The Water Knife

  And Lucy had spared him, after all.

  Footsteps crunched over unstable rubble. Flashlights swept the shattered glass and blackened Spanish tiles.

  “So what are we looking for?” one of them asked.

  “Pieces and parts.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Quit bitching.”

  Two of them. Angel felt a twinge of relief. Two, he thought he could manage. Even in his current broken state.

  “I want to know why I keep getting the messy jobs. I had to clean Ratan’s place, too. You know how hard it is to get brains out of a carpet?”

  “You don’t scrub bloody carpet, asshole. You rip it out and replace it.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  “That’s why I’m not promoting you.”

  “Help,” Angel moaned. “Heeeeelp.” Drawing out the word. Beckoning.

  “I’ll be goddamned.”

  The men circled in on him. Bright LED beams speared his eyes. Angel squinted against the glare. Reached out to them. Slow. So slow. A victim. A piece of meat, burned and nearly dead.

  “Looks like our special friend from Vegas.”

  Angel could imagine what they were seeing. The horror of a burn and missile victim, half-buried under soot and Spanish-tile rubble. Lucy had lit his hair on fire, melting it to a ragged mass. He’d taken glass and slit it across his forehead, letting blood and ash mingle muddy.

  The men crouched down beside Angel, playing their lights across his half-buried body.

  “You sure this is him?”

  “He’s a bit more fucked up than the last time I saw him, but I got a good look at him in the Taiyang.”

  “You mean when he ditched your ass at the Taiyang.”

  “Motherfucker was resourceful. What can I say?”

  Squinting against the glare, Angel could just make out their shapes. Two hulking men. Suit coats. Ties. A bare glimpse of pistols inside coats. From the comments, he guessed they were the same Calies he’d been playing cat and mouse with at the morgue, then again at the Taiyang.

  And now they were here, doing dirty work for Catherine Case.

  The junior man started dragging junk off of Angel while the senior guy squatted beside him.

  “How you doing there?” he asked soothingly as he ran his hands over Angel’s bloodied shirt, patting him down. “You got some papers for us? Or you got ’em stashed somewhere?”

  “They’re probably burned to a crisp.”

  “Help me…” Angel whispered.

  “ ’Course,” the Cali soothed. “No problem. Just tell us where you put the papers, and we’ll dig you out and run you over to the Red Cross. Deal?”

  Angel let his breath out in a long sigh and let his eyes roll up into the back of his head.

  “Shit. We’re losing him. Check the rest of him!”

  Angel let himself be rolled. Slipped a hand under sooty rubble. As the senior man leaned down to search beneath him, Angel seized hold of him.

  Unbalanced, the Cali toppled. Angel grunted in pain as the man landed on him. Blackness nearly swallowed him, but he managed to yank his gun out of the rubble and ram it under the man’s chin.

  Junior went for his own gun.

  “Freeze!” Lucy shouted. “Or I blow your goddamn head off!”

  The man did indeed freeze.

  Angel couldn’t help smiling. Lucy emerged from the shadows, stalking carefully. Angel jammed his gun deep against his own captive’s neck. “Got some questions for you, big boy.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “One more word like that, and we put a bullet in Junior over there,” Angel said. “Nice thing about having two of you. I got a spare body to question.”

  Lucy relieved her captive of his pistol and stepped back quickly, keeping wide of the man’s reach. She settled in, watchful, her pistol braced.

  “Just a couple questions,” Angel said. “If things go good, maybe we all walk away from this.”

  “Sure. Anything you want.”

  Angel knew the guy was playing for time and hoped the Cali wouldn’t realize just how weak he was.

  “Who you working for?”

  “You don’t know?”

  Angel didn’t like how dark it was getting. He wished his eyes would adjust. It made him feel vulnerable. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Maybe I put a bullet in your head when you answer wrong. You working for Case?”

  A long pause. “Yeah.”

  Lucy snorted disbelief. “Right.”

  She shot Junior in the leg. Junior went down, howling.

  Oh hell.

  Senior threw himself away from Angel. Angel barely hung on, feeling as if his guts were tearing open. He rammed his pistol deep into the man’s neck, making him gurgle.

  “Hold still!” he shouted as the man bucked. Senior froze, but Junior made a clumsy lunge for Lucy. Even wounded, he was fast.

  Lucy smashed her pistol butt down on his head, knocking him to the ground. She knelt on his back and jammed her pistol into the base of his skull.

  “If you move, I will paint your brains on the ground.”

  Angel stopped worrying about whether Lucy could back him up and started worrying whether she was about to go on a killing spree.

  “Lucy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You think we can keep them alive?”

  “These fuckers went after my sister. They were going to hurt Stacie and Ant.”

  “Not these guys, though,” Angel said.

  “You know they’ve done it to someone.” Lucy’s voice was so flat that Angel worried there wasn’t any way to control the situation.

  “I need these guys alive, Lucy.”

  “That’s fine. I won’t kill them if they stop lying.”

  She jammed her pistol against her Cali’s skull, driving his face into rubble. Angel could feel his own guy tensing, thinking there was no way to survive. The situation was spinning out of control.

  “All we want is answers,” he said.

  “You’ll kill us anyway.”

  “Do you remember when it wasn’t like this?” Angel asked. “When we weren’t at each other’s throats like this?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Come on. I’m a pawn. You’re a pawn. No reason you got to do some sacrifice play for some asshole back in L.A. We’re just a bunch of pawns, talking, right now. No reason we can’t all walk away from this, pretend this whole shitstorm never happened. Let’s make it businesslike.”

  “What about her?”

  “Lucy?”

  She didn’t answer. Angel wondered what was going on inside her head. How much anger and rage and fear and cathartic need to lash out she had built up in her? How many years had she been down here, looking over her shoulder, watching out for killers like these?

  “Lucy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re just soldiers,” he said, “same as me. They do their jobs. Get their pay. Hope their families get to stay in California. They’re just tiny gears in a big machine.”

  “Dangerous gears.”

  “No.” He shook his head tiredly. “This is just a job to them. Not worth dying for.” He paused. “And maybe someday when they get the drop on me or you, they remember we did them a favor, and we walk out alive instead of ending up buried in the desert.”

  Finally Lucy said, “Okay, Angel. Ask your questions. If they tell the truth…I’ll let them walk.”

  “How do we know?” the Cali asked.

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  But the tenor of her voice had changed, as if her rage was no longer making her choices for her. Angel thought the Calies could hear the change, too, because he felt his man relax.

  “Can I get my leg…?” the junior guy asked.

  Lucy got off him and stepped back quickly. The man stripped off his jacket and started binding his wound. “Ask your questions.”

  “You’re Calies, right?”

  “Sure. Yeah.” The senior guy sighed. “Like you said, out
of L.A.”

  “What the hell are you doing out here working for Vegas?”

  “Came down the chain, is all I know. We were supposed to comb a house, look for the body of a Vegas water knife. Look for some senior water rights papers, and see if maybe we’d get lucky finally. That’s it.”

  “Papers?” That brought Angel up short. “Dead trees? That kind of papers?”

  “We’re pretty sure. Ratan’s computer didn’t have anything on it, but we know he did the deal for the rights. Looking back on all his communications, it started to make sense that the documentation was hard copy, not digitized at all. So yeah, we’re looking for paper.”

  Angel laughed tiredly. Of course. He could imagine Civil War–era military guys, sitting across the table from the Indians they had destroyed, scratching out agreements on parchment sheaves. Each man handing a feather quill pen to the next, dipping the sharp tip in ink, each man scratching his name on paper.

  Old paper, for old rights.

  “I don’t got those papers,” Angel said.

  “Come on, we all saw you bail out of the Taiyang. And we know Ratan had them, even though he was denying it to everyone up and down the chain. We know he was keeping them real close while he tried to double-cross us. Except we went over his apartment with a fine-tooth comb, and the only thing missing from it was whatever you had when we saw you leaving so fast. Put two and two together, and we got you running off with our rights, after you popped Ratan.”

  “No. That wasn’t me. I didn’t kill Ratan,” Angel said. “It was another of our guys, trying to make his own play. He thought he’d make himself a pile of money selling those rights off for himself.”

  “Yeah, Ratan was pulling the same shit on us. He kept telling us he’d been sold forgeries, probably a Phoenix sting operation, and there wasn’t even any chance of payback because now the guy was dead in some kind of narco murder thing. Typical smokescreen bullshit. I mean, sure, we bought it for a little while, it was almost too bizarre not to believe…but then the story just got a little thin. Too bad, because he used to be a pretty decent guy. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. You were the last guy in his apartment before we got there, so—”

  “So now you think I’m pulling the same trick? Making my own score?”

  “You are the last man standing.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  Angel could imagine Catherine Case, putting disparate data points together, forming a picture of betrayal. Braxton screwing up things that were too obvious to miss. Added to it: Ellis up in Colorado, flipped or dead, not telling her about the dams going down. And then Julio going indy. Lots of things going wrong. Betrayals. Lies.

  And then Angel himself, going to ground and telling her that the water rights couldn’t be found.

  He could imagine her back in Vegas, surrounded by her analysts. All of them going over their intel. Listening not just to Angel’s reports but also to whatever moles and eavesdropping her people had on Ibis and California.

  He could imagine her hearing him saying he didn’t have the rights, then California buzzing and pissed off that someone with Angel’s exact description had just escaped with their precious rights from the Taiyang.

  If Julio didn’t have the papers, and California didn’t have the papers, that left Angel, lying to her.

  It made sense. Case watched patterns. She made decisions because of patterns. And the patterns that had emerged were all about betrayal.

  “Everyone’s hedging these days,” Angel muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. Gimme your phone. I got to make a call.”

  The senior guy hesitated, then drew one out under Angel’s watchful gaze. Angel rolled away from his captive, getting clear. He dialed with one eye on the Cali. He felt almost light-headed, knowing at least that this problem could be solved.

  She answered on the third ring. “This is Case.”

  “Since when are you working with California?” Angel asked.

  A pause. “Well, Angel, I suppose it was around the time that I realized so many people turn out to be unreliable. If there’s one thing I can count on, though, it’s that California will protect its own interests. And as long as our interests align, that makes them far more reliable than my own people.”

  “I ain’t dead. How’s that for reliable?”

  He could hear a waterfall in the background. She was probably at the SNWA offices, on her office balcony, looking down into the central cooling bore. Enjoying the hanging gardens. Surrounded by the lush world that she’d created.

  “I always knew you were one of my best,” she said.

  “I don’t have the water rights, either.”

  “That’s harder to believe.”

  “Did Braxton put you up to this?” Angel asked. “You know that pendejo hates me.”

  A moment of hesitation.

  He pressed. “Was it him?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “What if I can find you those water rights?” The Calies perked up at that, but Angel ignored them. “What if I bring them to you?”

  “You mean because you have them and you were planning on selling them off the way everyone else who gets hold of them tries to sell them?”

  “Because I’m still working for you! Just like I always have.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “You used to trust me.”

  “I trust that everyone is out for themselves these days. That’s turning out to be a very reliable assumption.”

  “Not me, though. That’s why you sent me down here in the first place. I don’t do that.”

  Catherine Case laughed. “Okay. Sure, Angel. For old times’ sake. If you hand over those rights, I’m willing to forget the whole thing happened. I’ll take the bounty off your head, and you can come right back home to Cypress. We can call it a big misunderstanding.”

  “I can work with that.”

  Her voice hardened. “If they show up in someone else’s hands, I’ll know it was you, and I swear I’ll be right there hunting you along with California and Arizona for the rest of your life.”

  “I get the picture.” He paused. “I don’t suppose you could turn my IDs on again. It would help me get the job done.”

  “Would you trust me if I said I would?” Case asked. Angel could hear the smile in her voice.

  “I’ve never stopped working for you,” he said.

  “I like you, Angel, but I’m not going to be made a fool. Get me those rights, and we’ll talk about bringing you back from the dead.” She clicked off.

  The senior guy chuckled. “Your boss sounds like my boss.”

  “Yeah. She’s not real sentimental.”

  “Too bad for you. Because if you don’t have the rights, and we don’t have the rights, you’re a walking dead man.”

  “No.” Angel hauled himself to his feet. “I know where they are.”

  “You what?” Lucy and the Calies stared at him, shocked.

  “Everyone’s looking for paper,” Angel said. “I know where paper is.”

  CHAPTER 42

  The problem with maps was that they never told you what was really on the ground, Maria thought.

  When she and Toomie were planning it, it had seemed so simple.

  They could zoom in and out on satellite views of the towns that ran along the edge of the Colorado River. Look at the dams. Look at all the waters and where they lay. Look at the reservoirs that were still kept full and those that had been drained and turned back into steep, nearly inaccessible canyons.

  It was all there for them to look at and plan around, and she’d assembled her equipment carefully. She had the water wings she’d use, and the clothes she’d wear that night, made of midnight fabric that she’d use to disappear. She’d thought about how low she’d need to float in the calm waters of the reservoir as she crossed, barely above the waterline, cold to infrared scopes.

  It could be done. She could do it.

  With Toomie’s h
elp, she’d caught a ride out near the border with some Chinese solar engineers who were regulars at his pupusa stand. They’d thought it was interesting to help a girl make her run at the border, a safe sort of adventure for them to take her along when they went out to inspect their photovoltaic arrays, and it had all worked so simply that she could almost see herself making it all the way across, without a hitch.

  And then she’d arrived in Carver City and found chaos in the streets, and the far shores of the river glinting with sniper scopes and watching militias. It seemed like half of Nevada and California had turned out to make sure the desperate people of Carver City couldn’t make a run for it.

  The Red Cross tents were full of people getting sick as the town’s water systems failed. The city was awash with sewage, and there weren’t anywhere near enough Jonnytrucks to serve a hundred thousand people. And now the National Guard had swept in, looking as if they were going to push everyone out any second.

  At night Maria crept down to the waters of the reservoir where Carver City perched.

  The reservoir was low. She made her way down over weathered sandstones and clay soils, shattered magma.

  She followed a draw deeper down and in the darkness came across rocks that had been inscribed with lovers’ notes and spray-painted markings. Joey and Mei. Spring Break Forever. Kilroy was here. Hearts with arrows through them. Funny faces.

  Except the lake’s waterline was still far below her.

  She realized that people had once boated to these locations and tied up here, marked their summers and vacations and loves…And later the waters had drained below this high point, leaving not just the bathtub ring of a water stain around the reservoir but also this secondary ring of memories and mementos where people had once swum to shore.

  Maria crept deeper into the gully, scrambling. Stubbing her toes. Her shoes were no good. Her hand throbbed, and she was still clumsy with it, trying to use just her few remaining fingers.

  She got down to the waterline and started to blow up the water wings. They were black as night. She bundled her hair under a kerchief of the same material. Toomie had said this was the stuff. Ninety-nine percent black. It would absorb all light. She would be nothing in the moonlight. She could lie on her back and slowly move across the waters. A turtle, barely surfaced.