The Water Knife (36 page)

It would just run right through you, dumbass. You got too many holes in you
.

A funny thought. His body spilling water like a sprinkler, like in those cartoons he’d watched when he’d been a little kid, where bullets didn’t kill, just poked holes in a body.

Off in the distance the gunfire continued, sounding like a war. The
world falling apart. He was glad he wouldn’t be around to see it. He lay still, staring up at the sun, waiting for his heart to stop beating.

A shadow loomed over him, Death, at last. La Santa Muerte coming to him. The Skinny Lady coming to gather him up.

She had him now, just as she’d had him so long ago when the
sicario
put his pistol in Angel’s face.

Angel was ten years old again, all his limbs paralyzed. Death had not passed him by; she had only been waiting.

She had always been waiting.

E
veryone in the LocoMart hit the floor, assuming the gunfire outside was a drive-by. Only Lucy remained standing, staring at what she had wrought.

Two big pickups had pulled up, one beside the Metrocar, one behind it, hauling clusters of men standing in the pickup beds with automatic rifles.

They opened up on the car, peppering it with bullets. The windows of the Metrocar shattered.

Abruptly, the car scooted forward, trying to escape. It accelerated, swerving, taking more bullets, then slammed into an old fire hydrant and spun to a stop. The two trucks cruised after it like a pair of sharks.

Men hopped down, walking over to make sure the job was done.

I did this
, Lucy thought, but that thought was accompanied by the knowledge that they would have done the same to Anna and the kids.

So why am I crying?

It was better this way. Lucy would walk away, and Anna would go on living her dream life in Vancouver. Ant and Stacie would grow up never knowing that death had stroked their cheeks with cold bone hands. They would live, and Lucy would walk away. Lucy wiped her tears with the back of her hand. She needed to get out of Phoenix. Run, while she still could—

She spied two men with pistols drawn, ducked behind the candy rack. One of them was talking on his cell phone. The other gave her a wink.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he drawled. “We ain’t going to let this pass. When they go after one of us, they go after all of us.”

He and his friend scrambled out the door and stormed toward the assassins, pistols blazing.

Texans? But I’m not Texan
.

The car. Texas plates.

The assassins scattered for cover, returning fire as the Texans dropped one of their number.

Lucy had the sense to hit the floor as the Texans came diving back into the convenience store, whooping gleefully as lead poured in after them. Glass shattered. Bullets pinged and crashed through the store.

“That’s right, you motherfuckers! You don’t mess with Texas!” one of them shouted.

The other was on his cell again, calling for more friends and more guns.

Across the street, Merry Perrys were pouring out of the revival tent. Most of them were scattering like cockroaches exposed to light, but some of them were striding across the wide boulevard, headed for the gas station, carrying rifles and handguns.

More glass shattered as the assassins laid down fire. Bullets ricocheted. Potato chip and pretzel bags exploded. The Texas duo elbow-crawled across the linoleum. Popped up to return fire.

“Go on!” one shouted to her as they emptied their clips. “Get out of here! We got this!”

Lucy risked one more glance over the candy racks. The assassins were splitting up, some going for the Metrocar to finish Angel, the rest headed toward the store, crouched and shooting. None of them seemed to notice the Merry Perrys coming up behind them, opening fire.

Lucy dove for cover. Bullets pounded the store. Strays buzzed like hornets. She slithered across the tiles, dragging herself through a litter of convenience foods.

The other LocoMart patrons were already disappearing through a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
. Lucy reached up and shoved the door open, tumbled through. Gunfire pursued her, rattling loud.

Back inside the store, someone was screaming. She bolted out the back and ran. Behind her the gas pumps blew.

The air shuddered, and a roiling black mushroom cloud billowed up over the filling station, flickering with orange flames. More gunfire. Pops and booms. The chatter of automatics.

Lucy paused, panting, hands on her knees, staring back at the rising
cloud. Sirens wailed in the distance. She needed to get out of here. She needed someplace to hide.

Her arm hurt. When she looked down, she found the hot furrow of a bullet trail running up her flesh. Blood trickled and dripped from her elbow. She stared at the wound, surprised. She’d been hit and hadn’t felt it.

Now that she was seeing it, though, it hurt like hell.

She stripped off her tank top, standing in her bra as more gunfire floated in the blazing air. She tore a strip from the shirt and wrapped it around the wound, wincing. She didn’t think the arm was broken.

Just a flesh wound
, she thought, and had to stifle the hysterical laughter that followed.

It hurt.

“It’s nothing,” she told herself. “It’s nothing. You’re fine. Just get out of here.” Talking to herself. Talking herself through the panic as she pulled her tattered tank back on. “Just get out of here. You’re okay. You’ll be fine. You did what they wanted. Just get out, now. Just get out. Get Sunny, and get out.”

The black cloud of smoke over the filling station seemed to be growing. She shaded her eyes, watching the smoke billow. It
was
growing.

“You okay, miss?”

Lucy whirled to find more people carrying weapons.
More Texans
.

A lot more.

“I’m fine.”

She clutched her arm, nodding, knowing she should walk away but feeling her journalist’s brain engaging instead.

“What are you all doing?” she asked as the Texans streamed past.

“Payback,” a woman said, not stopping. “They took one of ours.”

They mean Angel
.

Despite herself, Lucy followed. They reached the back of the convenience mart. It was on fire, blazing merrily, but its concrete blocks still provided cover. Heat and ash boiled over them.

Lucy peered around the corner with the others. One of the pickup trucks was engulfed in flames. The assassins were pinned down. She could see Texans on their cell phones, calling back and forth.

“What is this?”

“First Texas Patriots,” the woman said. A couple men tipped their hats. “Giving back to the community.”

The Texans laughed darkly, and then they were all slipping out from their places of cover, opening fire, closing in on the embattled would-be assassins, giving back for all their humiliations.

In the distance, more sirens howled. Police and fire departments responding to the black pillar of rising smoke. The winds were kicking up, and with them the fire. Sparks and debris rained over the neighborhood.

A pair of trucks, loaded with gangbangers, came roaring down the street. They opened fire, dropping Merry Perrys as they skidded past the revival tent. The gas station continued to burn. Flaming debris filled the blue sky, raining down. A house across the street sparked alight, then burst abruptly into roiling flames. Another house went up beside it.

Ash and flaming papers floated on the hot dry winds. Lucy found herself wishing Timo were here to record this. He’d know how to capture this moment. A small spark, becoming conflagration, becoming maelstrom…

From her vantage she could still see the bullet-riddled Metrocar and its Texas plates. The spark. To her surprise, it looked like the passenger door was open, and no one was inside.

A body lay beside the car, but it wasn’t Angel’s.

Lucy found herself hoping that Angel had somehow escaped. Even if Anna’s survival depended on his death, she couldn’t help rooting for the man. He was tough. Maybe he’d made it.

If he does, he’ll come back for me
.

The thought chilled Lucy, even as waves of heat rolled over her, searing. Gunfire sparked and popped all around. The gun battle metastasizing. Another house went up in flames. Hot air gusted, roiling smoke. Flames rose, roaring, crackling, rising higher.

Without even realizing, Lucy found herself approaching the little bullet-riddled car, squinting against the heat and blowing dust. If he was alive, he’d come after her. He’d kill her. And yet still she walked closer.

Fucking hell
.

A bloody trail led away from the car. Lucy followed it and found
a second dead assassin in the alley. Her dread intensified. Angel had survived. She felt a prickle of superstition. Maybe he couldn’t be killed. He had seemed bigger than life with his impossible tales of survival as he clawed his way up from Mexico and burrowed into Catherine Case’s trust. Maybe he wasn’t human at all. Some sort of unkillable demon. Blessed by La Santa Muerte, and unkillable because of it.

With rising anxiety, Lucy followed the blood trail down the alley. His pistol lay in the gap of a shattered cinder-block wall. She picked it up. It was slick with his blood. Heavy in her hand. She squeezed through the gap in the wall.

The trail led to the edge of a drained swimming pool. At its bottom, Angel lay in an expanding lake of his own blood.

For a moment, Lucy thought he was dead. A broken marionette of a person, like so many other swimmers she’d seen in her time in Phoenix. But then he blinked.

He raised a hand, seeming to point an invisible pistol at her. Seeming to take aim for a second, before his hand fell back, limp.

Lucy weighed his pistol in her hand.

Finish it. Just finish it and be done
.

Instead, she scrambled down beside the dying man.

“Lucy?”

“Shh. Don’t move.”

She ran her hands gently over his body. The ballistic jacket had taken a lot of the damage, but there had been too many bullets from too many angles for him to escape unscathed. One had grazed his skull. Another his jaw. She pulled back his jacket. Sucked in her breath. Blood soaked his shirt, oozing and sticky. She ran her hands under the jacket, trying to find the entry point.

Angel groaned. “I thought you killed me.”

“Yeah.” Lucy sighed. “So did I.”

“Lousy job. Those shooters…” he whispered. “Low-rent.”

Lucy found herself blinking away tears. The pistol lay beside her. One shot, and it would be done.
I didn’t have any choice. They would have done this to Anna
. Putting a bullet in him now would be a mercy.

Angel coughed. “Hey, Lucy?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you quit smoking?”

“That’s not me. It’s the fire.”

A lot of fire, actually. Ash was raining down on them. Black leaves of insulation and paper as big as her hand, and now when she looked, she realized that flames licked the sky on two sides, and winds were gusting over them, hot and choked with smoke.

Lucy cradled Angel’s head. The gun was right there. Why couldn’t she just put a bullet in him? It would be mercy.

She was a part of it. This was the maelstrom. All the evil of the world resting in her hands. All of it pressing down on her. Pressing to make her another of its creatures. Another agent of its horror, creating one more swimmer in a city full of them.

Lucy got to her feet. She threaded her arms under Angel’s and started to drag him toward the shallow end of the swimming pool.

He groaned. “Oww.”

“Shh,” she said. “I need to get you out of here.”

He sagged against her, and she realized that he’d blacked out. Either that or he’d just died. She kept dragging. It was like hauling concrete. “Why do you have to be so heavy?”

She reached the edge of the pool, gasping and sweating. Levered him over the lip of the pool, then got down to heft his legs. Up and over. She heaved and rolled him out of the pool. She climbed out, panting, dripping with sweat. Ash rained down on them. Angel lay still. Maybe he really was dead.

She felt for a pulse. No. Still going.

She sat back, wondering how she was going to get him out of here, when she could barely drag him out of the pool.

“Lucy?” A whisper. He was awake again.

She crouched down. “Yeah?”

“How’d they get to you?” he asked. “Who’d you tell that I was with you?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. They just knew.”

“They put some pressure on you?”

Lucy looked away, unable to meet his eyes. “My sister. They threatened my sister.”

“ ’S a good threat.”

Smoke billowed over them. The flames were getting closer. Lucy
was reminded of wildfires in the mountains, wildlife fleeing from the onslaught of roaring conflagration. And here she was, moving too slowly.

She hoisted Angel up again. Got him as far as the gap in the wall. Sweat dripped into her eyes. Dripped from her nose and chin. Spattered his face. She crouched down, coughing and retching in the thickening smoke.