The Water Knife (10 page)

Sunny panted eagerly. Lucy shoved her pistol into the back of her jeans. “We’re not going for a ride,” she told him.

Sunny gave her a disgusted look.

“What?” Lucy asked. “If you want to go back inside, fine. Or you can stay outside. I’m going to sweep. We’re not going for a ride.”

Sunny crawled under the truck and flopped down. Lucy got the dust broom. Sunny watched her with accusing eyes.

“You and Anna,” she muttered.

She started sweeping off the sandstone slabs of her patio, obliterating the pale dunes that had settled into angles of repose around the edges of her home. Clouds of grit enveloped her, making her sneeze and cough. She could almost hear Anna scolding her for being too casual with her lungs.

In the beginning Lucy had been religious about using her dust mask and changing its filter, religious about shielding her lungs against wildfire smoke and dust and valley fever. But after a while it was hard to care about invisible airborne
Coccidioides
fungi anymore. She lived here. This was her life. A dry hacking cough was simply part of that.

She could remember her shiny REI dust mask dangling around her neck when she’d first arrived in Phoenix. Straight out of J-school and ready to dig up her first big scoop.

Christ, she’d been wet.

With the patio cleared, Lucy propped a ladder against the house and climbed.

From the flat expanse of the roof, Phoenix spread before her: traffic and suburbs, a dust-draped sprawl of low-rises and abandoned single-families slumping across the flat desert basin. Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Scottsdale—the remains of a metropolitan sea that had flooded the open basin, filling it with houses and arrow-straight boulevards until they lapped against the saguaro-studded mountains at its rim.

Sun blazed down, hot and relentless, glaring through a muddy veil
of powdered soil kicked up by commuter traffic. Even on a clear day like this, the sky seemed truly blue only directly overhead.

Lucy smeared muddy sweat off her brow and wondered if she even knew what true blue looked like anymore.

It was possible that she stared up at the sky, and called it blue or gray or tan, and it was none of those colors. Dust eternally hazed the air here, and if not dust, then the gray smoke of California forest fires.

Maybe she’d forgotten the color blue, and it existed only in her imagination now. Maybe she’d been down in Phoenix for so long that she now made up names for all sorts of things that no longer existed.

Blue. Gray. Clear. Cloudy. Life. Death. Safety.

She could call the sky blue, and maybe it was. She could call her life safe, and maybe she’d survive. But really, maybe none of those things existed anymore. Blue was just as much a mirage as Ray Torres and his patronizing smile. Nothing lasted in Phoenix.

Lucy got to work, shoveling storm dust off her collectors, exposing black silicon surfaces from GE and Haier to the sun. She spat on the glass and rubbed pits and scratches muddy clean, scrubbing longer than necessary, knowing that she was being obsessive but working still, because it was easier to clean house than face what she’d seen the night before and what it meant for her now.

“Why are you calling?” Anna had asked.

Because my friend had his eyes pried out, and I’m afraid I might be next
.

She couldn’t get the memory of Jamie out of her head. A disassembled person, lying right outside the Hilton 6. She had photos on her camera. She hadn’t even realized that she’d snapped them when she was at the scene. Sheer reflex.

The first one had almost been too much. She’d set the camera aside, overwhelmed by what she’d captured, but still they were there. The abrupt end to the story Jamie had been trying to write for himself.

She remembered him sitting in the Hilton 6. Polished and confident, saying, “I’m going to be a goddamn fucking fish, Lucy. I’m going to have a swimming pool and boy toys wall to wall, and when I get my Cali visa stamped, I am never coming back.”

His life, mapped out.

Jamie was too smart to stay stuck. And too clever to stay alive.

She remembered him, too, the night of the deal. Jittery. Smoothing his coat. Straightening his tie. Stone sober but trembling with anticipation. She remembered sitting in his tidy one-bedroom, there to record the moment.

“You should let me come along,” she’d said.

“I like you, Lucy, but no. You get your exclusive
after
I get my money.”

“You’re afraid I’ll try to steal your score,” she’d said, making him look over sharply.

“You? No.” He’d shaken his head. “Every other person in the universe, yes. But you, no.”

She remembered him reknotting his tie again and again, something that he normally did without thinking but that now had him so fumble-fingered that Lucy finally came over to help him.

“Thank God for crypto currencies,” he’d said. “I couldn’t do this kind of deal before. Not without raising flags. I should probably be making an offering to the patron saint of Bitcoin and CryptGold when it’s all done.”

“You would have just used regular cash,” Lucy said.

That had made Jamie laugh. “You think it’s that kind of deal?” he asked. “You think this is the kind of thing where I walk out of a hotel room with a couple suitcases full of nicely pressed hundred-dollar bills? Girl”—he shook his head—“you think too small.”

“How big is this?”

Jamie smirked. “How much would you pay to keep a city alive? Or an entire state? What would you pay to keep the Imperial Valley’s agriculture from turning into a dust bowl?”

“Millions?” Lucy hazarded.

That had made Jamie laugh again. “And that, Lucy, is how I know you will never betray me. You think small.”

The rumble of an engine broke Lucy’s thoughts. It was the same truck as before. A predatory unmuffled grumble. She pulled her gun.

Down in the yard, Sunny started barking. He was racing back and forth along the chicken-wire fence as the red truck eased down the alley. It slowed, a red gleaming monster, scoping Sunny and the house and her.

A shark, cruising its prey.

Lucy crouched and aimed. Sunny’s barking was incessant—he was going crazy. Lucy was afraid he’d jump the fence and go after the truck.

The truck rolled slowly past. It didn’t stop. Just kept going.

Lucy straightened, watching it recede down the alley and pass the squatter camp at the far end of the block.

She wondered if she should have taken a shot.

The engine noise faded. Sunny stopped barking and retired to the shade on the porch, looking pleased with himself. Lucy kept waiting, listening, but the truck didn’t circle back. The lesson was clear enough, though. She couldn’t sit paralyzed any longer. She could either make decisions for herself, or someone else would make them for her.

Lucy climbed down from the roof and shook the dust off her clothes. She ran her fingers through her hair and brushed out Sunny’s fur. She let him inside, stripping off her own clothes in the dust room, carefully leaving the storm’s residues outside her home.

Sunny watched her expectantly as she put on indoor clothes, then sat down before her computer.

The first taps were hesitant. Embryonic words. A sketch, a history. And then a cascade of letters, tapping faster now, her fingers rhythmic, finding the shape of her story, all the words she’d held back from writing for over a decade because she’d been afraid. All the words, all the accusations, pouring out of her and onto the page, describing the shape of the vortex that was swallowing them all.

She wrote about bodies. She wrote about Ray Torres and the swimmer he’d warned Lucy off from so many years ago. She wrote about how he’d ended up, slumped over the wheel of his truck, after being gunned down. A man who knew too many things about too many people, and who knew where the bodies were buried. She wrote about Jamie and the discarded body that he’d become. She marked him as a person, as an individual, flawed and crazy and passionate. Horny and angry and brilliant. She marked him as someone who might last beyond his dreams and ambitions, a person who would not be erased despite his killers’ attempts to tear away his face.

When Lucy was finished, she posted her words along with a single
photo of the dust-storm hillock that had been her friend. A tombstone. A marker. A chance for Jamie to be something more than another bit of rubble in Phoenix’s collapse.

She stood and stretched and went and got a beer from her tiny fridge. She went outside to the porch, calling Sunny after her. Was surprised to find the sun was already setting. She’d written the day away. Lucy toasted the bloodred ball of fire as it sank over the Phoenix sprawl. Toasted Jamie.

Don’t write about the bodies. It’s not safe
.

“Maybe I never wanted to be safe.”

It felt good to say it out loud. She didn’t want safety. She wanted truth. For once, she wanted truth.

Nothing lasted forever, so why should she try to fight her own end? Phoenix would fall as surely as New Orleans and Miami had done. Just as Houston and San Antonio and Austin had fallen. Just as the Jersey Shore had gone under for the last time.

Everything died. Places were blown away, or drowned or burned, and it just kept happening. The equilibrium of the world was shifting. Whole cities were losing their balance as the ground they’d taken for bedrock shifted beneath them and knocked them right on their collective asses.

Maybe it would just keep happening.

Maybe it would never end.

So why run? If the whole world was burning, why not face it with a beer in your hand, unafraid?

For once, unafraid.

Lucy switched to tequila. She drank in the darkness, grateful for nightfall and the cool hundred degrees it brought.

She wouldn’t lock herself away, and she wouldn’t run. She would remain here, comfortable in the smoke and the dust and the heat and the dying.

She was a part of Phoenix, just like Jamie and Torres.

This was home.

She wouldn’t run.

M
orning for Maria came as gummy eyes, smoky air, and the hack of Sarah’s dry cough.

Beams of desert sun cut the dimness of the basement, revealing lazy dust motes, concrete floors, and cracked plastic pipes for water and sewer overhead. The arteries and veins of a house that had died years before.

Maria didn’t need to check Sarah’s phone to know she’d overslept. It was time to be awake, time to be out. Time to be selling water.

Maria’s few clothes dangled from nails beside the tank tops and ass-hugging shorts that Sarah used in her work. A stuffed frog that Sarah had gotten out of an abandoned house and given to Maria, right after her father had died, looked down on her. A pink plastic hairbrush of Maria’s that they shared lay on a concrete ledge, carefully arrayed beside their frayed toothbrushes and old barrettes, and a couple tampons that Sarah was saving in case she needed to work during her period.

A scarred red-and-glittery wheelie suitcase held the rest of their clothes, a lot of them coming from Tammy Bayless, before she and her family had gone north. The girl had been their size and just given them the suitcase full of clothes before her father could sell them off.

“Just take them,” she’d whispered in the darkness.

The next day she’d been gone with the rest of her family.

Maria rifled through the suitcase and found clothes that were sort of clean. Some days she and Sarah would hang them up and beat them with sticks to get the dirt and dust out. Other days Sarah would sneak their underwear into the hotels where she worked and sometimes wash things when men let her shower.

Maria pulled on shorts and an
Undaunted
T-shirt, ignoring memories
of when her mother had washed clothes in a machine and left them folded on her bed.

Maria climbed the steps and unlocked the door to the basement. The sudden glare made her eyes tear. Outside, the smoke was thick, a brown haze in the cloudless sky. Ash scents clogged the air. The wind was blowing in from California and the burning Sierras, for sure. Maria waited, peeking out the door, watching.

Not much stirring yet. Just the few people with work and places to go: Texans who’d been lucky enough to get work at the Taiyang Arcology like her dad, people who knew complex plumbing or could use industrial cutters, or who knew algae reclamation. The Nguyen family was up—she could smell cooking noodles in a broth, the smoke of burning two-by-fours curled gray over the fence next door, lazy in the still air of the suburb. It looked safe. A good time to be on the move.

Maria closed the door again and padded back down the stairs to crouch beside Sarah. Shook her. “Come on,” she said. “We got to go. Got to get all this water over to Toomie’s spot.”

Sarah groaned. “How come you don’t just do it?”

“You want your money, you got to sweat for it.”

“This water scam is your thing, not mine. I’m just an investor.”

“Yeah? Gimme your sheet.” Maria yanked it off Sarah’s body, revealing pale flesh and the red nylon panties that the men liked.

Sarah curled up, skinny legs pulled up tight, tan lines glaring rings on her thighs. “Come on, Maria, why you gotta be like this? Gimme time to wake up, at least.”

Maria poked her in the ribs. “Score’s only half done, girl. Come on. We got to turn our water into money. Can’t just sit on it. And I want you with me to walk it over.”

Maria made her voice as authoritative as she could, pretending she had a plan and was in control. But it made her nervous, staring at that pile of water they’d scored. Knowing the days of life it would support. Knowing that people would be inspired to just take it from her. She needed this water turned into cash. Compact paper that she could shove into her bra and have a hope of protecting.

“Vultures are circling, girl. We got to do this now. While everyone’s asleep. Before Toomie heads out for work. Toomie’s our ticket.”

Sarah sat up, grabbed her sheet back, and pulled it over her head. “I was
sleeping
.”

She reminded Maria of a kitten that she’d found mewling inside a banged-up trash can. The kitten hadn’t had a mother, probably because some needleboy had caught and cooked her, and there this little kitten was, curled up and begging for something it would never get.

Maria had petted the tiny creature, understanding its need—the wishing for milk that would never come, the desperate desire to have someone come back and take care of you—but you couldn’t just lie there praying for rescue.

Sarah, though…Sarah acted hard, but the girl was soft. Even when she peddled ass, she expected someone to be taking care of her. Kept thinking the world gave a damn about her worthless life.

Sarah. That kitten. Maria’s father. They were all the same.

Maria gave Sarah a hard shove. “Come
on
.”

Sarah sat up, her blond hair tousled, squinting. “I’m up. I’m up.” She started coughing. Spasms wracked her. Coughing up the smoke and dryness that had settled in her chest overnight. She reached for one of the bottles of water.

“That’s our money you’re drinking,” Maria reminded her.

Sarah gave her a dirty look. “It’s my money, you mean.”

Maria made a face back, then grabbed their Clearsac and climbed the basement steps.

In the smoky dawn light, she hustled across red gravel landscaping, flip-flops slapping her heels, to where her father had dug a latrine inside the house’s back shed. He’d called it an outhouse, something to civilize their lives, so they wouldn’t just be shitting in the open like all the other Texans who couldn’t find a Jonnytruck in time.

Maria closed the door and looped string over a nail to lock it. She crouched over the trench, wrinkling her nose at the stink, opened the Clearsac, and peed into it. When she was finished, she hung the sac on a nail, then finished her business, wiping with ragged squares of newsprint that she and Sarah had torn from
Río de Sangre
. She pulled up her shorts and hurried out, carrying the half-full Clearsac, glad to be back out in dawn’s open smoky air again.

“You got my rent?”

Maria yelped and spun, almost dropping the Clearsac as she went down.

One of the Vet’s thugs was leaning against the outhouse, partly shielded by the door. Damien. Thick blond dreds and a lazy eye that looked wrong at the world, a face pierced with bone and silver, and white skin that had burned and tanned and burned so many times that he was a mottled peeling patchwork of deep golden browns and sun-scorched red.

Maria glared at him. “You scared me.”

Damien’s cracked lips split into a sly smile. Proud of himself. “Awww, you got nothing to fear from me, girl. You don’t got nothing I want—except rent.” He paused. “So? You got it?”

Maria got to her feet, carefully holding the unspilled Clearsac. It was frightening to find him standing there like that, a chilling reminder that just because the Nguyens didn’t raise an alarm didn’t mean she was safe.

Maria’s father might have helped them out by driving Mrs. Nguyen to the Red Cross tent in the back of his truck when she’d been septic with her pregnancy, but that didn’t mean they owed Maria now. Not if it meant crossing someone who could wipe out their family.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that,” Maria said. “I don’t like it.”

Damien just laughed. “Poor little
tejana
don’t like being sneaked up on.” He sauntered over to her. “Call it a free lesson,
putita
. Lots of people sneak better and hurt harder than me.” He chucked her under the chin. “Swimming pools are full of girls like you. Free advice? Think like a rabbit and put your damn ears up before you come out of your hole, right?”

Why did she trust him? Maria wondered. It wasn’t like he was her friend. There was no doubt that if she didn’t make rent he’d toss her out, or drain her blood and black-market it, or sell her ass to make up his quota for the Vet.

And yet these days, when she prayed to be protected, more often than not it was Damien’s face that was in her mind. Damien wasn’t her friend, but he also didn’t hate Texans. Whatever sicknesses he might have, they weren’t the kind that fed on the likes of Maria. She took what she could get.

“You got my money?” he asked.

Maria hesitated. “I still got till tonight.”

“I guess that’s a no?”

When Maria didn’t answer, Damien laughed. “You think you’re getting your rent in the next twelve hours? You peddling that tight little
culo
of yours without telling me?”

Maria hesitated. “I don’t got cash. I got water. Whole bunch of liters. My rent’s in water till I sell it.”

Damien smirked. “Oh yeah. I heard some little
putas
made out big at the Friendship pump. Got themselves a whole red wagon full of Red Cross water. I ought to tax you, just for bringing it in.”

“I got to sell it, if you want our rent.”

“Maybe I take your pay in water right now. Save you the effort.”

“This water?” She held up the Clearsac, full of dark yellow pee.

Damien laughed. “I don’t drink that shit. That’s for Texans.”

“Once I squeeze it, it’s just water.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

He’s just testing me
, Maria thought. But still she was afraid. Damien could just take all her water if he wanted. All that water that she’d gotten so cheap and was supposed to sell so high…

“If you pay me what they’ll pay at the Taiyang, you can have it now,” she said.

“What they pay at the Taiyang?” he laughed. “You really think you can bargain with me?”

She hesitated, trying to measure the threat. He had to be here because he’d heard about the water. But if she sold to him, she’d just end up breaking even, back to broke again, instead of getting ahead. He watched her, smiling slightly.

“Please,” she said. “Just let me sell it. I’ll pay you as soon as I get back. You know I can make more over by Taiyang. Workers got cash, don’t mind spending it. I’ll give you a cut.”

“A cut, huh?” He shaded his eyes at the sun, where it was rising and burning through the smoke and dust of morning. “Lemme think about it…gonna be a hot one. Lots of money to make, lots of drinks to serve…” He grinned. “Okay, sure. You want to sweat like that, you go run your play.”

“Thanks.”

“I always say I can be reasonable. But if you really want to make
money, you should work for me. We dye your hair blond, I can put you in with the Chinese construction guys. They’d buy your time, easy. Or maybe I run you past the Red Cross tents, make some introductions. Meet ourselves a nice humanitarian doctor.” He smiled. “Every girl wants to marry a doctor, don’t she?”

“Cut it out,” Maria said.

“No hard thing, girl. You go peddle water at the Taiyang, if that’s what you want. But you better pay off Esteban first, make sure you’re kicking up to the Vet.” He quirked an eyebrow. “He’s over at the Vet’s place.”

“Can’t I pay you here?”

“Vendors ain’t my turf. I take your money—Esteban don’t know you. If I tell him some
tejana
might be peddling water, he don’t know which one, don’t know you paid or not. Best you take it up to him. I don’t need that fucker banging down on me. I got enough trouble from him as it is.”

Sarah came up the stairs out of the basement.

“Oh. Hey, Damien.”

Damien smiled. “Just the
güera
I was looking for! You have a good night? You got rent?”

Sarah hesitated and her eyes darted to Maria. “I—”

Damien made a noise of disgust. “God damn, Maria. You got my girl’s cash wrapped up in this, too? You’re worse than a pimp, taking her cash like that.”

“We got the water,” Maria said. “We’ll get you your money.”

“You got rent due is what you got. Plus her kickback to me. So hurry the fuck up and go hustle.” He motioned at the streets. “And remember, I’m the good guy here. If I got to call in muscle, you’ll end up at one of the Vet’s parties, and you know you don’t want that.”

Maria could almost see the shiver of fear that enveloped Sarah at the mention of the Vet’s parties.

“We’re not behind yet,” Sarah said, finally.

“Keep it that way. You won’t like how the Vet pulls his payback out of a couple Texas bangbangs like you.” He turned to leave and then turned back. “And pay Esteban his tax, too. Make sure you got his permission before you get all entrepreneurial. That ain’t my territory.”