The Water Knife (27 page)

“T
he guys who took your lady…and killed…” The girl swallowed. Pushed her black hair back behind her ear.

“One of them was going through the clothes in the bedroom, while I was lying under the bed, and I could see his hand. He had a tattoo, like you were saying about that other guy. That
sicario
you saw.”

Angel felt his childhood rising up to seize him. He could still remember the
sicario
’s hand, and himself, incongruously, trying to spell out the letters on his knuckles, even as the man’s pistol centered on his forehead.

“Letters?”

He remembered the
sicario
smiling at him, pretending to shoot, letting the pistol kick in his hand. Making the sound of its report the way Angel and his friends Raul and Miguel had played at guns.

“Pshew.”

Angel had gripped his ice cream cone so hard, it snapped between his fingers. He’d been so scared he pissed himself, his bladder letting go like a popped balloon, hot liquid coursing down his leg—

The girl was talking. “No. Not letters. It was like a snake tail. It went around his hand and up under his jacket sleeve. I saw it. It was a snake tail.”

Angel was so caught up in his own memories that at first he didn’t hear her words, and then abruptly it was all jigsaw puzzle pieces falling into place, his world clicking together, piece by piece, making a picture.

“A snake you say?”

He ran his hand up his wrist. “You think maybe it could have been a dragon tail? Did it have scales? Colored, maybe?” Not wanting to prompt her into remembering something that didn’t exist, but knowing
the answer, and knowing before she answered what she was going to say. “Not green, but maybe some other colors?”

“Red and gold.”

I’ll be goddamned
.

Absolute pattern emerging from chaos.

“Does it help you?”

Angel could have kissed her. This innocent girl being ground up in the gears of the world was offering him the gift of understanding. A virgin mother showing him the shape of the world. She should have been wearing blue, the Virgin of Guadalupe blessing him with all the pieces.

“Oh, yeah. It helps.” Angel reached into his pocket. “It helps a lot.” He had a sudden overwhelming need to balance all the things in the world that couldn’t be balanced. “Here.” He emptied his wallet of cash, not bothering to count it. “Take it. Take it all. You helped me.”

She took the cash with wide eyes, but he didn’t wait to see its impact. Time was running out. He grabbed his phone, waving off her thanks, and then she was closing the door, and he was all alone, dialing a number from memory.

Catherine Case saw the world in terms of a mosaic. She spent her time trying to gather data, then shape that data into a picture that pleased her. But that wasn’t Angel. He didn’t need to shape a picture—he needed to see what was already there. Mosaics made you hope that you could push pieces around to create a picture that didn’t exist, instead of letting all those little pieces click click click right into place. Instead of letting them tell you what was right in front of your face.

Red and gold. Tail like a snake.

Or a dragon
.

Julio’s phone went straight to voicemail.

Angel swore and pulled away from the curb. Goddamn Julio. Ducking and dodging. Complaining about being stuck in Phoenix. Bitching about big risks and small payoffs.

Red and gold. A tail curling around his wrist and up his arm.

The girl had seen it and thought it was a snake, but Angel knew what she’d seen. If that girl had been able to see the rest of Julio’s arm and shoulder, the way Angel had so many times when they were out
on some river, squeezing some dumb farmer for his water rights, both of them wearing tank tops and sweating, she wouldn’t have said she was looking at a red-and-gold snake; she’d have said she saw a dragon.

The number of people who handled water was small. Clean-cut Cali agents, federal bureaucrats in BuRec and the Department of the Interior. The municipal water managers of the many cities that depended on the interlocking water rights of the western United States…

Julio.

He’d been one step ahead of Angel all along. Playing him right from the start. Killing the people Angel wanted to talk to. Cleaning up ahead of Angel. Beating Angel to…what?

What are you after, you
hijo de puta
?

Angel remembered Julio standing in his hotel room, staring down at his phone, bitching about the
lotería
, pretending to be frightened. He remembered how Julio had scoffed about James Sanderson, not interested in him at all.

Midlevel nobody…Doesn’t fit the profile…I doubt Vos was running him, he would’ve told me
.

Julio’s phone went to voicemail again.

Where the fuck are you, you snake?

Assuming that Julio needed information from the journo, he’d want a quiet place to question her. A place without neighbors. Someplace he’d think of as secure.

Angel wondered if Julio had big enough
güevos
to use one of his own safe houses. If he didn’t think anyone was on him, he might. And for sure, he wouldn’t think Angel was on his trail. He thought Angel was still chasing mirages around Phoenix, pleasingly clueless while Julio skipped ahead of him.

Julio would still feel safe, Angel decided. So he’d wander out to the blasted edges of Phoenix, somewhere in the dark zone, where electricity and water were shut off and people were scarce, and he’d set himself up in one of his nice Vegas safe houses that he normally used for meetings with his agents and informants, and that water knives like Angel could use when they needed to go to ground.

And there he’d finish his business with Lucy Monroe.

Angel had a half-dozen Vegas safe houses memorized for this
operation. Only a few were very close. They wouldn’t be the only ones that Julio had set up on Vegas’s behalf, but they were worth a try.

Angel stomped on the accelerator, ignoring the Tesla’s protests as he bottomed out on dust washboard and street dips.

Time was ticking. Pretty soon the journo would be another piece of ruined flesh, same as Vosovich and Sanderson.

T
he first safe houses Angel tried showed no signs of life. But the third one had Julio’s truck parked right out front.

“Well, fuck you, too, Julio.”

The man’s arrogance was irritating. If Angel needed any more confirmation that Julio thought Angel was a complete
pendejo
, finding the man’s truck parked in plain sight in front of one of Las Vegas’s very own safe houses did the job.

Angel parked well down the street and studied the scene. Nothing but dust and tumbleweeds. Cracked stucco houses sat silent. Most of them had been gutted for their metals and solar panels a while back.

Nothing to see, nothing to care about. Move along, folks
.

The houses were big. Angel wondered if the people who’d owned them had felt rich living in their 5 Bed/3 Bath houses. They’d probably been pretty pissed when Phoenix shut off their water. All that money invested in things like granite countertops for resale value that were now just polished rock no one gave a shit about.

Angel reloaded his SIG Sauer. Chambered a round and sighted on Julio’s truck. “
Pshew
,” he whispered, imagining the pistol kicking in his hand.

Angel knew the safe-house layout from training walk-throughs, and it looked just the way it had been in VR, except now the sun blazed down on his back as he approached.

A realtor’s keylock was attached to the door. Angel tapped the keys, holding his breath, hoping that Julio hadn’t switched the safe-house codes…The door clicked open.

He jerked back as screams ripped through the gap. Ragged. Animal-like. He eased down the hallway to the kitchen, checking rooms as he went. The screaming stopped, replaced by ragged breathing. Angel
peered around a corner. Lucy was tied to a chair, stripped to the waist. Her lips were broken and bloody, her breasts raked with slashes. Julio and some Phoenix
cholobi
with gang tats on his face stood over her, both holding knives while Lucy shuddered and whimpered.

Angel stepped through the door. “Thought you left for Vegas, Julio.”

Julio dropped the knife and whipped out a pistol. The
cholobi
ducked behind Lucy and put his knife to her throat. Angel felt death’s presence, black wings beating air. Angel and Julio both raised their pistols, but Angel fired first. The
cholobi
’s head exploded. He fell away from Lucy. Julio’s bullet hit Angel in the shoulder, blasting him back like a horse kick. Angel tried to raise his gun and return fire but nothing happened. The bullet had done something to his gun arm. He couldn’t lift his hand.

“Told you you should leave,” Julio said.

He pulled the trigger again. As his gun went off, Lucy threw herself forward. She toppled, still tied to her chair, into Julio. The bullet that had been destined for Angel’s eye hammered past his ear.

Lucy and Julio crashed to the floor in a tangle. Julio kicked free of journo and chair, cursing. Angel slapped the Sig into his left hand and braced it against the wall. Julio’s gun was coming up, but he was too slow.

Angel fired.

A bloody hole appeared in Julio’s chest. Angel kept pulling the trigger. More holes blossomed in Julio. Chest. Face. Belly. Bone and blood mist.

Julio dropped his gun and fell. He rolled, trying to reach his pistol again. Angel stumbled over and kicked it clear. Rosettes of blood stained Julio’s chest. The man’s jaw was shattered. His breathing bubbled with blood. Angel crouched beside his former friend.

“Who you working for?” Angel demanded. “Why’d you do this?”

He wrenched Julio around, staring into the man’s tooth-shattered grinning face. Julio was trying to say something, but his voice was a rasp. Angel hauled him close, pressing his ear to the man’s lips.

“Why?” Angel demanded, but Julio just gave a final cough, spraying blood and teeth, and died.

Angel knelt back, gripping his wounded shoulder, trying to make sense of Julio’s betrayal.

“Can…can you…help?”

Lucy was lying on the floor, still tied to a chair.

“What? Yeah. Sorry.”

Angel went searching for a knife. Found one on the counter. He sawed clumsily at her bonds with his left hand, cutting her free. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Her voice was hoarse. “I’ll live.”

She peeled herself away from the toppled chair, moving stiffly. Pulled herself into a ball, staring at Julio and the dead
cholobi
.

“You okay?”

She huddled there, hugging her knees. Breathing. Staring intensely at her torturers.

“Lucy?”

At last she took a deep shuddering breath, and her eyes seemed to find focus. “I’m fine.” She stood shakily and went to pick up her T-shirt. She examined the slashed rag and tossed it away. Went over to the dead
cholobi
and crouched down beside him. Started tugging off his wife-beater. Angel was careful to look away as she pulled the clothing on.

“Don’t bother,” she rasped. “They’re just tits.”

Angel shrugged but still didn’t look. He heard her suck in her breath as she pulled the shirt over her ravaged skin. “Okay, I’m decent,” she said. “Thanks for saving me.”

“Told you I could help,” he said.

“Yeah.” Lucy laughed shakily. “You do seem to have your uses.”

She dragged her chair upright and sat down on it, wincing. Her blood was already staining through the shirt. She stared down at the stains, pulling the shirt away from her skin. Her hands shook. “How’d you find me?”

“Put a tracker on your truck. Another on your purse.”

“I don’t have my purse.”

“Someone saw you get taken by Julio. Got lucky because he used one of his old safe houses. He should have changed up more, but he didn’t.”

“I thought you were all connected.”

Angel stared down at Julio’s dead body.

“I did too.”

It raised Angel’s hackles to admit how much he’d missed. He should have seen it coming. If not in the man, then in the details around him. He’d missed whole pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. It made him wonder what else he wasn’t seeing.

“What do you know about all this that you wouldn’t tell me before?” Angel asked.

“Why should I tell you now?”

“Other than that I just took a bullet for you?”

“You didn’t do that for me. You did that for Vegas. Little Miss Catherine Case.”

Angel scowled. “That how you’re going to play it?”

“Is that a threat?” she asked. “You think you’re going to take a run at me like your friends did?”

She was smiling tightly, and now he saw that she had a gun in her hand.

How—?

Julio’s gun. She’d collected it while he’d been distracted. She didn’t miss a thing.

“Bet I beat you to the draw,” she murmured, and her gray eyes were hard, cold chips.

Angel glared. “I ain’t like that. I just put a bullet in a friend for you,” he said. “I think I deserve to know why.”

She stared at him, her jaw clenched. Finally she nodded, looked down at Julio.

“He’s the one who killed Jamie and that other guy, Vosovich. He wanted to hijack the water rights Jamie was selling for his own profit. I think he ambushed Jamie and his own guy at a meet, so he could get his hands on them. The joke was on him, though. Jamie had already sold the rights to California.”

“He wasn’t selling them to us at all?”

“Jamie hated Vegas. He was just screwing with you. I told him he was in over his head.”

“So he sold them to Michael Ratan?”

“I think so. Your…
friend
…sure wanted to know if I could get
into Ratan’s computer. From what he said, Ratan was trying to do almost exactly what Jamie had done. Sell the rights to the highest bidder. So Ratan contacted the most likely buyer: Vegas.” She smirked slightly. “Your friend was desperate to find out if I could open Ratan’s computer.”

“Can you?”

“I doubt it. Ibis has pretty good security.” She looked at Angel. “You’re bleeding.”

“I told you I took a bullet for you,” he said, exasperated.

She laughed at that. “My hero.” She got up and went to the kitchen. Came back with a bunch of towels. “Let me see.”

Angel shrugged her away. “I’m fine. Just tell me about the deal your friend Jamie was doing.”

“No. Let me see.” Her voice was commanding. Angel gave in. He eased out of his jacket. Lucy sucked air through her teeth. “Shirt, too.”

Wincing, Angel let her peel off his T-shirt.

Her eyes traveled over his chest, the scars and tattoos. “You were in a gang?”

“Long time ago.” He shrugged and winced again. “Before I started working for Case. Before I made it into Nevada.”

She turned her attention to his shoulder. “Your jacket took most of it. But your skin looks like someone ran it through a grater.”

“Julio liked choppers. Bullets that blew apart. Shitty on armor, though.”

“Be glad your jacket’s ballistic.”

“Comes with the job.”

“You get in a lot of gunfights?”

“Not if I can help it.” Angel laughed. “Guns kill people.”

She frowned. “There’s a lot of shrapnel in here.” She went back to root through the kitchen cabinets and came back with a bottle of tequila and a knife. Angel made a face.

“What?” she challenged. “You want to go to a hospital? See if Phoenix PD gets curious about you?”

Angel submitted.

Lucy was efficient. She cut and poked and prodded. She poured tequila over the wound, and he gritted his teeth and bore it. She didn’t
apologize for what she did or make a production of it. She just dug in, as if excavating a gunshot victim’s shoulder wasn’t much worse than wiping counters after dinner.

She was good. He watched her pry into the shredded meat of his shoulder, her eyebrows knitted in concentration, pale gray eyes intent on the task.

“You got a lot of experience with bullets?” he asked.

“Some. We used to spend time shooting coyotes at this bar. Then we’d go down and skin them.”

“Coyotes?”

“The furry kind.”

“You dug the bullets out of the animals you shot?”

“No. That was for a friend. Photographer I know got himself shot up a couple times. Caught in the middle of a murder scene when the shooters came back for a second round.”

“The photographer you were with at the morgue.”

“Good memory. Yeah. Timo.” The knife sank deep. Angel hissed. Lucy glanced up. “Sorry.”

“I didn’t complain.”

She smirked a little at that. “Tough guy, huh?”

“Got to be tough. Water knife basic training.”

“I thought water knives didn’t exist.”

“That’s right.” Angel gritted his teeth against the pain. “We’re a mirage.”

“A figment of Phoenix’s imagination,” she murmured.

Angel couldn’t help liking her. Something about her efficiency, no bullshit. Most people would have been losing their shit right now, after going through what she’d gone through, but she’d just gotten up from being tortured and gotten back in the game.

She studied his wound, evaluating. Angel thought maybe he loved her eyes. He kept wanting her to look up at him. Wanting to hunt for the recognition that he thought he’d find there.

“You ever get a feeling that you know someone, first time you meet them?” Angel asked.

Lucy glanced up, sardonic.

“No.”

But even as she said it, he knew she was lying. Her gaze lingered
too long, and when she started cutting into his shoulder again, her cheeks were flushed.

Angel smiled to himself, content. They were the same, and they both knew it. He’d seen the same eyes in other people. Some cops. Some hookers. Doctors and EMTs. Narcos. Soldiers. Even the
sicario
who had scared him to death when he’d just been a little kid. It was the same look every time. A tribe of people who had seen too much and had given up on pretending that the world was anything other than a wreck. And Lucy Monroe was right there with him. Lucy saw things. They were the same.

He wanted her. He wanted her like he’d never wanted another woman.

Is that why I shot the
cholobi
first?

A troubling thought.

In the moment he hadn’t paused to consider his targets, but he clearly should have dropped Julio and his gun first, then gone after the knife guy who was holding Lucy hostage. Instead, he’d mixed up the order of his kills.