The Slab (18 page)

If she could continue to evade the men who chased her.

And that didn’t look good, because when she pulled her mouth away from the wall—holding her hand there to catch what water she could—and looked back over the plain she had just crossed, she saw several figures, following her path. She had bought herself some time but she hadn’t lost them. Which just meant things would be harder from here out—she was weak, tired, hungry, burned, and used up. They were maybe not much fresher, but they had the right clothes and gear.

And guns.

Lucy turned and pressed her face to the cliff again. She’d need to find a better source of water than this soon, but at least it was something. She stayed as long as she dared and then left the cliff wall, following it around until it opened into a wide, rocky canyon.

She scouted the canyon for a few minutes, always aware that the hunters were less than a half hour behind her. Running away was looking less and less like a possibility, which left her only two options. Giving up seemed like a bad choice.

So, to be honest, did making a stand.

But if she was going to die, then she’d by God do everything she could to take some of those men with her.

Exploring the canyon, though, gave her a glimmer of hope.

A side canyon branched off this main one, its entrance blending so well with the main canyon’s wall as to be virtually invisible unless one were walking the canyon’s edge as Lucy had done, looking for precisely this kind of thing. The narrow side canyon led uphill, and its walls were a dozen feet or so tall, and climbable, with plenty of hand and footholds. Lucy scaled one to see what was on the other side and spotted an inset in the canyon wall—an indentation big enough for a person, if she was small enough and maybe a little flexible.

She poked her head inside, looking for snakes or scorpions, but it was clear. And shaded by the overhang. She climbed inside, fitting herself into the indentation’s natural curve. Pluses and minuses, she knew. If they climbed the canyon wall in the same place she did, they’d spot her, and she’d have nowhere to hide or run. Her back was, quite literally, to the wall.

But if they didn’t climb the wall, they’d never see her. They’d go up the main canyon, or maybe even up the side canyon, but the only place from which they could see into this indentation was from up on the opposite wall of the side canyon itself, and what were the chances they’d be up there when the canyon floor was easier walking?

With a few minutes to spare, Lucy climbed back down and went out into the canyon to make a few more adjustments. Stepping as firmly as she could bear to, she made a trail of deep footprints leading up the main canyon a ways, ending at a rocky patch where sandaled feet wouldn’t leave marks anyway. Then she backtracked, walking backward, stepping in her own footprints. Finally, she cut over to the side canyon, using a fallen branch of greasewood to brush away the footprints she made. Her hope was that they’d believe the obvious footprints and go straight up the main canyon, leading them far away from her. In the meantime, she’d be inside her hidey-hole, in the shade, waiting for them to clear out so she could get back to the important business of finding water and food.

She worked her way back up-canyon and was starting to climb when she heard them behind her, entering the main canyon. If her camouflage didn’t work, they’d spot the side canyon within minutes, and see her before she got back to the indentation. Climbing all the way to that would leave her visible for too long, so instead she picked a flat shelf of rock, lower than she was comfortable with but well above the head of any of the men, and flattened herself against it, waiting to see which way they’d go.

***

Carter Haynes had to shove a pile of newspapers—the most recent seemed to be from late 1998—over to one side of the chair he was offered in the semi-random collection of debris that was Gray Boonton’s little piece of the Slab. Where most of the locals at least had something resembling a mobile home, Gray had connected sheets of cast-off corrugated sheet metal, possibly with chewing gum and kite string, and added cardboard, plywood, and other artifacts (the hood of a Ford Fairlane, for instance, had become a front door). There were mushrooms, for God’s sake, growing up through a scrap of cheap remnant carpeting that covered the broken cement slab and served as a floor; broad-headed, red-spotted things with a fine red tracery connecting the spots. Sandra, Carter’s wife, would probably have his clothes sterilized if she saw this place. She was a clean freak, which didn’t bother Carter as long as she dealt with her neuroses while he was away from the condo. And there was something to be said for coming back to a neat home every night.

Despite the crushing heat inside the place, Boonton wore a moth-eaten cardigan sweater the color of his name over a one-piece orange polyester jumpsuit, open to the navel. Sweat gleamed across his chest and the exposed swell of his belly. Giving Boonton two grand for this mess was absurd—it would probably cost nearly that to haul it all to a dump, and if he’d spent a penny on it Carter would be surprised. But a deal was a deal, and if Boonton would sign the contract, he’d get the dough, same as anybody else on the Slab. It was worth it to Carter to avoid the bad publicity that might come from forcible evictions. Not to mention the possibility that any of these people could come back with a can of gasoline and a match if they weren’t treated with what passed for respect.

He was perilously close to losing his cool with Boonton, though.

The old man turned the contract this way and that, upside down and over, as if he not only couldn’t read but didn’t actually understand that the side with the words on it was the side that mattered. “All I got to do is sign this paper and you give me the money?” he asked, for what must have been the thirtieth time.

“That’s right. You sign that and then you move off the Slab.”

“Why do I got to move?”

Carter bit his lip. Behind him, he could tell Nick Postak was working hard to keep from cracking up—he could hear his bodyguard’s breathing catch and hold as he made a supreme effort.

Gray Boonton was a hundred and fifty if he was a day, Carter thought, and resembled nothing so much as an older version of Professor Irwin Corey. The man still had a wild shock of long hair, lots of it for someone who should have been dead decades past. His chin and cheeks were grizzled and white, and his teeth sat abandoned in an empty glass on top of an upside down tortoise shell that rested on a broken-slatted fruit crate turned on end to function as—well, apparently as a base for the turtle shell, Carter decided. Unless the shell and crate were both meant to be part of a pedestal for the teeth. Hard to tell, really.

“Because that’s the whole point,” Carter reminded him. “We’re building houses here.”

“Well, as soon as you start to build on this spot, why then I’ll move,” Boonton said. He sounded totally convinced of his own reasonableness.

“No, you need to move right away. Everybody else is.”

“They are?” Boonton asked. “Why?”

“Because that’s the deal. They agree to move, they get the money. Then they can use the money to pay for the move.”

“Two thousand dollars?” The man had a lock on that particular figure, if nothing else.

“That’s right.”

“Can I buy one of these new houses for that?”

“No,” Carter replied. “I’m afraid not. Not even close.”

“Well, then what good does it do me? I ain’t got any other money.”

“I don’t care where you move to,” Carter said. “As long as it’s ten miles or more from the Slab.”

“You going to give me a ruler?”

“With two grand you can buy a whole yardstick.”

Boonton sprang to his feet from the old truck bench he’d been using as a chair and began rummaging around on a card table. One leg was broken off and that corner wedged between the slats of a kitchen chair, keeping it somewhere in the general vicinity of level. Watching him dig through the detritus of his life, Carter had the sense that Boonton was an impersonation of a man, maybe a bunch of squirrels in a human suit trying to pass.

“So…” Boonton muttered, seemingly to himself, “…so, two thousand dollars for me. But that won’t buy me one of your fine houses. But if you have money for me in that case, maybe you have money for everybody else, hey? Hey?”

The last word came out louder, almost shouted. With it, Boonton drew a long, wicked-looking knife from underneath the piles of crap on his slanted card table. It looked like a fish-scaling knife with a rusted, serrated blade. He pointed it at Carter.

“Just hand that suitcase over here, you,” he said. “Let me see all that pretty money inside.”

Nick Postak was already in motion. Having decided the old man wasn’t a significant enough threat to use the gun on, Carter guessed, he planted himself between Boonton and Carter and grabbed the wrist of Boonton’s knife hand. His bulk blocked the next move, but Carter heard the crack of bone and Boonton’s scream. Nick’s left arm shot out in a jab, and Boonton flew backward, crashing into his barely-balanced card table and upending the whole thing. Boonton flipped over the table as it fell, paper and animal bones and aluminum cans and bottles and broken appliances flew through the room as if catapulted. Carter ducked as a green beer bottle jetted past his head, slipping somehow through the barricade that Nick’s body provided.

He looked up again to see Gray Boonton, still in motion, seeming to cartwheel over the card table into the rear wall of his dwelling. Into, and through—as Boonton slammed into the rickety structure, the wall gave way behind him. The old man, arms and legs flailing, burst through into the bright sunshine on the other side. As the corrugated tin wall hit the cement of the Slab, the rest of the makeshift cabin shuddered as if an earthquake were striking it. Carter Haynes bolted from his seat for the Fairlane hood door, shoving it aside and running away from Boonton’s collapsing home. Nick Postak followed, his gun clenched in his meaty fist now.

As he and Carter stood there, catching their breaths, the little shack fell in on itself with a rumble and a cloud of dust.

On the other side, Gray Boonton knelt on the Slab, shaking a fist at them. “You broke my God-damned house, you bastards! You owe me a lot more than two thousand dollars now, by God!”

Nick looked at Carter. “I could just shoot him.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Carter said. He looked past Gray, where a familiar figure came toward them at a trot. “But I’d advise against it. That’s the local law.”

Ken Butler came up behind Boonton, still screaming bloody murder over the collapse of his house of cards. Half a dozen mangy-looking mongrels converged from different points of the Slab, barking and sniffing at the wreckage. “You gentlemen having a disagreement of some kind?” Butler asked.

“They knocked down my house,” Boonton insisted. “And that big fucker hit me!”

“This is Nick Postak, my bodyguard,” Carter explained quickly. “He did strike Mr. Boonton, after Boonton pulled a knife on me and tried to steal my briefcase.”

“I see,” Butler said. “And you have a concealed carry permit for that weapon, Mr. Postak?”

“I sure do, Lieutenant,” Nick said. “I can show it to you.”

“Not just yet, please. That true, Gray? You tried to get the man’s briefcase?”


“He’s trying to give me two thousand bucks,” Boonton said. “But he’s got a lot more than that in the case. Figure I need it more than he does if I got to find a new place to live.”

Butler did a chuckle that reminded Carter once again of Andy Griffith. “Looks like you need one anyway,” he said. “I’m going to make a suggestion, gentlemen. I’m going to suggest that no one presses charges for any of the variety of criminal acts that may have occurred here, because I just don’t think a judge or jury will be able to keep a straight face long enough to hear the facts. Mr. Haynes, I recommend you wrap it up for today and continue again tomorrow. Further, Gray, I’m going to suggest that you sign Mr. Haynes’s contract, and take the two thousand dollars, and move off the Slab right away.”

Boonton rose unsteadily to his feet, with Butler helping him. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Considering Nick’s size, the old coot’s lucky his jaw wasn’t broken, Carter thought. The bodyguard had probably pulled his punch so as not to kill the old fool.

“I reckon that’s the best thing,” Boonton said. He looked at the pile of wreckage that had once been his shelter and kicked at a stray bottle that had rolled out of it. “Shoot, I gotta find my teeth.”

Chapter Twelve

Cam had a bad feeling about this whole deal, and his bad feeling got worse and worse as the day wore on. The Dove had managed to elude them for far longer than they usually did—usually, within an hour or so, they could be found sitting and crying against a rock somewhere. This one had stones, though. Without food or water or even decent shoes, she did an Energizer bunny routine that was wearing Cam out. His shoulders ached from the backpack, his arms were tired from carrying the gun, his feet felt like he’d tromped barefoot on hot glass. This girl was going to pay for running them ragged…if they had the energy to extract the price.

“We’re not far behind her,” Kelly insisted. That had been his usual refrain, today. But every time he was convinced they were right on top of her, she was nowhere to be found.

“You keep saying that, Kelly,” Rock said.

Kelly shot him a death look. “And I mean it. These tracks are fresh.”

“It’s the desert, Kelly,” Vic pointed out. “It’s a pretty still day. Hard to tell if a track was made an hour ago or a day ago.”

Vic was right, Cam knew. There were still marks from wagon wheels in parts of the desert, not that far away, on land that he owned, made during the westward migration that followed the gold rush of 1849. The desert healed slowly and showed its scars for a long time.

He wasn’t used to this kind of physical exertion—he was getting up there, anyway, the double-nickel had come and gone since the last time he’d done this, and he paid people—maybe this Dove’s family, for that matter—to do the manual labor on his property. For Cam, farming was about sitting in front of a computer, meeting with accountants and lawyers, being driven in a pick-up truck or flown overhead in a helicopter occasionally. Not as hands-on as some, but at least he was actually farming his land. Other landowners in the Valley were absentees, big corporate interests that owned tens of thousands of acres each, farming little, mostly holding onto the property so that at some point they could sell water, not produce, to the increasingly thirsty megalopolises of coastal California. Cam had little patience for those outsiders. Cam double-planted when he could, bringing in his lettuce, for instance, and then planting Sudan grass on the same acreage. Used more water, but he was thinking about installing a drip irrigation system which would be much more efficient than the old-fashioned flood irrigation most of the Valley’s farms had. If you were going to go up against the big agribusinesses, he thought, you had to be leaner and smarter.