The Slab (16 page)

“Will they find us?”

“They have satellites that can take pictures clear enough to read the logo on your backpack, Mick. If they want to find us bad enough, they will. The ‘copter probably won’t. The ground troops will, eventually, but it’ll take them a while. In the meantime, we’ll be ready to move whenever they get too close.”

“I guess you’re stuck with me for a while.”


“I guess I am,” Penny agreed. “Do what I tell you, though, or I’ll feed you to them.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Don’t forget that.”

***

Terrance Berkley hated the silence.

When he was at home, he always had the radio playing or a CD going or the TV on. He didn’t much care what he was listening to as long as it wasn’t that rap shit. Classic rock, Top 40, shit-kickin’ country, even Rush Limbaugh was better than silence. A lot better. Fact was, the man just made sense and there was no getting around that.

But today, he had nothing to listen to except the breeze that blew up occasionally and scratched the leaves of low-growing plants against sand, the random caws of a raven, the faster flutter of a starling’s wings. He didn’t like Kelly’s order to stay at the cabin, alone and silent, but he understood it. And if the girl did what Kelly suspected she might and double back, trying to steal the SUV, then Terrance would be damn glad it was him.

Whoever brought in the Dove got first crack at her. Terrance had never had first crack, not in nine years of Dove Hunts. Maybe this one was as smart as Kelly thought she was. A guy could always hope, anyway.

Terrance had taken up a position in the bare rocks overlooking the cabin and the SUV. If she came back to either one, he’d spot her. But he’d been sitting here for more than an hour, in the hot sun. Big guys had a tendency to sweat, and Terrance was a big guy. So he’d already finished off the two quarts of water he carried. Good thing I’m not on the trail, he thought. Walking would only make it worse.

There was no sign of the girl anywhere, so he figured it couldn’t hurt to head back down to the cabin and refill his canteen. Anyway, Kelly had told him to walk the perimeter from time to time, not just watch the house. Which he hadn’t done. So he’d get some water, take a leak in the outhouse, and then make a circuit of the area. If she was hiding out there, he’d find her. He hoisted his bulk off the ground, his wooden-stocked Steyr Forester rifle—if he ever did shoot a real dove there wouldn’t be enough left of it to roast over a fire, but it’d stop a person, which was the important thing—in his hands, and hiked back down off the rocks.

The cabin was quiet and empty. He went to the kitchen and refilled his canteen from the five-gallon jugs they’d hauled in, and left it on the counter while he went outside to offload some. The outhouse was empty, too.

He leaned the Steyr against the wall while he urinated. The stench was almost unbearable in here. Most outhouses were emptied once in a while, he knew. Serviced. But there could be no public acknowledgement of this one. It had been stolen from a construction site outside Redlands and brought here in the back of Rock’s pick-up truck. Once a year, they brought a bag of lime and dumped it down the hole, but all that really accomplished was changing the quality of the stink. If a terrorist really wanted to cause havoc, Terrance thought, all he’d need to do would be to steal the contents of this Port-a Potty and dump it over an inhabited area.

Finished, Terrance zipped up, then peered through the ventilation slits before stepping outside again. Still no sign of their Dove.

Back in the kitchen, he found his canteen where he’d left it. He was tempted by the coolers of beer and soft drinks, and by the relative comfort of the living room’s chairs. But if the guys came back and found him inside…best not to even think about what their reaction would be. He didn’t hang around, but stepped back into the punishing heat for his reconnaissance mission.

The cabin was in a narrow, boulder-strewn valley a few miles from the Eastern Mojave National Monument. This land was government-owned as well, managed by the BLM, but no one could think of anything to do with it so it was left alone. Anything worth mining had been taken long ago, there was no timber to harvest unless a sudden market for Joshua trees opened up, and there were no particularly stunning natural features to draw hikers or tourists. The nearest town was twenty miles away, most of that grueling, washboard dirt road. It was almost ten miles to a paved highway.

Terrance had spent most of the morning so far on the north side of the cabin, where the rocks combined with the natural rise of the valley to make the elevated bluff from which he’d stood guard. But to the southeast of the cabin the ground fell away rapidly, a rocky slope that bottomed out in a tangle of thick brush at the bottom, edging a wash where water ran during the rare winter rains.

This was where they dug the graves.

Terrance went that way, because it wouldn’t be impossible for someone to hide down there in the brush until the cabin was empty, and if she had gone that route, he wouldn’t have been able to see her from his earlier perch. He used the barrel of the rifle to push aside thorny branches as he plucked his way down the slope. At the very bottom the growth was thickest, almost as if the branches had been woven together by hand, but when he was all the way through the worst of it, he stepped out into the wide, sandy wash.

The sand was a bitch to dig in, he remembered. You’d dig and you’d dig but the sides would continually cave in on you. Fortunately they didn’t have to dig too far down—just enough to make sure animals didn’t get at the bodies. And the graves almost filled themselves in, once the bodies were down here. A few shovels of sand, then they all stomped around on top to flatten it out. By the next year, it was impossible to know for sure where a body had gone. Once, in fact, they had accidentally dug up a Dove from a couple of years before when trying to bury a new one, so they’d just shoved the new corpse in with the desiccated old one.

But it only took a moment for Terrance to know that something was very wrong. The floor of the wash was disturbed, with a big pile of sand next to a depression. He hurried over to it and could see in an instant that someone had been digging there. And he was sure that whoever it was had been digging over one of the graves—he remembered the position of the paloverde tree just beyond it, one of the immovable landmarks of the wash. None of the guys had been down here during this trip, Terrance knew.

Which had to mean that someone else had been in the wash, snooping around. Someone who knew where to dig. It couldn’t have been too long ago, or the winds and occasional flash flood would have leveled the ground again. No rain had fallen out here for months, but wind was a constant factor.

Terrance had no shovel with him, just a hunting rifle. He knelt in the sand and scooped up double handfuls of earth, throwing it to the side. Whoever had dug this hole hadn’t worried about refilling it at all—in just a few minutes, he had found the skeletal remains of one of their Doves, from five or six years ago if he remembered right. She’d been buried nude, as they all were, so there were no clothes in the pit, just bones.

There was also no skull.

Breathing faster, feeling the onset of panic, he dug around some more, in case the skull had somehow become separated from the rest of the skeleton. Sand and dirt sprayed from the hole like splashes of water; Terrance got grit in his eyes and mouth, and ignored it.

No skull at all.

This isn’t good, he thought. Kelly needs to know about this. Everybody needs to know.

He scrambled back up the hill, shoving through the brush, mindless now of the thorns that tore his clothes and skin. By the time he reached the cabin he knew his skin was flushed, his heart slamming. All’s I need’s a fucking heart attack now, he thought. That would put a capper on a fine day. He stumbled into the cabin. He had a cell phone in his bag, but it wouldn’t work here, there was never any signal here, so even if Kelly’s was receiving, which was unlikely, he still couldn’t get through.

He dug it out anyway, just in case. No signal. He shoved it into the pocket of his pants and stalked from room to room as if an answer would present itself in their gear, in the D-rings set into the floor to hold down the Dove, in the coolers of drinks and meat.

Hidden on the back of one of the kitchen’s drawers, though, they always kept a key to whichever vehicle they’d come out in, just in case there was some sort of emergency. It wouldn’t do for the only key to be in the pocket of one of the guys if that guy happened to be at the bottom of a cliff with two broken legs. Terrance tugged the drawer out and snagged the key. The path the girl had taken had—at least initially—followed the track of an old mining road. Terrance could make up some ground by taking the SUV, if they’d stuck close to the road. And if they hadn’t, he’d see what the thing’s real off-road capability was. He ran outside, threw the rifle into the passenger seat foot well, and cranked the engine.

***

Diego had the wheel, his father cramped between them on the bench seat, legs straddling the gearshift, and Jorge against the other window, trying to keep the three rifles between his legs from rattling too much.

The law had done nothing, which wasn’t surprising but was upsetting anyway. Henry Rios had forgotten what it meant to be a Mexican in this world—it was like when he put a uniform on, his skin turned white. So they were out again, in Diego’s truck, looking for any sign of their sister. No one would help them; they had to help themselves. The way it was, the way it had always been.

They’d all skipped work that day. If they got fired, they’d just find other work. Lucy was more important than any construction job. But they’d been out for hours—and they’d cruised for hours the day before, too, as long as it stayed light out—and so far, nothing.

They worked their way north now, having gone south before. They covered the roads away from Mecca, up through Thermal and Indio, then into the strip of wealth that became Palm Desert and Palm Springs. The guys had driven a luxury SUV, according to the witness, so it made sense that they might be up this way. But mostly they’d seen pick-ups, Explorers, Jeep Cherokees, a couple of old Toyota Land Cruisers. Except for the islands of excess in Palm Springs, where Mercedes and Lexus became the standard, they saw nothing fancy and dark, like they were looking for. None of the expensive ones in the rich neighborhoods carried the right assortment of passengers, and they didn’t really think that kidnappers would hang out in one of the more heavily populated areas of the county.

“They’re in a garage by now,” Jorge said. “There’s no way they’d leave it sitting around in the open, not after someone saw them.”

“They don’t know anybody saw them,” Raul argued. “They think they’re clear.”

“Even if they garaged it, they might go out for something,” Diego insisted. “We stay out long enough, we’ll find them.”

“There!” Raul shouted suddenly, grabbing Diego’s right arm as he did. Diego fought to maintain control of the truck. “Don’t do that,” he said. “What?”

Raul was pointing forward, and then Diego saw it too, a quarter-mile or so ahead. A big, black luxury SUV pulling out of a dirt drive onto the paved road, turning to travel the same direction they were. “What is that?” Diego asked.

“I don’t know, Expedition, Lincoln, Lexus, something like that,” Jorge said. “I can’t tell from here. But it’s one of those expensive ones. Look at the way it shines.”

The windows were darkened, too, which fit what the witness had told Sheriff Rios. Diego mashed the accelerator to the floor.

“Those guns are loaded, right?”

“You shot anything today?” Jorge came back. “I haven’t.”

“Just checking.” Diego leaned forward as if doing so could squeeze every ounce of speed from the old GMC. It wasn’t much of a truck but it had been built to last and it had served the family well for many years. He was pretty sure that Lucy had lost her virginity in its bed—he knew he had—but he’d never been able to find out to whom, so he hadn’t been able to beat the guy up.

Ahead of them, the SUV picked up speed, as if suddenly aware that it was being chased. Its burst of speed was tentative, though, while Diego’s was sustained. He had already made up most of the ground between the two vehicles. The SUV’s tail was right ahead of him now. Diego flashed his headlights and honked, but the driver refused to pull over, and instead leaned on the gas more. The other vehicle started to pull away.

“Come on!” Jorge pleaded. “Catch it!”

“I’m trying,” Diego said.

The SUV leaned into a blind curve, and its brake lights flashed. The driver didn’t want to lose control of the big car. Diego had no such compunctions. He pulled out into the oncoming lane to go around the thing, block it off.

Only there was a farm truck, loaded with sugar beets, barreling at them in that lane. Raul let out a scream and grabbed Diego’s arm again. Shaking him off, Diego heard his father muttering prayers in rapid Spanish.

Diego pushed farther to his left, going around the truck on its right shoulder. The truck’s horn blared in his ears, and his pick-up’s tires slipped when they hit the dirt on the shoulder, kicking up a blinding plume of dust. But within seconds he was back on the highway, farm truck past him, rocketing toward the SUV. The driver of that vehicle had either thought he was dead, or had been watching the near-miss instead of the road, because Diego had hardly lost any ground at all. A minute later Diego had pulled ahead of it, and he stomped on the brake, fishtailing to a stop across two lanes. Smoke coming from tires and brakes, the SUV screeched to a halt just behind it.

Diego, Raul, and Jorge threw open their doors and jumped to the ground, rifles raised and pointed at the SUV.

Inside, a young couple sat, hands over their heads. The guy looked like an accountant or a computer programmer, right down to the pens in the pocket of his blue Oxford shirt. The woman seemed a little hardier, dressed in a denim jumper over a white cotton blouse. Both had tears streaming down their cheeks.