The Water Knife (15 page)

“A police baton?” Lucy asked.

Christine caught the implication as soon as Lucy asked—the widening of the eyes, the fast-covering blankness. Christine glanced furtively to where the cops were milling at the far side of the room with a new flood of bodies, and she glared at Lucy for speaking aloud what everybody whispered—that Phoenix’s cops were thugs for hire. “It could have been some sort of poker.”

She plunged on. “He was probably killed several times, then revived. The adrenaline in his system points to revivification. The eyes were removed pre-mortem. Of the other body parts, only the hands and feet were removed pre-mortem. The legs and the rest happened after he was dead. It appears that there was some attempt to tourniquet the limbs and prolong life longer still.”

Lucy forced herself to breathe slowly, to take the information as it came. The room felt as if it were tilting under her feet. She gripped the gurney, steadying herself. Christine was completely dispassionate as she described the stages of Jamie’s abuse. But it hadn’t been dispassionate for Jamie. He would have been sobbing and blubbering and screaming and begging, snot running down his face. Tears and spit. His voice would have been raw from screaming…

Lucy leaned close, staring at his mangled face.

He’d bitten off his own tongue.

The blood was still in his teeth.

She straightened, fighting the urge to throw up. It would have been frantic for quite some time, until finally Jamie’s attackers lost the ability to reach him anymore. And that must have made them angry, because they’d pulled him back from his place in Heaven or Hell to have another run at him.

And another, after that.

Christine could describe the stages of Jamie’s disassembly, but that didn’t begin to describe the horror that he had experienced as his attackers broke him apart. God, Jamie had been a fool. So pleased
with himself and his plots. All his ideas of how he could make himself rich and get away with it.

“Did he have his things here?” Lucy asked.

The ME gave her a long look. “Yeah. He wasn’t robbed.”

“Can I see?”

She hesitated. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

Lucy nodded. “Yeah.”

“I could tell.” She sighed. “Put on gloves.”

Lucy did, and Christine let her paw through the bag of Jamie’s effects. His bloody clothes. His wallet. She opened it and flipped through. Found credit cards, a few yuan. Scraps of receipts. She looked them over. Food stall receipts, the kind of hand scraps that Merry Perry
churro
vendors would make out. Jamie always made sure he got reimbursed for his business expenses, but this was ridiculous. A couple of business cards. Salt River Project. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Bureau of Reclamation. The ephemera of his work.

Looking through his credit cards, Lucy came up with a chip-and-pin anoncard. Gold laminated, with a bloody slash logo:
Apocalypse Now!

Lucy turned the card over. It was the kind that had stored value in it. You dumped cash into it via Bitcoin or other crypto currency, then used it without fear of being traced. Nice if you didn’t want a financial trail. Nice if someone else was dumping money into it, too. An easy, anonymous way to be paid.

She tapped the card against her palm, thinking. It bothered her, this card. It didn’t fit with Jamie. He had more style.

“Bad way to die,” someone said behind her.

Lucy jumped at the voice, shoving the papers and the card back into Jamie’s wallet.

A pair of plainclothes detectives were standing behind her. Hispanic men with thumbs in their belts, pulling their jackets back to show handguns and badges.

One guy was short, with a bit of a gut, a trim goatee, and a knowing smirk. The other one was tall. Serious, angular, and weathered. They were both looking at Jamie.

“Damn,” the short goateed one said, “looks like someone wanted this motherfucker to hurt for a while.”

“Can I help you?” Christine asked sharply.

“CID.” The taller man flashed his badge and joined his partner in the examination, leaning close to study Jamie’s face. “He hurt all right. Looks like he bit off his own tongue.” He glanced over at Lucy, dark eyes cold. “Those his things?”

He plucked Jamie’s wallet from her hand before she could answer.

“The Coyote Killers’ bodies are all over there,” Christine said pointedly.

The serious cop straightened. “Not looking for old dug-up bodies,” he said. “Looking for nice fresh ones. Like this.” He stared down at Jamie’s corpse. “This one got a name?”

“James Sanderson,” Christine said.

“Huh.” He shrugged. “Not the one I want. We’re looking for one named Vosovich.” He looked thoughtful. “Beat all to fuck like this one, though.”

Lucy didn’t like the way the cops held themselves, how their eyes went from Jamie’s corpse, to Christine, and then to her.

The short cop with the goatee had the tracery of what looked like a snake tattoo running down the back of his hand. The tall one had a scar on his face and neck, a pale ragged thing as if someone had jammed a bottle into his throat and then dragged it down to his chest. The short one was pawing through Jamie’s wallet as Christine led them to another body and pulled off a sheet.

“Is this the one you want?” she asked.

Curious, Lucy followed. The cop with the grin and the goatee still held Jamie’s effects. Lucy desperately wanted to look at the receipts again, the club card—but she forgot all about it as soon as she saw the other body. They were connected. The two corpses could have been mirror images, for all the difference their torture had taken.

“Look at this,” the short one said. “Vosburger. Chihuahuan Apocalypse 3.0. Now you tell me this ain’t all hell breaking loose.”

The taller one snorted. “End of days, for sure.” He jerked his head back toward Jamie’s body. “And he’s got a twin.”

“Probably just a coincidence,” the goateed one joked.

“Coincidences do happen, I hear.”

They were both smiling, eyes boring in on Lucy now.

“You know this one?” the scarred cop asked. He was pointing down at the new corpse, the one they’d called Vosovich.

The dead man’s ravaged body looked so much like Jamie’s that the connection couldn’t have been missed by even the stupidest cop.

Lucy shook her head. “Never seen him.”

The scarred man pointed at Jamie. “That one, though? That one’s a friend of yours?” He plucked Jamie’s wallet from his partner’s hand and pulled Jamie’s driver’s license. “Who’s this James Sanderson?”

“Says he’s a legal associate. Phoenix Water,” the short one said. “Least, if that’s his business card.”

“That right?” the tall one asked Lucy. “That what Sanderson did. Water? Legal?”

Lucy didn’t like the way the cop was looking at her. He seemed to hold himself casually, but his question was pointed. His dark eyes had her pinned.

“Hell if I know.” Lucy made herself pretend disinterest. “He’s just a swimmer to me.” She jerked her thumb toward where Timo was shooting photos. “We’re with
Río de Sangre
. Thought the body might be good enough to make the cover.”

“Huh. Didn’t peg you for a vulture.” The scarred cop nodded toward Jamie and the new body. “You see any other kills like this lately? Tortured like these ones? Swimmers maybe? Hanging off overpasses—that kind of thing?”

Lucy shrugged. “Narcos do things like this sometimes.” She let the conversation roll along, pretending boredom, using everything Ray Torres had ever taught her about pushing aside cop interest. “Timo over there has whole catalogs of pics, if you want to take a look. He’s probably got something like this.”

“I bet he does.” The cop turned and called to Christine, who had gone off to supervise more of the chaos. “Hey! This guy have any belongings?”

“He might have,” Christine called back. “If you can find them, they’re all yours.”

“If you can find them,” the short one grumbled, scanning the chaos. He ambled back over to Jamie’s corpse.

Lucy was trying to figure out the connection between the two
cops and if there was something she could pry out of them.
Vosovich
, the cop had said. She wished she could ask for the spelling, so she could start digging. She was sure it would tell her more about Jamie’s death. Just this one time, a death wouldn’t be a mystery.

Unbidden, an image of Ray Torres rose in her mind, wagging a warning finger.
Don’t write about the bodies
.

“You have any leads?” she asked the cops.

The pair exchanged amused glances. “Bad guys,” the goateed one said. “Real bad guys.”

“Can I quote you?” Lucy shot back.

“Sure. You do that.” The scarred one was looking at her in a way that made her suddenly uncertain. Her eyes were drawn to his scar, running up his neck to his jaw, disappearing down beneath his shirt, that ragged slash in the hard mahogany of his skin. Puckered broken flesh. Violence there.

“Tell me again about this man,” he said, tapping the gurney where Jamie lay. “What’s your interest in him again?”

“I—” Lucy found her voice. “Like I said. I was just looking for something bloody. For the rags.”

“Right.” He nodded. “For the rags.”

Lucy had the sudden uneasy feeling that she had met him before.

It’s his eyes
, she thought. There was something about the intensity of his watchfulness. Dark and hard. Eyes that had seen too many horrors and held no illusions. He saw things the same way she did.

Her mouth felt dry.

Timo sometimes talked about people walking on your grave. If you were paying attention, he claimed you could feel death’s wings, flapping over your head, and that was the moment you needed to hightail it to a Santa Muerte shrine and make some big fucking offerings. If you were quick, the Skinny Lady could lay protection on you—if she liked you. If you made the right offerings.

Lucy had laughed it off as Zoner superstition. But now, suddenly, she believed.

This man was death.

“I didn’t get your name,” he said. Lucy swallowed. She didn’t want to give him her name. She wanted to blend into the walls. She wanted to run.

“I’m sure you got a name,” he pressed, smiling.

His head was cocked, studying her. Like a crow eyeing carrion. His eyes were picking her apart. Plucking at skin and flesh, muscles and tendons. Flaying her wide. She’d been a fool to come to see Jamie, she realized. A fool to even consider tracing the story of her friend’s death.

“You’re not a cop.”

As soon as she said it, it seemed obvious. He wore a badge, but he wasn’t a cop.

A tight smile confirmed her guess, even as he said, “No? You don’t think so?”

She wondered if this was the man who had tortured Jamie. If he’d left Jamie and the other body in the morgue to draw her in.
Cholobi
gangs sometimes used that trick. They murdered someone, then waited for the victim’s friends to come close, and then killed them, too. A sly trick. A favorite trick. A way to squeeze more death from a target, like wringing the last juice from a dry lime.

Lucy took a step back, but the cop seized her arm. His fingers dug into her skin. He dragged her close, and his head dipped low. His lips brushed her ear.

“I don’t believe you ever gave me your name.”

Lucy swallowed, scanning for help in the morgue. Christine was nowhere to be seen. Timo as well. She pried his fingers off, made herself glare at him. “You’re way out of line.”

“You think?”

“Back off, or I’ll bring every real cop down on your head.”

She guessed she had a fifty-fifty chance of convincing bystanders that he was an impostor. If Christine had been in the room, it would have been different.

Lucy scanned the room again, looking for the ME—where was she?

The guy with the goatee and the tattoo on his arm ambled over. “You got something?” He reached to his belt, pulling handcuffs. “She got a lead for us?”

The scarred man glanced at his companion, then back to Lucy.

To Lucy’s surprise, he let her go.

“Nah,” he said. “Nothing here. Just a blood rag girl who don’t
know shit.” He glanced over at her, warning in his dark eyes. “Blood rag journos don’t know shit, ain’t that right?”

It took Lucy a second to find her voice. “Right,” she whispered.

“So go on.” He jerked his head toward the door. “Beat it. Go vulture somewhere else.”

Lucy didn’t wait for the scarred man to repeat himself. She fled.

A
ngel watched the blood rag journo go.

Something about her wasn’t right, but he hadn’t liked the way Julio zeroed in on their conversation. With Julio, there was a decent chance that anyone he questioned would end up worse for wear. So Angel had let her go. And now he regretted it.

I’m getting soft
.

“Hey.” Julio gripped his elbow. “We got company,
cabrón
.”

A couple guys were pushing through the crowds, jostling EMTs, showing badges. State cops, from the look.

“You know them?”

“Calies.” Julio turned away, keeping his back to them. He murmured, “If they see my ass, they’ll know me for sure. Phoenix is too small a town for this shit.”

Angel gave them a once-over. They had the look, he decided. Where Catherine Case recruited her people from prisons and desperation, California had its own processes and spent its vastly larger pool of money in different ways. The pair threading their way between the gurneys had the clean-cut look of rich Stanford graduates. No visible tats. Hair trimmed just right. Real overachievers.

“You sure they’re Calies? Maybe they’re real CID.”

Julio elbowed Angel impatiently. “Hell yes, I’m sure. I got cams on Ibis, and those guys are in and out of the headquarters all the time.”

“That company might as well be a Cali embassy.”

Julio was already scanning the exits. “I knew I shouldn’t have agreed to come down here with you.”

“Calm down,
ése
. Let’s see what they do. Maybe we’ll see us something interesting.”

“Fuck you and your
ése
bullshit.” Julio’s face was a death mask of fear. “Ten to one those motherfuckers have badges that actually check out. If they want, they really could arrest us. Start running background checks on our asses. You want that?”

“You serious? They can do that shit?”

“Calies are way ahead of us on everything. You’re running with the big dogs down here,
ése
.” Julio emphasized the final word, mocking. He tugged Angel’s sleeve. “Now will you come
on
?”

Julio had lost it, Angel decided.

Time was, the man standing next to him would have let a rancher put a shotgun in his mouth and wouldn’t blink. Julio would tell that redneck and his shotgun that Vegas was putting a call on his water and he could kiss it goodbye. No fucking fear. Julio’d just hand over the papers and wait to get his brains blasted out the back of his head.

Now a couple Calies had the poor bastard jumping out of his skin.

“Do what you feel,” Angel said. “I think I’m going to linger. See what our friends get up to.”

Julio hesitated, clearly torn between his urge to run and his desire to keep Angel’s respect. “It’s your funeral,” he muttered, and then he was off, squeezing through the crowds, fleeing the scene.

Angel kept wandering among the bodies, occasionally lifting a sheet, pretending to do official business while keeping an eye on the Calies, who were busy making their own tour of the dead.

Despite what Julio claimed, they looked a hell of a lot like real CID to Angel. It would make sense that CID would be here, given that Texans were stacked in the morgue like cordwood. Even Arizona had to give a shit once in a while, if only to show the tourists that the state wasn’t deliberately aiming to become the next poster child for ethnic cleansing.

The blood rag photographer was still snapping pictures, his flash going off like a bomb. Angel watched the guy work the bodies, fluid and professional. The man’s presence reminded him of the journalist who had fled. Something had been off about her.

So why’d I let her go?

Still keeping his eyes on the Calies, Angel moved to join the photographer. The man was trying to get an angle on a corpse, holding up a gurney sheet as he took the shot, one-handed.

Angel plucked up the sheet and held it for him. “Looks like business is good.”

The photographer nodded at Angel, grateful. Fiddled with his camera settings. “Oh, man. You wouldn’t believe it.” He sighted through the viewfinder. “Could you hold that up a little higher? Thanks.” He snapped pictures. “I want to get her missing teeth. They pried all the gold out, but…”

Angel obligingly tugged the sheet into the position. “Say,” he said, “you had a friend here. Lady working the blood rags with you.”

“Who? You mean Lucy?” The photographer took another shot. Stepped back, considering the angles. “She’s not blood rag. Woman’s got Pulitzers.”

“No shit?” Angel kicked himself for letting her go. “Guess I should have known she was good. Asked smart questions, you know?”

“Yeah.” The photographer nodded, distracted, still focused on shooting.

“I was supposed to give her some background, but…” Angel waved at the chaos around them. “I forgot to get her name and number with all this shit coming down.”

“You can just Google her. Lucy Monroe.” The photographer rattled off her phone number from memory, not pausing as he took shots. “Can you lift that higher?”

More commotion came from the hallway. They both turned, expecting another surge of excavated corpses, but instead it was families, a whole flood of people, not just Texans, either. Locals, it looked like. A rainbow of skin colors. Black and white and brown and yellow. All united in their loss, all pouring past the cops, who were losing control of the situation, people babbling in Spanish, English, and Dallas Drawl, and all sounding pretty much the same in mourning.

“Oh man, this is going to be sweet!” the photographer said. He dove into the action. Angel faded up against a wall, keeping an eye on the Calies as they made their rounds.

Lucy Monroe. Winner of Pulitzers
.

The Calies paused at James Sanderson’s body and called out to the Chinese lady who ran the morgue. Two clean-cut guys, doing the exact same routine Angel and Julio had pulled just a few minutes before.

This ought to be interesting
.

The ME was gesturing, arguing with the Calies. They showed her badges, and now she was turning, her whole demeanor changing as she scanned the mayhem…

She pointed, picking Angel out.

Thanks a lot, lady
.

Angel smirked, tipped an imaginary cowboy hat in the Calies’ direction. “Too slow,” he mouthed to them.

Of course, they went for their guns, but by then Angel was plunging into the crowd of grieving families.

As he bailed, he casually tipped a gurney, double-stacked with bodies, sending corpses tumbling behind him.

The Calies went sprawling in the mess, and the families lost their shit, seeing their loved ones dumped on the ground. They went after the Calies, screaming blood and vengeance.

Angel grabbed a nearby cop and flashed his badge. “Get those idiots out of here! This is a crime scene, goddammit!”

He kept moving, threading the crowds before the Calies could get themselves untangled from the raging families and the guards.

They were good. One of them managed to get past the cops.

Angel kept forging through the crowds, fighting against the incoming flow of bodies, families, and med techs. He yanked a sheet off a gurney as he passed, leaving another dead Texan exposed, then cut left into a side hall.

The Cali came around the corner, hot on Angel’s trail. Angel threw the gurney sheet over the man’s head. He yelped, but Angel yanked him close, slamming his elbow into the man’s nose. He caught the Cali’s gun as it came up and smashed it against the wall, knocking it free. He spun the man about, put him in a headlock, and started dragging him down the passage.

The man kept thrashing, yelling through the muffling sheet.

“Police business!” Angel shouted as people stared.

He hit the man again and got him in a chokehold. A few seconds later the man went limp.

Angel flipped him over and cuffed him for the benefit of the watching crowd, then dragged him farther down hall, out of the mayhem.

He shoved the man under a gurney and riffled the man’s badges and wallet, then draped the sheet over him. He returned to the main hall, looking for signs of the guy’s partner.

The other Cali was still tangled up with the cops and families, all of them pointing fingers at one another, pissed off that someone’s kid had come apart in the chaos.

Angel ducked his head low and pushed out through the steel doors, into the heat and bustle of cops and ambulances and Texas refugees. Arizona sunshine blazed down, turning the blacktop sticky. Angel jammed his way through the press, half-expecting pursuit but seeing none.

He picked up Julio in the parking lot. The man looked like he was about to piss himself from anxiety.

“You were right,” Angel said, tossing him the wallet as he climbed into Julio’s truck. “They were Calies.”

Julio caught the flying billfold against his chest. “
Chinga tu madre
. I told you that.”

“They zeroed right in on Vosovich and that other deader.”

“Fantastic. You’re a real Sherlock Holmes.” Julio powered up his truck, kicking the A/C to full. “Can we please get the fuck out of here?”

“Yeah, let’s roll.” Angel strapped his seat belt. “I think I want to check on that journo next.”

“The blood rag lady?”

“Not just blood rags, apparently. Real journo. Pretty sure she knew that other deader who was cut up like Vos.”

“The water lawyer?”

“Yeah. Since the lawyer’s missing his tongue, let’s see if she talks any better.”

“Got to find her first.”

Angel laughed as Julio pulled out of the police department’s lot. “Journos are easy to find. They like attention.”

Julio steered around piles of dust that had been pushed aside by street cleaning crews. They headed downtown, Julio’s truck bouncing on the cracked concrete of the highway. “Not like us,” he said.

“No.” Angel watched the hollowed-out city passing outside his windows. “Journos—it’s like they got a death wish.”

Julio changed lanes, gunning his truck past a couple on a scooter, full-head dust masks and helmets making them look like the shock troops in
Fallout 9
.

“That was a hell of a lot of bodies back there,” Julio said.

“So?”

“Think I’m going to put some more money on the
lotería
. They ain’t anywhere near done digging.”

“Is that what you spend your time doing down here?”

“Don’t laugh. Payout is sweet. Crypto cash, so no one can track it. Tax-free profit. So?” Julio waited, his expression expectant.

“So what?”

“So you want to go in on it with me? There had to be at least a hundred bodies in the halls—plus you got your regular deadfall all over the city. I mean, we got a chance to really skew the numbers here.”

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you nothing comes free?”

“Shit.” Julio laughed. “It’s the Texans who do all the paying round here.”