The Slab (30 page)

“I was reading,” she tried to explain. “All this freaky graffiti on the wall.”

“Reading?” Mick echoed. “What graffiti?”

Penny turned the flashlight’s beam away from him and toward the wall she’d been examining before.

It was blank, solid rock—a few scrapes and chinks from the occasional explorer’s passing the only sign that humans had ever been here.

***

The busy chittering of small birds woke Lucy up in the morning. Sunlight angled in through the car’s windshield but hadn’t reached her yet, curled up as she was in the back seat. She felt behind her head for the door handle and opened it, then fell out into the still-cool morning air. Every muscle in her body seemed to have its own individual ache or pain; she felt like she’d been dragged behind the Altima last night, instead of driving it.

She hadn’t wanted to sleep this late, but figured maybe it was better than fighting exhaustion all day. She had a lot to take care of before she could sleep again. Opening the front passenger door, she found a couple of mini-donuts, some napkins, and a bottle of the water that she’d taken the night before. She ate the donuts walking, stretching her thigh and calf muscles. Then she found a dense bush and squatted behind it to pee, wiping herself with one of the napkins. After fastening her jeans again, she broke the seal on the water bottle and guzzled it. When it was nearly gone she fingerbrushed her teeth and used the last little bit of water to rinse and spit.

Her morning ablutions done, she climbed back behind the wheel and keyed the stolen car to life. She made her way back to the freeway, a little busier at this time of the day than it had been the night before, and drove it for about twenty minutes, until she found the exit for the 111. There she headed south, through the wealthy communities of Palm Springs and Palm Desert, and farther down, through Indio. At Mecca, worried that she might be recognized, she tried to keep her face down as much as possible, looking at the road through the tops of her eyes. Still she stayed on the road, leaving Riverside County and entering Imperial. She knew nobody down here, so she relaxed a little.

Finally she left the Salton Sea behind her and drove into Brawley, the sugar plant rising up on her left, the town spreading ahead of her. She fished Ray Dixon’s driver’s license out of her jeans pocket and looked at the address on it. She had to drive around for a little while before she could find his apartment on Gilmour Street, but finally she did and she pulled the car to a stop in front of it and sat looking at it. The building was nothing special, a two-story stucco construction that faced onto a parking area and an empty cement pool. It looked like maybe it had been a motel once, though why on Earth anyone would stay here at the edge of Brawley if they didn’t have to was beyond her. Probably why it was a motel no longer, she guessed.

From what she could tell sitting here in the car, the building was deserted this time of day. It was after ten now, later than she had hoped to arrive, but that sleeping-in thing had thrown off her whole schedule. It didn’t really matter, she supposed. She didn’t know much about Ray Dixon, but he had worn a wedding ring and in his wallet there had been a photo of him with a skinny brown-haired woman at least four inches taller than him, so Lucy assumed that he’d been married at one time, and maybe still was.

She spotted the apartment door with the number 8 on it, upstairs, second door from the stairway. Not ideal, but she’d make do. She pulled the rifle from the car and carried it close to her side, hand down casually, keeping her body between the apartment building and the gun. At the stairs, she climbed quickly, and then hid the gun with herself again as she covered the walkway to apartment 8. There was a doorbell button in the center of the door, with a peephole above it. She pushed the button and didn’t hear anything so she rapped on the flimsy door, loud, with her knuckles. She waited. Nothing. She knocked again, and this time she heard a rustling from inside.

A moment later the door pulled open to the maximum width that the inside chain lock would allow, and a woman—the one from the photo, just as scrawny and tall as she’d looked—peered out at her through sleepy eyes, her brown hair in matted clumps. “Yeah?” she asked. “I’m sleepin’, what do you want?”

“I need to talk to you,” Lucy said calmly. “Let me in.”

“About what? I don’t even know you,” Ray Dixon’s wife said. She hadn’t noticed the rifle yet. Shaking her head, she began to close the door.

Lucy raised the gun and drove its stock against the chain, slamming it into the door and pushing as hard as she could. The chain snapped out of the jamb and the door flew open. Dixon’s wife turned and stared at her, eyes wide, and started to say something, but only “What—” came out before she saw the gun and her jaw shut with an audible thump. Lucy spun the weapon around so that the muzzle was pointed at Dixon’s wife, and stepped inside, backing the other woman up with the gun. Once inside the apartment she closed the door firmly with her foot.

“Wh-what d-do you want?” Dixon’s wife asked, her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t have any m-money.”

“I’m not after money,” Lucy said.

“Then what? Why are you here? I don’t have anything for you.”

“Maybe you do. Is Ray Dixon your husband?”

The woman sniffed and held a knuckle under her nose. She paused before answering, as if trying to decide what would be the best way to reply. Impatient, Lucy retrieved the driver’s license from her pocket and flung it at the woman. It hit her in the chest and she snagged it with both hands. She wore a tattered bathrobe over an oversized tee. “Is that your husband?” Lucy asked again.

The thin woman fumbled with the license, but got it turned over and looked at it. She nodded and the tears started to really flow now, streaming down her cheeks and rolling off to fall onto the plain gray carpet. “What, are you sleeping with him or something?” she asked.

“Where is he now?” Lucy demanded.

“He’s…he’s hunting.”

“Dove hunting.”

“That’s right.”

“I need to know who’s with him. I need names, addresses, everything. You got that?”

“Why?” Dixon’s wife sniffled again. “What’s this all about?”

Lucy wagged the gun at her. “Lady, you’re not in a position to ask a lot of questions. Do you have that information or don’t you?”

The woman dragged her hands through her stiff hair and looked at Lucy as if measuring how far she’d go. He decision apparently made, she heaved a big sigh. “Ray is good about being organized,” she said. “A place for everything, everything in its place, you know?”

“I don’t care about his personal habits,” Lucy prompted. “Just get me the details. Five guys.”

Dixon’s wife nodded. “Okay.” She sniffled again and wiped her nose on the back of her ratty pink bathrobe sleeve. “It’ll take me a minute.”

“Faster is better,” Lucy pointed out.

“Yeah, okay,” the woman said, sounding resigned. She went to a little table underneath a wall-mounted telephone and opened the single drawer, taking out a red address book. She laid that on a kitchen counter and tore a piece of paper from a pad kept on top of the table, took a pen from beside the pad, and flipped through the address book.

Lucy looked at the apartment as Dixon’s wife wrote. It was nothing special, she decided. The focal points of the living room were a widescreen color TV and a gun rack with a couple of empty spaces. The furniture was serviceable, but nothing more. A couple of framed prints that had probably come from a poster store, with no particular significance other than that the colors blended with the gray of the carpet and the tans and light blues of the couch, decorated the walls. Everything was neat and clean. The place felt like a model apartment, not like somebody’s home. Lucy figured that Dixon’s wife probably worked a night shift, and maybe Dixon worked days and they only saw each other in passing. The apartment reflected that kind of marriage, she thought, one in which the parties were husband and wife in name but not in much more than that. Their emotional lives were probably as barren as the walls.

A minute or two later the wife held out a piece of paper with shaking hands. Keeping the index finger of her right hand near the trigger, Lucy let go with her left and took the paper, scanning it quickly before stuffing it into a jeans pocket. “If this isn’t right I’ll be back for your skinny white ass,” she warned.

“Those are the addresses in his book,” Dixon’s wife swore. “He writes in pencil so when he has to change them he can just erase the old ones. He’s very meticulous.”

Lucy started to back toward the door, but Dixon’s wife kept talking, almost as if she didn’t want to be left alone. “He’s really done it this time, hasn’t he?” she asked. “Screwed something up big time.”

“You could say that,” Lucy said. Then the door was at her back so she pulled it open and slipped through, lowering the rifle back to her side as she did. She hurried to the Altima, got in, and sped off. Four blocks away she stopped and, with hands shaking even more than Dixon’s wife’s had been, she unfolded the piece of paper and read what the woman had put down there.

The names of her attackers.

Kelly Williams.

R. J. Rocknowski.

Vic Bradford.

Terrance Berkley.

Cam Hensley.

She had some visits to make.

Chapter Twenty-One

Kelly tossed a match at a tendril of lighter fluid and watched the flames leap up. It wouldn’t be long before the ancient, bone-dry wood caught, and the propane cans—if they didn’t blow so forcefully that they knocked the cabin apart before it burned fully—should only help speed things along. He’d saved some fluid for the outhouse, too. Investigators would be able to, he was certain, find bits of DNA evidence around the place if they looked hard enough. He was hoping they wouldn’t bother to. He for damn sure didn’t have time to stick around here and sterilize. The Dove had been gone for hours and could be leading a posse back here even now. He shouldn’t have let the guys sleep as long as they did. But they needed it, he supposed, after the day they’d had. He certainly felt restored.

He’d caught up to them after they’d been gone about fifteen minutes, right before the propane cans went off, one after another like a stuttering bass drum. For the rest of the morning, he set the pace, cajoling and browbeating the others into keeping up with him. Eventually the sun glimmered on the Eastern horizon and then broke over the distant hilltops and the day began to warm, and with that, Kelly’s mood improved as well. He was where he liked to be: one step ahead of trouble.

He couldn’t say as much for the moods of his fellow travelers. Terrance was virtually silent, almost completely shut down. He plodded along, his enormous bulk making him the slowest of them all. When Kelly poked or prodded he didn’t react at all, not a smile or a grimace or a growl. He just walked faster for a little while, and then slowed again.

All in all, that was pretty much exactly what Kelly wanted from the fat man. He had broken Terrance Berkley, now he could remake him in whatever mold he saw fit. He’d lost Cam Hensley, who had money, and Ray Dixon, who had some skills. Terrance at least had a steady job and some brains, but he was physically useless and had never shown as much zeal as he should have. Kelly anticipated fixing those problems, shaming him into losing weight and working out, and transforming him into a kind of sidekick who’d do Kelly’s bidding without question or complaint.

And it was all, Kelly thought, because of gender inequality. Together these men had killed thirteen women, and Terrance hadn’t suffered, so far as Kelly knew, a single sleepless night over it. But kill one man—one friend—and guilt destroyed him.

That left Rock and Vic Bradford. Rock was his name—hard, solid, dependable, and with only a single other characteristic that mattered. He was a horndog of the highest order, which was how Kelly controlled him. Once triggered, he would soldier on until Kelly released him. Vic, though…Vic was another matter. Kelly thought he’d been seeing signs of defiance in Vic. Rebellion brewing, maybe. Vic would most likely have refused to kill Cam, even if he’d been ordered to. That was a problem.

Kelly thought that perhaps Vic would not survive this particular Dove Hunt either. He’d just have to see.

They found the house around six-thirty in the morning. It was a small, wood-frame job with a little dry yard surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, painted white. A red GMC pick-up idled in the drive, the driver’s door open. Kelly motioned the other guys to get down as he approached the house alone, staying low and keeping the fence between himself and the building’s windows. As he squatted in wait, a man came out of the house in a faded brown tee and jeans, carrying a metal lunchbox in his hand. Kelly gave him time to almost reach the car, then shouldered his M-4 and squeezed out one round. The crack was deafening in the quiet morning air, with only the rumble of the truck’s engine to compete with it, and seemed to echo for minutes. But it dropped the guy, his lunchbox breaking open and spilling into the dirt drive. Kelly gestured for the other guys to join him, and as they were running he scanned the house.

What he was afraid of. A woman stared out the window at him, fear twisting her face and making her into an ugly crone. He raised his weapon again and fired a short burst in her direction. The window and her head exploded at the same time.

“Jesus, Kelly!” Vic complained. “What are you doing?”

Kelly pointed the barrel of his gun at the truck. “Hitching a ride,” he said. “What’s it look like?”

***

He could have found Hal Shipp a whole lot easier, Ken figured, if the guy had stuck to preexisting paths or gotten himself lost in daylight, or both. As it was—even using the trick he’d so recently learned of closing his eyes and concentrating and looking at the landscape through Hal’s eyes—the sun had been up for hours before he finally tracked the old man down. During the night, looking through Hal’s eyes hadn’t done much good—starry skies and moonlit desert shrubs looked basically the same all over. Come daylight, he’d been able to recognize landmarks again—though not many, since Hal had crossed over onto the bombing range the day before and Ken had never spent time over there. But he got an angle of one of the more notable hills, a tall one with a sharp peak offset to the left and a sudden drop-off beside it, so he headed to where the view ought to be the same and eventually found Hal sound asleep in the shade of a smoke tree in the middle of a wash.