The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  They’d get more Texans and do it again.

  She saw the world clear. For once, she realized she was seeing the world clear. No wonder Papa had kept himself pretending.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Mr. Vet!” She started waving her arms. “Mr. Vet!”

  The Vet turned at her words.

  Damien stiffened. He glanced from Maria to the Vet and back, his face schooled into a tight pissed-off smile. “You have no idea what kind of hurt you’re getting into.”

  The Vet set his bucket down and waved for a couple of his other cholobis to take it away. They handed him a rag, and he idly wiped at his gore-soaked arms as he strode over.

  Maria tried to hide her fear as the Vet ambled to the gate and peered through the bars.

  “Who do we have here?” he asked.

  “No one,” Damien said. “Girl’s behind on her rent.”

  The Vet’s eyes went from Damien to Maria. “And what does this have to do with me?” He wiped more gore from his hands and arms. Fat and meat and thick rich blood on the rag.

  “I had my rent. I sell water over by the Taiyang,” Maria said. “I had my rent, but he took my money. He had Esteban take it.”

  “And now you’re coming to me.” The Vet smiled. “I don’t know that many people who would consider coming directly to me.”

  He was solidly built. A bull of a man, with thick shoulders and a shock of white hair and blue eyes. Pale blue eyes as cool and high as a cirrus sky. Pinprick pupils. The man was staring at her through the links, looking at her with as much hunger as his hyenas. A starved creature, considering what it would do if it reached the other side of the fence.

  Maria suddenly understood her mistake. The Vet wasn’t a person at all. He was something else. A demon, climbed up out of the earth. Some kind of creature that ate and ate and ate, and now the demon was staring into her. Licking his lips. The fence was nothing as far as a barrier. He could reach through and take her.

  “Come here.”

  Blood-smeared arm extended, stained palm open, crabbed and expectant, beckoning. “Let me see you.” To her horror, Maria found herself obeying the command of his gory fingers.

  His hand stroked her cheek, gripped her beneath her chin. “What’s your name?”

  “Maria.”

  He tugged her closer still, his eyes pinprick bright. Animal and hungry.

  “What do I see?” he murmured. His eyes appeared fascinated as he turned her face this way and that with his blood-slicked hand. “What do I see?”

  “I can’t earn if he keeps taking my money,” Maria whispered, as he continued to grip her chin. She felt as if she were outside her body, looking in.

  “Maria,” the Vet whispered, “Maria…I’m not stupid. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “No.” She could barely force out the words.

  “So why do you come to me, telling me things I already know?” His grip tightened, pinching her viselike. “You think I don’t know everything that happens in my domain, Maria? You think I thrive because I fail to see?”

  He stroked her cheek again, running the backs of his fingers down her face. “I know you sell water by the Taiyang. I know you’d like to earn more. I know everything about you. I have visions, you see? La Santa Muerte whispered in my ear, and she said you’d be coming. The Skinny Lady likes you and your little red wagon.” His wild blue eyes scanned the dusty cul-de-sac. “But there’s no wagon. I saw you with a wagon full of bottles, all glittering in the sun. But all I see is you. Visions have variations, I find. Do you find that’s true, too?”

  Maria swallowed. Nodded.

  “So why don’t you work for me, Maria?”

  “I just want to sell my water.”

  “Damien could put you on corners, Maria. High traffic. Easy money. Or you could carry packages for me. You’re smarter than that friend of yours who hides from me. I could use a girl like you. There would be benefits. You could live closer to a relief pump. You could save money for a coyote. There’s no way you’ll make it north if you insist on earning small money. It’s the big money that matters. Big money crosses borders.”

  “I’m just selling the water.”

  “You aren’t freelancing, are you?” The pinprick eyes studied her. “Maybe holding cash that you should have passed to our friend Damien?”

  Maria swallowed, terrified that he somehow knew she’d gone with Sarah that one time and met the fiver. That she’d had dinner with him and listened to him tell her stories about aquifers, for money.

  “I’m not stupid,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t ask a stupid girl. It’s only the smart ones who think they can go it alone.” Again the empty smile. “It’s only the smart ones who think they can carve out their own little niches in our little family down here. Our little ecosystem.”

  His eyes darted to the hyenas. “Those ones think they could do well outside their walls too, of course.” His eyes went back to her. “They yearn for their freedom here. To hunt and run. They see us, such little puny, soft, and confused things, and they see opportunity. We are not evolved as they are. We aren’t adapted to the hardships of eat-or-be-eaten that have toughened their kind. Look at them.” He turned her face so that she could see the hyenas staring at them both.

  Maria swallowed. The Vet smiled. “You see it, don’t you? We both see things, I think.”

  The hyenas studied Maria with their yellow piercing eyes, and Maria knew the Vet was right. She could see their ancient minds at work. She thought she could almost hear them dreaming of how mightily they would thrive if the Vet would just allow them to go hunting beyond the fence lines.

  This is their world, Maria realized. The broken Phoenix suburbs were their promised land. They didn’t fear the lack of water. They simply waited behind their fences for the time when they would inherit the earth.

  We are not like you, sister. We don’t need water. We need blood alone.

  “If I let them run free, I think they would thrive,” the Vet said. “Don’t you? Maybe someday they will, and all of this city will be their domain.”

  He released her.

  “You have an extra day,” he said, turning away. “Pay Damien what you owe him.”

  “But he’s got the money already.”

  “Santa Muerte said I shouldn’t throw a party for you,” the Vet said. “She didn’t say I had to stop doing business.” He glanced at his underling. “Damien won’t interfere again, if you come with what you owe.” His eyes focused on her, as crazed as any hyena. “Pay him. Or the next time you come back, I will see you in a party dress.”

  Maria stepped back, wiping her face. Her hand smeared and came away red from her cheek.

  “You heard the boss,” Damien said, smirking. “Better start earning. And don’t forget, your girlfriend owes me, too.”

  Maria turned away. Trying not to think about the blood on her skin, trying not to think of where it had come from.

  It’s just water, she told herself. It’s just red water.

  The hyenas paced her as she walked away from the Vet’s compound, chuckling and rattling the fences, reminding her with every step that when they saw her, they saw prey.

  CHAPTER 13

  Angel kicked his boots up on the Hilton 6’s soft bed, propped himself against fluffy pillows, and tuned the TV to the new episode of Undaunted.

  On his lap he set his tablet, running searches for the journalist he’d let escape. Her friend Timo had been right—she wasn’t hard to find.

  Lucy Monroe, muckraking journo extraordinaire, was busy raking muck.

  PHOENIX CITY WATER ATTORNEY SLAIN

  WATER ATTORNEY TORTURED FOR DAYS BEFORE DEATH

  She’d lied to him, all right. Not a blood rag girl at all. Lucy was way crazier than a body chaser, and he had to hand it to her, the woman had balls. Or ovaries, as Catherine Case liked to say, whenever Angel said something that she thought reeked too much of machismo.

  Balls, or ovaries, or plain lack of common sense, Lucy was
taking swings at every power player in the Lower Basin, calling out California, Las Vegas, and Catherine Case…calling out Phoenix Water and the Salt River Project. Angel half-expected to find himself named, the way she was running.

  A Phoenix Water lawyer had gotten ripped to pieces, and everyone was pretending it hadn’t happened. So now Lucy Monroe was kicking over every anthill in creation, hoping to stir things up, with accusations everywhere and “no comment”s from Phoenix PD and the attorney general.

  Angel figured the lady wasn’t long for this world at the rate she was going. Someone would get annoyed eventually and put her down.

  On the TV, Tau Ox had just put a bullet in a couple of cholobis who’d been terrorizing Texas refugees, and now Tau had a pistol up some blond guy’s mouth and was demanding answers about the Burned Man.

  Angel liked Tau Ox’s character in Undaunted: Relic Jones, ex-recon marine, returned from his Arctic tour to his home on the Texas coast, only to find his family missing from a hurricane.

  First season, Relic Jones had spent his time trying to find his wife and kids in the FEMA hurricane domes of South Texas, digging through the human refuse and the swamped shorelines of the Gulf Coast, dodging water spouts and tornadoes. But now Relic Jones was on the road, searching.

  And god damn if Tau Ox didn’t know how to play the character.

  Tau knew about loss, so the man played Relic just right. Bastard had been washed up until Undaunted. Big in a couple action movies and rom-coms, then disappeared. Turned into a coke and bubble addict, some people said he’d been a gigolo, and then he’d dropped off the tabloids entirely. People stopped giving a shit about him. There were other stars fucking up their lives in better, more spectacular ways. Tau Ox was done.

  And then out of the blue, he got pulled out of the gutter for this role. Now Tau Ox was middle-aged and hard. Not the pretty boy he had been. Sucker’d been through the wringer enough to make you believe he really was a Texan.

  The toilet flushed. Julio came out of the bathroom, buckling his belt. “You still watching that shit?”

  “I like it,” Angel said. “Sucker has soul.” Tau Ox had scars. He’d had troubles. “He’s got depth,” Angel said.

  Not many actors seemed real to Angel, and sure as shit no one who acted knew the world Angel ran in, but Tau Ox—when he played Texan, Angel felt it. Angel had been through the wringer, too. When Catherine Case pulled him out of Hell, he’d needed rebirth, and she’d given it to him.

  Second chances. Maybe that was why he liked the cabrón.

  “What’s the word on that chick from the morgue?” Julio asked.

  “Well, she ain’t just blood rags. Does real journo,” Angel said. “Lot of articles.”

  He didn’t say that there was something familiar about her. When he’d seen her in the morgue, he’d felt a shock of recognition that had shaken him, and more troublingly, it had made him let her go when he should have grabbed her and tried to question her more. Like a fool, he’d let her go, and so now he had to hunt her up again.

  Embarrassing.

  “Big bylines. Google/New York Times. BBC. Kindle Post. National Geo. The Guardian. Some enviro shit. High Country News. A couple others. Writes a lot about how Phoenix chews people up. She’s got hashtags, too. Posts a lot into #PhoenixDowntheTubes. She’s kind of the queen of that one.”

  “She does #PhoenixDowntheTubes?” Julio was briefly interested. “That one’s pretty good. A little like #BodyLotty. You ever read #BodyLotty? That one is insane. Better than the blood rags, even.”

  On the TV, Tau Ox put a bullet in the last gangster. A muffled sound. Blood on the dirt.

  “Lot of bodies to write about,” Angel observed.

  “Believe,” Julio said. “We’re going to be bigger than New Orleans.” He held up his phone. “Bad news on the lotería, though. I think we got five hundred yuan into the Over One-fifty, but I don’t have a confirmation yet. And now those fuckers won’t add all the bodies in. Bitching that they aren’t sure how to count it, with them still digging more out of the desert.”

  He glared at the phone’s screen. “You know it’s time to get out of a place when even the damn lotería is broken.” He shoved his phone into his pocket. “Fuck it. Anything else you need before I head north?”

  “You go through that other guy’s stuff?”

  “Yeah.” Julio went over to where he’d tossed all the materials they’d collected from the corpses’ evidence bags. “Nothing here.” He grinned and held up a gold card. “Unless you want to hit Apocalypse Now! and see how much anonymous cash our dead boy saved up. Might be good for a party.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  Julio gave him an exasperated look. “If you’re going to be down here any time at all, you got to learn how to have a good time. Texas bangbang girls, they’ll do pretty much anything for a shower.”

  “You ever heard of Lucy Monroe?” Angel held up his tablet, showing Julio the photo.

  “That your journo’s name?” Julio pocketed the club card.

  “She’s writing all about that James Sanderson guy who was slabbed with Vos.”

  “Writing some sensational shit for the blood rags, I bet.”

  “No.” Angel shook his head. “She doesn’t bite on narcos and torture, at all. Just goes straight for water. That boy Sanderson was definitely in Phoenix Water. Some kind of lawyer for them.”

  “Like Braxton?”

  “Not that important, I don’t think. More of a paper pusher. Kind of guy who digs through county records for the paper that Braxton uses at trial.” Angel frowned. “Sanderson, plus your guy Vosovich. Two bodies cut up the same can’t be a coincidence. Not with those Calies all over his body, too.”

  He turned his tablet for Julio to see the face of the Phoenix Water guy, a pristine image, separate from the mangled face down in the morgue.

  “You recognize him? Maybe see Vosovich running him? I was thinking maybe your guy Vosovich had him recruited for intel or something.”

  Julio studied the image and shook his head. “I sure never seen the guy. But like I said, Vos got real cagey with me the last couple weeks. He kept telling me over and over that he was on to something that was worth big money. But wouldn’t give any details.” He studied the image. “I just figured Vos was looking to get an extra handout.” He laughed. “I was so pissed that he was angling for a big score, while I was stuck down here humping for Case on salary. And now he’s dead, and I’m headed for Vegas. How’s that for irony?”

  “Shit is ironic, for sure.”

  Julio looked at Angel significantly. “If you’re smart, you’ll get out of here with me.”

  “Job’s not done yet.”

  “Shit. The job.” Julio made a sound of irritation. “Don’t think you’re going to pull some Relic Jones action hero shit down here. You showed up. You looked around. I’ll swear it to anyone.” He made a motion for the door. “So let’s both get out. It’s not like Case is going to check our homework. We go home and tell her whatever got Vosovich killed was a mirage. Done and done. And we don’t end up looking like Vosburger.”

  Angel glanced up from another of Lucy Monroe’s articles, a thousand words of bile about the Phoenix PD that connected to a cop who’d taken a bullet a couple years back. Woman was a stone-cold muckraker.

  “Where’d your güevos go?” Angel asked. “Used to be you had balls. Big old bull’s balls, size of my fist. Qué malo, all that. The fuck happened to you?”

  “I spent too much time in this shithole, is what. If you spend enough time down here, it’ll infect you, too. People down here—they die for no fucking reason. I’m telling you, this isn’t some Tau Ox bullshit TV epic. It’s cholobis banging on Texans so they can get their colors. It’s Merry Perrys getting strung up on the overpasses. It’s little kids catching bullets ’cause somebody loses their shit after a storm.

  “One second you’re buying a bottle of tequila in the dark zone; next second, you got some sunburned ten-year-old Texas punk frog
-walking you to the nearest ATM. Shit’s crazy here.

  “Even the establishment Zoners are bailing. I see it all the time on my intel. Politicians getting their payoffs so they can buy a nice villa over in California. Using the cops to drive journos into the desert when they start to ask questions. I mean seriously, half the state reps have ‘vacation’ homes up in Vancouver or Seattle, making sure they got special travel visas so they can get out of the state.

  “This place is falling apart, people are starting to strip the bones, and you’re here trying to figure out if there’s a reason for one more body to be dead.”

  “Two, actually.”

  “Oh, chingada—” Julio shook his head. “No. Never mind. Ten to one says Vos, and your Jay-jay Samsonite or whoever the fuck he was, pissed off some cholobi at a club and just ended up dead. This place ain’t about balls. It’s just a hellhole for cheap Juárez drugs, cheap Texas ass, and cheap Iranian bullets.”

  “The Julio I used to know would have called that Heaven.”

  Julio made a face. “You laugh because you haven’t got caught in a firefight between a bunch of Arizona militia and those Merry Perry fuckwits yet. After that, you’ll see things different, too.”

  Angel held up his hands in surrender. “I’m not judging.”

  Julio laughed cynically. “The fuck you’re not.” He checked his phone again and shoved it into his pocket. “Oh, and by the way? Fuck you, if you think I care what you think.”

  “So that’s it? You don’t got anything for me before you go? Goodbye kiss? Any other intel I should know about?”

  “Oh, sure. I got all kinds of shit. I got nice weekly reports on who got promoted at Phoenix Water. I got prior-rights water filings up the ass. I got reports on the city’s aquifer desal and chemical filter plan, which is a fucking pipe dream. I’ve got reports that Coca-Cola is pulling out of their brand-new bottling facility because it’s cheaper to ship from Cali, and it doesn’t matter how many incentives Phoenix gives them to stay. I got reports on how far the Verde River is sunk underground now. I got USB drives full of intel for you, and I can tell you that none of Vos’s stuff was worth dying for. It was all bullshit paperwork.”