Chapter Three
1
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 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.
“Maryjane!” he shouted, surprising even himself at the fury in his voice. “Why the fuck isn’t there any coffee?”
A moment later the screen door opened, and Maryjane leaned inside, a glistening green bottle in her hand. Already at the brew, Darren thought.
“It’s like a thousand degrees in there,” Maryjane pointed out. “I didn’t think you’d want a hot drink, for God’s sake.”
“Give me a beer, then,” Darren growled, determined to keep his mad on.
“You’re standing right in front of the fridge, Darren.”
Darren started to answer, but stopped himself, opened the refrigerator. Inside he found an old half-carton of milk, some eggs, a moldy square of cheese, part of a loaf of bread, and some lettuce so brown it looked like ancient parchment. No beer.
“Oh, yeah,” Maryjane said, and he could hear the pleasure in her tone. “This is the last one.”
He lunged for her but she dodged him easily, ducking back out of the RV. He followed her onto the slab outside, unmindful of his nakedness. Maryjane laughed at him and handed him the beer. “For fuck’s sake, put some clothes on,” she said. “Nobody wants to see that.”
He ignored her. “Why’d you let me sleep so late for?” he demanded.
“What’s the difference? Not like you have a job to go to or anything. You did, maybe we’d have some groceries in that icebox.”
She was right about that, he knew. He sometimes worked as a mule, carrying dope across the Mexican border for some dealers he knew down in Calexico. More often, it was Maryjane, though, since women could usually cross with more ease than men. And when there was no money there, she could go to San Diego or up to Vegas, work shaking her moneymakers in a strip club for a week or so and earn some cash that way. But it had been a while since either of them had brought home so much as a dollar. It was looking like time to get back to it.
He took a long pull off the beer, finishing the bottle and hoping she didn’t spit in it before she turned it over. Then he turned, still naked, and hurled the empty into the desert, listening to it crash against unseen rocks with a certain satisfaction.
That reminded him of another image from his dreams, one that he’d forgotten about until now. Maryjane herself, lifeless on a cement floor someplace, with a neat round hole between her wide-open eyes. The image, he knew, was horrible, and he was chilled to realize the distinct pleasure he got from seeing it.
He noticed that Maryjane was watching him, a strange expression on her face that he could only read as flirtatious. “You’d better get inside,” she said, gesturing toward his crotch. “I don’t know what’s got you so revved up, but maybe we should go use that thing instead of letting it go to waste.”
2
Penny Rice hiked for a couple of hours, enjoying the sunshine on her face and arms, the clear sky, the surprisingly lush foliage around her, standing in stark contrast to what could be found on the public side of the line. The creosote bush on this side grew tall and thick. Spiky green wands of ocotillo towered over her, and the sides of the hills were coated with dense cholla forests, their thousands of needles glowing in the afternoon sun. In just an hour of hiking she had seen the tracks of various critters: rabbits and snakes and kangaroo rats and coyote. Ravens, turkey vultures, starlings, the occasional dove, and assorted little gray birds she always thought of as LGBs flitted around her, hopping from plant to plant or catching afternoon thermals. For a brief while, a tiny gray lizard dogged her steps, keeping to the shadows underneath the lowest fringe of bushes. She was glad to have some time alone, far from telephones and televisions, the constant psychic scream of the internet, the righteous indignation of talk radio’s insane ideologues.
The thought of finding herself in a war zone again unnerved her a little. She had volunteered for the Army during a period of relative peace, planning, in the aftermath of her mother’s long hospitalization and then death, to serve her hitch and then use the GI benefits to fund her education. But then Iraq invaded Kuwait and she found herself on a troop transport headed for the Persian Gulf. They’d landed at night, and she remembered stepping out of her temporary barracks the next morning—she had been born and raised in the moist, fertile American Southeast, and had never seen a desert except on TV—and thinking that she had never imagined a place where everything was the color of sand. Now, however, she knew that not all deserts were like that—that, in fact, her first impression of the Gulf’s deserts had been mistaken, too. Life was there—you just had to look a little harder for it.
Hiking had always been one of life’s pleasures, as far as she was concerned. It was the most egalitarian pursuit she could imagine, beyond class—the poor could do it was well as the wealthy. The physically challenged, she supposed, those in wheelchairs, or with infirmities that made walking difficult, probably couldn’t take the enjoyment that she did from it. But even they could find pleasure in being outside, rolling in a chair or slowly perambulating down a city sidewalk or a park’s pathway.
Penny had been raised in southern Virginia and in South Carolina’s low country. She had grown up hiking through swampy forests of cypress and pine, or on Appalachian hillsides in Virginia and West Virginia. She hadn’t, in those days, thought of being outside as a political activity. It wasn’t even something she talked about much, especially after her father died when she was thirteen. He’d been the one who had introduced her and her two brothers to hiking. His wife, Penny’s mom, had never been strong, never been the outdoorsy type at all, and that was a special bond she and the boys had with their father. After he was gone, she alone kept it up. He’d never politicized it, though; to him, it was about being outside, being alone, finding peace in the simple physical act of planting one foot in front of the other in some wild setting.
War had ultimately caused her to rethink that. The massive devastation of pristine desert landscape she saw during Desert Storm had politicized the outdoors for her, made her come to think of wild places as treasures that needed to be saved—as islands of peace in an increasingly violent world. Returning to civilian life after serving in the Army there, her newfound political beliefs had resulted in a quest, finally bringing her to the Washington, DC headquarters of the Wilderness Peace Initiative.
And that association had proved, she believed, to be the most meaningful of her life, finally leading her to this action in California’s Chocolate Mountains. Which could, she knew, turn out to be the most dangerous thing she’d involved herself in since the Gulf War. But she believed in the cause, and that made a little danger worthwhile.
Besides, she had yet to see any signs of bombing. No craters, none of the unexploded ordnance she’d been warned about. Instead, she was finding that, at a glance, at least, the theory they were working with seemed to be true—that instead of being destroyed by the military’s bombing activities here, the landscape—except for the precise spots where bombs had fallen—was protected from the day-in, day-out damage caused by civilians. She hiked along a dirt road presumably used by military personnel when they needed to come into the range for some reason, but unlike the dirt roads in the public lands outside the range, this one wasn’t intersected by other roads every couple of miles. There was no litter in sight. No bullet holes marred the tall stalks of agave or the occasional golden barrel cactus. This was like seeing what the southern California desert must have resembled sixty years ago—before World War Two, before the postwar boom that had fueled the paving over of much of the state.
She stopped at the top of a rise, glancing back at the ground she’d already covered and ahead at the taller hills she had yet to reach. She wanted to get deep inside the range before setting up camp and addressing her actual purpose for being here. Dry-mouthed, she uncapped a canteen and took a deep pull.
The water tasted sour to her. She swished it around in her mouth and spat it into the red dirt. She held the canteen up, sniffing from its mouth. Smelled okay. She took another sip, swished, swallowed.
The taste seemed somehow familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
She screwed the cap back on the canteen, clipped it to her belt, and resumed walking.
3
Billy Cobb always felt a little uneasy when he went down to El Centro, a little intimidated. Sharp-uniformed officers, their cars clean and polished, their boots shining, populated the coroner’s office. El Centro was quiet, compared to those human cesspools of Los Angeles and San Diego to the west, but compared to Salton Estates it was a bustling metropolis. Sheriff’s officers here saw genuine action. Drugs, murder, grand theft auto. Real police work was done here.
By contrast, Billy often felt like a glorified messenger boy.
Leaving the coroner’s office—he had been summarily dismissed after dropping off the skull—he tried to soothe himself by enjoying his favorite aspect of the job, the feeling of his gun against his hip. He had never fired it in the course of duty except on the range, but it pleased him to know it was there. Not many people, in these modern times, got to walk around with a gun strapped to their belt.
He had met a deputy in a bar down in Brawley who had been in an actual firefight, a few years back. Half a dozen punks with semi-automatic weapons had been cornered after trying to rob a farm equipment dealer’s payroll. Six squad cars had responded, and the resulting gunplay had destroyed a good chunk of the dealership’s inventory. Billy had listened with rapt fascination to the man’s story, seeing in his mind’s eye each bullet spanging off metal, shattering glass, driving through flesh and bone.
That was the story that had inspired Billy to apply for a job, to become a Sheriff’s Deputy. Of course, being assigned to sleepy little Salton Estates wasn’t part of his original plan. But it would work out all right, Billy figured. He was an optimist. There would come a time when he would see some real action. He had even considered enlisting in the military, in the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There were terrorists to kill, and an experienced law enforcement officer might be just the guy to go and kill them. But that would mean giving up his place in line to take over the Salton Estates substation. He’d just stay where he was, he decided, and God help any terrorist who showed his face in Imperial County. Billy could wait—there was no big hurry.
And there was no hurry to get back to Salton Estates now, he decided as he unlocked the squad car. Lieutenant Butler would need him for the meeting on the Slab tonight, but if he took an extra hour or so to get back, no harm done. He knew a street corner where a man in Sheriff’s tans could get his knob polished for free, just about any time of day, or at least that’s what the local guys claimed. Billy had never tried it. He thought it was about time he did.
4
Ken Butler ate his lunch out of a brown paper bag, sitting at his desk. He was working his way through Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose, reading whenever he had a few spare minutes in the office, so he pulled that from his desk drawer and flipped to his bookmark. He knew he should be out in the community, having lunch at Mary’s, maybe, a shop on the shore that sold bait and beer and burgers. But the burgers at Mary’s always tasted fishy to him, and the fish in the Salton were poisonous, like eating straight mercury right out of the thermometer, as far as he was concerned. The trade-off was that he could socialize with the locals. The downside was that he’d have to socialize with the locals, listening to their war talk. If he heard one more overweight fifty-year-old man threaten to pick up his 12 gauge and buy a ticket to Afghanistan, he thought he’d go berserk.
All things considered, he was just as happy to sit in his office with a book and a turkey sandwich. The turkey tasted off, but he’d known that it would. Just one of those things you had to put up with, days like this one.
He’d only managed a few pages when the phone rang.
“Sheriff’s office,” he answered, somewhat grudgingly, replacing the bookmark between the pages.
“Ken, it’s Henry.”
Henry was Henry Rios, Ken knew, up in Riverside County, at the Thermal substation. He sounded tense. “What’s shakin’, Henry?”
“Hard to say for sure, man,” Henry replied. “There’s been a reported abduction of a young woman, Mexican, down in Mecca. Eyewitness saw it from inside his living room, looking out the window during his afternoon talk shows. But he’s not a very reliable eyewitness—reason he’s home during the day is because he drinks too much to hold a steady job. Anyway no one has reported a missing person yet, so I don’t know how seriously to take it.”
“Could be no one would notice she was gone until later tonight, when she doesn’t come home.”
“That’s true,” Henry agreed. “That’s why I’m calling around. Just want people to be on the lookout for a dark Lincoln Navigator with several white males and a Mexican girl in it. Just in case.”
“You have a description of her?”
“Of ninety-nine percent of Mexican women everywhere,” Henry said. “Late teens, early twenties. Black hair, olive skin. Wearing dark jeans and a tight top. Healthy build.”
“By healthy, you mean lean and toned, or stacked?”
“Way the witness reports it, a regular brick shithouse.”
“Got it. I’ll take a look around,” Ken assured him. “I find anything I’ll let you know.”
He shoved the remains of his sandwich back into the paper bag and tossed it into the office’s mini-fridge. Glancing at his watch, he swore. Almost three, and no sign of Billy since he’d been sent down to El Centro. The boy had better be back before I have to go up to the Slab for that meeting, he thought, or there’ll be hell to pay.
He cast a sad eye toward the little refrigerator that contained his lunch and headed out the door. The Bronco waited outside, parked in what little shade a spindly cottonwood provided, with a windshield screen on top of the dash for a little extra insurance. Even so, it was hot inside, metal parts searing like a branding iron when he touched them. The wheel was covered with a leather wrap that kept it cool enough to touch, but drawing the seatbelt across his chest was like walking into a flaming branch. He cranked up the air and backed out of the short driveway.
There wasn’t much town to Salton Estates, but there were hundreds of square miles of desert around. Thousands, if the abductors—if there had, in fact, been an abduction—had time to get out of the area. If he had taken a pretty young Chicana, Ken figured, he’d head for the Mojave Desert. It’d take a military operation to find someone out there who didn’t want to be found. And from Mecca, it’d be a short trip, up the 111 through Palm Desert and Palm Springs to Interstate 10, then east a ways. The last thing you’d do would be to head south down the 111, which would trap you between the Salton Sea and the bombing range, eventually dropping you onto Interstate 8 or skipping that and continuing down to the border towns of Calexico and Mexicali.
That would be the only reason he could imagine they’d come his way—if their final destination was Mexico. But that made no sense either—why snatch a Mexican girl in the States just to take her into Mexico? The idea of a bunch of white guys in a high-end SUV trying to hide anonymously on that side of the border was laughable, anyway.
As he pulled out of his reserved parking space in front of the office, catching a glimpse of the Salton shimmering in the pounding sun, he thought again about that real estate developer, Haynes. Maybe the guy could make his plan work. But then again, maybe not. This whole region had been, since the first white man came through looking for the Seven Cities of Gold, beset by people trying to turn empty desert into profit.
The Salton Sea itself was a corporate accident, an inadvertent sea formed by the California Development Corporation, when greedy developers had tried to turn the desert into farmland—which they would control, of course—by diverting the flow of the mighty Colorado River and irrigating the wastelands of the Imperial Valley. But they hadn’t reckoned with the massive loads of silt the Colorado carried, filling up their waterway far too soon. In a misguided attempt to direct the water to where they wanted it, they cut a new channel around the silt-blocked area. Heavy flooding in the winter of 1905 broke through their canal, diverting the river’s entire flow into their little valley, flooding homes and Indian settlements and the very land they were trying to farm, filling the bed of the ancient Lake Cahuilla, and creating the largest lake in California. Birds liked it, when it didn’t kill them. Since the same philosophy—basically, Ken thought, “It’s our water, so fuck you”—had resulted in the damming and diverting of so much Colorado River water that Mexico barely got its legal allotment and the river’s Delta had pretty much dried up, the birds on the Pacific Flyway needed someplace to go. The Salton was what they got, poison or no.
It was poison because the Salton was a lake without an adequate means of water exchange. Water flowed in from the Alamo River and the New River that came up from Mexico, bringing with it untreated or barely treated sewage, industrial wastes, and who knew what else. A truck had fallen into the river once and its paint had been stripped by the New River’s toxic sludge by the next day. The truck’s cargo—human waste—hadn’t even added enough toxins to the water to be considered a problem.
Locally, runoff from irrigated Imperial Valley farmlands trickled in, carrying large amounts of fertilizer to poison the Sea even more. With nowhere to flow to, the water in the Sea only evaporated, leaving behind massive amounts of salt and concentrating the other chemicals in the lake. The Valley provided a third to a half of all the winter vegetables consumed in the country, so there was probably some merit to irrigating the place, but the cost to the Salton was high.
In addition to those who tried to profit by controlling the flow of water, there were others trying to pull gold from the ground. At the southern end of the Chocolate Mountains, below the military Impact Area, a foreign gold mining operation took millions of dollars out of the earth while paying only a tiny fraction in lease fees and nothing in royalties. Farther east, near the Arizona border, another company was trying to start a gold mining operation on land sacred to the Quechan Indians—the only stretch of earth on which windows existed, or so they claimed, that enabled them to walk to other worlds, or ten thousand years into their own past. But in spite of those ten thousand years of history, a century ago the Bureau of Land Management had taken away the part of their reservation that included that sacred ground. In its final days, the Clinton administration had denied the mining company’s application, but now it was being reconsidered—and since the new Interior Secretary had hired members of the gold company’s law firm for her staff, chances were good that the short-term profit of the powerful would win out over the religious beliefs of the Quechans.
Ken hoped that Carter Haynes had carefully considered the difficulties that the Valley often threw at those who would profit from it, though. As the California Development Company had learned in the twentieth century’s first decade, the desert had a way of subverting the will of mere humans.
He drove for an hour, covering the main road and the side streets, but there was no Navigator to be seen, no crew of white guys in any SUV with a Hispanic hostage. Finally giving up, he turned around in the parking lot of the Corvina Café, just below the Riverside County line, and headed for the office, hoping that Billy had made it back.