The Slab (21 page)

Ray worked processing sugar, and if that wasn’t boring then boring had never been invented. Once a year, he came out with Kelly and the guys and cut loose—really letting themselves be
men
for a change, taking what they wanted instead of begging for it like most men did their whole lives. It had taken amazing courage to do this, and the experience had bonded them, made them closer than brothers. No Dove had ever run them such a wild chase, that much was for sure.

Ray was glad that this one had. Made the whole thing that much more special. And he’d enjoy killing her, once he finally caught her. He had no doubt about that, none at all.

Yes indeed, he was glad that Kelly had picked him.

***

Ken sat in his office in the dark, eyes shut, face buried in his hands, trying to see.

He’d been interviewing people up on the Slab, to no apparent effect, when he realized that he was having trouble concentrating on their faces because other images kept trying to force themselves to the forefront of his mind. He couldn’t quite bring those pictures into focus, though—trying to was like watching a TV screen hopelessly clogged with snow, or looking through a sandblasted camera lens.

Finally he gave up on his interrogations, which weren’t going anywhere to begin with, and drove back to his office, hoping that solitude and silence would allow him to clarify the half-formed images in his head. To a degree, it seemed to be working. The distortion cleared, and for a moment the picture swam into view, floating up from the soup of his own mind. Ken didn’t question the origins of these visions—it was a magic day and touching Hal Shipp’s hand had somehow kicked the magic up into a higher gear than before, so he just accepted that it all stemmed from that.

The first fractured image had involved hands on a shovel’s handle and a booted foot pushing its head deep into packed earth. Everything was dark, lit occasionally by a flickering circle of light. The hands were vague, almost formless and colorless, just hand-shaped blobs of light. Ken could tell they were hands only because of their position on the handle. He could almost feel the effort of digging, the cold metal of the shovel handle against his palms, the hard rim of the shovel’s head pressing against the sole of his foot. As he watched the shovel churn up dirt and toss it to the side and return for more, he could tell that this was hard work for someone unaccustomed to physically demanding manual labor, but that the person he couldn’t quite make out—a woman, he was pretty sure, it felt like she was a woman, though he couldn’t see her—was spurred on by anger. Anger, and fear. And not for herself, but for someone else.

Ken shook his head and slammed his palm on his desktop. Why can’t I see more? he asked himself. Or feel more? Not being able to tell who he was looking at was more frustrating than being up on the Slab, asking questions to which no one knew the answers. This time, the answers were there, in his head, and he couldn’t get at them. He knew the problem was that he was seeing these things through her eyes, so he couldn’t get a look at her face. She was focused on the effort of moving dirt, so that’s what he saw—not who held the flashlight that wobbled off to one side, casting an uneven beam over the dig, not even, yet, what she was digging for.

Though he had a pretty good idea what that would be anyway. This had all started with a skull in a fire pit, and what better place to find a skull than by digging it up?

Maybe he just needed to give it more time. Some things couldn’t be rushed, he guessed, and whoever the skull had originally belonged to was certainly in no hurry to get it back. Ken stood and went to the coffee maker to brew a fresh cup, hoping that to focus on mundane tasks might free his mind to make some progress on its own.

***

Lucy Alvarez had grown up around guns.

Her big brothers both owned guns, as did her father and grandfather. She’d never been a particular fan of them, but neither was she afraid of them. She had fired them, had gone out into the desert with her brothers plinking, shooting at cans and bottles and on one memorable occasion, a wide-screen TV they’d found abandoned in an alleyway. The TV had made wonderful popping sounds and small explosions when they’d hit it.

Even her husband had owned a couple of guns, though they, in fact, had been a factor in ending the marriage. It still made her heart catch a little to picture Dag. He’d been twenty-seven when they’d met, and she only eighteen, still easily impressed by a deep chest and broad shoulders and bulging arms. Besides a powerful build, Dagoberto Morales had been blessed with an angel’s face. His features were movie-star perfect, right down to the dimples that carved his cheeks when he smiled, revealing even, white teeth. His eyes were dark and soulful and seemed, to Lucy, like the ones that had been under discussion when the phrase “window to the soul” had been coined. They clouded over like a stormy day when he was troubled, shone like the summer sun when he was happy, wept like the winter rain when he felt sorrow. He’d been funny and charming and seemed to have plenty of money to shower on a young lady, and it was no wonder she’d fallen in love with him. The only wonder would have been if she hadn’t.

But after they’d married, Dag had changed. He lost his job, for one thing, when the Palm Desert restaurant he’d been managing had closed its doors. Lucy was working retail in a poster gallery at the mall there, so they weren’t broke, but they were suddenly much less flush than they had been. As the money crunch continued, Dag’s temper started to flare, revealing a side of him that she hadn’t encountered before. His drinking, once seemingly part of his social life but lately more and more common at any time or opportunity, exacerbated the problem. The first time he’d struck her she had tried to excuse it, blaming stress, blaming herself. The second time she blamed the booze. The third time, he had reminded her of his guns, and she’d moved out.

She was born and raised a good Catholic and good Catholics didn’t divorce, but Lucy decided that her safety and sanity were more important than decisions made long ago by men who would never understand what it was to be female and vulnerable, and she’d divorced him anyway. He had pleaded and wept and promised to change, scolded and threatened, called her every name in the book, but eventually he had agreed to the divorce and had signed the papers that freed her.

Lucy hadn’t spoken with him since that day, though it took some doing. At night she went out with high school friends, or sometimes a couple of people from the insurance agency she worked at. Drinking, shooting pool, partying by the Salton on hot weekend days. She’d grown up in the tiny community of Mecca, and so far seemed to be stuck there, though she couldn’t imagine that she would stay forever. But being in such a small town made it hard to avoid places where she might run into Dag again.

She made the effort, though. She didn’t want to risk falling in love with the physical perfection of him all over again; couldn’t risk being blinded to his dark side. Avoidance was her best bet.

Guns? No friends of hers, but no strangers either.

She heard the man coming when he was still halfway down the canyon. He moved slowly, and he thought that translated as quietly, but he was wrong. The desert was truly quiet, with only the occasional breeze and the distant cries of a raven disrupting the silence. From where the man was, down-canyon, every sound was captured by the stone walls and funneled up-canyon to where Lucy waited, safe within her indentation atop the canyon’s wall. His breathing, slow and steady. The scrape of his foot on sand, of equipment, maybe his backpack, against the canyon walls. The occasional clink of his gun or creak of its strap. The shuffling when he rearranged his grip on it. He broadcast his location every step of the way.

Waiting was hard, especially when he moved so slowly, but she forced herself. She kept telling herself that he’d pick up speed, move past her. She needed to pee but she tried to force that out of her mind, promising herself that when he was dead she’d drop her pants and have the most satisfying pee of her life.

Finally, she could tell, he reached the spot where she had stabbed his friend. She remembered the spurt of blood when she’d driven the fork into his face—there was still a brown streak of it on her hand and up her arm—and knew that it must have splashed the canyon walls as well. And there would be remains of his glasses—she was pretty sure he’d lost the whole deal, frame and all, so that would be on the ground. The location would be easy to determine and even the method would be clear. He’d be able to look up and see the shelf upon which she’d waited. If he ventured up there, it wouldn’t take much more climbing to bring him to a point where he could look down into the indentation she hid in now. She held the stolen rifle pointed in that direction, though, and if he showed himself, she would fire.

But she didn’t hear him climb. She heard him pause and move around the site, his clothes rustling as he did. He even kicked at the glasses, it sounded like, sending them scuffing over the ground. But then he kept on, heading up the canyon at a slightly faster clip, as if he’d already decided that’s where she had gone.

Lucy’s heart started to pound. She’d almost hoped that he would climb, because that would force the issue. Now, though, she had to make the decision, and fast, before he was out of sight around a bend. She would have to choose to kill him—no longer in legitimate self-defense, but out of a longing for justice. Or revenge.

She realized she’d already made the decision, long ago. He was a rapist and a killer and there was nothing she could do to him that was worse than what he intended for her. She rolled out of her indentation in the stone and flattened herself against the upper rim of the canyon. Now she could see him. They’d sent the black man, the short, muscular one after her, the one who looked like a soldier in his buzz cut and rigid bearing. He carried a mean-looking weapon, a semiautomatic or automatic rifle. A military weapon, she thought.

Lucy sighted down the barrel of the rifle. She aimed at the mass of his back. A shot there would probably prove fatal, if not immediately, and the target was bigger than his head. All she really had to do was drop him, and she’d be able to finish him off, as long as he was wounded badly enough that he couldn’t turn his gun on her. High in the upper back, that’s where she needed to take him. If she missed a little she might get the neck or head of the small of his back or the ribs, and any of those would do. He wore a small day pack, slung low on his back, and it could be a problem, she thought, if she hit that, but there really was nothing to do but try to miss it.

He was no beer can or soda bottle, no household appliance, but a flesh and blood man. And he wasn’t sitting still on a rock or a fence, but moving away from her, fairly quickly now. He wouldn’t remain a target for long. She sighted the way she had been taught to do, getting a bead on him, and she blew out her breath and she squeezed the trigger.

In the canyon, the shot echoed like thunder.

She missed.

She saw the man throw himself to the ground, flattening himself, but the bullet had torn out a chunk of wall six feet from him. Lucy threw herself back into her hidey-hole before her target was able to look up and behind him—at least, she thought it was before, unless he’d caught a glimpse of her as he fell. She didn’t think that was likely, but it was possible, and since he would be hunting her now, she had to accept that if it was even remotely possible then it was probable.

Her heart had been pounding before but now it jackhammered inside her, making it hard to even catch her breath. She tried to still herself so she could hear him, but now he really was silent.

She could only assume the minutes were ticking by. Time seemed to both stop and stretch—she felt like it had already been an hour since the echo of her shot had died off, but she still hadn’t heard the slightest sound from the man she’d fired at. She wore no watch, and the upper edge of the indentation blocked the sun from her view. She could judge time only by the shadows she could see, and they were long, making it late in the afternoon, but she didn’t know how much they had changed since she had come out of hiding to shoot a man.

More time passed, and still, not the faintest sound. She began to wonder if in fact she had killed him after all—if maybe the bullet had passed through him and then hit the wall, or if he’d been killed by a ricochet. She could well be stuck in here, still needing to pee, forever if she waited for a dead man to make noise.

She waited what seemed like another long stretch and then decided she had to find out. There was every likelihood that he was simply waiting her out, watching for her to show herself so he could unload that wicked-looking automatic rifle at her. But she’d die anyway if she never came out of hiding.

It was her turn to move silently. She scooted from the impression in the rock, weapon in her hands held just inches above the stone so it wouldn’t scrape. Keeping her head low, she inched out onto the rim—not as far as she’d gone before, just enough to raise her head to the level from which she’d be able to spot him if he was still flat on the canyon floor where she’d last seen him.

He wasn’t there.

She raised a little more, just in case she’d misjudged where he’d fallen. Still no sign of him.

Which could only mean that he was out there somewhere, on the move, no doubt closing in on her.

She was lowering her head again when a brown-skinned hand came over the rim, quietly flattening itself on the rock, four feet from her face. A gun barrel, black and ominous, followed, sticking up into the air. She watched the barrel rise like a shark in the sea, knowing that there would be another hand coming along behind, finger on the trigger guard, ready to slip inside and fire. The barrel shifted, lowering, pointing almost straight at her, and she stifled a gasp of surprise. But it was just a natural shift as the man continued to hoist himself up. She saw the hand, knuckles paling with exertion against the rock as it bore most of its weight. Then the top of his head, the short, razor-cut dark hair, the skin of his forehead. Then his eyes, brown as those glass bottles she and her brother had shot so long ago. As the eyes cleared the rim of stone, they saw her and widened in surprise.