The Slab (7 page)

She was brewing a celebratory cup of herbal tea—which she suspected would taste just as wrong as her water had—when she heard the crunch of a footfall, not far away. She instantly shut off the propane burner and listened for it to repeat. To be caught before she even started would just suck too much to be believed.

Hearing another footstep, Penny left her cooking gear where it was and slipped into the wall of rock at her back, standing between two of the biggest boulders and watching her own back trail. From the sound of it, someone was dogging her path. She’d already scouted the rocks and knew that, if it came to it, she could duck between these two big chunks of sandstone and go up and over the ridgeline behind her. That would give her a head start back out of the gunnery area.

After another couple of minutes she saw a head come into view, and then the rest of the body. She was already leaving her hiding place among the rocks, though, because she recognized him as soon as his long yellow dreadlocks appeared. His broad, simple features were arranged in a strange smile, like a kid who thinks he’s putting something over on Mom. His tie-dyed shirt was about the farthest thing from camouflage a human could choose to wear.

Mick Beachum.

Who was supposed to be, at that moment, setting up a command center in a motel in Salton Estates or Niland.

“The fuck are you doing here, Mick?” she demanded loudly.

He stopped in his tracks, startled for a moment, and the oddly juvenile grin vanished. Mick was a big man with long, gangly arms and legs, ending in huge hands and feet. His face was almost totally without guile, every thought or emotion etching itself there with utter transparency. Penny wouldn’t have described him as handsome, but there was an innocent, puppyish quality to him that she supposed some people might find kind of endearing.

If only, she thought, he could keep his mouth shut. And make some better decisions. And learn to take no for an answer.

“Looking for you,” he said. “I followed your trail. You didn’t exactly hide it.”

“I didn’t realize I needed to. No one’s going to know where I came into the range except you.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

“Which still doesn’t answer the real question,” she reminded him. “Why did you follow me?”

“I got to thinking,” he began. Anytime that happened, trouble wasn’t far behind, she knew from long experience. “I realized that I didn’t need to be in a motel.” He shrugged his shoulders, hefting his backpack. “Everything I need is in here. We can have a mobile command center, right out here, and I can be around to help out if you need it.”

“If I’d needed help we’d have planned for that from the beginnin’,” Penny said. When she was upset or anxious, the Southern accent she had otherwise squashed after the Gulf War crept back into her voice. Her “I’d” became “Ah’d,” she dropped ending sounds, even the rhythm changed to one with more of a musical lilt. Just now, she was plenty upset. One thing about puppies—you could talk to them and talk to them, but that didn’t mean they learned until you rubbed their noses in it and gave them a swat. “What if there’s an emergency? You’re supposed to be someplace central so y’all can cover all of us if somethin’ happens.”

“I’m only an hour from the van, if I hustle,” he said, trying his hardest to be reassuring but not quite pulling it off. “And here, I’m closer to you and to Dieter.”

“But without wheels. And on the wrong side of the line. You’d best go back.”

“I just hauled all this crap in here, Penny.” His tone edged dangerously close to whining. He seemed to realize it, and dialed back the drama a couple of notches. “I thought you’d be glad. It seemed like a really good idea to me.”

“Yeah,” Penny sighed. “The thing about a plan, though, is that it’s best to stick to it unless there’s an overwhelmingly good reason to change it. ‘Because I felt like it’ doesn’t count.”

“Look, I can go back, Penny, if you want.” Mick looked up at the sky and Penny followed his gaze. The sun perched above the hills to the west, ready to slide behind them. It would be dark before he made it halfway.

“No, don’t try to do it tonight,” Penny finally said. “Crash here, then tomorrow morning you can help me set up before you go back.”

His face broke into that big, goofy smile, revealing an array of uneven teeth. “Okay,” he said. “Anyway, the view here is a lot better than…well, anywhere else.”

She chose to ignore the comment, tossing him an icy glance but nothing else. He was, in his own awkward way, trying to compliment her looks. She’d heard it before, from him, but it did nothing for her.

Penny had always been realistic about her own looks. She wasn’t willing to put much effort into appearance, but she did have a thick mane of light brown hair that was usually pulled back into a ponytail and tied with a rubber band or scrunchy. It was unruly, though, and tended to strike out on its own with no notice. Her face was okay, she thought. It worked, its parts were in the right places and there was nothing misshapen about any of them. Her eyes were an unusually light green that contrasted nicely with the brown hair. She had always kept fit, more through being outdoors than in a gym, so her body was as toned as it was going to get: strong legs, probably too muscular in the calves to be really shapely, firm ass, breasts a little on the large side but enhanced by strong pecs. And with a shirt on, no one could see the five-inch scar across her abdomen, her permanent souvenir of the Persian Gulf.

***

On the Slab, Lettie Bosworth made dinner for her husband Will.

She worked over a propane stove in their mobile home, making a casserole out of various leftovers and canned meat. With a very few exceptions for restaurants or visits to friends’ homes, she had made dinner for Will every night for the past thirty-four years. He never cooked, not even barbecue. He never skipped a meal. She had heard about men who traveled for business, but when Will had been in business he’d been a barber. There was no travel involved, and he was home in time for dinner every night. Since he’d retired six years before, he’d been home for every meal.

She supposed there were women who would appreciate such a faithful record. He didn’t go out with other women or carouse with buddies from the barbershop. He went to work, and then he came home. In the morning he did it again. Retirement had only changed the part where he went to work. There was talk of war, but she didn’t think she could count on men in their seventies being drafted.

She had had to drive a borrowed truck all the way to Brawley to find rat poison. Even when she had, she wasn’t sure what it would do. She’d heard about it in movies and TV shows, but that was fiction. She didn’t know if it would kill him instantly, or just make him sick. Depended on the dose, she figured, but there was no handy little chart inside that detailed its possible effects on a human being.

But that was okay. Either result would be fine. She didn’t wish Will dead, necessarily. She was just looking for a change in the routine.

She poured a little more in, replaced the cap, and put the rat poison back under the sink.

Lettie figured the casserole would disguise the flavor pretty well.

Chapter Five

Lucy Alvarez bounced in the back of the Navigator like a kernel of corn in a popcorn popper, each bump or jolt the SUV took throwing her against one of the walls or tossing her up to slam back down against the cargo area floor. With her hands and ankles bound tightly and a gag across her mouth, all she could do was kick and make muffled screams. But the men in the front ignored her, for the most part, only turning around when she tried to raise herself up high enough to be seen from outside the vehicle. Then one of the guys would turn around and push her back down.

The ride took hours. Much of the trip, she was sure, was off-road. The whole time, none of them spoke to her, though they spoke of her quite a bit, appraising every part of her body they’d been privileged to see, and many they hadn’t.

“You think she’ll bruise back there?” one of them asked after a particularly brutal jounce.

“You care?” another had answered. “What is she, a piece of fruit?” They had all laughed at that one.

Lucy’s emotions hopscotched from terror to rage to self-pity; every time she tried to pray, for deliverance from these men, for protection, for a boulder to fall from the sky and crush their car or a cop to stop them for speeding, to be transported away with a wish, her thoughts became so jumbled that she lost track of where she was. There was no telling what they wanted with her, but there was no way it would be good. Men didn’t kidnap someone just to shower her with gifts and crown her a princess. At the least, she figured she was looking at being gang-raped. At worst, she would die in some awful fashion.

There was, of course, one other possibility—they might have kidnapped her for ransom money. If that was the case, they were going to be seriously disappointed.

By the time they stopped she was parched and nauseous. Her arms, cuffed behind her, had gone numb but they had ached for a long time before that and would again, she knew, when sensation came back into them. Her back and neck felt like they were on fire, and her legs were as sore as if she had run a marathon.

She thought she’d never get the taste of the gag out of her mouth. But then, there was a good chance that she’d die with it there. Who knew what these men had in mind for her?

When the SUV’s back was opened, she had looked up from her position on the floor, wide-eyed and fearful. She knew she probably looked like a scared doe, and she hated that. At the moment it was the best she could muster.

The car had parked somewhere out in the desert near an old shack, mud-walled with a simple tarpapered roof, dark in the long shadows cast by the sun dropping behind a nearby hill. Two of the guys pulled her from the vehicle, one muscular with curly gray hair in a yellow polo shirt and khakis, the other smaller, furtive-looking, with straight brown hair and a drooping mustache that gave him a dour expression. He wore a T-shirt with a silhouette of a deer in cross hairs and a gun shop logo on it, over camouflage fatigue pants. That one said, “There you go,” as they stood her on her feet. But when they let go of her, her legs couldn’t support her weight and she collapsed into the dirt. She felt tears spring to her eyes, though she fought to hold them in.

“Come on, get her,” the curly-haired guy said. The tone in his voice, and the speed with which the mustached guy and a couple of others jumped to obey, indicated to Lucy who was in charge here. The man had spoken with the confidence that his command would be carried out swiftly and efficiently. She wondered if he had been a military man in his younger days.

She had, on the ride here, determined to remember as many details about all of them as she possibly could. If she did manage to get out of this alive, she wanted to be able to put all these men in jail.

The mustached guy held the cabin door open while two of the others held her arms and helped/dragged her inside. The curly guy that she took to be their leader, or at least their Alpha dog, had gone in first, carrying an armful of rifles. The man on her right was older than the others, with thinning black hair turning to silver on the temple that Lucy could see when she turned her head. His prescription glasses had clip-on sunglasses attached. He wore a white guayabera shirt, though he was no Mexican, and black slacks. On her left was a younger guy, muscular in an orange tank top and jeans, with long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She thought about trying to pull free from their grip, but realized that she wouldn’t be able to take two steps without falling down until her legs recovered from the cramped ride.

The cabin, once they had her inside and a couple of lanterns lit, turned out to be nicer than she’d expected. The furnishings in the main room were primitive but adequate—a couple of old couches and some thrift-store chairs arranged around a stone fireplace, all atop an ancient wooden floor. Sleeping bags were rolled neatly and stacked near one of the couches. The guns were leaned against one of the bare adobe walls, less than twenty feet from her but far out of reach. A kitchen area held no modern appliances, but there was a camp stove and several coolers on the counters. Certainly there would be no indoor plumbing, but she hadn’t seen an outhouse, so that was still a mystery.

The curly guy had taken a beer from one of the coolers and sat in the most comfortable-looking of the various old chairs. Lucy’s escorts led her to one of the couches and shoved her down onto it. Springs stabbed at her butt, which was still an improvement over the past few hours. She rolled her head from side to side, trying to work out the kinks in her neck and shoulders.

Now she could see the last two guys. At first glance she’d thought they were all Anglos, though a couple were deeply tanned. But now she saw that one of them was black. He was extremely short, not much more than five-five, she guessed, but heavily muscled. His hair was cut short, in an almost military trim, and his small brown eyes bored into her like an oilman’s drill into the earth. He wore a dark blue T-shirt and dark shorts, like gym shorts, with expensive athletic shoes. The last man was the heaviest one of the bunch, with a big gut and a big build overall. She figured he must have topped two hundred pounds, probably more, and he wasn’t more than six feet tall. His hair was bright red and unkempt, as if he didn’t own a brush or a comb. His T-shirt, white except for the stains and a couple of torn places where pasty skin showed through, had to be an XXXL, and still when he sat down it rose up over the rolls of his belly. Like the guayabera guy, this one wore glasses, but in contrast to the older man’s heavy black plastic, this guy’s frames were wire. He looked like a computer programmer, Lucy thought, who had accidentally found himself far from his keyboard.

When they were all settled and those who wanted beer had some—except Lucy, who would have given anything for any liquid at that point—the curly-haired man, who sat with his bottle and examined her dispassionately, like a man looking at a used car, finally spoke. She’d guessed it would be him.