Back | Next
Contents

Chapter Seven

1

Penny and Dieter and Larry had made a big deal of synchronizing the new digital alarm watches they’d purchased in San Diego before driving into the desert. When it beeped her awake in the morning, an hour before sunrise, she knew that Dieter and Larry were also waking up at their own campsites. She shook Mick awake—he had been expected to be encamped in a motel, so he didn’t get one of the spiffy watches—and started a pot of coffee. While the water boiled, she went off into the desert to fulfill her toilet needs, and when she got back, he was up and preparing breakfast for them both.

They ate quickly and headed out to get their first task accomplished before the sun came up. Using satellite photos they’d purchased on the web, they had identified what looked like reasonably flat, bare spots in three different areas in the mountains. Penny and Mick hiked quickly to the one nearest their camp. The aerial view had been fairly accurate, it turned out. To be exactly the blank slate they wanted they had to clear away some stray rocks, but for the most part, it was a wide stretch of brown earth with no plants, flat as a city street.

“This is perfect,” Mick said.

“Not perfect, but close enough,” Penny replied.

“Close enough.” They set to work.

Within thirty minutes they were done. With light-colored rocks, to show against the brown dirt, they had spelled out NO MORE BOMBS in letters large enough to be seen from hundreds, maybe thousands of feet up. Dieter would be writing WAGE PEACE, while Larry’s slogan was WAR NO MORE. This kind of stone art, called geoglyphs or intaglios, was actually very traditional in this part of the world, with a string of images, maybe thousands of years old, still visible from the air, from Blythe all the way down to the Yuha Desert near the Mexican border.

Every day until they were caught, they would either change their messages slightly or make new marks upon the land, so that flyovers would reveal that there was still someone alive within the Impact Area. Their continued presence—and the attendant publicity surrounding it—would ensure that the bombs wouldn’t fall, and make people rethink the very idea of dropping bombs on human beings. At least, that was the theory.

As they walked back to camp, Penny touched Mick’s arm. “Hey, I’m sorry I shut you down last night when you wanted to talk, Mick.”

He looked at her and smiled. “No problem,” he said. “I’m getting kind of used to it.”

She didn’t know exactly how to respond to that—it was true, but not something she wanted to get into just now. Instead, she veered in a slightly different direction, focusing it on herself in a desperate attempt to keep him from thinking there might ever be a them. “It’s just something I do, you know? I kind of keep people at a distance, I guess. Keep walls up.”

“You have to let them down sometime, Pen.”

“That’s what they tell me. I guess I just haven’t found my time yet.”

“Have you tried?”

“Now and again,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s a defense mechanism, or what. I just don’t seem to be comfortable letting people get too close.”

Penny began to wish she’d initiated this conversation last night, in the dark. She kept her head down, picking out a path in the early morning light. But she felt the heat of his gaze on her, studying her.

“Maybe you should give it another shot, Penny. You might find that you like it.”

“I … I don’t know,” she said. “I like sex. I like physical contact. I like having people to talk to … except when I don’t. I know it doesn’t make sense.”

“Not a lot,” Mick agreed.

“And it’s not that I don’t want a relationship,” she went on. “But even if I’d found the right guy, which I haven’t, that takes a lot of … you know, time and energy. And I’ve just been too busy for that.” Which is true, she thought. But maybe a bit of a dodge all the same. And I don’t think I could get much more pointed without cutting his throat.

“So,” Penny said, changing the subject completely. Another wall, another defense. When it gets too personal, step aside. “So, you think this will work? Really?”

They had all agreed that it would—they wouldn’t have come if they didn’t think there was a reason to be out here, she knew. But thinking that on the floor of someone’s Connecticut Avenue apartment and thinking it on the ground in the middle of a live bombing range were two very different things.

“No,” Mick said. His honesty surprised her, but that was often the case with Mick. “Do I think it’ll end war for all time? Absolutely not. Do I think it’ll at least make them stop bombing one of the most beautiful spots in the American West? Maybe, at least for a little while. Maybe we’ll get enough publicity to make people pay attention to the Chocolates. Chances are if you went more than fifty miles in any direction you’d have a hard time finding anyone who had ever heard of this place. If we can capture some eyeballs, then the battle’s half done, right?”

“I suppose.”

“We want a world at peace,” Mick went on. “A world where the military doesn’t need bombs—better yet, a world where we don’t need a military. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, especially now. Especially with Bush and his friends firing up the war machine again. That just makes our job that much harder—but also, that much more vital. If we can get people to think about peace—to consider the idea that peace is a viable alternative—then we’ve done more than we could have hoped for.

“So I guess that’s the answer, Pen. Will this do what we want it to? Not a chance. But can it do things we haven’t even dared to consider? Absolutely it can. That’s why we’re here, why you and Larry and Dieter are risking having your heads blown off.”

“And you, now,” Penny pointed out.

Mick shrugged. “I guess so.”

She stopped and smiled. There had been a time when she might have given him a hug at that moment. But not anymore. Now it would just confuse him, make him hope for things that weren’t going to happen. She kept her hands, somewhat uncomfortably, at her sides. He wasn’t the man for her but that didn’t mean he wasn’t—if one could disregard his awkward social skills and grabby hands—a halfway decent man.

“Thanks, Mick,” she said, and she was surprised to realize that she actually meant it.

2

Ken knew that crime scene investigators could discover amazing things from careful examination of a scene where a crime had taken place or evidence had been abandoned. But he was no trained forensic technician, and the fire pit at the Slab was hardly pristine. It had burned the night before, as it did every night. It stank of old ash and burnt garbage and urine, as if the locals pissed on it at night to put it out. Likely they did, once they’d tucked away a few beers.

Oddly, the metallic taste remained in his mouth, and nothing that had happened the day before seemed to fit the previous pattern the magic had established. He’d never had it last more than a day, but it seemed to be hanging on. He wished it could do something about the stench of the ashes before him.

Carrie Provost stood nearby, watching him work. He sifted through the ash with a screened tray, much like panning for gold. Anything he found big enough not to fall through the screen went into one of a series of evidence bags. So far mostly what he’d found were charred beer cans, melted lumps of plastic, nails and screws, and one pair of pliers. He’d also come across two unknown chunks of something that might have been bone fragments. Of course, they could have been from a steak as easily as from a person.

“You think you’re going to find a fingerprint or somethin’ in there, Kenneth?” Carrie asked. “Because most people, they won’t touch that with their hands. When it’s not hot it’s filthy, if you know what I mean. All that dirt and muck and ash. People put their hands in there, they leave fingerprints all right—on everything they touch for the rest of the day.”

“Then it ought to be pretty easy to find out who put that skull in, right? I just follow the prints around the Slab.”

“I don’t think that’ll—ohh, you’re teasin’ me, ain’t you?”

“I’m teasing you. Tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’ll find much in here of value to anyone, especially me. But I have to look.”

“I did the right thing, didn’t I? Calling you when I found it?”

“You did the right thing.”

“And you don’t think it was me, do you?”

“I don’t think so, Carrie. I’m pretty sure if you’d put it in the fire pit, you’d have let someone else dig it out.”

“That’s the way I see it. Unless of course I was trying to fool you into thinkin’ that.”

“Well, you might have a point there,” Ken said, shaking his tray. A rock stayed in it, so he picked the rock up with tongs and dropped it into yet another evidence bag, which he carefully sealed. With a permanent marker he wrote the day’s date, the location, and “rock” on the bag’s label. It suddenly occurred to him that there were probably still firefighters and rescue workers performing this exact same process in Manhattan—sifting through the ash, looking for body parts. Except the Carrie Provosts they had to deal with were mothers and brothers and spouses, driven half-mad by tension and fear and hope. Goddamnit, Ken thought as tears welled in his eyes. He couldn’t even wipe his own face with his hands, encased as they were in latex gloves caked thick with ash and muck from the pit.

“You okay, Sheriff?” Carrie asked. Her concern sounded real and he didn’t bother to correct her nomenclature.

“Yeah, just got some grit in my eye.”

By the time he’d finished—“finished” being a relative term, which in this case meant that he had sifted as much crap as he was going to and was pretty sure he hadn’t found anything at all helpful—a small crowd had gathered to watch. He recognized Clyde Wills, a tattoo artist whose body was his own best calling card, old Hal and Virginia Shipp, Maryjane Peters, who lived with a loser named Darren Cook, Jaye and Jim Gretsch, and there were a couple of others who he couldn’t place. Peeling the gloves off his sweaty hands, he dropped them into a larger plastic bag and loaded up the evidence bags into it, then rose and turned to face the spectators.

“I’m here to investigate a possible crime,” he said. “A human skull was found in this fire pit. Do any of you know anything about how it came to be there?”

A murmur of negatives.

“Well, if you think of anything, or hear anything, let me know. I’ll probably be coming around to visit each of you privately, too. Only unlike Mr. Haynes, I won’t be bringing a couple of grand with me when I come, just a lot of annoying questions.”

That, at least, got some smiles. The entertainment apparently over, people started to drift away. The Shipps, having wandered by after showering in the natural hot spring tank, were the last to go. Virginia hovered almost as if she had something to say, but maybe it was just her way of letting Hal get some air, Ken speculated. There was a blank look on Hal’s face as he watched the proceedings, and when Ken looked at him, the old man stepped forward, his hand extended.

“Pleased to meet you,” Hal said. “My sister said you were a Sheriff.”

Ken caught Virginia’s gaze over Hal’s shoulder. Sister? The two had been married for decades, Ken knew. And Hal had known Ken for years.

“Pleasure,” Ken replied, reaching for the hand.

“Harold’s been like this all day,” Virginia said. “Exhausted, probably. Sat up all night, far as I can tell. When I found him this morning he was just lost.”

Ken got closer to Hal, and their fingers touched, and then they clasped hands firmly and Ken felt like he was holding a live wire. A shock went through his entire body, leaving his arm numb and shaking. Hal reacted with surprise too, and dropped Ken’s hand.

“Boy, we got a little static electricity going that time, didn’t we, Ken?” he asked.

“I guess so,” Ken said. Wherever Hal had been, he was back now.

“What brings you back to the Slab?” Hal continued. “Following up on that real estate guy’s pitch?”

“Oh, no,” Ken said. “He’ll follow up on that without my help. I’m actually doing real police work. You know anything about a skull that ended up in the fire pit?”

Hal looked like he was thinking it over. “No, no, I can’t say that I do. How long do you suppose it’s been there?”

“Well, that I don’t know,” Ken replied. “A little while, at least.”

“I sure hope you find whoever put it there, Ken. Best of luck to you.”

“Thanks, Hal. Appreciate it. You folks take care.” Ken gathered up his bag and equipment, touched the brim of his Smokey hat, and carried everything to his Bronco. His arm still tingled from the unexpected shock of touching Hal Shipp.

3

The men untied her for breakfast, allowing Lucy to eat a plate of scrambled eggs and a few pieces of steak they had cut for her, standing at the kitchen counter with only a fork. When the gag came off, the curly-haired guy who had done most of the talking so far did some more of it.

“None of what we talked about last night was negotiable, doll, so don’t waste any effort trying to talk us out of anything. Just use it to eat. You’ll need your strength, believe me.”

The other guys laughed at that. Lucy took his advice and downed the food as fast as she could, in case they changed their minds again. Someone put a cup of black coffee in front of her and she swallowed that too.

“Here’s the thing,” the curly guy continued. “We’re lousy hunters. We’re shitty hunters, if you want the technical word for what we are. But what we’re doing here, it’s not really hunting, you see? We’re sportsmen. It’s something entirely different. Hunting’s when you track something down so you can kill it. We have no interest in killing you—although we would if we had to. No, our interest is in tracking you, for the sport of it, and then using you. For the sport of that.”

Lucy nodded her understanding, shoveling in her last forkful of eggs. She ate fast, not knowing if they might at any moment decide she’d had enough time. She didn’t want to upset her stomach, but she figured she would need the fuel. When she had downed the last of the coffee, she realized she still had the fork in her hand.

“Can I keep this?” she asked.

“A fork?” the guayabera man asked with a chuckle. Today he wore a military-style olive drab T-shirt and camouflage pants, though, as did all the others, so she knew she’d have to come up with a different name for him. She noticed they’d been careful not to use their names in front of her. She took that as a positive sign—maybe they intended to let her live, after all. “You want to keep a fork?”

“You guys have the guns, so it seems only fair,” she said.

“Sure, darlin’” the curly guy said. He was definitely the decision-maker of the bunch, and the first one she’d plunge the fork into if she ever got the chance. “You can keep the fork. Enjoy it. You need to use the can before you get going?”

“Yes, please,” Lucy said, willing to delay the start any way she could. A few minutes sitting around in the shade while they stood outside in the sun, getting more and more anxious and disturbed—she would take that. She knew it wasn’t much of an advantage—it wouldn’t compensate, for instance, for the fact that her wedge sandals were just about impossible to run in. But it was something, and she had decided during the night that she would cling to any positives she could. Negative thinking was just going to get her dead.

When she got inside the outhouse, she realized, too late, that she should have asked for water instead of coffee for breakfast. Water would do her more good and stay with her longer. But it wasn’t like they’d offered her the choice—the coffee had just been put in front of her. If she hadn’t accepted it, she might well have gone thirsty.

Once again, she sat inside until they banged on the walls and insisted she come out. When she emerged, she was still cool, but the two guys who had escorted her out had already sweated through their T-shirts.

“Let’s go, bitch,” one of them snarled. He was the one with the drooping mustache that made him look perpetually miserable. Probably he is, she thought, or why would he participate in something like this?

She just gave him a smile. “Show some respect,” she said. “You don’t own me yet. Maybe you never will.”

“Oh, we own you, bitch,” he said. “Just like you were bought and paid for. You just don’t know it yet.”

“We’ll see,” Lucy said, trying to maintain a pleasant demeanor. It was fun to see how much it pissed this guy off when she was nice to him.

The other escort, the muscular one with the ponytail, seemed to understand her psychological warfare, though, because he grabbed the mustached guy’s arm. “Let it go,” he said. “She’ll find out soon enough.”

“There’s thirteen graves around here full of bitches didn’t think we owned them either,” the mustached guy said, ignoring his friend’s advice.

“Shut up, man,” the ponytailed guy said. “You too,” he said, directed at Lucy. “You just keep quiet.”

She nodded and smiled as they walked her back to the house.

The other men were scattered around the couches and chairs of the cabin’s main room, looking like they were ready to get going. “You know the rules,” the curly guy said. “You get away, you get away. You don’t, you’re ours. You get a twenty-minute head start. Any questions? Too bad. It’s really very simple.”

She had questions, but none that she would bother to ask. What the mustached one had let slip answered the most important one. If they brought her back here, not only would they use her but then they’d kill her. So she wasn’t coming back to this cabin, ever. Curly was right. It was very simple.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Nobody’s stopping you. Clock starts now.”

Lucy turned without a second look back and ran out the door. As soon as she was outside, she took off the sandals and looped them over her wrists. It would hurt to run on the bare dirt and rocks, but she’d make far better time barefoot. At the same time, she didn’t want to let go of the sandals, because they might come in handy later on.

She still had the fork, tucked into the rear pocket of her jeans.

Bare feet slapping the hot stones and fallen twigs and raw earth, Lucia Alvarez ran for her life.


Back | Next
Framed