The Water Knife (34 page)

Setting her up.

A shadow descended on her table, impeccable, settling comfortably into Timo’s place, tugging at his tie, opening his jacket.

Lucy recognized him as soon as he sat down. It was the same executive who had approached her years ago. The man from Ibis. The man from so long ago who had observed,
You write a lot of stories that are critical of California
.

She remembered him pushing the blood rag across to her, along with a pile of Chinese currency. Letting her know the rules of the game that would allow her to keep working in Phoenix.

The man smiled as he took possession of the booth. He seemed almost unaged. Lucy tried to recall his name.

“Kota,” she said. “You were David Kota.”

“Well done,” Kota said, smiling. “We always thought you were good at your work. You had that knack for knowing the right names. Keeping people up in your head, with no help from a device. Sign of a good mind. Made it hard to know what you were up to sometimes, with you keeping so much locked inside your head.” He tapped his glasses, their data glazing the surface, a muddy window into his mind. “Most people need more help for their memories.”

Behind the data glasses, Kota’s eyes were odd and watery. Liquid almost. Pale blue watery eyes, rimmed red. They were so unnatural, she wondered if he’d had them altered. Little pinpricks of black in the pale blue iris. He seemed to catch her focus.

“I have allergies,” he explained. “This dust”—he shrugged—“it’s
hard to get relief here, even with the filters over in the Taiyang. Everyone cuts corners. They’d never get away with shoddy work like this in California. No one’s really investing long term. Not even the Chinese. Not here, anyway. It’s a doomed place, after all.”

“I’m not taking money,” Lucy whispered. “I don’t want your money.”

“That’s good,” Kota said. “I already paid you.”

“Do you want me to stop writing about something?” She motioned at the computer. “Is it that? The water rights? The Pima tribe? Can’t you just leave it?”

He smiled. “It’s not what you write that concerns us this time.” They both contemplated the laptop in front of them. “It’s this computer.”

“You have it. Just take it.”

“It doesn’t have anything on it.”

That brought Lucy up short. “It doesn’t?”

“Well, it’s our company laptop,” he said. “I think I would know quite well what’s on it.”

“But that’s what has the rights on it.”

Kota held up a crooked finger. “Don’t play us.” He stared at her. “Where are our water rights? We paid for them. We want them. Ratan bought something, then he claimed he was swindled, but we know that’s not true, now. We know he had those rights.
Where are they?
”

“I—” She stared at the laptop and swallowed. “I thought they were on the computer.” She swallowed again. “We all did.”

Kota’s expression twisted. He leaned forward. “I’ve lost people on this,” he hissed. “Good people. You can’t expect me to believe you don’t have them.”

“I don’t!”

“So…the rights evaporated? Poof? Into thin air with them?” His red-rimmed eyes blinked. “I’m giving you one chance, Lucy, and I’d like you to take it seriously. You don’t want your friend Timo to take your last pictures, do you? Down in a swimming pool, all alone? You don’t want it all to end like that, do you?”

“You’re an animal.”

Kota pretended shock. “You think I like doing this? I only want what James Sanderson sold us.”

“And I told you I don’t have it.”

“What about the water knife? Angel Velasquez. Does he have them? He’s carrying them, isn’t he? He has them with him somehow.”

“He’d have gone back to Las Vegas if he did.”

“Unless he’s pulling the same trick that Sanderson did to Phoenix, and Ratan did to us. We’ve noticed a disturbing trend with these rights—whenever someone gets their hands on them, they try to sell them off and make their own score.”

“I’m telling you I don’t have them.”

Kota started to say something, then paused. He touched his tie, stroking it, a motion from his throat down to his chest, thoughtful.

He’s getting instructions
, Lucy realized. He was reading information coming in over his data glasses. Other people were in the booth with them, listening.

“Ah,” he said. “So, then. Perhaps I believe you.”

But he didn’t stop eyeing her. Lucy was suddenly filled with dread.
I should get up, I should walk away
. He was about to say something, and she knew it would be awful.

I should go. I should run
.

And yet she remained frozen, unable to resist the journalist’s urge to find out where this story led.

What do you want? What are you about?

She was too attached. She’d been hooked ever since Jamie had told her about his scheme. However much she might lie to herself that she could still walk—or even run—away, she had to know.

“What do you want?” she asked finally.

Kota touched his data glasses. Lucy wondered what he was seeing and what kind of people held the leash on a monster like David Kota.

Kota said, “Let’s assume that certain people I work with know a great deal about you. Your comings and goings, your associations. Let’s assume they know all about you. Much like a neighbor who watches your home for you, feeds your dog when you are gone, and warns you when you are in danger.”

Sunny
.

“Is this another threat?”

He gave a sharp negative headshake. “Let’s assume this is a friendly neighbor. Someone who just wants to look out for you.”

Again a pause.

“The water knife you’re with,” he said. “Your neighbor thinks it would be good for you to bring him to a certain place, at a certain time—”

“I won’t do it.”

Kota went on as if she hadn’t interrupted. “There’s a service station, right on the edge of the dark zone. You’ll recognize it for the Merry Perry tent that’s on the corner. A whole revival, right there. All those Texans. All the locals they’ve converted here in Phoenix, everyone singing and stamping and searching for their god’s love.”

“I won’t do it.”

He wasn’t deterred. “We’ll expect you there, tomorrow afternoon. At, say, two-fifteen p.m.”

She had listened too long, she knew. She had to run. Right now, she needed to get up and run. She had to tell Angel and run with him, but Kota’s watery blue eyes held her still. He continued on, inexorable. “I’m a little worried that we’re not reaching each other.”

“You can’t threaten me. I don’t care what you do to me. You can’t make me afraid. Not anymore.”

“Threaten you?” Kota’s expression was bland. “Of course not. We’re not like that animal who kidnapped you. We would never hurt you.” He leaned forward. “We like how your fingers tap tap tap out stories. We’re averse to breaking them.”

He reached into his jacket and laid a handful of photos on the table.

“But this is your sister, is it not?”

Lucy gasped. Anna, up in Vancouver. Photos of her picking up Ant from day care, buckling her son into their little blue Tesla, the day damp with gray clouds and verdant green trees behind them.

More photos, a bit of Stacie in the frame, turned around in her car seat to watch as her mother secured her brother. The picture was so intimately close that the photographer might as well have been standing right next to Anna. Lucy could see a spray of rain on Anna’s hair, diamond liquid beads.

Lucy stared at the photos, feeling sick.

She’d lied to herself all along, pretending she could wade among the refugees and swimmers and dealers and narcos and not have any
of it rub off on her—as if because she refused to look directly at the beast, the beast would agree not to look at her as well.

But she’d been lying to herself. A girl in the bottom of a swimming pool became a cop shot dead in his driveway, became a friend dead in front of the Hilton, became Anna, smiling at her children.

Anna, looking so soft and safe and happy. Anna, who thought the vortex was far away, not understanding that the threads of the world were all connected, and that as Lucy was dragged down, Anna and her children would be sucked down as well.

This was the illusion Lucy had been living under—the idea that she could keep herself separate.

But as soon as she started filing stories with her name attached, she’d become another bit in the maelstrom, paddling just as madly as everyone else to keep her head above water and to avoid being sucked down for good. It had just taken her longer to realize it.

Lucy swallowed. “You’re going to kill Angel, aren’t you? That’s why you want me to bring him.”

“You misunderstand us.” Kota smiled. “We just want to meet. He’s been slippery in the past, that’s all. If you bring the water knife to us”—he shrugged—“then you go back to tap tap tapping out your stories, and we all forget that we ever had this conversation. It’s a simple thing. Almost nothing, really.”

W
hen Lucy got back to the flop, she found Angel sprawled on the mattress.

“Well?” he asked, looking up at her.

Her throat clogged. She couldn’t find words. All she could do was stare at the bullet wounds and scars on his body. She remembered the Ibis man’s comment—
He’s been slippery in the past
. Scars over scars. And now the new puckers of shrapnel in his shoulder. The wound that he’d taken rescuing her.

“Well?”

She could see his ribs, she realized. He was so very lean. Nothing but muscles and bone strength. He was staring at her.

“You learn something?” he asked again.

“Yeah. Sure.”

She went to the water jug. Poured into a smudgy glass that someone
had left behind. Furnishings that people had decided weren’t worth carrying farther north. She drank, convulsively. The water didn’t get rid of the parched feeling in her mouth. She filled another glass of water, feeling sick, not knowing what else to do.

“We’ve got an address,” she said finally.

“Oh?”

She was surprised at how normal she sounded. She should have sounded like a liar. He was so good at his work, she was sure he’d see her lie. But there was no hint of nervousness in her voice. Nothing at all.

This is what fear does
, she thought.
It makes you a perfect liar
.

“There’s a place where Ratan was keeping his work materials. Some kind of safe house for the Calies, I think. It looks like the rights are there.”

Angel was already getting up, pulling on his ballistic jacket.

She watched him dress. “You ever get hot wearing ballistics?”

He grinned at her for a moment, looking young again. “You kidding? Rig like this makes the ladies all think I’m a badass.”

Lucy made herself smile. He seemed to take it as an invitation. He came across and pulled her close. As he started to kiss her, she had a terrified thought.

He knows, he has to know
.

She fought the urge to push away, afraid that he’d sense her betrayal. He kissed her again, harder, hungrier, and suddenly she found herself sagging into his arms, kissing him back, hard and desperate. Tasting his tongue. Running her hands down the plane of his stomach to his belt, working the buckle, suddenly crazy, suddenly frantic with desire.

Everyone dies. We’re all dead in the end, no matter what we do
.

There was nothing to fear. Nothing to regret.

They clutched close, starved for each other, starved to live a little longer.

It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. It’s all the same in the end
.

M
aria lay in a cage, fetal around her wounded hand. The blood had clotted, leaving throbbing stumps where her pinky and ring finger had been. She wondered if the wounds would get infected, and then decided it probably didn’t matter. She wouldn’t be around long enough to care. The sun burned down on her and a steady wind scoured the Vet’s compound, adding to her misery. Sands whipped her skin.

Her pen abutted the fenced area that the hyenas occupied, and the hyenas watched her, tongues out, intrigued after their first taste of her. Whenever she moved, they came loping over to snuffle at the barrier, returning again and again, as if expecting her fence might prove weak.

They were relentless.

Part of her wished she could die of dehydration, be sucked dry and turned into a mummified corpse. Then at least the Vet and Esteban and Cato would all be disappointed. She wouldn’t be their entertainment then. They wouldn’t get to see her screaming and running from the hyenas. She considered ways she might hang herself, or cut her wrists and bleed out, but no tools were available.

“Here. You should drink.”

Damien, standing beside her cage, holding a bottle of water and a dish of food. This was the first time she’d seen him. Before, it had always been others.

“I don’t want it.”

He sighed and squatted down. Started pushing the food through.

“I don’t want it!” she shouted at him.

The Vet’s soldiers looked over. Esteban got up and ambled over, smiling.

Damien glared at Maria. “See what you done?”

Maria laughed. “You think I’m scared of him now? What’s he going to do—feed me to the hyenas?”

“The Vet only wants you running,” Esteban said. “Long as you don’t bleed out, I can do plenty to you.”

“Just leave her alone,” Damien said. “You already did enough.”

“I don’t like how she’s looking at me.”

“Let it go.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,
pendejo
. I’ll dump you in there with her.”

Damien backed off.

Esteban took the rice and beans and slid them through. “Go ahead,
putita
. Eat up. Can’t run if you don’t got your strength.” He waved at the hyenas in the pens. “You know how it works, right? We start you at one side of the pens, and if you make it all the way across before the hyenas get you, Vet lets you out. If you’re fast enough, and lucky enough, you got a chance. But you got to get your strength up.”

Maria glared at him, imagining him being run down by hyenas.

“Come on, sweetie. You got food right there. Why don’t you get your face down in it? Eat it like a little bitch.”

She imagined blood, spurting from his neck.

Esteban scowled, and walked away.

Damien came back with another bottle of water. “Seriously, just drink.”

“Why do you care?”

Damien at least had the grace to look embarrassed. “I—I didn’t think it would go like this.”

“How long until you feed me to…them?”

“Next time Vet feels like it.” He glanced over to where Esteban had rejoined some of the Vet’s other soldiers under an awning, playing cards. “He likes people to see you. Lets other people know what’s coming.”

He shoved the bottle through the slot in the fence. “It might not be for a long time. You might as well eat and drink.”

She considered rebuffing him, but some part of her refused to give up entirely, and her hunger and thirst won out. She drank greedily and ate the food with her one good hand, ravenous, unable to deny herself sustenance.

Esteban came back over to watch. “How come you eat for him and not for me? You still mad about your fingers?”

Maria paused to glare up at him.

All she could think was how badly she wanted to see him dying. Screaming and dying. To make him pay. To get hold of his throat. She wondered if there was some way she could bait him into the cage with her. Some way.

“Get out of here, Esteban,” Damien said. “You had your fun.”

“I don’t think so. Fun’s just getting started,” Esteban said. He looked as if he were about to do something more, but then Cato called to him.

“Esteban! We’re gonna be late!”

“I’ll see you later, girl. When I get back, we’ll talk.”

He ambled off to join Cato in their big black truck. They drove out of the compound, leaving dust clouds in their wake.

Damien squatted down again beside her. A few feet away, the hyenas regarded her with interested yellow eyes. Hungry and intrigued. Unblinking. Maria wondered if Esteban had told her the truth—that she was allowed to at least try to escape. That there was even the barest chance…

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Damien asked.

Maria gave him a disgusted look. “I was thinking I needed to get the fuck out of here.”

“I thought you were a smart one.”

“Fuck you, Damien.”

“Hey. Sorry. Just didn’t figure you’d end up there. Thought you knew how to play the game a little better. Your girl Sarah—she knew the score. You should have stuck with her.”

“She’s dead,” Maria said.

Damien looked surprised.

“What?” she goaded. “You didn’t know that? She played the game just like you wanted her to. We went out to earn just like you told us to, and she got killed. We did it like you wanted. Both of us. And now she’s dead.” She glared at him. “And you set us up for that. So yeah, I decided I’d run instead.”

Damien sucked his lip, his tanned and burned face looking ugly. Maria wiped the sweat from her eyes. Her black hair felt hot and heavy with the sun. She was cooking out here. One hundred twenty
degrees, and her out in the sun, roasting to death. Damien looked guilty.

“Help me,” Maria whispered to him.

“How’s that?”

“Let me out.”

Damien laughed uncertainly.

“They got the keys right over there,” Maria urged. “I’ve seen them. Tonight. You could let me out. No one would even know. And you know you owe me for getting me into this mess.”

Damien glanced to where she indicated. The Vet’s shooters, all playing cards, not giving a shit about anything except drinking tequila, laughing as they lost money to one another.

He was looking at them, and she could almost feel him weakening. “You don’t like them any more than I do,” she said.

And it was true. She could see it in him. He was at the bottom of their hierarchy. Skinny and tough but not one of them, truly. Just the boy who ran the whores for the Vet. “We could both leave. We could both go north.”

The connection evaporated.

“I can’t,” Damien said, shaking his head. “I try that, I’m in there with you, and we’re both running from the hyenas.”

“They wouldn’t even know. You could do it tonight.”

But the connection was lost, and she knew it. Now she was just going through the motions. Whatever small hold she’d had on him was lost. “You owe me,” she said. “I’m here because of you.”

Damien wouldn’t meet her eyes. “You want, I can get you some bubble,” he said. “Get you good and high. You dose enough, you won’t feel much when they…” He trailed off, glancing at the hyenas.

“When they rip me to pieces?” Maria prodded. “That what you wanting to say? You want to get me high before I get eaten alive? You think that helps?”

Damien looked embarrassed. “You want the bubble or not?”

She just glared at him.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. He started to turn away.

“Damien?”

He turned back. “Yeah?”

“Fuck you.”