The Water Knife (33 page)

B
y 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 people 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…”

He glanced at Lucy, then looked away.

“They did a bunch of shit to a village.” He shrugged. “And it was exactly what some militia I worked with did to a bunch of Merry Perrys who tried to swim across the river to Nevada. And
that
was
exactly
like the cartels did when they took Chihuahua for good.

“It’s the same every time. All the rapes. All the chopped-off cocks that get shoved in dudes’ mouths, all the bodies burned with acid or lit on fire with gasoline and tires. Same shit, over and over.”

Lucy felt sick, listening to him. It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn’t really argue.

“Like there’s something in our DNA,” she murmured, “that makes us into monsters.”

“Yeah. And we’re all the same monsters,” Angel said. “And it’s just accidents that turn us one way or another, but once we turn bad, it takes a long time for us to try to be something different.”

“Do you think there’s another version of us, too?”

“You mean like if we’re devils, we also get to be angels?” He tapped his chest, indicating himself.

She couldn’t help smiling. “You’re probably not the best example.”

“Probably not.”

On the screen, Tau Ox was trying to convince some more Merry Perrys not to trust the coyotes who were about to guide them across. No one was listening to him.

Angel blew out his breath and nodded at the screen. “I think we wish we were good, anyway,” he said. “It feels good to wish we were as good as him.”

Lucy looked at the TV show, then back at Angel and was hit again by the unsettling impression of naïveté.

One minute he seemed so hard that he might as well have been sculpted from slaughter and granite. But then, watching Relic Jones set his booby traps for the human traffickers, Angel became almost entirely innocent.

Enraptured.

Uncynical.

“He’s totally going to hand it to the coyotes,” Angel said, and to Lucy he looked like a wide-eyed boy, entranced by the exploits of his hero.

Lucy couldn’t help laughing. “Do you seriously like this show?”

“Yeah. It’s great. Why?”

“It’s propaganda. More than half of this show’s funding comes from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.”

Angel looked surprised. “Seriously?”

“You didn’t know?” Lucy shook her head, amazed. “They wanted to make Texas refugees more relatable to Americans in the Northern States. I did a profile of the producers. More than half the show is subsidized. You seriously didn’t know?”

She started to laugh again, then laughed harder at Angel’s bereft expression as she did. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I thought you knew. Big badass water knife. I thought you people were always in the know.” She shook her head, gasping, trying to stifle her laughter.

He was looking at the screen, his expression wounded. “I still like the show,” he said. “It’s still good, though.”

He looked so sad that Lucy took pity on him. She choked back her laughter.

“Yeah,” she said, “it’s still good.” She curled up next to him and laid her head on his shoulder. “What other episodes do you have?”

T
imo’s call came an hour later.

“Well, I got what you wanted. Meet me at the Hilton. In the bar.”

“Seriously?” Lucy asked. “You cracked it?”

“Yeah, I cracked it.” He hesitated. “But you aren’t going to like what I got.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Meet me in an hour. And for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone we’re meeting.”

Which gave Lucy time to worry and stew before driving the beat-up Metrocar that she’d borrowed from Charlene downtown, taking dirty looks for her Texas license plates the whole way.

Inside the Hilton 6 the bar was dim, letting in the blaze of the desert sun through autotints that cast the space in quiet amber.

Timo was already waiting in a booth by the window, sitting with Ratan’s laptop, looking ethereal in the filtered light. It was as if everything in the bar were glazed by perpetual sunset.

Timo caught sight of her, but his lips remained pressed in a tight line as she approached.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as she slid in across from him. “What have you got?”

“We known each other a long time, right?”

“Sure, Timo. What’s up?”

He tapped Ratan’s laptop. “This is ugly stuff, girl.”

She looked at him, confused. “What’s wrong?”

“When you said you wanted me to look at this, I thought it was…” He lowered his voice. “You didn’t tell me we were pushing up against California.”

“Does it matter?”

“You know what? I’d say it doesn’t—except I got a visit from a couple of guys this morning who flashed Ibis Exploratory business cards at me. Nice guys, you know? Just a couple nice guys who
wanted to know if I was planning on living much longer in Phoenix. Real
plata o plomo
fuckers, you know?”

“Ibis?” Lucy felt a chill. “Ibis came to you?”

“If I’d known you were doing a water thing, I would have used someone else. I thought this was narco.”

“Ibis knows you have the laptop?”

Timo gave her pained look. “Actually, they know you have it.” He pushed the computer across to her and stood up.

“Are you serious?” Lucy hissed.

“They threatened me, Lucy. Me and Amparo. What am I supposed to do?” He hesitated. “They just want to talk to you.” And then he was up and walking away, walking fast, leaving her sitting in the booth.