The Slab Read Online Free PDF Page B

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,