The Water Knife (39 page)

Betrayals
.

The
sicario
bitching about his woman putting all that lead in him. Warning Angel not to run around on his girl.

“You tell anyone about me?” Angel asked. “That we were working together? Before the Calies leaned on you? You tell anyone at all?”

“You asked that before. I told you, I didn’t.”

“I wouldn’t be pissed if you did. I just need the truth.”

“I didn’t!”

“Fucking hell.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you have your truck?”

“Sure. I went back to the Taiyang and got it. I didn’t think anyone would be tracking it after—”

“That’s okay. It’s good.” Angel took a deep breath. “Help me up. I need to get dressed.”

“Are you kidding? Your stitches haven’t even set. You’re still getting growth drips.”

“I don’t got time for that. Unplug me.” With a groan, he hauled himself upright.

“Are you crazy?” she demanded. “You need to rest. Your lungs have grafts. Your kidneys, too.”

“Yeah.”

His insides felt like razor blades and rusty gears, hamburger grinding. It hurt, but he made it upright. He sat, panting and trembling, letting the pain wash past.

“You need to slow down!”

“Actually, I got to speed up.” He reached for his bloody pants, fighting off scudding blackness and an urge to collapse. “I think my boss put a hit on me.”

H
e gave her directions, guiding them through the city to the burned outskirts.

To Lucy, Angel looked terrifyingly weak, and the longer he was up and moving, the more she wondered if she was watching a man kill himself.

“It still doesn’t make any sense,” she said as she took another long subdivision curve. They’d been driving around the city, passing through burned-out suburbs. Smoke still guttered from the blackened ruins in many places, stubborn smolders that refused to die. “It was California who put the pressure on me. Last I checked, Nevada and California aren’t exactly friends.”

“That’s what’s screwing with me. I keep thinking about something that happened right before I got shot. I tried to use my cash card, and it didn’t work. Like I was dead already. Like someone deleted me, you know? California couldn’t do that.” He laughed darkly. “But my people could.”

He pointed at a new road.

“There. That way. Where those ones haven’t burned.”

“What are we looking for out here?”

He gave her a secretive look. “Answers.”

“Seriously, you’re going to play cute?”

“Why, you want the exclusive?”

“Do you really care?”

“Okay. Without IDs I’m dead. I got no cash and no way to cross borders. I’m about as shit out of luck as a Texan. If I surface, someone will come after me. So I got to find a way to get back in with Catherine Case.”

“What did you do to piss her off?”

“Had to be Braxton. That motherfucker has it out for me. He put her against me.” At her puzzled look, Angel expanded: “Head of legal for SNWA.” He shrugged. “We never really got along.”

“Enough to put a hit out on you?”

“Well, you know.” He shrugged. “I’d have done the same to him if I had a chance. I kept thinking he was playing angles on us. Maybe selling info on the side.”

“Even Vegas has moles?”

“Everybody’s hedging.” He pointed ahead. “Here. This is it.” Lucy pulled to a stop, seeing nothing in the abandoned subdivision that distinguished it from any of the others. The recyclers had been at the houses, tearing out all the wiring, some of the timber, even some of the glass. Lucy wondered if Charlene had done the work. It was thorough enough to be one of her jobs.

“What is this place?”

“Bolt-hole stash. Help me out.” He leaned against her and pointed her into one of the ripped-to-pieces houses. “We put these all over the city,” he grunted. “For emergencies. In case our people ran into trouble.”

“How many?”

“I knew a couple dozen. Probably there are more.”

“You had Phoenix completely infiltrated, didn’t you?”

“Did our best. Had people taking payoffs in all the city departments. Promised them all kinds of things. Moved their families into Cypress developments up north. Those were the best informants.” He glanced at Lucy. “Family makes people reliable.”

Lucy found she still couldn’t meet his eye.

“Hey.” He reached out to touch her arm. “I already told you, it’s not on you.”

His voice was surprisingly gentle, the empathy of someone who had been under the control of others and knew how easily a person’s ideals could be broken. Lucy felt an almost overwhelming flood of gratitude at the forgiveness in his voice.

“That was who Jamie approached, wasn’t it?” she asked. “Someone inside his office who was working for you. Some mole of yours.”

“You’d have to ask either Julio or his guy Vosovich. They’re the only ones who know for sure.” Angel knelt slowly, panting, and tugged at
a chunk of carpet. It was glued down. “Help me,” he wheezed. “I’m still a little…not myself.”

The carpet came away with a ripping sound, revealing a trapdoor.

“It’s like a pirate’s treasure house.”

“Hide it under the junk that even junk people don’t want.” Angel shrugged. “Plus there’s enough of these around that even if we lose a few, it doesn’t matter.”

“You mean if half of Phoenix burns?”

“Something like that.” He pried open the door, revealing steep steps descending into darkness. “Help me down.”

She went down first and guided him slowly into the basement. He flicked a switch, bathing them in pale light from a few tiny micro bulbs.

“Batteries still work,” he said, sounding relieved.

He’s winging it
, Lucy realized, as she scanned the stocked shelves and drums of water and bundles of Clearsacs.

Angel looked so confident that she could be fooled into thinking that he knew what he was doing, but the man was on his last legs, struggling for a chance that, if she was honest and looked at his broken body, was slipping away from him, even as he rifled through the basement’s stored equipment.

He pulled down a pistol and checked it. Started pulling down boxes of bullets and loading magazines. Practiced comfortable motions. He dragged a ballistic jacket out of another box, wheezing with the effort, tossed it to her. “This one’s for you.”

“Is someone shooting at me?”

He glanced back, smiling. “If you’re standing next to me? Probably.” He pulled out another jacket. “Gimme a hand?” He held out an arm. “I can’t quite…”

She helped him shrug into the bulletproof armor, then did her own inspection of the stocked shelves. There were sealed metal ammo boxes labeled with protein bars and powder packs of rehydration supplements. When she cracked one open, it was full. A fifty-gallon drum of water sat in the corner. Months of life, maybe more, considering the Clearsacs.

“It’s a prepper’s dream down here,” she said.

Angel snorted. “Fucking preppers.”

“You have issues with them?”

“Just when we pump their wells dry.” He laughed cynically. “Never could figure out why people would think they could survive all out on their lonesome like that. All of them sitting in their little bunkers, thinking they’re going to ride out the apocalypse alone.”

“Maybe they watch too many old Westerns.”

“Nobody survives on their own.” Angel’s vehemence made Lucy suspect he wasn’t really talking about preppers.

He was going through boxes of medicines, reading labels. “Painkillers. Ah.” He popped a couple pills and swallowed them dry. “That’s better.”

He was almost manic, rifling through the stores. He pulled down a cell phone and cracked open a pack of batteries. Charged the phone and dialed. A second later he was speaking in codes to someone on the other end of the line: strings of numbers and letters. His voice became distressed. He was smiling at Lucy, but his voice rasped desperation and panic.

“I need extraction,” he gasped. “I’m at…Aztec Oasis. Please…hurry. I’m bleeding.” He set the cell phone down.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing her arm. “Time to go.”

“What are we doing?”

“Testing a theory.” He dragged her to the steps, gasping. Leaned hard on her as they went up.

Outside the house, Lucy started for her truck, but Angel yanked her in the opposite direction. “No! Not that. Too obvious.”

“Too obvious for what?”

But he was already limping down the street. “This is a good house.”

Except he passed through the front and out the back, crossed the yard, and lurched across another empty street, before finally stumbling into another house.

“This should be good.” He coughed and absently wiped blood from his lungs on his jeans. “Yeah. This is good.” He pointed at stairs.

“You want to go up?”

“I need to see!”

His eyes were wide, almost mad.

Halfway up he almost fell, and Lucy had to catch him. Instead of stopping, he crawled.

At the top of the stairs, he went from bedroom to bedroom, gasping, inspecting each one until he found one with an intact window.

He stumbled to it and sank down, staring out. His breathing was ragged, eyes wide, glassy with narcotics and pain and effort. “How long has it been?” he asked.

“Since when?”

“Since I called!”

“Maybe five minutes?”

“Come on, then.” He grabbed her, dragging her across the room. “Here is good.”

“The closet? Are you high?”

For a second, Lucy thought he was trying to screw her, that somehow he’d become so addled on his painkillers that he actually thought he was up for sex, but he wasn’t looking at her as he pulled her down; he was staring at the window.

He crouched, his breathing ragged. She could hear his damaged chest, the bubbling wheeze of bullet wounds and blood deep in his lungs.

“Shhhhhh,” he said when she tried to question him again. “Listen,” he whispered. “They’re coming. They’re coming for me.” He sounded almost reverent.

“I don’t…”

It came first as a whisper. A buzz high above, growing, and then suddenly shrieking.

The window shattered. Glass and flame showered them. The house rocked. Lucy cowered as scorching air enveloped them. She clutched close to Angel, fire burning against her retinas. Her skin was searing.

“What the—”

Another wave of heat and shock hit the house. Shrapnel ripped the walls, a fury of flames and destruction.

Amid the firestorm she could just make out Angel. He was smiling. Happy. Pleased and satisfied as if he had been given a precious gift.

She started to get up, but he yanked her down again, pulling his jacket around her.

A second strike hit. The blast rained over them.

“They like to make sure,” he whispered as he held her.

He was smiling. In the orange blaze of the missile strikes, he looked wildly alive, a fervent believer seeing the manifestation of his god.

Slowly her hearing returned. No more missiles fell from the sky. She struggled to her feet and went to the window, her boots crunching over glass shards.

Two streets over, a thick cord of smoke spiraled black into the sky, flicking with fires.

“Your people really don’t like you,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” Angel said. “I’m starting to get that feeling.”

T
hey came at dusk to make sure of their kill.

Angel closed his eyes, preparing himself as the SUV’s tires crunched over glass and the electric whine of the motor died.

Doors clicked open and slammed. Men’s mutters carried easily as they swept the wreckage with flashlights.

Angel nestled deeper in the burned wreckage, hoping that Lucy was up for what he needed from her. When things got ugly, it was hard to tell how a person would act. He’d known Desert Dogs who hadn’t been able to stomach pushing refugees off the border, and he’d seen Nevada guardies choke in a firefight. He’d seen
cholobis
deliberately miss rather than take a life.

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.