The Slab (25 page)

“
Cerveza
,” he ordered.

The bartender met his eyes briefly and then turned away, setting down the glass he’d been toweling off and reaching for a clean beer mug. At the same time, the man at the bar clicked his tequila glass on the counter, hard. “Hit me again, Pablo,” he said.

The bartender glanced at Diego again and showed some gold teeth in what was probably, Diego figured, supposed to be a friendly grin. “My name ain’t even Pablo,” he said. “S’Isidro.”

“I give a fuck?” Diego said. “Get me a beer.” He flicked his thumbs toward Raul and Jorge. “Three beers.”

The drunk at the end of the bar slammed his glass down, louder than before. “I said hit me,” he said.

“I’ll hit you,
madrone
,” Diego offered.

The drunk spun slowly on his stool and eyed Diego, letting his rheumy gaze slide briefly over Jorge and Raul as well. He looked like he’d been sitting there long enough to have become part of the barstool itself. But except for his typical barroom pallor, he seemed healthy enough, with muscles that rippled beneath his tight T-shirt and strong, bandy legs straining the pants of his jeans. Steel-toed work boots were hooked over the rail of the stool’s footrest.

“You say something to me?” he asked. “Pablo, I’m a regular customer and I asked for another drink. You’re not going to serve these wetbacks before you serve me, are you? They still smell like the Rio Grande. Or is that the Mexicali sewer system?”

“Look, man,” Jorge said, beginning to push forward. “We didn’t come in here to—”

Diego cut him off, putting a hand out in front of his brother’s chest. “We didn’t come in to start nothing but that don’t mean we got to take this kind of shit,” he said. He locked eyes with the drunk for a long moment, sizing him up. The three of them, he decided, could take the guy, easy. Strong or not, he was hardly able to stand up straight. But a better idea occurred to Diego. Without another word, he turned and pushed between his brother and father, heading for the blue leatherette strips that shielded the doorway.

Jorge and Raul were out the door by the time he reached the truck. “What are you doing?” Raul demanded.

“Finishing what that
puta
started,” Diego said simply. He unlocked the truck and wrapped his fist around the barrel of his Winchester Model 94 Trails End rifle. Raul was on him as he turned around, pulling it from the truck’s foot well.

“I asked you a question,” he said.

“Get out of the way, Papa,” Diego said. “I didn’t start this, but I’ll end it.”

“You can’t just shoot the dude!” Jorge put in.

“Watch me.”

Raul had impressed upon the whole family that if they were going to live in America they had to speak English, and they’d all worked hard at doing so between themselves. But when he was really emotional, it became harder. Diego started to think in Spanish, and then the languages got mixed up in his head and he started to think in pictures because it was easier than words, and that was happening now, but the pictures were all of that Anglo fuck at the bar choking on his own blood with a hole in his lungs. Raul and Jorge both had their hands on him now, but he knocked them away, swinging the Winchester’s butt to keep his path clear. He couldn’t even see his brother or father now, his vision was a red blur, a tunnel leading back through the barroom door and ending with the drunken fool dead on its floor. He knew they were speaking to him, in Spanish now as well as English, but he couldn’t hear their words, any more than if he’d been underwater and being called to from dry land. The roaring in his ears drowned out everything else.

The drunk looked up in surprise when he came back in, and fear when he realized Diego held a gun. Diego’s mind was hazy but alert enough to know he hadn’t fired the gun today, which meant it still held eleven rounds. The bartender and the drunk both screamed, their mouths turning into ovals, and the screams joined the general cymbal crash that was his only experience of sound at that moment, a crash punctuated with the boom of the rifle as he pulled the trigger and pumped the lever and pulled and pumped and pulled again. The drunk flew backwards off his stool then, as if he’d been yanked back by a wire, and roses of blood bloomed on his T-shirt, and fountains of it sprayed out behind him, then into the air as he fell from the stool and spun and dropped toward the floor.

Diego’s senses began to return to him once the drunk was down. He could hear screaming now, and he thought he heard another sharp report, and another, and he looked and saw the bartender stagger back against his back shelf, breaking glasses and bottles as he went, and then slide down behind the bar. But he hadn’t shot the bartender, he was sure. Then still another gun boomed and he turned again and the woman at the table, hiding under it now as if its one skinny center pole provided any cover at all, was jerking like she was having some kind of a spasm, and blood gushed from her, pooling on the ground. She slipped in her own blood and fell still. Diego took all this in before he bothered to look back to see Jorge and Raul standing behind him, each with his own rifle in his hands. Raul looked grim but there was a smile on Jorge’s face.

“Couldn’t let there be any witnesses, you did what we thought you were going to do,” he said.

“Get out of here,” Raul urged. “
Vamonos
.”

Diego clapped his brother on the shoulder and led the way back into the dusk. The migrant picker they’d seen in the parking lot on their way in was on the move now, starting to run from the lot but looking back over his shoulder with a fearful expression.

Witnesses, Diego thought. He raised the Winchester, sighted carefully, and squeezed the trigger once. He was much calmer, taking this shot, than he had been previously. The red haze had lifted and he knew exactly what he was doing. The slug hit the worker between the shoulder blades and propelled him forward, carried along by his own momentum, and he must have covered ten feet before he hit the ground, skidding along the pavement when he did.

Jorge high-fived him and they climbed back into the truck. There would be beer someplace else, he knew.

He felt better than he had all day.

***

The trilling phone roused Ken out of the half-doze he’d slipped into. He had kept his gaze focused on a bare patch of wall and worked on clearing his mind. He no longer focused so intently on trying to figure out where the mystery skull had come from, until his vision blurred and he drifted away. But he grabbed for the phone now, instantly alert. “Sheriff’s Office.”

There was a pause during which all he could hear was cell phone static, and then a small voice spoke. “Lieutenant Butler,” the voice said. It sounded female and familiar, but he couldn’t place it right off. “This is Virginia Shipp.” She didn’t sound well.

“Hello, Virginia,” he said. “What is it?”

“Harold, Lieutenant Butler. He’s wandered off somewhere. He was doing so well today, since we saw you, and he wanted to take a walk by himself and I thought it was all right to let him. But now it’s been hours and I can’t find him anywhere.”

Great, Ken thought. An old, forgetful man out in the desert, with dark coming on. “I’ll come up and have a look around, Virginia. Don’t worry about him. There’s not too much trouble he can get into out there, and with sunset coming up, well, he might get a little chilly but it’s better than if he was out at midday.”

“I suppose that’s true,” she admitted, not sounding completely convinced.

“Sure it is,” Ken said. “I’ll be up there in just a few minutes, okay?”

He hung up the phone and glanced out the window. Where the hell was Billy, anyway? That kid had taken to disappearing lately. He tried to raise the Deputy by radio and by pager, but neither one got a response. Which meant he’d have to take Billy’s Crown Vic up to the Slab, when, if old Hal Shipp really had wandered into the desert, the Bronco would do him a lot more good.

And if he couldn’t get a line on Hal pretty quick, then he’d have to call in help, raise some volunteers to go hunting for him. Being lost in the desert at night wasn’t really that much better than on a hot summer day. Temperatures would drop fast, and Hal would still have a hard time finding water, which he most likely hadn’t thought to carry with him.

Any way he looked at it, he didn’t like it. And he didn’t like that Billy Cobb was missing, either.

He was heading for the door when the phone rang again. He debated whether to answer it or let it shunt automatically to El Centro, but decided it might be Virginia Shipp calling to tell him that Hal had shown up, so he grabbed it.

“Sheriff’s office.”

“Hi, Ken.” This voice, he knew instantly. Clara Bishop was a dispatcher in the El Centro office.

“What’s up, Clara? I’m just on my way out the door. Got an old man, an Alzheimer’s case, wandered off the Slab.”

“I won’t keep you then,” she said. “Just wanted to let you know there’s been a shooting incident, just outside Coachella. Four dead in and around a bar just off the one-eleven, called The Rig.”

“I know the place,” Ken said. “Real dive. Any suspects?”

“No suspects, no witnesses.”

“Those Riverside boys are having a bad week, aren’t they?” Ken said, thinking of the abduction in Mecca.

“Sounds like ours isn’t much better,” Clara reminded him. “You want any help with your stray? Need me to round up a Search and Rescue team?”

“I’ll take a look around first and let you know,” Ken said. He wanted to find Hal Shipp himself, if there was a way to do that. And he had a feeling there was. “I think I know where he’d go, though, so I’ll let you know.”

“Okay, Ken. That’ll work. In the meantime, keep an eye out for anyone who looks like he just killed four people up the road from you.”

“Got it, Clara. Thanks.” He hung up the phone and went out to the Crown Vic, wondering just what steaming pile of trouble he’d run into next.

***

“No, not tomorrow,” Carter said into his cell phone. “Maybe in a couple more days. There’s still a long way to go out here, babe. I know. I know. Listen, I can barely hear you in here. I’ll talk to you soon, okay? Bye, honey.”

He ended the call, folded the phone and slipped it back into his pocket. He and Nick Postak were in a nice steak house in Palm Springs, with heavy leather-backed chairs and substantial carving knives and white linen tablecloths. Candles glowed on the tabletops. Sinatra played in the background.

He glanced at Nick, who was slicing into his prime rib. “She doesn’t understand business,” Carter said. “My wife. She thinks I should just be able to wave my magic wand and make everything okay, so I can come home and make babies. Well, I’ll tell you something. It isn’t that simple, and I’m not ready for babies. Not that there’s anything wrong with practicing.”

“I hear you,” Nick said, stuffing a big chunk of beef into his mouth.

“I guess it’s a guy thing,” Carter continued. “Although, come to think of it, my dad was just as bad as my mom when it came to business.”

John Haynes, Carter’s father, had led his small family from one western boomtown to another in search of the elusive goal of financial self-sufficiency. He had mined for uranium, coal, methane, copper—whatever was in demand at the moment. John Haynes kept his ears to the wind, and when he heard a whisper of a strike, even if the last one wasn’t played out, he packed the car and hit the road, chasing the dream to the next place, and the next, and the one after that. His wife, Helen, tagged along without complaint, even though the thankless job of turning one shoddy trailer or shabby apartment into a home was left entirely to her. For Carter, who moved from school to school almost as soon as he’s made a single friend in any one, the constant uprooting was hard to take. But his voice carried no weight in family discussions, which were called only so John Haynes could announce to his dependents which small mountain town they’d be moving to next. These pronouncements were usually accompanied by exaggerated accounts of the wonders these towns had to offer: friendly people, free public swimming pools, great schools, ski runs, movie palaces. What the boomtowns usually contained, though, was somewhat less grand than advertised. There were always a few bars and usually a church, a company-owned store, sometimes a bowling alley, a school, and row after row of hastily-erected housing for the families of those who would extract some mineral from the earth until it had no more to give. One town they lived in had five thousand residents at its peak and forty-seven two years later. But by then, of course, John was already on to the next big strike.

What struck Carter Haynes early, though his father never seemed to catch on, was that only the owners got rich off these operations. The people who worked the mineral claims in exchange for a salary never got ahead; they spent their lives scraping and struggling, while the people who owned the companies—usually living in far-off big cities, Carter noted—raked in the dough. Determined not to make his father’s mistake, as soon as he was old enough to leave home he went to Los Angeles and then to San Diego, still a bit of a boom town then but not an extractive town. San Diego was a place where growth could still happen and fortunes could be made. Carter put himself through school, emerging with an MBA, and took a well-paying job with a brokerage firm. But instead of depending on the salary he made, he put all his money into buying a piece of property, a lovely but worn-down old Victorian house a few miles from downtown. Into this house, Carter put his own efforts, the sweat of his brow and the blood from his veins, and within a year had restored it to its original glory. He sold it for more than three times what he’d paid just a year before, quit his job at the brokerage, bought two houses and hired a crew.

You only get rich by owning things, he had decided. Not by working for the guy who owns things. That had been his way of doing business ever since, and it had worked for him,

He speared a piece of a rare, bloody porterhouse with his heavy silver fork. Postak had been talking, and he’d been ignoring the guy.

“I understand why you’re trying to get those losers off the Slab,” he was saying. “But how are you gonna get rich people to buy houses there?”