The Slab (6 page)

There wasn’t much town to Salton Estates, but there were hundreds of square miles of desert around. Thousands, if the abductors—if there had, in fact, been an abduction—had time to get out of the area. If he had taken a pretty young Chicana, Ken figured, he’d head for the Mojave desert. It’d take a military operation to find someone out there who didn’t want to be found. And from Mecca, it’d be a short trip, up the 111 through Palm Desert and Palm Springs to the 10, then east a ways. The last thing you’d do would be to head south down the 111, which would trap you between the Salton Sea and the bombing range, eventually dropping you on Interstate 8 or skipping that and continuing on to the border towns of Calexico and Mexicali.

That would be the only reason he could imagine they’d come his way—if their final destination was Mexico. But that made no sense either—why snatch a Mexican girl in the States just to take her into Mexico? The idea of a bunch of white guys in a high-end SUV trying to hide anonymously on that side of the border was laughable, anyway.

As he pulled out of his reserved parking space in front of the office, catching a glimpse of the Salton shimmering in the pounding sun, he thought again about the real estate developer, Haynes. Maybe the guy could make his plan work. But then again, maybe not. This whole region had been, since the first white man came through looking for the Seven Cities of Gold, beset by people trying to turn empty desert into profit.

The Salton Sea itself was a corporate accident, an inadvertent sea formed by the California Development Corporation, when greedy developers tried to turn the desert into farmland—which they would control, of course—by diverting the flow of the mighty Colorado River and irrigating the wastelands of the Imperial Valley. But they didn’t reckon with the massive loads of silt the Colorado carried, filling up their waterway far too soon. In a misguided attempt to direct the water to where they wanted it, they cut a new channel around the silt-blocked area. Heavy flooding in the winter of 1905 broke through their canal, diverting the river’s entire flow into their little valley, flooding homes and Indian settlements and the very land they were trying to farm, filling the bed of the ancient Lake Cahuilla, and creating the largest lake in California. Birds liked it, when it didn’t kill them. Since the same philosophy—basically, Ken thought, “It’s our water, so fuck you”—had resulted in the damming and diverting of so much Colorado River water that Mexico barely got its legal allotment and the river’s Delta had pretty much dried up, the birds on the Pacific Flyway needed someplace to go. The Salton was what they got, poison or no.

It was poison because the Salton was a lake without an adequate means of water exchange. Water flowed in from the Alamo river and the New River that came up from Mexico, bringing with it untreated or barely treated sewage, industrial wastes, and who knew what else. A truck had fallen into the river once and its paint had been stripped by the New River’s toxic sludge by the next day. The truck’s cargo—human waste—hadn’t even added enough toxins to the water to be considered a problem.

Locally, run-off from irrigated Imperial Valley farmlands trickled in, carrying with it large amounts of fertilizer that could poison the Sea even more. With nowhere to flow to, though, the water in the Sea only evaporated, leaving behind massive amounts of salt and concentrating the other chemicals in the lake. The Valley provided a third to a half of all the winter vegetables consumed in the country, so there was probably some merit to irrigating the place, but the cost to the Salton was high.

In addition to those who tried to profit by controlling the flow of water, there were others trying to pull gold from the ground. At the southern end of the Chocolate Mountains, below the military Impact Area, a foreign gold mining operation took millions of dollars out of the earth while paying only a tiny fraction in lease fees and nothing in royalties. Farther east, near the Arizona border, another company was trying to start a gold mining operation on land sacred to the Quechan Indians—the only stretch of earth on which windows existed, or so they claimed, which enabled them to walk to other worlds, or ten thousand years into their own past. But in spite of those ten thousand years of history, a century ago the Bureau of Land Management had taken away the part of their reservation that included that sacred ground. In its final days, the Clinton administration had denied the mining company’s application, but now it was being reconsidered—and since the new Interior Secretary had hired members of the gold company’s law firm for her staff, chances were good that the short-term profit of the powerful would win out over the religious beliefs of the Quechans.

Ken hoped that Carter Haynes had carefully considered the difficulties that the Valley often threw at those who would profit from it, though. As the California Development Company had learned in the twentieth century’s first decade, the desert had a way of subverting the will of mere humans.

He drove for an hour, covering the main road and the side streets, but there was no Navigator to be seen, no crew of white guys in any SUV with a Hispanic hostage. Finally giving up, he turned around in the parking lot of the Corvina Café, just below the Riverside County line, and headed for the office, hoping that Billy had made it back.

Chapter Four

Billy found the corner that had been described to him, and standing on the corner—just back from it, actually, leaning against the wall of a liquor store, windows plastered with signs advertising ICE COLD BEER and CHEAP CIGS and GOD BLES AMERICA, he found the woman. He assumed she was the one, anyway, or that there were more than one but they’d all provide the same service. All that he’d been told was the where, not the who.

But she looked the part. She could have had more meat on her bones and she could have been better looking and she for damn sure could have been younger, he supposed. She was stick thin, a meth-head, he guessed, or a heroin addict. Her wispy hair looked like limp straw, and her skin was dried-out from the sun. She wore a miniskirt that showed off scrawny legs that could have been attached to a chair, and a tube-top over breasts that barely dented it. He thought streetwalkers usually wore high heels, but this one had on faded red sneakers, so he figured maybe that only applied to city girls.

Well, he thought, no promises had been made about quality. Just price.

Making sure that no one was watching, he pulled the squad car over, opened the passenger window, and beckoned to her. She eyed him for a moment, spat once onto the hot sidewalk, and then ambled over to the cruiser, taking her time. Billy’s fingers drummed on the back of the seat. The longer he sat here the more likely someone would come down the road. El Centro in September was pretty quiet because when the heat raged, people stayed inside as much as possible. But all it would take to bust him was one car.

Finally, she reached the street, leaned into the window.

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“You don’t need to. Get in.”

“You arresting me, officer?”

“Should I? Is that the way you like it?”

She laughed, a cackle that turned into a hacking cough.

“Just get in, for God’s sake,” he said, agitated. He leaned over and tugged on the door handle.

She pulled the door open and climbed in, sitting down and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Before she was even settled, Billy hit the gas and lurched away from the curb.

“Jesus,” the woman said. “You in a hurry or something?”

“You ask a lot of questions for a whore.”

“Who said whores ain’t curious?” she replied. “Anyway, if you’re not arresting me, where you taking me?”

“You tell me,” Billy said. “Where’s a good place?”

“Oh…” she said, as if just now catching on. She was a tease. Billy kind of liked that—teasing was fine as long as the payoff was there at the end. And it didn’t take a detective to figure out that this woman knew all about the payoff. “Well then, make a right at the corner.”

Billy made the right. “Where we going? Your place?”

She made a huffing noise that he figured was probably a laugh. “There’s a carport in that alley up ahead,” she said, pointing to a rutted dirt track behind a faded brown apartment complex. “It’s usually quiet back there. Nobody’s going to bother us, and your car’s invisible from the street.”

“You sure?” He was still nervous about this whole thing. His heart hammered in his chest and he could feel sweat running down his ribs. He’d never done anything like this, but he had to admit that there was a thrill to it. The lure of the forbidden or some shit, he thought. He turned into the alley. She was right; the carport was deserted, the dozen or so apartments above it silent. And it wasn’t like he was planning to take a long time.

He pulled into the shade of one of the carport slots and killed the engine. “This good?”

“This is fine,” she said. “Cash first. Forty unless you want something more complicated than head.”

“Head’s fine, but…in case you didn’t notice, I’m a Sheriff’s deputy.”

“I noticed,” she said.

“So I was thinking you’d do me for nothing.”

“You thought wrong, stud. Girl’s got to earn a living.”

“I could run you in right now. You solicited me.”

“You could. Of course, I could talk about how you made me get in your car and drove me here. Look, I don’t want no trouble, handsome, I just want to make some bank.”

Billy felt himself filling with an unexpected—and unfamiliar—rage. His face felt hot. “I don’t pay for it,” he snapped. “Ever.”

“Then you should get it the same place you usually do,” the woman replied. “Your right hand, probably.” She pulled on the door handle, opened the door, and left the car.

“Hey!” Billy shouted. “Get back in here!”

Instead, she broke into a run. Billy scrambled from the car, nearly slamming the cruiser door into the stucco carport wall as he did. Squeezing between car and wall, he dashed into the alley. She was already out of sight. Her footsteps still echoed in the silent town, though. Billy ran into the street and spotted her rounding a corner. She’d lost one of her red sneakers but was making still remarkably good time for a woman, much less a woman with one foot bare on pavement that was at least a hundred degrees, probably more like one-fifteen or twenty.

He sprinted down the middle of the street toward the corner. Besides the apartment building there were small single-family homes here, all stucco, all dark and quiet. It was like he’d wandered into some kind of ghost town. The only thing he could hear now was a distant air conditioner humming and the buzz of a fly that strafed him. In sequence, he realized three things: he’d lost the hooker, he was very exposed out here in the street, and he had his service weapon in his hand.

That last was particularly troubling.

He holstered it and jogged back to the alley. How had a simple urge to put his cock in somebody’s mouth ended with his Glock 22 drawn? He knew that he’d have shot her if he’d seen her there on the street—the mental image of her flying forward, a spray of blood and skull spewing out ahead of her, came to him, and he shivered.

Back in the squad car, he sat for a minute with his hands gripping the wheel, shaking uncontrollably. As soon as he felt like he could control the vehicle, he backed out of the alley and headed for home.

***

Sitting in his favorite chair, windows on both sides of the RV open to catch a breeze that was more wish than expectation, Harold Shipp had fallen asleep. He awoke an hour later, alert and clear-headed. He rose and went to the window, looking out at the gray slab under its coating of sand and debris. A tiny bird hopped around, then took wing for the brush surrounding the slab.

Harold turned around and saw Virginia watching him. “It’s September,” he said.

“That’s right. All month.”

“They’re out there. The boys.” He looked back out the window, as if trying to see beyond the brush, as if trying to grow wings so he could rise up into the air where he could see over the miles. Behind him, Virginia said something. He could hear her voice but not her words. It didn’t matter, though. He had only been making an observation, not really seeking confirmation. After this many years, he knew what the Dove Hunt schedule was.

What he didn’t know—couldn’t know—was how much Virginia was aware of. Harold knew about his own condition, knew he suffered Alzheimer’s, even had a vague idea that it meant that plaque deposits had built up on his brain that made him forgetful, confused, lost. Times like these, when he could remember and process information, were rare and getting more so. But after he had his spells—could they still be called “spells” when they had become the norm? he wondered—he retained none of what had happened while he was gone. He could have told Virginia everything, or nothing. To ask her would only mean opening a door he didn’t want to go through, and since the possibility remained that he had told her nothing, he wanted to leave that door shut as long as he possibly could.

He had sworn to secrecy, as they all had. If it was within his power, he’d keep that vow.

He found that he was suddenly excruciatingly thirsty. He hoped Virginia had some iced tea or lemonade made, but if not, a tall glass of water would do. It would taste funny—and he was clear-headed enough to know what that meant—but right now that didn’t matter as much as getting some liquid into him.

He turned back to the kitchen, where Virginia waited.

***

Desert Storm had taught her a thing or two about desert camouflage, so by the time Penny had finished setting up her camp, she was convinced that it would be all but invisible from the air or from the ground, unless someone happened to come right up to it. A large camo ground cloth, in uneven browns and tans with a scattering of green, was spread on the ground, anchored with rocks and a couple of stakes. All her gear was stowed on the ground cloth. Above that, and overhanging by several feet in all directions, she’d raised camo netting, through which she had twined bits of local vegetation. The netting would, she believed, prevent people flying overhead from seeing her even when she sat at the low, flat boulder before her ground cloth that she had determined would be her kitchen. A series of big rocks shielded her from the rear, and she’d made camp on the west side of a rise above a wash, out of flash flood danger. From here, she could keep an eye on the wash. If anyone came in that way, she’d see them long before they saw her. She had cut cross-country away from the jeep road for almost a mile, and put two hills between it and her base camp.