Flat and level, the slabs were a perfect parking place for recreational vehicles. So that’s what they had become. But not primarily for tourists, although its population exploded during the winter months, with as many as two thousand snowbirds moving in and parking their mobile homes on any unclaimed stretch of cement or dirt. But during the hot months, most of the RVs here were, like the Shipps’, permanent fixtures. People lived on the Slab year round, even though there were no services like water or plumbing or electricity and they had to drive into Niland to pick up their mail, most of them, because it was cheap. As in, free. No one taxed them, no one came around to collect rent or mortgage payments. Anyone who could afford a broken-down motor home and a generator to power it and some food at the market in Salton Estates or Niland could live there. The Slab attracted society’s outcasts, retired folks, nudists, survivalists. A few drug dealers had set up shop there but they tended to be frowned upon, even ostracized. This was a white, conservative, blue-collar bunch, mostly, people tired of paying taxes and living by society’s rules. Imperial County’s only real concession to their existence was to send a school bus up, during the school year, to pick up the dozen or so young kids and haul them off to become educated.
One thing that had always struck Billy Cobb as strange, which he noticed again as he threaded between the RVs, was the yard sales. People hauled the most bizarre crap out of their homes and put it up for sale, and their neighbors bought it, putting their own crap up for sale to make room for it. This formed the basis, as far as Billy could see, of most of the cash economy of Slab society. Outside the Hudsons’ Winnebago was a folded ping-pong table with a sign taped to it offering it for sale for five dollars. Never mind that there wasn’t a doublewide on the Slab with room inside it for a ping-pong table. By the weekend, somebody would have bought it, and they’d set it up under the shade they made by jamming poles into the dirt a dozen feet from their trailer and stretching a sheet between them, and they’d drink beer and play ping pong for a couple of weeks until it got old, at which point they’d sell it to some other neighbor for the same five bucks.
In the past few days, Billy noted, patriotism had flourished like a fast-growing fungus among these people who had willingly turned their backs on governments large and small. Flags, those printed in the newspapers and taped to windows, small plastic ones hung on foot-long sticks, and even a few full-sized cloth ones, were everywhere in evidence, competing for space with animal skulls, faded Christmas lights that had never been plugged in, random graffiti and other attempts at personalizing the mass-produced housing these people lived in.
Carrie Provost’s mobile home was the same as most of the others, in that it looked like it had been decorated by a coalition of the blind and the insane. An army of ceramic beings defended its ramparts: gnomes, trolls, elves, deer, sheep, geese, ducks, rabbits, and a single pig, on the side that Billy could see on his approach. Most of them were cracked or broken in some way—a good number of them having suffered bullet wounds somewhere along the way—but the pig looked brand new, pink and shiny in the morning sun.
Aluminum foil coated every window, which was not all that unusual in the desert. It deflected the heat that would otherwise be magnified by the window glass. In Carrie’s case, though, Billy thought it might serve the secondary purpose of blocking the radio transmissions of invading aliens. He had heard that she’d covered the whole roof of the trailer with the stuff too, but had never cared enough to climb up and check.
From rusting wire hangers, she had hung a wide and bizarre variety of found items from the edge of her roof. Anything discovered in the desert seemed to be fair game. The hollowed-out shell of an ocotillo branch hung next to the skeleton of a small bird, next to the carcass of a television set with its picture tube blown out, next to a shredded tire. The overall effect was strangely disturbing, a kind of museum of litter and cast-offs that meant nothing to anyone but its curator. Billy was a little surprised that Carrie had made the effort to find a phone so she could report the skull, rather than simply hanging it from yet another coat hanger.
He parked the Crown Victoria in front of her place, got out, and sauntered up to the door. It had taken him a couple of months, once he’d decided on law enforcement as a career, to perfect the walk he wanted to use. He’d adapted it from a John Wayne walk he’d seen. He kept his legs somewhat stiff, moving at the hips, arms swinging freely. He felt that this walk gave the impression of a coiled jungle beast, ready to run or strike at any moment, and emphasized the spread of his shoulders and the depth of his chest, two features of which he was especially proud. The chest, in particular, was the result of many hours on a weight bench in the back yard of his parents’ home in Brawley. He didn’t know if Carrie Provost was watching, or anyone else for that matter, but it didn’t matter. The walk was second nature by now.
Carrie had a screen door pulled closed, with an open interior door. Billy tapped on the screen. “Carrie!” he called. “Ms. Provost! You here?”
“Coming!” Carrie Provost called from inside the mobile home. There was a clattering noise, like sheet metal hitting a concrete floor, and then she appeared in the doorway a moment later. “Sorry about the racket,” she said. “I don’t have room to turn around in here.”
“We can talk outside if you’d rather, ma’am. It’s Deputy Cobb.” Truth to tell, he’d rather she came out than to set foot inside her place.
“Oh, you’re here about that skeleton head?”
“The skull you found, yes ma’am.”
She stepped down from inside, pushing open the screen. Carrie Provost was in her fifties, and she looked like she’d lived in the desert the entire time. Her skin was dark and leathered, muscles stringy, hair bleached and limp. She had big stained teeth and her eyes had that perpetual smoker’s squint, as if there was always smoke drifting into them even when she didn’t have a cigarette going. She wore a baggy T-shirt with a Marlboro logo on it, a giveaway at some long ago county fair or supermarket promotion, and her thin legs protruded from cut-off jeans. Rubber flip-flops on her scarred and wrinkled feet completed the ensemble.
“Can I see it, ma’am? The skull?”
“Oh, sure, just a minute,” Carrie answered. She climbed the two steps back into the trailer. Every time the screen door flopped open the cloying stench of cigarettes wafted out, as if someone had emptied an ashtray into Billy’s mouth. He hated cigarette smoke.
Inside, there was another loud metallic rattling and then a muffled “Sorry!” from Carrie. A moment later, she reappeared with a plastic supermarket bag in her hands.
“Here you go. I put it in this Vons bag to keep it clean.” The skull’s outline could clearly be seen imprinting the hanging bag. She handed it to Billy, and he carefully set the bag down on the cement slab and opened it.
He was no forensic pathologist, but even through the scorch marks and black smudges of ash, the skull definitely looked human to him. A gold tooth shining up at him from the lower jaw clinched it. And the neat circular hole in the forehead, in combination with the larger, jagged one at the back of the skull, pointed to a cause of death. Billy felt his stomach flop like one of the Salton’s dying fish. This had just become a murder case, and he was the first officer on the scene.
“Looks like somebody punched his ticket, don’t it, Billy?” Carrie said. “That’s a bullet hole, right? I seen that on TV before. Exit wound out the back.”
“I’ll have to take it to the lab to be sure, ma’am,” Billy said, not wanting her amateur deduction to cloud his own professional judgment. “But it does look that way at a glance, yes.”
“Well, I’m no expert,” Carrie went on. “Just know what I see and hear, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, ma’am. Can you tell me how you happened to find it?”
“Well, you know the fire pit, right?”
The fire pit was where, most nights, residents of the Slab gathered around a roaring bonfire to talk, drink beer, sometimes watch the “fireworks,�
� which is how they referred to military bombing runs in the Chocolates, and generally enjoy their freedom from both taxation and representation. “Yes ma’am.”
“Well, I was over there last night, at the fire pit. Just talking and, you know, hanging out with the neighbors, having a couple of beers, I guess. Anyways, I got close to the fire once to poke a stick in it, shove some logs around and all. And that’s when I thought I seen it, or something anyway that didn’t look quite right. It was hot and all, though, so I just left it until this morning. Then I went back and poked through the ashes a little, and there it was. That gold tooth just about glowed at me. I pulled it out of there and took it home and then went down to the Lippincotts’ because they have a cell phone, and I called the Sheriff. You don’t suppose it was Arabs put it there, do you? You know, like in New York?”
It took Billy a moment to make the connection, since he didn’t recall any Arabs putting a skull into a fire pit anywhere in New York. But then he decided that she must have meant the Islamic terrorists who had attacked the World Trade Center.
“No, ma’am,” he assured her. “I don’t believe it was. Do you remember who was at the fire pit when you found it?”
“I didn’t say anything at the time, because, like I said, I wasn’t sure what I seen, entirely. But the usual group was there, I guess, the Hudsons and the Lippincotts, Jim Trainor, the Shipps, Rusty Martin, Lettie Bosworth, Hank Dunn…I guess the McNultys were there for a bit.” She stopped, chewed her lower lip for a second. “But wouldn’t it make more sense to make a list of who wasn’t there? I mean, if you put somebody’s head in a fire pit, you probably wouldn’t want to be there when it was found, would you?”
“That depends on when it was put there, I guess,” Billy replied. “You don’t know that, do you? Unless you check it every morning?”
Carrie Provost hesitated before answering, as if considering whether or not to give away a secret. “You find some great things in there once in a while,” she said finally. She pointed to a metal lunchbox suspended on one of the coat hangers. It was fire-blackened and the plastic handle had melted, but it was probably from the 1960s, and the cast of Gilligan’s Island was still recognizable on the side. “I found that in the fire pit once. And money, now and again, coins, you know, not bills.”
Billy found himself strangely moved by this side of the woman. A little frightened, but moved just the same. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. If you can write me out two lists—one of the people you know were there last night, and one of the people you know who weren’t there last night, why then, I’ll check them out and maybe we’ll get someplace.”
“I guess I can do that,” she agreed.
“I can pick them up at the meeting tonight, if that’s all right.”
“Oh, the big meeting.” She nodded. “At the fire pit, yeah. I’ll be there.”
I’ll just bet you will, Billy thought. As he headed back to his squad car, he shook his head slowly. The Slab, he thought. What a weird fucking place.
***
“Who was that?” Harold Shipp asked his wife. The world called him Hal, but she invariably went with Harold.
“Who was what?” Virginia countered.
“Who you just waved to.”
It took Virginia a minute to realize what he meant. That deputy, Billy Cobb, had driven past almost fifteen minutes before, and she’d “waved” as best she could with a tray of cold lemonades in her hands. He’d responded by tipping his hat, as best he could while driving a car. She had thought the whole exchange had slipped by Harold unnoticed, but apparently he had seen it.
“Oh, that was the Sheriff’s Deputy, Billy Cobb,” she said once she’d puzzled out what he was asking about.
“Cobb?” Harold repeated. “He’s from Georgia, isn’t he?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think he’s from El Centro or someplace. He’s a local boy.”
“Ty Cobb’s from Georgia. The Georgia Peach.”
“The baseball player?”
“That’s right,” Harold said, chuckling at some private memory. “And I knew a Cobb in the service, James Cobb, I think. He wasn’t from Georgia, though. Minnesota or Wisconsin, somewhere cold. He loved it when it was cold out, and damp. Sweated like a pig when the sun came out and warmed things up.”
“He wouldn’t like the weather here,” Virginia observed.
Harold looked around, as if he needed to visually catalog the air temperature, which was already in the high eighties. After a moment of that, he looked back at Virginia, and she could tell by his blank expression that he’d lost the thread of the conversation. He covered by lifting his lemonade to his lips and taking a long drink. She didn’t push it. She had learned by now that pushing it would only result in anger or an argument, and she didn’t want that. It was heartbreaking enough to see his memory go, bit by bit, as if, at eighty-one, his brain had decided to shut down cell by cell. She had grown tired of compounding the hurt by pointing it out when he couldn’t remember something or follow a conversation. All she wanted to do now, and until the day he died, was to protect him from harm or pain. So she shrugged off his lapses, and she took care of him as best she could.
“Lemonade tastes funny,” Harold said. He moved the cup away and a little trail of lemonade ran down from his mouth to his chin. She dabbed it with her finger, and his hand caught hers, his touch impossibly gentle, his workingman’s hands restored with age almost to the softness they must have had in his infancy. He held her hand to his lips and he kissed it. For the hundredth time that day—and it wasn’t even noon yet—Virginia Shipp’s heart skipped and swelled and broke all at the same time.
Chapter Two
Ken Butler had poured himself a second cup of coffee, but it had tasted funny and he’d opened the back door and poured it out into the little weed-choked lot behind his office. The Salton Estates substation was in what had once been a bait-and-tackle shop right on the main highway, and the bait shop owner had tried to grow a garden out back. When the Sheriff’s Office took over, they’d gutted the place except for a walk-in cooler that had been converted to a holding cell, and brought in a couple of desks and a teletype machine. Now Ken had a computer, a fax machine, and a couple of telephones to call his own as well. It was no high-tech wonderland but it did the job.
As he shook the coffee out of his mug he looked down the slope toward the cocoa brown waters of the Salton Sea, two hundred and some feet below sea level. After the little weed patch, there was nothing between here and the lake’s edge but mud. Even from here, he could see the glint of dead fish on the surface of the mud, and their smell was ever-present. He was used to that stink, though, and it wasn’t as bad as when the algae bloomed and decomposed or selenium and other chemicals in the water killed off birds by the thousands, so it wasn’t the Sea’s odor that had made the coffee taste funny. It was only now, thinking it through, that he realized it was a coppery taste in the back of his throat that had been with him unnoticed since he woke up this morning.
The taste was at once familiar and rare, like a species that a birdwatcher has seen pictures of many times but only glimpsed once in the wild. Rare, because it had only come to him four or five times—five, he corrected, because he could still enumerate them—over the course of his fifty-two years on God’s green Earth. The first time had been on that day in Vietnam, the day he still thought of as the day in the tunnel, though he’d been a tunnel rat and had spent a good many days in tunnels.
Ken also thought of that day in a different way—as the day the magic came.
And when he’d tasted this peculiar flavor since, like fresh pennies caught inside his throat, those too had been on days when the magic had come back.
Which made today suddenly crystallize for him. Something would happen today, something strange and miraculous. It might be good or bad, but it was on the way, and there was no dodging it. Just over a week ago bad magic had struck in New York and Arlington, Virginia, but that hadn’t been his magic
. He was sure there was no relation to the strange taste in his mouth now.
He started to look back over everything that had happened since he’d rolled off his rack, just in case it had already taken place and he’d missed it. But he didn’t get far at that before the front door opened behind him.
Glancing at his watch, he realized that it had to be his eleven o’clock appointment, right on time. He turned away from the Sea, closed the back door, and faced his visitor.
“Mr. Haynes,” he said.
“Sheriff Butler.”
“Lieutenant,” Ken corrected. “There’s only one Sheriff, and he doesn’t leave El Centro all that often.”
“Sorry, Lieutenant.” Carter Haynes stepped forward, hand out like a politician looking for a baby to kiss or a wad of cash to grab. Haynes dressed like a politician, too. His charcoal gray, pin-striped suit must have cost more than a thousand dollars—Ken knew that he, a man who tended toward boot-cut Wranglers when out of uniform, had a tendency to underestimate the cost of fine clothes—and the mere fact that Haynes wore a suit out here in the middle of the desert marked him for a fraud or a fool, in Ken Butler’s eyes. His thick black hair was carefully cut and combed off his face. He had intelligent brown eyes, widely spaced, and a fixed smile that looked genuine at the same time that it looked like a permanent feature. There was something a little unsettling in his skin, though, which was extraordinarily sallow, kind of unhealthy-looking beneath a layer of tan that looked so uniform is must have come from a salon rather than from being outside, and lips that were naturally as red as if they’d been lipsticked. An interesting study in contradictions, Ken thought. Carter Haynes came across as a man to be reckoned with.
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