The Slab (37 page)

“No trouble,” Hal said. “I feel, quite literally, stronger than I have in years. Maybe decades. You can’t outrun me.”

“You’re not leaving me here,” Penny said. “This place creeps me out.”

“You were kind of creeping us out,” Ken pointed out, already making his way back toward the cave’s entrance. “What was going on with you back there?”

“I’ll tell you on the way,” she said. “Let’s go.”

***

Penny explained what she’d seen in the cave as the Bronco bounced toward Salton Estates. Ken acted like he barely heard her. Whoever this Mindy Sesno was, she must have been important to him. But he nodded and grunted in the right places, and when she was done, he was silent for a moment, mulling it all over.

“I can’t claim to know what you saw,” he said after a time. “But it sounds right, somehow.”

“What do you mean?” Hal asked him. Hal had the shotgun seat while Penny rode in the back, leaning forward, her arms over the seats between the two men.

“The Cahuilla Indians used to live in the Salton Sink, back in the old days. When white settlers first came through here, but even before that, for who knows how long? Thousands of years, maybe. They were a pretty basic, primitive people. But we know they painted and tattooed themselves, like you described, Penny. We know they went mostly naked. And we know something else.” The Salton Sea filled the middle distance, out the windshield, and he pointed toward it. “The Salton is basically an accidental sea, an error in judgment made back in 1905 when the Colorado River was allowed to run free for two years and filled this vast, low space. But it’s not the first time there’s been water here. See that line on the hills?”

He pointed now at a distinct line, a little more than halfway up the hills on both sides of the Sea. The rock was noticeably darker below the line, lighter above it. “This land was all underwater once, part of the Gulf of California. As the Colorado River wore through the Earth, carving out the Grand Canyon and the like, it carried its silt down here and made the Delta that’s out there now, effectively damming it up. But even so, some years there was a lake here, Lake Cahuilla, it’s called now, even before the Salton Sea. It was bigger and deeper, and it came and went with very little notice. When the Colorado and Gila Rivers overflowed their banks powerfully enough, the lake came back, and it happened with what the Cahuilla Indians must have considered depressing regularity. Their oral tradition, at least, is full of it. They liked it when there was a little water around. They could farm, grow some crops, have plenty to drink. When there was a lot of water, though, they had to move to higher ground, sometimes in a hurry.”

Now the dirt road met the pavement of Highway 111, and Ken squealed out onto the roadway. A couple of cars and a big rig were in the lane ahead of him, but he hit lights and siren and bore down on them. “So the part you describe, Penny, about the water coming in and forcing them off their land, is accurate. This ‘gray man,’ I’ve never heard stories about him. The Cahuilla weren’t especially warlike, that I remember hearing about, so that whole thing with the stakes is a little strange.”

Penny shut her eyes, trying to remember not what she saw but what she felt about what she saw. “I had the impression that he was one of them, but not,” she said. “Not their God, but sort of—the way we tend to think of God as a guy, you know, a man who sits on a chair, that you could talk to if only you were in Heaven. It was like the gray guy was some kind supernatural entity, but not one who was strange or unknown to them. More like he was around a lot, and he was a nuisance. Not a nuisance, that’s understating it.”

She decided to tell them what she had really felt, watching him. Even though it scared her to think about. “It was like he was evil. Or maybe Evil, with a capital ‘E.’ The personification of it. Like they held him responsible for the bad things they’d done to each other, and wanted to punish him for that.”

“And they punished him by putting him in a hole in the ground?” Hal asked.

“Right. Not just under the ground, though. Under this magical slab, in a place where they knew the water would cover him. He was supposed to be kept under the sea. I don’t think these people would have had a safer place they could have put him. He’d have been at the bottom of the ocean, as far as they were concerned, for what? A generation? More?”

“I don’t know precisely how long the deluge lasted when it came,” Ken said. “Long enough to make it into their stories. And not the happy ones. If they managed to capture Evil and put it under the sea, that’d probably help explain why they weren’t happy ones.”

The town of Salton Estates rushed past the Bronco’s windows. Between the buildings, Penny caught glimpses of the Salton Sea, strobing in the last light of the sinking sun. Ken drove like a maniac, whipping into the oncoming traffic lane of the two-lane highway when someone wouldn’t get out of his way fast enough. Capture Evil? Penny thought. Somehow, evil had gotten out. She doubted whether there had ever been a time, in the history of mankind, when evil had been entirely encapsulated in a single individual, even such a big, freaky looking one as the gray man. Maybe before people had come along to spoil things there had been no evil, but there certainly was now. If the Cahuilla had managed to seal away evil beneath their stone slab and their rising sea, then more power to them. But they hadn’t locked it away completely or forever.

A minute later, Ken brought the Bronco to a shuddering halt in front of a small house. The stucco had been pink once but was faded and cracked. Colorful curtains covered the windows and the little patch of gravel in front, where a couple of golden barrel cacti and an ocotillo grew, was well manicured. A window air conditioner dripped onto the gravel near the house, and a couple of dandelions grew up where the water fell. Not far away, a couple of mushrooms had sprouted, white with red, like the ones they’d seen in the cave. Ken jumped from his seat as soon as the engine died and ran to the door. He pounded on it, calling Mindy’s name. When no one answered, he reared back and kicked the door, next to the knob. Wood splintered and the door gave way, and Ken disappeared inside.

***

Hal turned in his seat and looked at Penny. She had changed in the few short hours he’d known her, he realized. When she had first walked into the Sheriff’s office she’d been distraught, an emotional train wreck. Surely she’d been through a lot since then—discovering that others shared the same kind of magic that had touched her life; finding that the body of her friend was gone, maybe eaten by impossibly fast-growing mushrooms; somehow seeing or being transported through the mists of history to the distant past. And yet, she looked better than ever—clear-eyed, alert, almost happy. She was a pretty young woman, even reminded him a little of Virginia when they’d first met. It was the intelligence about her eyes, he thought, and the way she held her mouth when she was about to say something and then decided against it. So many people, they never decided against it. Just said whatever flitted into their minds.

She ticked her eyes toward the little house. “He going to be okay?” she asked.

“He’s plenty worried about that young lady,” Hal answered. “I think she means a lot to him.”

“Because he didn’t talk about her all the way down here.”

“I’ve never heard him talk about her,” Hal said. “That’s how I know how much he thinks of her.”

“Have you known him long?”

“Ken? As long as I’ve lived on the Slab, I guess. But really known him, just the last day or so. Since the…”

“Since the magic kicked in,” she finished.

“Right. Since then.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it? Feeling like you’ve known someone your whole life when you barely know their name.”

“Funny?” he repeated. “I guess. But nice, too. We could all use more people to be close to, right? I mean, really close.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “I suppose we could.”

Hal looked back toward the house, its door gaping open on a dark interior. “And Kenneth, I think he had his heart set on a closeness he may never get now.”

***

He knew she was dead as soon as he got inside the front door. The a/c was blasting and had been for some time, cooling the house far below the temperature at which he knew Mindy, a lifelong desert dweller, was comfortable. The air conditioner had helped to dilute the smell of her, but it still hung in the air.

He found her in her bedroom, nude, laying on her back on top of sheets which she had soiled in death. A ligature around her throat—the sash of a pink silk robe he saw wadded in a corner—and hemorrhaging there instantly revealed how she had died. He fought back tears at the sight of her body, so vulnerable in its nakedness, so slight. Trying to maintain an air of professionalism, he looked at the condition of her body—the body, he corrected himself, keep it straightforward, it’s a crime scene investigation now.

Cyanosis had blued her lips and the tips of her fingers. Her eyes were open, covered with a filmy glaze. The body had paled as blood settled to her back, lividity showing when he raised one shoulder and looked at the blotchy redness on her back. The corpse was cold and the muscles were stiff, so rigor mortis had set in.

Touching Mindy, though, he couldn’t hold back his personal feelings for her any longer. He sank to his knees beside the bed and awkwardly cradled the rigid form in his arms, getting just a whiff of her perfume from her hair, the scent that had always appealed so to him when he leaned close to her in the store or spoke to her on the street.

As he held her and breathed her in, a dozen images of Mindy flooded his brain, but then they fell away and he was here, in this room, but frantic, anger and fear and pain fighting for primacy in him and he knew he was looking out through Mindy’s eyes. “If you want the old man so much why don’t you just go to him?” a voice raged at her, and then a hand slapped her, backhanded her, and she took a deep gasping breath until the hand resumed tugging on the silken sash, cutting into her throat and then she couldn’t breathe, and “You’d be perfect together, you’re both used up old ladies!” and then tighter, he pulled the silk still tighter, and she tried to twist, to writhe out of his grasp but her strength was already going, arms and legs and hips not responding to the desperate commands her mind sent, black dots filling her vision, swarming before her, blocking everything.

Blocking his face.

Billy Cobb.

Ken put Mindy Sesno back down on her bed, gently, as if she could tell. He reached for his radio, but then stopped himself. The coroner would need to examine the scene at some point, but Ken didn’t need a complete crime scene investigation. It didn’t matter what traces there were of DNA evidence, hairs or saliva or semen or bits of fuzz from the carpeting in his car—which, he realized, would be from the Bronco anyway since Billy had been driving that—because Billy Cobb would never stand trial for this crime.

He wouldn’t live that long.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Kelly moved from window to window like a gangster in a bad hostage movie, a second-rate Bogey checking for John Law to come sneaking up on him. Rock’s windows were covered with curtains made from torn strips of fabric: old sheets, a Gold Medal flour bag that must have been older than he was, a flattened cardboard box he’d simply taped over the window with masking tape. But in the movie the gangster would have worn a gray suit and hat, not stained and torn desert camo trousers with a sweat-rimed olive drab tee, and he’d have carried a snub-nosed .38 instead of the utilitarian killing machine that was Kelly’s M-4.

“She’s out there,” Kelly said. “I know she is.”

“How do you know she hasn’t just called the cops?” Terrance asked him. Vic thought it was wishful thinking on Terrance’s part—with everything their Dove had put them through, it might have been easier to just deal with the criminal justice system.

“She wouldn’t have barged in on Ray’s wife if she were going to do that,” Kelly replied. “No, she’s gone vigilante on us.”

“So you guys are just gonna camp out in my place until she comes after us?” Rock asked.

“We’re staying put until full dark,” Kelly said. “At which point I’m going to go out and kill Hal Shipp, that traitorous bastard. After that we’ll figure out what to do about the bitch.”

Vic didn’t like that idea. He’d always been friendly with Hal, even though the man was so much older than him. But he couldn’t see any flaw in Kelly’s reasoning—it pretty much had to be Hal who had planted the skull. Hal’s mind was going, this last year or two, and he supposed Hal hadn’t even remembered that he was supposed to keep the Dove Hunts a secret. Although, in that case, why wouldn’t he have just gone to the law or started talking about it to his friends and neighbors? Sticking the skull in a fire pit sounded like someone trying to tip people off while still keeping his own identity secret, and that didn’t point to a person who couldn’t think clearly. Downright clever was what it was.

But he was already losing his patience with Kelly, and didn’t want to open up another can of worms with the man. They were both on edge—all of them were, and they were all armed, and it wouldn’t take much, he thought, penned up in this tiny trailer, to start a firefight.

That was the last thing any of them needed.

***

Carter Haynes stared in the rear-view mirror of his Town Car, his attention suddenly caught by motion in the far distance. Behind him, lost in darkness now, was the Salton Sea. But what had struck him was an enormous flock of birds—egrets, maybe, what looked like thousands of them—taking wing from its surface and flying up to where the sun’s last rays, angling in over the hills of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, on the Sea’s west side, caught their white feathers, an explosion of light on an otherwise dark backdrop.

It had taken him and Nick Postak all day to pull together the men and machines they needed. Now they all rolled in a convoy, up the low grade toward the Slab, the huge tires of flatbed trucks chewing up the dirt road, two rented vans full of men leading the way and Carter’s Town Car bringing up the rear. Bright headlights illuminated the desert scrub, brutalized and dirt-caked by the amount of vehicle traffic this stretch of road carried. As the pink of the western sky purpled toward indigo, they arrived at their destination.