of the blade with it, forcing the shovel in deeper still, then turned the blade, heavy with dirt, and strained the muscles of back and ribs to spill it outside the hole. Beyond the physical, he had a sense of her emotional state. And he knew, as she did, that this body was just one of many.

  He even understood her motivation. Hal Shipp had not committed these murders alone. He’d had help, he had been part of a group. But now the group was out there again, without Hal—certainly too old, too wracked with dementia, to be trusted with firearms even by killers—and another victim would be in danger. By putting the skull in a place where it would surely be discovered, Virginia hoped to spur an investigation that would reveal the killers and save a life.

  Except it hadn’t quite worked that way, Ken feared. Either he hadn’t been a good enough cop, or she hadn’t planted quite enough evidence. Because that investigation had fallen by the wayside while the rest of the Slab went insane, and now many people had died. All while Ken made no progress at all in finding out anything about the killers.

  Well, now he had a clue. He had Hal Shipp, whose mind was sharp enough, thanks to the magic, to rat out his friends. He wasn’t sure how well Hal’s testimony would hold up in court, though, when the defense could call just about everyone Hal came into contact with on a daily basis to testify to his dementia. But a price had to be paid. Wrongs had been done. He despised the crimes in which Hal been complicit, and through the bond they shared, he felt that Hal genuinely regretted what he’d done—and more to the point, could barely remember it, most times. In prison, his Alzheimer’s would doubtless degenerate fast, and did it do any good to lock up someone who had no understanding of why he was there?

  Still, Ken knew what his duty was. Soon as they had some time, he’d do it. He’d arrest Hal Shipp, and the others involved, whose faces he had seen through Hal’s eyes.

  So stepping back into their RV and facing them, burdened with the terrible knowledge he had, was something he would have avoided doing if at all possible. But he remembered what Penny had told him, the thing he’d remembered before, when he ran into Billy and was interrupted by his own murderous urges. Don’t try to do everything by yourself, she had said. Words to that effect, anyway. He had realized before, back at the space between the slabs, the war zone between residents and locals, that he couldn’t bring this conflict to a close by himself.

  Now, there was an even greater threat brewin
g, and once again, it wasn’t one he could counter alone. He needed Hal and Penny if he hoped to have a chance against it. He had left Billy in the dirt, bloodied and battered, but not dead, and run, full tilt, for the Shipp residence. As he ran he could hear the thunder of guns and the roar of the machines and the screams of the wounded.

  And over it all the whine of the jet’s engines as it came closer and closer.

  When he reached Ken’s place he didn’t knock or shout, just yanked the door open and burst in, half-tripping over the top step to land on his hands and knees just inside the door. Penny let out a shriek and fired the Glock and the shot went high, missing Ken because of his trip but punching a hole through the flimsy aluminum door.

  “Oh my God,” she said when she realized what she’d done. “Oh my God, Ken, I’m so sorry!”

  He pushed himself to his feet, walked to her, and took the gun from her, holstering it. “It’s okay, Penny,” he said. “No harm done.” The damage to the RV didn’t count, since he had a feeling that before too much longer the Slab would be empty of trailers and RVs and shacks. And maybe people. “But I need to borrow Hal again, Virginia.”

  The two of them sat on the couch, looking like they never planned to let go of one another again. Ken saw her fingers tense on his arm at his statement. “It’s important.”

  She forced a smile. “Will you bring him back when you’re done with him?”

  She was joking, he knew. Cops told lies all the time, little ones and sometimes big ones. But scrupulous honesty seemed crucial now. Hal might not live through what was still to come tonight. If he did live, Ken would have to lock him up. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  “All right, then,” she said, relinquishing her husband’s scrawny arm. “You be careful, Harold. That’s all I ask.”

  Penny looked at Ken with an even expression on her face. “Me too?”

  “You too. I think outside is better than in here. Out on the Slab.”