The Slab (42 page)

Billy fell back against the trailer again. But this time he’d planned it, and when he came back at Ken he scooped up one of the bricks from the loosely-constructed wall and slammed it into Ken’s chest. Ken fell back a couple of steps. Billy took advantage of the chance to swing the brick in a roundhouse aimed at Ken’s head. Ken dodged it, though, and when Billy’s brick-laden fist whistled past him, he followed up with a hard right hook to Billy’s chin. He felt bone give under his fist; Billy spat blood and teeth, but brought the brick back for another try. He was slowing, though, and Ken sidestepped easily, attacking Billy’s chin and jaw again with a left uppercut and another right hook. Billy’s head bounced off the trailer once more, and this time he staggered drunkenly as he tried to regain his balance.

Ken didn’t let up. Feet apart for stability, he pounded Billy again and again. His deputy’s face was cut in half a dozen places; blood flowed from his mouth and nose, his right eye swelled toward shut, a flap of skin on his cheek revealed white bone underneath when he moved his head.

Billy flailed back, but his blows carried less and less force. He connected with Ken’s ear and once with Ken’s stomach, but Ken was able to shake off both punches without trouble. He continued hammering on Billy, his own fists getting numb from the pounding.

Finally, Billy fell forward, against Ken’s chest, knocking over the low wall between them. Ken closed his hands on the man’s throat, meaning to strangle the life from him just as he’d done to Mindy. He watched, almost as if he was dissociated from the act, outside his own body, as Billy’s face reddened, eyes starting to bulge from his skull. The drumming of the deputy’s fists against his back and ribs grew weaker.

And then he sensed, rather than heard, the aircraft coming.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Eddie Trujillo punched the arm of his couch. “Man, I can’t believe you shot at a cop!” he complained loudly. “Are there any more of ‘em out there?”

Diego stood at the edge of the window, risking the occasional peek outside. “I haven’t seen any since that one ran away,” he said.

“If he’d come in here we’d all be in some deep shit,” Eddie said.

“If he’d come in here we’d have shot him,” Jorge replied. “But what do you got to worry about, Eddie? If you got some dope or something in here, I don’t think the cops would give a shit considerin’ what all else is breakin’ loose outside.”

“Ain’t dope I’m worried about,” Eddie said. His face held a kind of knowing smile, and Diego realized that he’d been keeping secrets, even from them.

“What, then?” he asked. “What are you hiding, dude? What are you into?”

“Hey, you think I live up here cause I got to?” Eddie asked them. “I like it here. It’s quiet, peaceful, there’s no law to speak of. And I got a solid customer base.”

“For what?” Diego wanted to know. “Solar panels?”

Eddie just sat back smiling, and held a hand up to his ear as if listening to something far away. Diego listened to, but all he could hear was the intermittent pop pop of gunfire.

Then it dawned on him, leaving him feeling like an idiot for being so blind. “Guns? You deal guns?”

“Not a lot,” Eddie confessed. “Just enough to pay the bills, you know?” He rose from the couch and went to the table in the old camper’s dining area, which had been made by laying a piece of a door over a long wooden crate. Pulling aside the door, Eddie opened the hinged lid and reached into the crate’s depths. When he brought his hands out, they were filled with something Diego had only seen in movies.

“The fuck is that?” he asked.

“Is that loaded?” Jorge demanded.

“All that shooting going on outside, it will be in a second,” Eddie replied calmly. The way he held the thing, gingerly but with confidence and a touch of pride, reminded Diego of the way some people held their babies. He reached back in and brought out a belt of ammo, huge bullets, to Diego. Maybe .50 cal. “Heckler & Koch,” he said. “HK21.” It looked to Diego like some kind of futuristic space gun. All the usual parts were there, in a kind of olive drab color that made it look intended for military use: stock, trigger, barrel, sights. But it came with additional knobs and buttons and attachments, and a bipod hung down from the slotted barrel. “Hundred round belt,” Eddie went on. “Available only to military and law enforcement customers. In this country, anyway.”

“That’s not legal, is it?” Diego asked him. He moved over to the crate and looked in. There must have been a dozen guns in their, mostly flat black steel, mean-looking weapons such as nothing he’d ever seen.

“Whatever you done that got you so scared you’re hiding out at my place, shooting at cops, is that legal, Diego? Didn’t you guys maybe break a teensy little law somewhere along the line?”

“Yeah,” Jorge said, “but—”

“Shut up,” Diego snapped. “None of us needs to know any more about what the others done, okay? I think maybe that’s best all the way around.”

“Yeah, okay,” Jorge agreed.

Eddie flopped back down on his couch, but he kept the HK21 in his hands. “Anything you say, man. It’s all okay by me.”

***

Ken didn’t want to go back into the home that Hal and Virginia Shipp shared. When he’d touched Virginia, he had flashed back to the vision he’d seen earlier, the lined, aged hands on a shovel’s handle, digging up a grave to find the skull that had found its way to the fire pit on the Slab. But this time, he knew that the hands belonged to Virginia, and he, through her eyes, looked up to see Hal holding the flashlight in shaky hands, causing the light’s circle of illumination to wobble this way and that. If they had dug up the skull and secretly planted it on the Slab, then they had some guilty knowledge of the victim’s death, he surmised. It was hard to believe of either of them—both gentle people, as far as he knew. But then, he had never known them well.

The worst part was that Ken could, to some degree, feel what Virginia felt at that gruesome moment—his muscles ached with hers as she pushed the shovel’s blade into the earth with arms and shoulders, then lifted a weary foot that wanted nothing more than to be propped up and massaged and pressed down on the back of the blade with it, forcing the shovel in deeper still, then turned the blade, heavy with dirt, and strained the muscles of back and ribs to spill it outside the hole. Beyond the physical, he had a sense of her emotional state. And he knew, as she did, that this body was just one of many.

He even understood her motivation. Hal Shipp had not committed these murders alone. He’d had help, he had been part of a group. But now the group was out there again, without Hal—certainly too old, too wracked with dementia, to be trusted with firearms even by killers—and another victim would be in danger. By putting the skull in a place where it would surely be discovered, Virginia hoped to spur an investigation that would reveal the killers and save a life.

Except it hadn’t quite worked that way, Ken feared. Either he hadn’t been a good enough cop, or she hadn’t planted quite enough evidence. Because that investigation had fallen by the wayside while the rest of the Slab went insane, and now many people had died. All while Ken made no progress at all in finding out anything about the killers.

Well, now he had a clue. He had Hal Shipp, whose mind was sharp enough, thanks to the magic, to rat out his friends. He wasn’t sure how well Hal’s testimony would hold up in court, though, when the defense could call just about everyone Hal came into contact with on a daily basis to testify to his dementia. But a price had to be paid. Wrongs had been done. He despised the crimes in which Hal been complicit, and through the bond they shared, he felt that Hal genuinely regretted what he’d done—and more to the point, could barely remember it, most times. In prison, his Alzheimer’s would doubtless degenerate fast, and did it do any good to lock up someone who had no understanding of why he was there?

Still, Ken knew what his duty was. Soon as they had some time, he’d do it. He’d arrest Hal Shipp, and the others involved, whose faces he had seen through Hal’s eyes.

So stepping back into their RV and facing them, burdened with the terrible knowledge he had, was something he would have avoided doing if at all possible. But he remembered what Penny had told him, the thing he’d remembered before, when he ran into Billy and was interrupted by his own murderous urges. Don’t try to do everything by yourself, she had said. Words to that effect, anyway. He had realized before, back at the space between the slabs, the war zone between residents and locals, that he couldn’t bring this conflict to a close by himself.

Now, there was an even greater threat brewing, and once again, it wasn’t one he could counter alone. He needed Hal and Penny if he hoped to have a chance against it. He had left Billy in the dirt, bloodied and battered, but not dead, and run, full tilt, for the Shipp residence. As he ran he could hear the thunder of guns and the roar of the machines and the screams of the wounded.

And over it all the whine of the jet’s engines as it came closer and closer.

When he reached Ken’s place he didn’t knock or shout, just yanked the door open and burst in, half-tripping over the top step to land on his hands and knees just inside the door. Penny let out a shriek and fired the Glock and the shot went high, missing Ken because of his trip but punching a hole through the flimsy aluminum door.

“Oh my God,” she said when she realized what she’d done. “Oh my God, Ken, I’m so sorry!”

He pushed himself to his feet, walked to her, and took the gun from her, holstering it. “It’s okay, Penny,” he said. “No harm done.” The damage to the RV didn’t count, since he had a feeling that before too much longer the Slab would be empty of trailers and RVs and shacks. And maybe people. “But I need to borrow Hal again, Virginia.”

The two of them sat on the couch, looking like they never planned to let go of one another again. Ken saw her fingers tense on his arm at his statement. “It’s important.”

She forced a smile. “Will you bring him back when you’re done with him?”

She was joking, he knew. Cops told lies all the time, little ones and sometimes big ones. But scrupulous honesty seemed crucial now. Hal might not live through what was still to come tonight. If he did live, Ken would have to lock him up. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

“All right, then,” she said, relinquishing her husband’s scrawny arm. “You be careful, Harold. That’s all I ask.”

Penny looked at Ken with an even expression on her face. “Me too?”

“You too. I think outside is better than in here. Out on the Slab.”

She rose and trailed Ken and Hal out of the RV. “There’s a jet coming,” he said as soon as they were outside. He didn’t know why but somehow it felt like what he had in mind would work better under the open sky. There were stars overhead but the smoke had grown so thick it blotted out most of them. And the jet, of course, wouldn’t be apparent until it was too late.

“What kind of a jet?” Penny asked.

“I don’t know,” Ken said. “Military. From the Marine base in Yuma, I guess. But they’re not gunning for the Impact Area. They’re coming for the Slab.”

“You know this how?” Hal asked him.

“I just feel it,” Ken admitted. “It’s not much to go on.”

“It’s good enough for me,” Hal said. He reached out and took one of Ken’s hands. “I think we should all feel it.”

“Yeah,” Ken agreed. “That’s what I was thinking.” He took Penny’s hand in his left, and saw her clasp Hal’s with her own left.

Touching either one of them, the magic was intensified, an almost physical sensation of hyper-intense power and energy and awareness. But standing together in a ring, each touching the others, that feeling was magnified exponentially. The world fell away.

And they stood together, completely revealed to one another in a way none of them had ever known.

Ken knew that Penny was premenstrual, starting to feel swollen and uncomfortable. He knew what she’d been doing on the gunnery range; knew of her relatively recent but passionate commitment to environmentalism; knew of her Gulf War experiences; knew everyone she’d ever slept with or flirted with; knew who her best friend had been in the third grade. And he knew just as much about Hal—he was suddenly aware of the Dove Hunts and Hal’s part in them, and who else had been involved; of the full extent of Hal’s dementia; of Hal’s postwar ambitions that had not been realized; and of his gradual acceptance of his lot—what Virginia called, when they argued, his giving up on his own life. And he knew that Hal had become convinced that she was right, that he had gone beyond resigning himself to the fact that he would never achieve the things he wanted, but he couldn’t bring himself to come around to her way of thinking, which was that success needn’t be measured in financial terms. He and Virginia had a close, precious bond. They had raised a son, dead now, but a loving child in life. They had shared the decades. That should have been enough—Hal knew it should—but he couldn’t make it be. He couldn’t make himself not feel like a failure because he’d never held the big executive job or made the big killing he’d wanted.

For their part, he knew that he was just as wide open to them as they were to him, and through their eyes he could see himself—the widower who had moved to the middle of nowhere rather than stay put and face his ghosts, the shy man who didn’t like to meet new people and would as soon stay inside his house with a book as go into the world, the angry man who knew that Billy Cobb had murdered Mindy Sesno and knew that Billy Cobb had made love to Mindy Sesno but didn’t know which fact enraged him more.

None of it made him like himself very much. But there was something he saw, reflected through Penny and Hal, some core of admiration for him that surprised Ken. They knew his innermost secrets, but they liked and respected him anyway. He was, they felt, a man who lived up to his promises, who worked hard to do the right thing, who didn’t shirk from duty or decisions, who tried his best to tell the truth. He guessed he had always known those things about himself too, but was surprised at the weight other people ascribed to them. For his own part, he had a hard time looking past the elation he’d felt at having Billy’s throat in his hands, just a few minutes ago.