The Slab (4 page)

Carter nodded. “I figure it can’t hurt.”

“I don’t have any doubt that they’d let you down off the Slab alive, even if we weren’t there to keep an eye on things. But we’ll be there, just the same.”


“That would be good,” Carter said, his tongue running across his unnaturally red lips. “That would be really good.”

Ken was about to say something else when a screech of brakes outside the office interrupted him. He glanced out the window, and saw only a cloud of dust hanging on the still air, then the tall shape of Billy Cobb loomed into view, heading for the door.

When he burst through it he held a stained plastic Vons bag in his right hand.

“That it?” Ken asked him.

“It’s human, Ken,” Billy said. “And look. It’s—” He stopped himself, noticing Carter Haynes for the first time. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your meeting. It’s just—”

Ken pushed himself up from the desk and crossed the office. He gestured to the bag. “Let me see.”

Billy held the bag open so Ken could look inside. He did so, lips pressed together, silently analyzing the bag’s grim contents. He felt a sudden tug of urgency. Haynes was just a rich guy, a roadblock in the path of him doing his real job, and he wanted the guy out of his office.

When Ken had seen enough he looked up at Billy. “Get it down to El Centro, to the Coroner’s office.”

Billy paused, looking at Carter Haynes and back at Ken as if waiting for an introduction.

“Today,” Ken added.

Billy tossed off his standard salute and left.

Returning to his desk, Ken said, “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Carter said graciously. “Everything okay?”

“There might be a bit of a snag to your meeting tonight, after all,” Ken warned him. “Looks as if we may have an ongoing homicide investigation up at the Slab.”

Carter’s eyes widened. It was barely perceptible, but it was the first indication Ken had seen that the man could be made to lose his cool. When Carter Haynes spoke again, there was new tension in his voice.

“Do you think that’s absolutely necessary?”

Ken just looked at him for a moment. “It’s a homicide investigation,” he said. “It isn’t something I can just sweep under the rug.”

Carter looked around the office, waving a hand to indicate the surroundings. “You have a nice little set-up here, in a Mayberry kind of way,” he said. “Just imagine what you could do if you had an actual tax base here in Salton Estates. Luxury homes, real property taxes. You and Deputy Fife could buy some new trucks, upgrade that PC, maybe hire someone to answer the phones, you know?”

“And I wouldn’t object to that,” Ken countered. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stall this investigation, if it turns out to be warranted.”

“There’s a chance it won’t?” Carter’s tone was hopeful.

“There will have to be some questions answered,” Ken replied. “I don’t know that it will turn out to be a full-fledged murder case. That’ll depend on the lab results.”

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” Carter said.

“Somehow,” Ken observed, “you don’t strike me as a man who relies a lot on luck.”

***

Four of them had made the annual Dove Hunt for all thirteen years. Vic Bradford had joined two years in. One of them, Ray Dixon, was a relative newcomer, with only seven years. And this was the second year without Hal Shipp, who was still missed by everyone.

Vic Bradford took mental stock as they cruised the towns of southern Riverside County. By now, it was all ritualized, done the same way every September. The first day, they said goodbye to their wives and families and piled into someone’s car, this time Cam Hensley’s Navigator. They drove up to the cabin they kept in a remote valley outside Blythe, unloaded their gear and groceries, and got down to some heavy drinking. The booze and storytelling went on most of the night, and finally they crashed for a few hours. The next day, bleary-eyed and hung over, the Dove Hunt began in earnest.

When they’d first invited him to take part, Vic had felt a tangle of conflicting emotions. He had just turned thirty-two, still young but starting to think, now and again, about thirty-five and then the inevitable slide into the forties and beyond. He was past that now, of course, and he realized that the forties weren’t as bad as he’d feared back then. Now, though, it was his fifties that loomed, and that really scared him.

He had felt honored to be asked. He’d heard that the other guys were going out hunting, of course. Then once he learned what it was really all about, he was appalled and intrigued and excited all at once.

He was only peripherally a part of their crowd, he thought, until he realized that not having obvious social ties was part of the whole idea. Cam Hensley looked like an accountant, with his balding, graying hair and thick black glasses, but he was one of the wealthiest men in the Valley, owning tens of thousands of acres of prime farmland. The thing that bugged Vic about him was his forehead, bulbous, as if he had extra brains inside there trying to get out. And while his hairline had receded almost to the point of nonexistence, right at the top and center of that huge forehead was this patch of black hair, an island of hair, unconnected to the rest, that Cam refused to shave. He kept it trimmed, which was new—until a couple of years ago, he’d grown it out and tried to connect it to his other remnants of hair by creative combing. But still, it looked like an aberration and Vic wished he’d just shave it already.

Silver-haired, tanned, and fit, Kelly Williams owned a Caterpillar dealership in El Centro. Kelly maintained an air of mystery about himself, though he occasionally talked about intelligence work in Central America during the eighties. Vic was never sure how much of that talk was true and how much of it was self-aggrandizing bullshit. He had no real reason to doubt Kelly’s word, but the self-aggrandizing part was undeniable. Kelly Williams considered himself a leader of men, and if this group was any indication then maybe he was.

Terrance Berkley and R.J. Rocknowski were closer to Vic’s social status and income level. Vic and Rock actually lived right on the Slab, while Terrance had a mobile home in a park in Niland, almost on that town’s border with Salton Estates. He paid for his berth, but at least he had plumbing and power, and since he lived with his wife and her twelve-year-old son from her first marriage, things like phones and an address were more important to him. With his Marine-length haircut and broad shoulders, Ray Dixon looked like the soldier Kelly had once been, even though he’d never been in the military at all. Ray worked at the sugar plant in Brawley and lived down there, in a second floor apartment, with his wife. They had come together at their kids’ Little League games—Cam and Terrance both had boys—at church functions or political fund raisers, at planning board meetings, at boat rental docks on the Salton, at the liquor store buying suds. There hadn’t been any master plan, any grand design. They were just a group of men who ran into one another around the area, found that they had common interests, and decided to put together a hunting trip.

But that first one had not gone according to plan. No one could say, or would say, whose idea it was, though Vic suspected Kelly Williams. Kelly was the one, after all, with the special ops experience. In his shadowy Latin American, he implied, he had developed certain tastes that were hard to satisfy in
el Norte
. And he had the strongest personality; he could talk the other guys into nearly anything.

Strike the “nearly,” Vic thought. He had already proven that, thirteen times over.

They told stories about the various Hunts, usually the same stories every year. But the guys who had been there that first year wouldn’t talk about it except in the vaguest possible terms. They wouldn’t describe exactly how it had gone down, and that secrecy carried over from year to year. People who heard about the Hunt asked questions and made a variety of assumptions—that the men spent the week in Nevada, gambling and visiting brothels, that they went down to Mexico for the same thing but without so much of the gambling. Those who went on the trip were sworn to secrecy, though, and their close-mouthed satisfaction just made the speculation that much wilder. Vic was able to make some guesses about that first time, based on how the ritual had played out since he’d joined, but they would only be speculation.

As they always did, the second day after the hard night of drinking and shouting and laughing and, this year, bitching about the Muslims—the bonding time that was required if any of them were to get through this—they cruised the back roads of Riverside County, heartened by the sight of American flags fluttering in yards and from businesses and plastered to windows everywhere. Dove season was over, legally—it ran from September first to the fifteenth, then kicked in for another forty-five days in November. But they didn’t want real dove hunters to be out while they were, so they habitually waited a week or two after the season closed. The delay just made the anticipation sweeter, and they didn’t really give a damn if they brought home any birds.

Somewhere out there was their Dove.

This year, it was Ray Dixon who spotted her. It happened in Mecca, a few miles above the north shore of the Salton Sea.

“There!” Ray shouted anxiously. “Right there!” He pointed toward a mercado called Leon’s. Its brown stucco wall was striped by the shadows of three date palms. Signs in Spanish filled its windows, completely obscuring any view in or out.

Stepping out of the door, oblivious to her fate, their Dove had a six-pack of Corona in one hand, and a plastic bag with some various dry groceries in it dangled from her other wrist. A thick tangle of rich black hair framed a pretty face, with huge brown eyes, smooth olive skin and a button nose. Her full lips were pulled into a private smile, as if she’d just shared a joke with the shopkeeper inside. Heavy breasts stretched a form-fitting striped black and white tank top that tucked into tight brown jeans. Her sandals had thick wedge soles—too high for walking around town in, Vic thought, but they made her look taller than her five-six or so. All in all, she was a lovely girl, the prettiest one he could remember.

Cam, behind the wheel, slowed down as he passed her.

“Not bad,” he said, appraising her as he drove by.

“What are you doing?” Ray demanded. “You’ll miss her! Go back!”

“Patience, my son,” Cam said. He made a hard right at the next intersection. Heading around the block. “If it was too easy, it wouldn’t be a Hunt.”

“I’d just hate to miss her,” Ray insisted. “I mean, she was hot.”

“I got to agree with you there,” Rock said. “That body, she could do porn.” The ability to do porn was, Vic had learned, the highest compliment Rock could pay a woman. Angelina Jolie, Nikki Cox, Ashley Judd, Dolly Parton, they were all tops in Rock’s book because they could do porn. Not that they would, but they could. Janet Reno, Laura Bush, Margaret Thatcher, and Betty White all shared a less elevated status, as women who could not do porn. It was, in its fashion, refreshingly non-ideological. Rock would vote for a woman for President, as long as the woman was built like Pam Anderson and her running mate carried the moral authority of Ron Jeremy.

Cam kept quiet, hanging another right, and then another. The woman had crossed the street and covered most of a block in the time it had taken them to circle around. The houses here were tiny stucco constructions on small lots, jammed right up next to one another. Cam gunned the engine a little and pulled up behind her. “See?” he said. “Put a little sport into it.”

“Look at that ass,” Ray Dixon said.

Vic had already done so, and found it exceptional.

“Oh yeah,” Rock said. “She could be a star.”

“Lookouts?” Cam had always been a practical man.

“Clear on my side,” Terrance Berkley called from the front passenger seat. Terrance pretty much needed a bucket seat to himself or his bulk would spread all over the bench—he was a big, sloppy side of beef of a man with wild red hair that looked like he styled it with a blender.

“Nobody over here,” Kelly Williams reported from the driver’s side rear. Just the sound of Kelly’s voice intimidated Vic—it was low and gravelly and he always spoke with a tone of supreme authority. He was glad that he and Ray Dixon sat in the second row buckets, while Rock rode on the rear bench with Kelly. Rock’s muscular arms were crossed, his ponytailed head whipping from side to side as he watched for witnesses.

With the street clear of visible onlookers, Cam gunned the Navigator again and pulled up ahead of the girl. She was aware of the SUV’s presence now, and became even more so when Cam cut in front of her, one wheel jouncing up onto the sidewalk. Doors opened and men spilled out in a practiced move.

“Excuse me?” The girl said. She started to say more, but Rock slipped behind her and clapped a strong hand over her mouth. Cam grabbed her ankles and upended them. Within seconds, a gag had been tied across her mouth, her wrists had been bound with plastic handcuff strips, and she’d been dropped in the Navigator’s luggage compartment. Cam hopped back behind the wheel and squealed away. No one had shown up on the street during the process.

Vic turned back to look at her, writhing on her side, eyes wide with terror, a film of tears and sweat sheening her cheeks.

The Dove Hunt was on.

Chapter Three

Darren Cook slept well into the afternoon, waking only when the heat building up inside his Fleetwood Jamboree finally got to be too much, and then he clawed his way out of sleep, slick with sweat. His dreams had been troubled and convoluted, filled with images of carnage. Bodies piled upon bodies as in a concentration camp or a natural disaster of some kind, blood everywhere, blood and brains and raw, ragged flesh as far as he could see, a smell like spoiled meat clogging his nostrils.

His thrashings had torn apart the bedding and he woke with his face pressed against the thin, bare mattress. He pushed himself off the bed, and headed into the tiny, cramped head where he took a loud, lengthy piss. He alternated between scratching his ever-expanding gut and finger-combing long blond hair that had encountered neither water nor shampoo in several days. Finished at last, he made his way through the empty camper to the kitchen. The coffeepot was cold and empty.