The Water Knife

  “Tighter.”

  She was rasping. The crush of his fingers overwhelming. He had her life. He had her breath. He could kill her if he wanted.

  There was nothing of her now. She was gone. Her air was gone. Her heart pounded in her ears. His fingers held her throat and her entirely.

  Taking away her air, and her, letting him take it.

  This was trust. This was life.

  “Tighter,” she whispered.

  Tighter.

  CHAPTER 33

  Maria’s feelings of security and safety lasted exactly a day—all the way until Esteban and Cato roared up in front of Toomie’s house in their big black pickup.

  As soon as Maria saw them, she ran inside and locked the door, but Esteban didn’t seem to care. He and his buddy just went and opened the tailgate of the truck and reached into the bed.

  Toomie hit the pavement with a hard thud.

  Esteban and Cato hauled him up to the front door, while Maria stared through the barred window. Blood ran from Toomie’s temple. His lips were split from beatings, and one eye was swollen shut. The two thugs had his hands zip-tied behind his back. They dragged him up to the doorstep and threw him down on the concrete.

  “Hey there, Maria!” Esteban called. “You got money for me?”

  Maria held her breath, trying to be silent. Pretending that he didn’t know she was on the other side of the door.

  “Come on, girl! Open on up and cough up the cash.”

  Stay quiet. Just stay quiet, and they’ll go away.

  “We know you’re in there!” There was a thud and a grunt. “Dumbass here already told us you’re in there, so make this easy on Mr. Pupusa and get your culito out here where I can see it!”

  Stay quiet. Quiet like a mouse. It will all go away…

  Esteban shouted again: “You think we’re stupid? You think we don’t know you peddled ass the other night?”

  “There’s no need to talk like that,” Maria heard Toomie say. “We can keep this businesslike.”

  “Businesslike? Is that what you want?” Esteban laughed. “Okay. Here’s some business for you.”

  Maria heard a thud and a grunt. Another thud. She inched up, to peer through the video monitor to the outside of the house.

  “Last chance, girl!”

  Esteban put a gun to Toomie’s knee and pulled the trigger. Toomie screamed as his knee exploded.

  “God damn!” Esteban laughed. “That’s got to fucking hurt!”

  He turned to the camera and stared up at it, grinning through the screen at Maria, his face speckled with Toomie’s blood, while Toomie writhed behind him on the concrete.

  “He said he wanted it businesslike,” Esteban said. “You don’t come out this second, I’m going to do some business with that other knee, too. See how this crippled motherfucker pushes pupusas when he’s got no legs.”

  “Run, Maria!” Toomie shouted. “Just run! Get out! Don’t worry about me!”

  Esteban hit him upside the head, stunning him. He grinned again at the monitor. “I just want to get paid, girl. Either I get paid in cash, or I get paid in blood, and I still come back for your Texas ass.”

  Toomie was spitting blood. “Don’t do it, Maria!”

  “If you want your friend to live, you come out now. Otherwise I put him down, and then I come and get you anyway.”

  “Okay!” Maria shouted through the door. “I got your money! Don’t hurt him anymore!”

  “That’s what I like to hear.”

  “Don’t do it!” Toomie shouted, but Maria was already running to where she’d stashed the small amount of cash she’d gotten from the scarred man. It wasn’t enough but…she shoved the money through the mail slot. Esteban crouched down and picked up the cash, counting.

  “Looks a little light, girl.”

  “It’s all I have!”

  “Oh yeah?” Esteban knelt beside Toomie and jammed his gun into the man’s mouth. “That’s funny you say that, because someone was going around asking our coyotes about buying a ticket out of here, so unless you were planning on going north with pupusas for payment, I think we got ourselves a problem.”

  “It’s all I have!” Maria shouted through the door. “He was using his own money. Not yours!”

  “I don’t work quite like that, girl, and you know it. You still got debts. Now, if you come out and pay, I promise I’ll leave your friend’s brains inside his head.”

  “Don’t!” Toomie shouted. “Don’t do it!”

  But all Maria could think of was Sarah dead in the bed because she’d run. She’d let Sarah go, and Sarah had died.

  With tears in her eyes, she fumbled with the dead bolts. Esteban grinned as the door swung open. He was enjoying this.

  “Leave him alone,” Maria said. “It’s not his fault.”

  Toomie’s face was covered with blood. He was breathing heavily, blood bubbling from his nose as he gasped for breath around the barrel.

  Not him. Please, not him, too.

  “I don’t have any money. But I’ll come with you.”

  For a second she thought Esteban was going to shoot Toomie anyway, but then he smiled and took his gun out of Toomie’s mouth. He motioned to Cato to get in the truck.

  Maria crouched down beside Toomie.

  “Don’t,” he whispered. “Don’t go with them.”

  “I can’t”—Maria blinked away tears—“I can’t let you get killed because of me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Toomie said. “I thought I knew a coyote who wouldn’t sell me out.”

  “It’s not your fault.” She wiped at her eyes.

  “Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t…”

  To Maria’s horror, she could see that Toomie was readying himself to fight again. To try to fight even though it would just get him killed. He was going to try to grab Esteban. Maria lunged forward and hugged him, hard. Hugging him so hard that he couldn’t do anything foolish.

  “It’s not on you,” she whispered, and then she straightened. Toomie’s blood was on her blouse, but she didn’t care.

  “You can’t hurt him,” she said to Esteban. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll earn how you want, but you can’t hurt him.”

  “Fine by me. Vet just wants you. He don’t care about no pupusa man.”

  To Toomie, Maria said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be back as soon as I pay the Vet.”

  “Yeah. She’ll be back.” Esteban smirked. “Once she’s all paid up.”

  He grabbed Maria’s arm and hauled her toward the truck.

  Maria glanced back and saw that Toomie had dragged himself up to a sitting position, still clutching his leg.

  “You can’t hurt him,” Maria said again. “You got to promise me.”

  “You should be worried more about your own hurting, girl. Vet gave you a special pass, and you fucked him over. Late on payment, and on top of that trying to make a run for it?” Esteban laughed as he jammed Maria into his truck. “Pupusa man’s got it easy in comparison to what the Vet’s got planned for you.”

  Sitting between the two men, riding to her fate, Maria told herself that she wasn’t going to show fear, but as the truck turned into the Vet’s territory and wound its way through the subdivision curves, she could feel her fear building.

  The hyenas caught sight of the truck and paced it as it roared up to the gates. Their fenced pens encompassed four or five properties, and now they poked their heads out of open doors and shattered windows, eager and predatory as Cato honked at the gates and was let in.

  Inside the Vet’s compound, some of the Vet’s people looked up at Esteban’s arrival, but most of them were sitting in the shade under big colorful umbrellas, playing cards and dominoes.

  The hyenas came loping to where their pens abutted the Vet’s human spaces, pressing their noses against the wire.

  The Vet came out of his house as Esteban dragged Maria from the truck. Esteban handed him the cash. The Vet hefted the cash, considered it, then turned his gaze on Maria.


  “This all the money you made working for me? This?”

  Maria nodded, not trusting her voice.

  “I tried to help you, you know.”

  He waited, seeming to expect an answer. The silence between them stretched. The hyenas paced behind the chain-link and razor wire.

  “I had to—” Maria started.

  “You had to try to run away instead of trusting me to take care of you.”

  She shut up.

  The Vet’s pinprick eyes bored into her. “I would have let you earn your way across the river, girl. Don’t you understand that?” He gripped her chin. “I wanted to help you. I liked you.”

  He cocked his head, frowning. “Such a smart young lady. I thought, ‘Ah. This one. This girl—she deserves a second chance. I will take this one under my wing. I will give her a chance to earn, and then, when she has worked, she will go north with a tidy bit of cash in her pockets, and she will always remember how I did a good thing for her.’ ”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I asked Santa Muerte about you again.” He waved toward where his shrine glittered with emptied tequila bottles. “She didn’t say to save you this time. She doesn’t like people who break their promises, either.”

  The hyenas on the other side of the fence whined and giggled, seeming to sense opportunity in their master’s conversation.

  “Sarah died,” Maria tried to explain. “I panicked—”

  “I didn’t care about Sarah,” the Vet said. “I only cared about you. The Skinny Lady cared about you. And you didn’t do what we asked.”

  “I can work now,” Maria said. “I can pay you back.”

  The Vet favored her with a pleased look. “We’re past money, I think. The issue before us is atonement, and atonement costs more than just an offering of money.” He stood up and looked to Esteban and Cato. “Take care of her.”

  Esteban and Cato seized her arms and dragged her over to the hyena’s pens. She struggled, but they were used to people fighting for their lives and held her easily.

  The hyenas went crazy, first one then others sending up yips of excitement, standing up on hind legs, giggling at their approach. More emerged from the shade of the abandoned houses, popping out through open windows and sprinting toward the three of them as Esteban and Cato dragged her through the dust.

  Maria jammed her feet into the dirt, screaming. Esteban and Cato laughed. They threw her against the fence, and the hyenas lunged for her, but she bounced away. She scrambled back as the animals lunged against the fence, shoving their snouts against the chain-link, seeking to slam through.

  Esteban and Cato corralled her and shoved her closer to the fence. Levering her closer and closer. “You like them, puta? They like you.”

  She couldn’t get away. All the hyenas were at the fence, a dozen, at least. Esteban and Cato pressed her closer. Teeth. Saliva. Brindled fur. The seething, bobbing movement of starving fascination. The hyenas pushed their noses through the link, trying to get at her. Their clamor was deafening. Esteban grabbed one of Maria’s wrists and held it tight.

  “Let’s give them a taste.”

  Maria found herself screaming, struggling to get away, watching her fingers moving closer and closer to the fence and the teeth on the other side.

  She couldn’t stop them. She couldn’t get away.

  Her fingers touched the chain-link. She made a fist, but Esteban rammed her hand hard against the fence, and the hyenas were there, tearing.

  Maria screamed as her fingers came off in their mouths.

  CHAPTER 34

  By the second day of waiting for word from Timo, Lucy was climbing the walls with worry.

  “I’m going,” she said.

  The morning sun was blazing in through the window of their squat, and it was boiling inside, and all she wanted to do was get out of that dim miserable sweltering space, but Angel was against it, and now, after a second day of sticking close to the hideout, she was going crazy.

  “I’m going,” she said again, more firmly.

  “There’s a good chance someone is watching your place,” Angel pointed out.

  “Sunny’s my dog. I have to get him. He’s my responsibility.”

  Angel shrugged. “Should’ve thought of that earlier.”

  Lucy glared at him. “What if I send Charlene?”

  He looked up from the cheap tablet he was watching. “If you got to do something, send someone who doesn’t know where you’re hiding.”

  “We don’t even know if anyone’s actually searching for us.”

  He was quiet, thinking about this, then shook his head.

  “No. Someone’s looking.”

  “How do you know?”

  He gazed up at her with his dark eyes. “Because I’d be looking, if I was them.”

  Finally they compromised. Lucy had Charlene call a boy up the street to drop by and take Sunny over to his house.

  It wasn’t what she wanted, but at least Sunny would be okay.

  She worried. She paced.

  Angel didn’t seem to mind the waiting at all. He seemed completely settled. He reminded her a little of some kind of peaceful Buddha, waiting for his moment. Ready but patient. Content to sit and watch TV and keep an eye out the window of the squat for signs of trouble.

  Angel had picked up a Chinese-language tablet discarded on the street and paid some kids by the water pumps to jack its download controls, so now, instead of running Hanzi tracing instructions and watching videos of people mime their way through basic language and etiquette, he had it streaming an old Undaunted episode, tinny sound and jittery video, but still it seemed to be more than enough for him.

  It was infuriating that he seemed unbothered by the waiting. She wondered if it had something to do with his time in prison, or his life in Mexico, or some other part of his life that he refused to reveal. She didn’t understand him at all. She found herself alternately wanting him intensely and feeling repelled and irritated by his serenity.

  Right now he seemed perfectly complete. Sitting with the banged-up language pod, he looked younger. When he grinned at something happening on the screen, it was almost as if she were looking past the scars to some other version of him. The more innocent version. The boy before the water knife.

  Lucy curled up next to him on the mattress. Christ. Another Undaunted episode.

  “You’re still watching this?”

  “I like these early episodes,” he said. “They’re the best. When it’s all still a mystery.”

  On the screen, a bunch of Merry Perrys were praying to God and getting ready to cross the river into Nevada. They were praying for God to open the hearts of the Desert Dog militia that was waiting on the other side and that had so far prevented them from making it across.

  “Nobody’s that stupid,” Lucy muttered.

  “You’d be surprised how dumb Merry Perrys are.”

  And just like that, the boy was gone. She was cuddled up beside a killer who did Catherine Case’s bidding. “You know those people?”

  “Who? Merry Perrys?”

  “What do you think? No, the other ones. The Desert Dogs.”

  He made a face. “That’s not what they call themselves.”

  “You know what I mean. You worked with them, didn’t you?” Angel paused the screen and glanced over at her. “I do whatever Case needs doing. That’s all.”

  “Those people are vicious.”

  He frowned, then shook his head. “No. Just frightened.”

  “They scalp people,” Lucy pointed out.

  Angel shrugged. “They get out of hand sometimes. It’s not their fault.” He started the video again.

  Lucy had a hard time controlling her voice. “Not their fault? I’ve been up to the border. I’ve seen what they do.” She put her hand in front of the screen, trying to get Angel’s attention. “I’ve seen scalps.” Angel paused the video stream and met her gaze.

  “You ever hear about that psychology experiment, where this guy made pe
ople pretend like they were either prisoners or guards, and everyone started acting just the way prisoners and guards really act. You see that?”

  “Sure, the Stanford prison experiment.”

  Angel started up the Undaunted episode again, pointed at it. On the screen the Desert Dogs were starting to butcher Merry Perrys.

  “This is the same. You give people something to do, and that’s what they are. People.” He shrugged. “It’s the job that pulls people’s strings, not the other way around. Put them on the border, tell them to keep the refugees out, they turn into a border patrol. Put them on the other side—they beg for mercy and get themselves scalped and take it in the ass just like the Merry Perrys. None of them choose their jobs. They just end up in them. Some people got born in Nevada, so they play Desert Dogs; other people, they’re born in Texas, they learn to crawl on their bellies and beg. Merry Perrys, they pray and they go across the river like sheep, and the Desert Dogs, they rip into them like prey. If they were born opposite, it’d still be the same.”

  “You, too?”

  “Everyone,” he said. “You live in a nice house, you’re one kind of person. You live in the barrio, you run with a gang. You go to prison, you think like a con. You join up with the guardies, you play soldier.”

  “And if Catherine Case recruits you?”

  “You cut what needs cutting.”

  “So you don’t think people are anything on their own, inherently? You don’t think anyone can be better than what they grew up with?”

  “Shit, I wouldn’t know.” He laughed. “I ain’t that deep.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Pretend to be ignorant.”

  For a moment his lips compressed, showing a flash of irritation. The urge to combat her. She almost expected him to flare up somehow, to lash out at her, but then it was gone, and he was placid again.

  “Okay.” He shrugged. “Maybe people got choices. But mostly they just do what they’re pushed to do. You push, they stampede.” He nodded down at the screen and restarted the video. “And when shit really starts falling apart? Sure, people work together for a while, but not when it gets really bad. I read this article about one of those countries in Africa—Congo or Uganda or something. I was reading, thinking how shitty people are to each other, and then I got to a part where these soldiers, they…”