The Slab (3 page)

It took Billy a moment to make the connection, since he didn’t recall any Arabs putting a skull into a fire pit anywhere in New York. But then he decided that she must have meant the Islamic terrorists who had attacked the World Trade Center.

“No, ma’am,” he assured her. “I don’t believe it was. Do you remember who was at the fire pit when you found it?”

“I didn’t say anything at the time, because, like I said, I wasn’t sure what I seen, entirely. But the usual group was there, I guess, the Hudsons and the Lippincotts, Jim Trainor, the Shipps, Rusty Martin, Lettie Bosworth, Hank Dunn…I guess the McNultys were there for a bit.” She stopped, chewed her lower lip for a second. “But wouldn’t it make more sense to make a list of who wasn’t there? I mean, if you put somebody’s head in a fire pit, you probably wouldn’t want to be there when it was found, would you?”

“That depends on when it was put there, I guess,” Billy replied. “You don’t know that, do you? Unless you check it every morning?”

Carrie Provost hesitated before answering, as if considering whether or not to give away a secret. “You find some great things in there once in a while,” she said finally. She pointed to a metal lunchbox suspended on one of the coat hangers. It was fire-blackened and the plastic handle had melted, but it was probably from the 1960s, and the cast of
Gilligan’s Island
was still recognizable on the side. “I found that in the fire pit once. And money, now and again, coins, you know, not bills.”

Billy found himself strangely moved by this side of the woman. A little frightened, but moved just the same. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. If you can write me out two lists—one of the people you know were there last night, and one of the people you know who weren’t there last night, why then, I’ll check them out and maybe we’ll get someplace.”

“I guess I can do that,” she agreed.

“I can pick them up at the meeting tonight, if that’s all right.”

“Oh, the big meeting.” She nodded. “At the fire pit, yeah. I’ll be there.”

I’ll just bet you will, Billy thought. As he headed back to his squad car, he shook his head slowly. The Slab, he thought. What a weird fucking place.

***

“Who was that?” Harold Shipp asked his wife. The world called him Hal, but she invariably went with Harold.

“Who was what?” Virginia countered.

“Who you just waved to.”

It took Virginia a minute to realize what he meant. That deputy, Billy Cobb, had driven past almost fifteen minutes before, and she’d “waved” as best she could with a tray of cold lemonades in her hands. He’d responded by tipping his hat, as best he could while driving a car. She had thought the whole exchange had slipped by Harold unnoticed, but apparently he had seen it.

“Oh, that was the Sheriff’s Deputy, Billy Cobb,” she said once she’d puzzled out what he was asking about.

“Cobb?” Harold repeated. “He’s from Georgia, isn’t he?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think he’s from El Centro or someplace. He’s a local boy.”

“Ty Cobb’s from Georgia. The Georgia Peach.”

“The baseball player?”

“That’s right,” Harold said, chuckling at some private memory. “And I knew a Cobb in the service, James Cobb, I think. He wasn’t from Georgia, though. Minnesota or Wisconsin, somewhere cold. He loved it when it was cold out, and damp. Sweated like a pig when the sun came out and warmed things up.”

“He wouldn’t like the weather here,” Virginia observed.

Harold looked around, as if he needed to visually catalog the air temperature, which was already in the high eighties. After a moment of that, he looked back at Virginia, and she could tell by his blank expression that he’d lost the thread of the conversation. He covered by lifting his lemonade to his lips and taking a long drink. She didn’t push it. She had learned by now that pushing it would only result in anger or an argument, and she didn’t want that. It was heartbreaking enough to see his memory go, bit by bit, as if, at eighty-one, his brain had decided to shut down cell by cell. She had grown tired of compounding the hurt by pointing it out when he couldn’t remember something or follow a conversation. All she wanted to do now, and until the day he died, was to protect him from harm or pain. So she shrugged off his lapses, and she took care of him as best she could.

“Lemonade tastes funny,” Harold said. He moved the cup away and a little trail of lemonade ran down from his mouth to his chin. She dabbed it with her finger, and his hand caught hers, his touch impossibly gentle, his workingman’s hands restored with age almost to the softness they must have had in his infancy. He held her hand to his lips and he kissed it. For the hundredth time that day—and it wasn’t even noon yet—Virginia Shipp’s heart skipped and swelled and broke all at the same time.

Chapter Two

Ken Butler had poured himself a second cup of coffee, but it had tasted funny and he’d opened the back door and poured it out into the little weed-choked lot behind his office. The Salton Estates substation was in what had once been a bait-and-tackle shop right on the main highway, and the bait shop owner had tried to grow a garden out back. When the Sheriff’s Office took over, they’d gutted the place except for a walk-in cooler that had been converted to a holding cell, and brought in a couple of desks and a teletype machine. Now Ken had a computer, a fax machine, and a couple of telephones to call his own as well. It was no high-tech wonderland but it did the job.

As he shook the coffee out of his mug he looked down the slope toward the cocoa brown waters of the Salton Sea, two hundred and some feet below sea level. After the little weed patch, there was nothing between here and the lake’s edge but mud. Even from here, he could see the glint of dead fish on the surface of the mud, and their smell was ever-present. He was used to that stink, though, and it wasn’t as bad as when the algae bloomed and decomposed or selenium and other chemicals in the water killed off birds by the thousands, so it wasn’t the Sea’s odor that had made the coffee taste funny. It was only now, thinking it through, that he realized it was a coppery taste in the back of his throat that had been with him unnoticed since he woke up this morning.

The taste was at once familiar and rare, like a species that a birdwatcher has seen pictures of many times but only glimpsed once in the wild. Rare, because it had only come to him four or five times—five, he corrected, because he could still enumerate them—over the course of his fifty-two years on God’s green Earth. The first time had been on that day in Vietnam, the day he still thought of as the day in the tunnel, though he’d been a tunnel rat and had spent a good many days in tunnels.

Ken also thought of that day in a different way—as the day the magic came.

And when he’d tasted this peculiar flavor since, like fresh pennies caught inside his throat, those too had been on days when the magic had come back.

Which made today suddenly crystallize for him. Something would happen today, something strange and miraculous. It might be good or bad, but it was on the way, and there was no dodging it. Just over a week ago bad magic had struck in New York and Arlington, Virginia, but that hadn’t been his magic. He was sure there was no relation to the strange taste in his mouth now.

He started to look back over everything that had happened since he’d rolled off his rack, just in case it had already taken place and he’d missed it. But he didn’t get far at that before the front door opened behind him.

Glancing at his watch, he realized that it had to be his eleven o’clock appointment, right on time. He turned away from the Sea, closed the back door, and faced his visitor.

“Mr. Haynes,” he said.

“Sheriff Butler.”

“Lieutenant,” Ken corrected. “There’s only one Sheriff, and he doesn’t leave El Centro all that often.”

“Sorry, Lieutenant.” Carter Haynes stepped forward, hand out like a politician looking for a baby to kiss or a wad of cash to grab. Haynes dressed like a politician, too. His charcoal gray, pin-striped suit must have cost more than a thousand dollars—Ken knew that he, a man who tended toward boot-cut Wranglers when out of uniform, had a tendency to underestimate the cost of fine clothes—and the mere fact that Haynes wore a suit out here in the middle of the desert marked him for a fraud or a fool, in Ken Butler’s eyes. His thick black hair was carefully cut and combed off his face. He had intelligent brown eyes, widely spaced, and a fixed smile that looked genuine at the same time that it looked like a permanent feature. There was something a little unsettling in his skin, though, which was extraordinarily sallow, kind of unhealthy-looking beneath a layer of tan that looked so uniform is must have come from a salon rather than from being outside, and lips that were naturally as red as if they’d been lipsticked. An interesting study in contradictions, Ken thought. Carter Haynes came across as a man to be reckoned with.

But not one to be trusted.

He pointed to the guest chair across from his desk, a wooden schoolteacher’s chair. “Have a seat, Mr. Haynes. You have a good drive out? San Diego, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. It was very pleasant, thanks. Nice to get out of town occasionally.” Carter sat down in the guest chair, his lean frame making it look comfortable somehow. Ken sat behind his own desk, suddenly conscious of his own boots, worn at the heel and toe-scuffed, in the presence of this expensively dressed visitor.

“Guess I’m just a country man at heart,” he said. “City living didn’t agree with me.”

“It’s certainly different than life out here.”

“But you want to build out here.”

“That’s right,” Carter said. “And I can tell you why. It’s because I know what life’s like in the city. I know there are plenty of people, people like me in San Diego and Los Angeles and Orange County. People with plenty of money, but who are tired of the rat race, tired of the traffic and congestion and noise and crime. We want a place where we can get away from that, a place where there’s quiet and natural beauty and peace of mind. We could afford Palm Springs or Palm Desert, but those places are getting overbuilt. What we want is a place like Salton Estates. Especially now, when those who can afford to might be looking for a place they can go that’s out of harm’s way. Nasty business back east, right?”

“Sure is,” Ken answered. People who knew he was a Vietnam vet kept wanting to talk to him about the nation’s war plans. He was tired of it, so he steered the conversation back to the matter at hand and away from the terrorist attacks that had dominated the national conversation since that awful Tuesday morning.

“You’re planning to build on the Slab.”

“Exactly.”

“You’ve managed to purchase that land?”

“That’s right,” Haynes said. “The government’s been doing a lot of unloading lately. Closing military bases, selling off land they don’t need or want. I happened to own some land they did want, near Yellowstone. We made a deal.”

It wasn’t Ken’s place to criticize business decisions, but he knew that developers had come into the area before, hungry to make a killing, and they usually were lucky to get away with the clothes on their backs. Salton Estates had, in fact, been named for one of those would-be resort developments. Roads had been graded and paved, lots carefully marked off, a marina and a couple of model houses built—but not enough people had wanted to buy into a beachfront resort where the sea might rise up and flood your home, dead fish would wash up onto your property every morning, and the chemical stink would keep you inside half the time. The developers had run out of money and interest. The marina was flooded now, the model houses stripped for parts, and the streets and lots mostly vacant.

“You know other people have tried to build resorts out here, right? Without notable success.”

Carter Haynes rubbed his hands together like a hungry man sitting down to big meal. “I can’t give away all my trade secrets, Lieutenant Butler,” he replied. “But I can tell you that one of the major stumbling blocks those earlier investors had is about to go away. Another one already has.”

“Stumbling blocks.”

“That’s right. The first one is money—those developers paid a premium for land right on the lake, with a nice view of the mountains behind. A beautiful spot, and worth premium prices. If the lake was healthier. But it’s not, not so far. The Slab, though, is back away from the lake. You can see it but you can’t smell it. And it’s closer to the mountains, so those views are better.”

“And what’s the other stumbling block?”

“That’s the one I can’t tell you about yet,” Carter said. “That’s my secret weapon.”

Ken steepled his fingers, resting his upper lip and his salt-and-pepper mustache on their tips. “Fair enough,” he said. “So tell me about what you expect from this meeting tonight.”

“I’m prepared to make these people a generous offer,” Carter said. “I own title to the Slab now, all legal and above-board, and I could just evict everyone. But I don’t want to play the game that way. Those people are living there under a certain set of expectations, and it’s time for those expectations to change. But that doesn’t mean they should be screwed.”

“I won’t argue with that.”

“So I hope to get everyone, or as close to everyone as will come out, to gather around so I can tell them all at once what the offer’s going to be. Of course, over the next few weeks we’ll be visiting each one separately, signing releases and turning over checks.”

“They’ll like to hear that, I expect,” Ken suggested. “But you might want to keep in mind the kind of people you’re dealing with This is a very independent-minded bunch. They tend to make Libertarians look like Socialists. You might be offering them something they can use, which is money, but you’re asking them to give up the one thing money can’t buy, which is freedom.”

“Do you think they’re likely to get vocal?” Carter asked, a note of concern in his voice.

“I imagine you’ll hear some raised voices.”

“Anything else?”

“I’m assuming—and I know what happens when you assume, but I do it anyway—that you’re expecting some dissent, and that’s why you want us there.”