The Slab

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Part One

Kenneth Butler

Chapter One

The raven’s wing feathers gleamed, black and wet looking in the morning sun, like ink freshly spilled from the bottle. The bird walked with a stiff-legged gait, wings held to its sides as if pinned there. To maintain equilibrium, just before thrusting its pointed beak into the warm, oozing mass at the side of the roadway, it raised one wing like a high-wire artist’s balancing arm and jabbed downward with its head.

The raven had no way of knowing—and its tiny brain would not have been able to comprehend, even had it witnessed the event—how this morning meal had come to be here at the edge of the desert road that ran north-south, skirting the eastern shore of the Salton Sea. The raven hadn’t seen the jackrabbit waiting patiently on the side of the highway at dawn, hadn’t seen the red 1974 Camaro that came barreling up the road twenty miles an hour faster than the posted speed limit, certainly hadn’t seen the driver of the Camaro spot the jackrabbit and swerve, aiming for the creature instead of trying to dodge it. The raven hadn’t seen the jackrabbit twist mid-stride, with a vain hope of avoiding the onrushing fender. The raven hadn’t even heard the whine of the Camaro’s engine as it disappeared up the road or the laughter of the driver and his passengers as the jackrabbit twitched and died in the sun’s first light.

The raven was only pleased to have found the meal. A bit of intestine clamped firmly in its beak, the raven hopped backward two steps, cocked its head both ways to look for predators, and then, catching sight of an approaching vehicle, took flight.

Below, the jackrabbit’s warm corpse waited for other scavengers—insect, avian, and mammal—to clean its bones. Death at the edge of the Salton Sea was nothing new, and certainly it was nothing that rabbits or ravens contemplated in any way. It simply was.

***

Carter Haynes had an office in a high-rise building in San Diego with windows overlooking the harbor, the bay, and the Coronado bridge. His receptionist was hot and wore skirts that showed most of her thigh, he drove a Lincoln Town Car, his condo had an even better view than his office, and his bank account was healthy. The national economy was taking a nosedive and terrorists had attacked American shores, but Carter was, so far, insulated from those events. And the President was talking about cutting capital gains taxes. Life was good.

Today, Carter was far from that office and that condo and the wife who shared it with him. He had, a short while ago, driven past a water tower on which a line was painted to delineate sea level, and that line was far above the highway. His Town Car’s A/C kept the valley’s heat at bay but the day would unquestionably be a scorcher. Vivaldi on CD isolated him from the outside world; the
Four Seasons
, moving through their progressive stages, formed a protective bubble around him as he buzzed through the unfriendly landscape. Here, in Southern California’s agricultural heart, Carter felt supremely out of place. He was city folk personified. He was a real estate developer.

The only sense that needed to extend out of the car and into the farmland was sight. He watched fields of alfalfa and lettuce and sugar beets whipping by, saw tractors churning earth, giant stacks of hay under green or blue tarpaulins, insects spinning crazily around the car in the wake of its passing.

At El Centro he pulled off the interstate and onto the 111, which would lead him up through Brawley and Calipatria, up along the western edge of the Salton Sea to his final destination for today, Salton Estates. This was not his first trip to Salton Estates, and it would not be his last, not by a long shot. Carter Haynes was about to become a regular visitor to Salton Estates. That was the bad news, as far as he was concerned. The good news was that the visits would, ultimately, pad his bank account even more, putting him in a position to buy the building his condo he was located in, if that was what he chose to do with his wealth.

Carter knew it was probably shallow, but hey, somebody had to be the richest man in San Diego. Currently it was probably someone in the computer business, or maybe biotech. It had been real estate in the past, though, and he wanted to see that it was again. Once he’d achieved that goal then he’d see about having kids, raising a family, all that other stuff that just got in the way of getting up a good head of greed.

Anyway, a man had to have priorities.

***

Through a finger-sized part in dusty Venetian blinds, Lieutenant Kenneth Butler of the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office, Salton Estates substation, watched Billy Cobb climb out of his squad car, hitch up his Sam Browne belt, and stride into the office. Deputy Cobb was tall, six-five, if his employment physical was to be believed, and watching him get out of a car always reminded Ken of a small piece of paper unfolding into a large one. This was only one of the ways that Billy Cobb amused Ken. Most of the others, though, Ken understood, had to do with what he considered to be Billy’s somewhat slow mental processes, and the fact that the ICSO had given Billy a gun and a badge sort of put a damper on how much entertainment value he could derive from that.

But, he reflected, in Salton Estates, with a budget roughly the size of the average high school sophomore’s allowance, you had to work with the tools you got. This substation was by far the smallest in the county, but Ken Butler had needed a Deputy and Billy Cobb was willing to work for him. And—so far, at least—he hadn’t killed anybody.

Ken tapped on his desk as he sat down in his swivel chair. Knock wood.

The front door opened and Billy Cobb let himself in. His uniform was clean and crisp, but Ken could smell the cloud of cologne Billy inhabited as soon as the Deputy was inside the door.

“What’s up, Boss?” he asked. The greeting was either ritual, or the only greeting Billy had ever mastered. Ken hadn’t decided which.

“You need to get up to the Slab,” Ken told him. “Carrie Provost called, says she found a skull up there this morning.”

Billy Cobb angled his head, the way tall people did sometimes. He’d have been a good-looking kid if he weren’t so damn stupid, Ken thought. Stupid people, it shows in the eyes. No spark there, no gleam of intelligence. Billy’s eyes were practically cobalt blue, but empty.

“A human skull?”

“What she says. Of course, would she recognize the difference if she was looking at a human skull or a monkey skull, that’s the question.”

“Or a bobcat or a fucking bighorn sheep,” Billy added.

“Just check it out,” Ken instructed. “Try to calm Carrie down, she’s a little freaked out. And if it is human, tag it, bag it and bring it here.”

Billy Cobb saluted lazily and turned on his heel. Ken Butler watched him go, then hoisted himself out of his chair and crossed to the door, opening it to get some air in and chase the smell of Paco Rabane out. He stood in front of the Sheriff’s office and watched Billy’s squad car roar off into the morning sun.

It would be another hot one, he knew. They always were, this time of year. September in California’s Imperial Valley. The mercury would push past the ninety-degree mark by mid-morning and rest in the low hundreds the remainder of the afternoon. That was a relief, though—in dead of summer the temperature could climb to a hundred and twenty, and passed the century mark an average of a hundred and ten days a year. The air outside held a lingering scent of dead fish from the nearby Salton Sea, mixed with the agricultural smells of the neighboring communities. The rich, fecund organic stink made even Billy’s cologne seem like a reasonable choice.

Ken raised a hand to a passing van that he didn’t recognize, a Dodge Ram 250, the bronze paint of which had oxidized to a reddish mud color, turned, and went back inside his office. Time to switch on the fan, try to get a jump on the heat before his mid-morning visitor showed up.

***

The van passed through the rather magnanimously titled Salton Estates in a heartbeat. Penny Rice barely noticed the collection of dusty, sun-bleached single-story buildings. The overall color scheme was monochromatic; except for the blue of the sky reflected in the sea, almost the entire landscape—mud and rocks and bushes and buildings—was the same flat ochre color.

One minute the van rumbled through desert scenery, the Chocolate Mountains hunkering on the right, a low muddy slope dropping to the gentle lap of the Salton Sea on the left, to the west as they drove up the north/south highway. They’d already dropped off Larry Melton, down toward the south end of the range, and Dieter Holtz near Niland. Now it was Penny’s turn.

Mick Beachum had the wheel, and the passenger seat next to him was empty. Penny used the back seat to spread out and do a final triple-check of her pack and everything she’d be carrying in with her, but she also avoided the front for another, more personal, reason. Mick had been getting more aggressive in his attentions lately—had, she was sure, arranged the drop points specifically so that the two of them would drive this last leg alone. She wanted the bulk of the seat back between them, a symbolic shield if not much of an actual one.

“You sure you’re okay about this?” he asked, craning his head to look at her in the back seat instead of watching the road. He had pulled off pavement a few minutes before, and they bounced over a rutted washboard track heading past the Slab and toward the Chocolates. “Not nervous?”

“Of course I’m a little nervous,” Penny replied. “You know, trespassing on military land and all. Not so much about getting bombed or anything—I’ve had bombs thrown at me before. It’s no fun, but I’m still here, right?”

“Can’t argue with that,” Mick said. He turned back to the front just in time to keep the van from lurching off the road. “You got your cell, your CB, and your GPS, so we can get to you in a hurry if we need to?”

“I’m locked and loaded.”

He was quiet for a few minutes, paying attention to the topo map unfolded on the passenger seat, comparing the lines on it with the jeep roads and washes that intersected the dirt path they drove on. He must have made the right choices, Penny reflected, because in a few minutes he had crossed the cement-banked Coachella Canal at one of the siphons and stopped before an invisible line marked only by signs on tall wooden posts. Here there was no wire fence, like the ones they’d found farther south when they dropped off Dieter and Larry. Penny read the signs, letters in stark black and red on a white background:

DANGER

LIVE BOMBING AREA

UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE

KEEP OUT

in English and Spanish, which did nothing to calm her nerves. She’d been vaguely jittery since they’d passed through Salton Estates, and more so since they crossed the side-road that led up to the Slab. Her destination lay on the other side of the imaginary line, inside the LIVE BOMBING AREA, and while it was true that she had a certain amount of experience with being shot at and having, as she put it, bombs thrown at her, thanks to the U.S. Army and, in particular, President George H. W. Bush and what she still believed was his deference to the gigadollars the petroleum business had put toward his election, it wasn’t an experience she was especially anxious to repeat. Now, of course, the man’s idiot son was in the same office, put there by the same petrodollar interests. And damned if there wasn’t another war in the offing, though this one far more vague and uncertain, against an enemy who just might be the guy next door.