The Water Thief (12 page)

“Oh—no,” I answered. “In fact, I
wanted to speak with her for a few minutes if I could.”

“Well, she’s not due in today, and
we’re not scheduling her at the moment.”

“I see. Do you have a number where
I could reach her?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sure you understand
we can’t give out friends’ numbers to clients. I can have her contact you.”

I shook my head. “You’re outside my
Karitzu. My corp might find out if you called me. I’ll just try again next
week. When might be good?”

“Like I said, we’re not scheduling
her right now. I can offer you a different friend, if you’d like.”

I shook my head. “No, don’t worry
about it. Maybe I can try again later, or go with another firm. Do you think
you could call me a cab?”

The man nodded. When I stepped out
onto the curb, I saw no trace of the curious neighbors or children.

A few minutes later a cab arrived.
I climbed in, and the driver asked me where I wanted to go.

“Do you have an anonymizer?” I
asked.

He looked me over, suspiciously.
“Sure. It’s eighty percent more.”

“Does it work?”

“The bill will say you hired a
trade consultant—all on the up and up. You can even put it on your ledger.”

“Do it. Head a mile east, as if
you’re going to the city. Then stop.” I commanded, handing my ledger forward.

“Pay when we get there.”

“Run it. It’s going to be a long
tab.”

The driver beamed when he ran the
ledger, still laden with borrowed cash.

I sat back into the dirty, beaten
old seats. For a moment I felt the pride of ownership, a pride I had purchased.
In MidSec I was an average guy. Here I had complete authority over the driver,
enough money to sell and buy him a hundred times over. I wondered if HighCons
felt like that all the time.

“Got a romantic interest? Don’t
want the corp to know?” the driver ribbed.

“When we get there,” I said, “come
back to the spot you picked me up, but on the intersecting street, kitty corner
to the building. I want to be able to see who goes in and out of there.”

“You got it.”

He didn’t say anything else. If
there was one thing money bought well, it was silence. I burrowed into the back
seat and waited.

“Mr. Thatcher?”

I had fallen asleep. It was night,
and about half of the street lamps were out. But by the dim light of the rental
sign, I could see a young olive-skinned woman approaching the office.

“That her?”

I nodded. She went inside.

“What if she goes out the back?” I
asked.

“Nah, she’ll come out the front
where there’s more light.”

A few minutes later she came back
out and began heading down the street. I reached for the door handle.

“Hold on!” cried the driver,
reaching for the dome light. “You open the door, she’ll see us! You know, if
she gets into a car, how you gonna follow her?”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“Stay in here, we can watch her
from the car.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “She’s
gonna notice a car following her.”

“Nah, I can do it. If I switch to
the battery, this thing’ll be dead quiet. If we stay between the lampposts,
stay a couple hundred yards back, she’ll never see us.”

Every person I added to this
intrigue increased the chance that I was going to get caught. Still, he seemed
to know what he was doing (which was more than a little unsettling in its own
right). I offered him a bonus of two hundred caps if he got me to her house
without her knowing.

“Yes sir!”

So we followed her. Every time she
approached a light, he’d release the brake, rolling forward into another dark
spot between the lamps. I felt like a stalker, like I was committing a
violation. It didn’t seem to bother the driver any.

Half an hour we did this. She would
turn down a street or vanish between buildings, and more than once I thought
we’d lost her. The weather was getting worse; the moon vanished behind the
clouds, and it was already beginning to drizzle. But my driver never failed to
find her again. As she went deeper and deeper into LowSec, fewer and fewer
homes were lit.

Finally she turned into an
industrial park. It began to rain heavily, and I could no longer make her out.
He pointed to a large warehouse with a very dull firelight shining through the
windows.

“She went in there.”

“What is this place?”

“Everett Park. It’s a communal.”

“You mean like communism?”

The driver shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s
just a place where a bunch of people take over a building. If there’s an owner,
they may pay him something to look the other way. Maybe not.”

I authorized his bonus.

“Pleasure, my man,” he said.
“Listen, bro, this can be a rough neighborhood. I can stick around if you’d
like. I mean the nearest working phone could be miles away.”

“I’ll be fine.”

The warehouse was about three
stories tall. If it was a shelter, I couldn’t imagine it being a good one.
Windows were smashed out, the fire escape was barely hanging on, and there were
large cracks in the wall.

As I got out the smell of sulfur
hit me. I made a mad dash for the side door, which opened onto a stairwell. The
air was so thick with smoke, I thought I had stumbled into a building fire. But
I could smell tobacco, wood and paper pulp, and looking out over the main floor
I could see nearly two dozen fires in everything from oil barrels to metal
pails. Already the lack of oxygen was making me dizzy

Even
with a thirty-foot ceiling and half the windows open, how are they not
suffocating?

It was a shantytown. Wire frame
bunks, old prison mattresses, shopping carts and makeshift partitions were
scattered everywhere. The air was rank with the smell of rotting meat,
body-odor and feces. Water dripped from the roof and broken windows, and
everything seemed damp and moldy.

I couldn’t make out any faces, so
finding Jazelle would be nearly impossible. I made my way as best I could,
looking for someone who looked like her. After a few minutes I had covered only
a small part of the warehouse, but somehow managed to work myself into a
dead-end corner behind several drums and a large wooden industrial spool.

“You lost?”

Through watery eyes and thick smoke
I could make out three men approaching me. The first was a large bald man with
a boxer’s nose and meaty hands, callused with scars and rope burns. The second
was thinner, but carried a bat and had a vicious look on his face, while the
third walked with a limp, dragging a metal pipe behind him.

“I... Yes, I’m looking for a friend,”
I said.

“You ain’t got any friends here,
HighCon.”

“No, no, I’m a MidCon; I’ve got a
Delta contract. My name is Thatcher, I’m looking for Jazelle.”

“Jazelle ain’t got no HighCon
friends.”

“No, I’m a Delta contract—almost a LowCon
myself! I met her at work.”

“
Almost
a LowCon, eh? Think you'se better than us?”

“The last thing I want is trouble.
I just need to talk to Jazelle.”

“Seems to me if you’se her friend
you w’udn’t be following her.”

“I’m not following her.”

“Yes, you is. Come out of that cop
car.”

“Oh my god, that wasn’t a cop car,
it was a cab.”

“So you
was
following her?”

“Yes, but not like—”

A fist met my jaw, and I tumbled
back onto the concrete floor. I took a few staggered breaths before managing to
get up on my hands and knees. The pipe hit me in the chest, and I felt a
sickening crack. I tried to ask, to beg, them to stop. But I couldn’t even tell
if I was breathing. I fell to the floor, and they grabbed me by the legs and
began dragging me over the concrete. It was chipped and cracked, and I dug my
nails into every crevice I could find, clawing at it. They hauled me over
debris, bits of broken glass and metal digging into my chest and stomach. They
flipped me over, and I looked up just in time to see a boot coming down on my
face.

I woke up
against a steel drum, my legs sprawled out on the floor. It was hard to
breathe. My nose was running, so I wiped it on the back of my hand, but instead
of mucus, I came up with blood. My hair was wet and matted from a gash in my
head, and my knuckles and fingertips were raw and bleeding. I wiggled my
toes—they hurt, but they moved. I couldn’t move my right leg, though. Whether
it was suffering from the old injury or from the beating I couldn’t tell. But
splayed out like that I kept sliding down, so I grabbed my leg and propped it
underneath myself to try to get more comfortable.

I was in a
corner somewhere. Someone had opened a nearby window to let in a little fresh
air, but at least one of my ribs was cracked, so it was hard to breathe anyway.
Around me were several four-foot bookshelves, a dingy mattress, and a small
metal pail hosting a fire. Book spines—the pages torn and used for insulation
or kindling—littered the floor.

“Who are you?”
Jazelle asked.

She sat in an
old wooden chair, watching me.

“My name is
Thatcher.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not lying.
My name is Charles Thatcher.”

“What are you
doing here?”

“I came to find
Katherine.”

“I don’t know
any Katherine.”

“You know, Kate.
You dropped her off at my apartment. I rented her for the night.”

“There is nobody
named Kate who works at our agency.”

“She was filling
in.”

“Our agency
doesn’t send unlicensed friends into Capital City. It would violate our
contract with Ackerman and half a dozen other firms.”

I scooched
higher up the drum.

“I’m not trying
to blackmail you.”

“That’s all your
type ever tries to do. I didn’t drop anybody off at your place. I’ve certainly
never met you.”

“Please. My name
is Charles, but she called me Charlie. I rented her. I don’t want any money; I
just want to talk to her.”

“Charlie? The
MidCon? Ackerman Perception?”

I nodded.

“What the hell
are you doing here? Did you want a refund?”

“I told you, I
want to see Kate.”

“She said that
all you two did was argue.”

“Yeah,” I
grinned. “So she remembered me too?”

“Don’t flatter
yourself. She wasn’t
that
impressed.
Why do you want to see her so bad?”

“Well, to be
honest, when I decided to come, I hadn’t actually priced baseball bats into the
equation.”

“What do you want
to see her for?” she repeated.

“It’s private.”

“Well, since I’m
the only one who knows where she is…”

“I wanted to
know more about the republic.”

“My god,” she
said, rolling her eyes. “She wasn’t going on about that, was she? Oh, Mr.
Thatcher, I’m so sorry she got you so worked up. You know, that is just like
her. She’s new to the friend business. I told her to make stuff up to make
herself more exotic, to engage you, give you guys more to talk about. She is
supposed to be getting you excited, to enjoy the friendship. I’m so sorry if
you misunderstood, or if she crossed a line. Most clients know that friends are
faking. Was she your first friend?” she said, handing me a towel and some
water. “Oh, this is a disaster. I feel so guilty. I wonder if we have any pain
killers around here.”

She examined the
wound on my chest. “Oh, Spag did a number on you, didn’t he?”

“Which one was
Spag?”

“The big one.”

“She wasn’t
faking,” I said.

Jazelle nodded.
“She was. I’m sorry. Her job was to chat you up. She has talent, but her choice
of subject matter… I’ll make it up to you. We can get you a credit, send you a
professional next time. Staff came up short and we sent her out. This really is
all my fault, I recommended her to the boss. I hope you won’t take it out on the
company; we have lots of good, reliable friends. She just acted
unprofessionally.”

I dabbed the
wounds on my face and shook my head. “If you believe that, then you don’t know
her half as well as you think you do.”

“I’m one of her
good friends, I know her just fine, and I’m telling you, there’s been a huge
mistake. Listen, I can get you your money back—even a bit more for your
trouble. And your medical bills, of course! We’ll take care of this.”

I gawked at her.
“Oh, my god. It’s not just her, it’s all of you—the entire agency.”

“Okay, now
you’re just trying to extort us. How much are you really looking for?”

“Is everyone
down here like this?”

“Christ, you
higher contracts. All Epsilons and Zetas must be citizen communists, why else
would they be poor, is that it? They’re lazy, useless….”

“No, you’re not
lazy. You believe. You’re actually looking to change the system—not just for
your own sake—for everyone. You’re a real citizen.”

“If you’re just
going to sit here and insult me—”