The Slab (22 page)

She pulled her trigger.

The gun boomed and the face exploded, a red haze filling the air where his head had been a moment before. A fine spray of blood spattered against the rock rim, and then a louder sound, his body thudding to the canyon floor below. As before, the gunshot’s echo bounced among the canyon walls for a while before it finally faded away.

She waited on top of the canyon wall for several minutes, letting herself settle again, before she tried to climb down. Reaching the ground, she hiked around a bend, not wanting him to see her even in death, and took down her pants for her long-delayed pee. She’d probably get a urinary tract infection because of this bastard, she knew, but compared to what he’d had in mind for her, that was something she could live with.

When she was finished, she fastened her jeans again and went to investigate the body. He had landed on his back, facing the sky. Just below the spot where his nose met his brow, and a little to the left, was a neat round hole, red with black edges. Blood had pooled under his head, and she imagined that there was an exit wound back there considerably larger than the entry wound.

The rifle’s strap had been wrapped around his wrist so the gun remained with him when he fell. He also had a hunting knife in a sheath on his belt. She almost couldn’t bring herself to do it, but she knew she had to so she forced herself to dig through the pockets of his camouflage fatigue pants.

Inside his right rear pocket, she found a wallet. Ray Dixon, his name was. And he lived in Brawley.

Now she had a starting point.

Chapter Fifteen

In the desert, a distant rainfall can set off a flash flood miles away. Rain hits hard-packed earth that is unused to absorbing water and runs along the surface, seeking a low point, rather than soaking in. As it goes, it’s joined by more rain. Finally, in a stream channel or road bed or wash, it turns into a raging flood until it finally finds ground willing to allow it to penetrate.

Hal Shipp felt like he was faced with a flash flood of memories, as if all the ones he hadn’t been able to grasp for the last couple of years, since his Alzheimer’s had really set in, were rushing through his brain at once. At the Slab, he’d been unable to unleash the flood—the noise from everyone’s disturbed and violent daydreams had blocked it—but now that he’d wandered off into open desert, far from the world, the dam was breached.

Not surprisingly, given his vivid recall earlier of the events at St. Fromond-Eglise, the times that limned themselves most clearly in his mind were the magic days. He had lived a long time since 1944, and there had been plenty of those days. Few had seemed as significant, in the living of them, as that day in France, but taken as a whole, he knew, they had shaped his life, pointed him in a certain direction and kept him on track. Does anyone ever know which days are really the telling ones? he wondered. You figured your wedding day, the day you landed the job you kept for most of your adult life, maybe the day you retired from it, the days your kids were born. But maybe the wedding day was a foregone conclusion, part of the arc of a relationship but not the key to it. Maybe the really significant day was the day you found out she was cheating on you and went ballistic, or the day you realized you didn’t care if she did, because either of those days could set the course for the rest of your time together. When you landed that job, you couldn’t have known it would last longer than all the rest—couldn’t the significant day be the one on which it suddenly occurred to you that you hadn’t been looking for a new career and weren’t going to bother?

Probably you never knew, even on the day you died, which days really counted and which were just marking time. But at least Hal could point to certain days, magic days, and know that they had made a definite impact on his life.

The first postwar magic day had been the day he’d met Virginia. That strange electric taste had been in his mouth that morning, and while it tasted familiar he didn’t, at first, connect it to the day in France. He wondered, instead, if he was getting a cold or something—the sensation was not unlike having a mouth full of metal or blood, and he thought it signified something wrong with him. It was a Saturday, he knew, a day off for him, and he was scheduled to drive into the hills outside Albuquerque for a picnic with a young lady named JoAnn Perski. They had dated several times, and seemed already to be falling into a kind of semi-domestic arrangement, as if both were ready to be married and were willing to accept the other as spouse material.

But looking out the window of his boarding house room that morning, Hal, tasting the familiar yet strange flavor in his mouth, had noticed that the sky had clouded over dramatically during the night. As he watched, the heavens opened up and an Olympian rainfall drenched the city. By the time Hal got downstairs, people were already talking about building arks.

The rain continued through the morning. Picnic cancelled, Hal was still in the boarding house when a call came in for him. A half-mile of recently-completed highway had collapsed, and the whole road gang was needed to get out and help contain the damage. Hal met his crew at the site, took a look around, and retreated to a nearby diner to get out of the rain and plan a strategy.

Inside the diner, he met Virginia Winfield. An apple-cheeked young blonde, applying for a post-high school job, she had looked at the dripping wet road crew foreman and burst into peals of infectious laughter. Hal found himself drawn to her on the spot and fished a wet quarter out of a pocket to buy her a cup of coffee.

After they had talked for a while and made a dinner date for later, Hal had his conference, then went back outside to find that the rain had stopped as quickly as it had appeared, and the damage wasn’t as bad as it had first seemed. He had never dated JoAnn Perski again, and never looked back.

Definitely a magic day, Hal thought. And one of the best ones.

Another one he remembered fondly was the day that Tim was born. Timothy Braddock Shipp, named for Hal and Virginia’s fathers, respectively, had come into the world on a brilliant June day in 1953. June fourteenth, that had been. Hal, by now out of the road-building field and instead selling business machines across the Southwest, had needed to make an unexpected trip to Austin. Knowing that his wife was due any time with their first child, he hadn’t wanted to go, but the client considered their situation an emergency, and if he wanted to support his wife and new baby in decent style, he couldn’t afford to write off a customer who added several hundred thousand dollars a year to the company’s bottom line. He and Virginia had settled just outside Albuquerque, so he made the trip by car, dealt with the situation, and then set off for home all on the same very long day.

He hadn’t been able to get very far from Austin that night, but he’d stopped in a small motel by the highway to catch a few hours of sleep. When he woke up, just after four in the morning, the now-familiar metallic taste was in his mouth and the motel room was bathed in an odd, golden light. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew what was on his mind so he went to a pay phone outside the lobby and called home. No one answered.

Leaving the motel key and twenty dollars in the room, he got back into his Buick and stepped on the gas. He was still hundreds of miles from home, and the only reason he could imagine that Virginia wouldn’t answer the phone was that she’d gone to the hospital to have the baby.

As he drove, he gradually realized something—his Buick’s speedometer needle remained poised at the sixty-five mark, but he was passing every car on the road. Not just passing, but flying past, like an Indy 500 driver tearing past a bunch of grandmothers out for a Sunday drive in the country.

He must have been doing a hundred miles an hour. More. Maybe close to one-twenty, he thought, watching the other cars blur as he tore past them. If it was even possible for the old Buick to travel so quickly, it should have been shaking apart, as it tried to do when he pushed it up to seventy on a normal day. But it gave no sign of any strain. As far as the car was concerned, he might have been cruising at fifty. Not only did it not seem to feel the speed, but it didn’t handle like a car going double the speed limit. He never even came close to losing control or running into anything. And no one seemed to take note of him, not even the Highway Patrol cars he rocketed past. It was as if he were invisible, hidden inside a pocket of motion.

Hal kept having to think he’d have to stop for gas, but the fuel indicator dropped only the tiniest bit during his journey, so he just pressed on. He reached the hospital in downtown Albuquerque an hour before his son did.

On the seventeenth of December, 1973, he had once again felt the presence of the magic. It was as strong in him as it had ever been, tingling in his mouth, making the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand on end as if he moved in a field of static electricity. All that day he’d waited—recognizing the symptoms by now, as easily as one might the onset of a cold or flu—for the magic to happen, for the next twist in a life that sometimes seemed directed by the whims of a force he could neither understand nor control.

But it didn’t. He went to work, he had lunch with a colleague, he came home, dined with Virginia, listening to her talk about her own day. After dinner they had done the dishes together, as was their habit, and then watched TV for a while.
The Flip Wilson Show
had been on, Hal remembered, and Virginia, who couldn’t stand Flip, had read a magazine while Hal laughed himself silly. Afterward, they’d watched
Ironside
together, switching to
The Streets of San Francisco
before finally turning in for the night. By morning, the magic had faded.

It wasn’t until more than a week had passed before he finally figured out what had happened.

In a camp somewhere in the Vietnamese jungle, Tim had been in a hut with a few of his friends. Someone was drunk, or high on drugs—the Army had never really specified—and fooled around with a live hand grenade. Which probably would have been okay, except that just then a Viet Cong mortar round had landed nearby, causing the drunk or stoned soldier to drop the grenade on the floor of the hut.

And then the magic kicked in. The other guys dove for the door. So did Tim, but, according to one of the G.I.s who was there and who later wrote to Hal and Virginia about it, he seemed to be moving in slow motion, as if he was underwater and couldn’t get any momentum going. He’d moved just inches when the grenade went off, killing him instantly. That had happened at what would have been 8:30 p.m. on December the seventeenth.

Until that day, Hal had always believed the magic was somehow a blessing, a favorable if inexplicable curiosity. He couldn’t quite bring himself to think that God was personally watching over him, but one of his angels? Maybe.

That day, though—the day he found out what had really taken place on his magic day—all that had changed. Hal came to believe that the magic was malicious, or if not that then at least capricious, with no concern for how Hal might be affected by its interference. He had thought once that he had been spared, back at St. Fromond-Eglise, for some specific reason. That he had something to contribute, something worthwhile.

Had he been spared so that he could later take part in the rape and murder of thirteen women? Where was the blessing in that? Looking back at it now, though, at the pattern of his life, at the turns that had sent him here, to the Slab, that conclusion seemed almost inescapable.

His last magic day had been seventeen years before. Tim’s death, and Hal’s subsequent loss of faith in the beneficial nature of the magic, had changed his life in significant ways, and not for the better. He had started drinking, heavily. His marriage had suffered, though Virginia, showing more patience than he would have if circumstances had been reversed, had worked hard to hold things together in spite of his bad behavior. He’d lost one job, then another, until he was, he thought, virtually unemployable—too old to be hired anywhere even if he had a clean record and hadn’t burned bridge after bridge. Virginia’s temporary job as an administrative assistant at a real estate office had turned into a permanent job and she paid what bills she could, and rent on a series of ever-cheaper apartments.

Finally, he had told Virginia he was going on an out of town job hunt and had taken the last fifty dollars out of his savings account and drove their old Ford Fairlane—praying all the way that it wouldn’t die until he got there—to Las Vegas.

Where the magic came back, strong, almost the minute he crossed into the city. The car, on its last legs, made it to a used car lot where he sold it for three hundred dollars to a mustached man named Slim.

For a second, he felt unbridled optimism. He was in Vegas with a few hundred bucks in his pocket, and the magic flowed within him.

But then he remembered Tim, remembered that the magic wasn’t always a good thing. When he got inside a casino, he was nervous. He bought a roll of quarters and hit a quarter slot machine. Lost it. Bought another, lost that too. A roll of nickels. Lost it.

As the money, the last of the money he and Virginia had to live on, to make rent, to buy groceries, trickled through his fingers, he began to have doubts. Bringing the money to Las Vegas without even telling Virginia had been patently stupid, but he hadn’t thought it through, had only believed that he’d be able to go back to her with pockets full and then explain where it had come from.

Only now, it was looking like he’d go back to her more broke than before, and have to explain where it had gone.

He backed off the slots for a while and wandered the casino floor. The din was awful, the sounds of slots and voices and cards slapping felt and tumbling dice, all of it somehow magnified by the surroundings as if to keep people unsettled, off their guard. He hadn’t spent much time in casinos, and now he understood why he’d never bothered.

He watched roulette, craps, blackjack. Looked over the rail at poker games. None of it appealed; all of it scared him. Finally, he changed another ten and sat down at a video poker machine, which he’d never seen before. He put four quarters in and pressed the DEAL button.