The Slab (11 page)

Carrie Provost stood nearby, watching him work. He sifted through the ash with a screened tray, much like panning for gold. Anything he found big enough not to fall through the screen went into one of a series of plastic evidence bags. So far mostly what he’d found were charred beer cans, melted lumps of plastic, nails and screws, and one pair of pliers. He’d also come across two unknown chunks of something that might have been bone fragments. Of course, they could have been from a steak as easily as from a person.

“You think you’re going to find a fingerprint or somethin’ in there, Kenneth?” Carrie asked. “Because most people, they won’t touch that with their hands. When it’s not hot it’s filthy, if you know what I mean. All that dirt and muck and ash. People put their hands in there, they leave fingerprints all right—on everything they touch for the rest of the day.”

“Then it ought to be pretty easy to find out who put that skull in, right, Carrie? I just follow the prints around the Slab.”

“I don’t think that’ll—ohh, you’re teasin’ me, ain’t you, Ken?”

“I’m teasing you, Carrie. Tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’ll find much in here of value to anyone, especially me. But I have to look.”

“I did the right thing, didn’t I? Calling you when I found it?”

“You did the right thing, Carrie.”

“And you don’t think it was me, do you?”

“I don’t think so, Carrie. I’m pretty sure if you’d put it in the fire pit, you’d have let someone else dig it out.”

“That’s the way I see it. Unless of course I was trying to fool you into thinkin’ that.”

“Well, you might have a point there,” Ken said, shaking his tray. A rock stayed in it, so he picked the rock up with tongs and dropped it into yet another plastic bag, which he carefully sealed. With a permanent marker he wrote the day’s date, the location, and “rock” on the bag’s label. It suddenly occurred to him that there were probably firefighters and rescue workers performing this exact same process in Manhattan—sifting through the ash, looking for body parts. Except the Carrie Provosts they had to deal with were mothers and brothers and spouses, driven half-mad by tension and fear and hope. Goddamnit, Ken thought as tears welled in his eyes. He couldn’t even wipe his own face with his hands, encased as they were in latex gloves caked thick with ash and muck from the pit.

“You okay, Sheriff?” Carrie asked. Her concern sounded real and he didn’t bother to correct her nomenclature.

“Yeah, just got some grit in my eye.”

By the time he’d finished—“finished” being a relative term, which in this case meant that he had sifted as much crap as he was going to and was pretty sure he hadn’t found anything at all helpful—a small crowd had gathered to watch. He recognized Clyde Wills, a tattoo artist whose body was his own best calling card, old Hal and Virginia Shipp, Maryjane Peters, who lived with a loser named Darren Cook, Jaye and Jim Gretsch, and there were a couple of others who he couldn’t place. Peeling the gloves off his sweaty hands, he dropped them into a larger plastic bag and loaded up the evidence bags into it, then rose and turned to face the spectators.

“I’m here to investigate a possible crime,” he said. “A human skull was found in this fire pit. Do any of you know anything about how it came to be there?”

A murmur of negatives.

“Well, if you think of anything, or hear anything, let me know. I’ll probably be coming around to visit each of you privately, too. Only unlike Mr. Haynes, I won’t be bringing a couple of grand with me when I come, just a lot of annoying questions.”

That, at least, got some smiles. The entertainment apparently over, the people started to drift away. The Shipps, having wandered by after showering in the natural hot spring tank, were the last to go. Virginia hovered almost as if she had something to say, but maybe it was just her way of letting Hal get some air, Ken speculated. There was a blank look on Hal’s face as he watched the proceedings, and when Ken looked at him, the old man stepped forward, his hand extended.

“Pleased to meet you,” Hal said. “My sister said you were a Sheriff.”

Ken caught Virginia’s gaze over Hal’s shoulder. Sister? The two had been married for decades, Ken knew. And Hal had known Ken for years.

“Pleasure,” Ken replied, reaching for the hand.

“Harold’s been like this all day,” Virginia said. “Exhausted, probably. Sat up all night, far as I can tell. When I found him this morning he was just lost.”

Ken got closer to Hal, and their fingers touched, and then they clasped hands firmly and Ken felt like he was holding a live wire. A shock went through his entire body, leaving his arm numb and shaking. Hal reacted with surprise too, and dropped Ken’s hand.

“Boy, we got a little static electricity going that time, didn’t we, Ken?” he asked.

“I guess so,” Ken said. Wherever Hal had been, he was back now.

“What brings you back to the Slab?” Hal continued. “Following up on that real estate guy’s pitch?”

“Oh, no,” Ken said. “He’ll follow up on that without my help. I’m actually doing real police work, Hal. You know anything about a skull that ended up in the fire pit?”

Hal looked like he was thinking it over. “No, no, I can’t say that I do. How long do you suppose it’s been there?”

“Well, that I don’t know,” Ken replied. “A little while, at least.”

“I sure hope you find whoever put it there, Ken. Best of luck to you.”

“Thanks, Hal. Appreciate it. You folks take care.” Ken gathered up his bag and equipment, touched the rim of his Smokey hat, and carried everything to his Bronco. His arm still tingled from the unexpected shock of touching Hal Shipp.

***

The men untied her for breakfast, allowing Lucy to eat a plate of scrambled eggs and a few pieces of steak they had cut for her, standing at the kitchen counter with only a fork. When the gag came off, the curly-haired guy who had done most of the talking so far did some more of it.

“None of what we talked about last night was negotiable, doll, so don’t waste any effort trying to talk us out of anything. Just use it to eat. You’ll need your strength, believe me.”

The other guys laughed at that. Lucy took his advice and downed the food as fast as she could, in case they changed their minds again. Someone put a cup of black coffee in front of her and she swallowed that too.

“Here’s the thing,” the curly guy continued. “We’re lousy hunters. We’re shitty hunters, if you want the technical word for what we are. But what we’re doing here, it’s not really hunting, you see? We’re sportsmen. It’s something entirely different. Hunting’s when you track something down so you can kill it. We have no interest in killing you—although we would if we had to. No, our interest is in tracking you, for the sport of it, and then using you. For the sport of that.”

Lucy nodded her understanding, shoveling in her last forkful of eggs. She ate fast, not knowing if they might at any moment decide she’d had enough time. She didn’t want to upset her stomach but she figured she would need the fuel. When she had downed the last of the coffee, she realized she still had the fork in her hand.

“Can I keep this?” she asked.

“A fork?” the guayabera man asked with a chuckle. Today he wore a military-style olive drab T-shirt and camouflage pants, though, as did all the others, so she knew she’d have to come up with a different name for him. She noticed they’d been careful not to use their names in front of her. She took that as a positive sign—maybe they intended to let her live, after all. “You want to keep a fork?”

“You guys have the guns, so it seems only fair,” she said.

“Sure, darlin’” the curly guy said. He was definitely the decision-maker of the bunch, and the first one she’d plunge the fork into if she ever got the chance. “You can keep the fork. Enjoy it. You need to use the can before you get going?”

“Sure,” Lucy said, willing to delay the start any way she could. A few minutes sitting around in the shade while they stood outside in the sun, getting more and more anxious and disturbed—she would take that. She knew it wasn’t much of an advantage—it wouldn’t compensate, for instance, for the fact that her wedge sandals were just about impossible to run in. But it was something, and she had decided during the night that she would cling to any positives she could. Negative thinking was just going to get her dead.

When she got inside the outhouse, she realized, too late, that she should have asked for water instead of coffee for breakfast. Water would do her more good and stay with her longer. But it wasn’t like they’d offered her the choice—the coffee had just been put in front of her. If she hadn’t accepted it, she might well have gone thirsty.

Once again, she sat inside until they banged on the walls and insisted she come out. When she emerged, she was still cool, but the two guys who had escorted her out had already sweated through their T-shirts.

“Let’s go, bitch,” one of them snarled. He was the one with the drooping mustache that made him look perpetually miserable. Probably he is, she thought, or why would he participate in something like this.

She just gave him a smile. “Show some respect,” she said. “You don’t own me yet. Maybe you never will.”

“Oh, we own you, bitch,” he said. “Just like you were bought and paid for. You just don’t know it yet.”

“We’ll see.” Lucy said, trying to maintain a pleasant demeanor. It was fun to see just how much it pissed this guy off when she was nice to him.

The other escort, the muscular one with the ponytail, seemed to understand her psychological warfare, though, because he grabbed the mustached guy’s arm. “Let it go,” he said. “She’ll find out soon enough.”

“There’s thirteen graves around here full of bitches didn’t think we owned them either,” the mustached guy said, ignoring his friend’s advice.

“Shut up, man,” the ponytailed guy said. “You too,” he said, directed at Lucy. “You just keep quiet.”

She nodded and smiled as they walked her back to the house.

The other men were scattered around the couches and chairs of the cabin’s main room, looking like they were ready to get going. “You know the rules,” the curly guy said. “You get away, you get away. You don’t, you’re ours. You get a twenty-minute head start. Any questions? Too bad. It’s really very simple.”

She had questions, but none that she would bother to ask. What the mustached one had let slip answered the most important one. If they brought her back here, not only would they use her but then they’d kill her. So she wasn’t coming back to this cabin, ever. Curly was right. It was very simple.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Nobody’s stopping you. Clock starts now.”

Lucy turned without a second look back and ran out the door. As soon as she was outside, she took off the sandals and looped them over her wrists. It would hurt to run on the bare dirt and rocks, but she’d make far better time barefoot. At the same time, she didn’t want to let go of the sandals, because they might come in handy later on.

She still had the fork, tucked into the rear pocket of her jeans.

Bare feet slapping the hot stones and fallen twigs and raw earth, Lucia Alvarez ran for her life.

Chapter Eight

Carter Haynes wasn’t foolish enough to think that most people on the Slab would have checking accounts, or would know what to do with a check if they were given one. But he also wasn’t stupid enough to bring cash to a place like this without protection. The bodyguard he’d hired was a walking mountain of a man named Nick Postak. At six-five, he towered over Carter, and he looked like he was probably double Carter’s weight, too. He had a big beefy face with small eyes under a heavy brow, a thin line for a mouth, and a wicked-looking red scar that ran from the outer corner of his left eye all the way down his cheek, past his ear. He wore jeans and a polo shirt stretched to its absolute limit by muscular upper arms and wide shoulders. Its tail was left untucked to hide the pistol Postak carried in a holster at the small of his back. Carter carried the cash in a briefcase. With Nick Postak at his side, no one would be crazy enough to try to take more than their share.

Also in the briefcase were contracts. They were simple, two pages each, no fine print. The head of each household—and he used that term loosely, in a place where a “household” might live in the back of a broken-down van—had to sign before he or she got the green.

The first four stops went as planned. A little finessing and the contracts got signed. It didn’t even hurt to hand out the eight grand, because he knew it’d be coming back to him in spades. A small price to pay.

Those four stops had taken about ninety minutes, which meant the sun was getting high and hot by the time he and Postak exited the fourth hovel. But there was something different outside this time, besides blinding light and the smell of baking aluminum siding.

This time, there were five men watching them as they made their exit. The five men were big men—not Postak’s size, but big nonetheless. One of them was tattooed from head to foot, with a shaved head and bulging muscles. Another looked like a Viking or a Hell’s Angel or some unholy combination of both, with a thick red beard and a long mane of red hair and a build like a refrigerator with legs. The other three weren’t quite as imposing, but since most of the Slab’s residents tended to be retirees and their grandparents, these five looked like the youngest and most dangerous of the lot.

They started across the slab toward Carter and Postak. Postak stopped, hands held casually behind his back, except that Carter knew he was going for his gun, that in fact his intent was anything but casual. For the first time, he wondered if bringing this much cash with him to this godforsaken Slab was a bad idea. Carter held up one hand over his eyes, blinking against the sun at their backs.

The Viking twitched a thumb toward a broken-down RV, the next disaster of a home in line for Carter to visit. “You coming to see me?” the man asked.

“If that’s where you live,” Carter replied, keeping his voice steady. He could sense Postak’s tension. The big man had made himself still, barely breathing, but ready to move.

“It is,” the Viking said. “But you ain’t invited in.” He didn’t sound like he was kidding.