Drought (11 page)

Like everywhere else, though, the streets were empty, and he drove for over five minutes before he passed another car, a Lincoln Town Car, heading in the opposite direction. The driver had dyed black hair and a papery, sun-mottled face, and as he passed he stared at Martin with undisguised suspicion.

Only a few streets further on, however, he took a right turn toward the medical center, and he saw a pot-bellied man in a baseball cap and khaki shorts, watering the plants on either side of his driveway with a hosepipe.

He pulled in to the side of the road and called out, ‘So – you have your water back on? When did that happen?'

‘Never been off,' the man told him. ‘I saw on the news they cut it off in some neighborhoods, but not here, not so far. Not too sure they'd dare. Too many council members live around here!'

‘Yeah, maybe you're right,' said Martin, watching the man fill his terracotta plant pots until they were flooded, and thinking of the Murillo children, listlessly sprawled out on their verandah, with only a half bottle of Dr Pepper left to drink, and that was probably long gone by now.

He drove on. He was only three streets away from the medical center, however, when he saw a battered black Dodge Ram parked at a diagonal across the road in front of him, and an old silver Caprice pulled up on the sidewalk. Both the car and the SUV had their doors wide open, and five or six young Hispanic men in sleeveless black T-shirts were milling around them. As Martin came closer, he saw that there were at least three more young men in the front yard of one of the houses, and he heard angry shouting, and then a woman screaming, too.

He pulled into the curb. Now he could see what was happening. The young men were filling up a variety of plastic bottles and large plastic containers with water from the outdoor faucet at the side of the house. Two of the young men had the house owner pinned up against the wall of the house. He was a big man, with curly gray hair and a jazzy red Hawaiian shirt, but although he was big he had the blueish lips of an angina sufferer, and in spite of his obvious anger he was staying silent, and making no effort to break free. His wife, however, was standing next to him in her housecoat and hairnet, almost bent double, screaming at the young men to let him go.

I don't believe this
, thought Martin.
These punks are actually stealing water
.
More than likely they're aiming to take it back downtown and sell it.
For a split second, he thought:
why not let them?

But then the woman furiously started pummeling one of the young men with her fists. ‘Let my husband go, you punks! You let my husband go!'

Another member of the gang shoved her in the small of the back, so that she tumbled face-first on to the wet brickwork drive, hitting her head. She tried to climb back on to her feet, but then he kicked her with his shin, so that she toppled sideways on to the dried-up lawn.

Martin climbed out of his car and walked up toward them. ‘Hey,' he said.

The gang all stared at him. One of them was wearing mirror sunglasses and at least six gold chains around his neck, and by the challenging way he looked back at him, Martin guessed that he was their leader. He said, ‘What?'

‘I'll tell you what,' Martin told him, glancing back down the street as if he were expecting reinforcements to arrive at any second. ‘You just assaulted this lady, which counts as battery, and you're holding this gentleman against his will, which at the very least is false imprisonment, and at the same time you're trespassing on private property, not to mention taking water which you haven't paid for.'

The gang member in the mirror sunglasses looked around at his four companions, and then said, ‘Are you a cop?'

‘No, I'm not. But I'm a council official, and I know the law.'

‘Are you carrying?'

‘No, I'm not.'

The gang member frowned, as if he were thinking seriously about this. Then he said, ‘You're not a cop. You're not carrying. In that case, fuck you.'

Martin came further up the drive and helped the woman back on to her feet. She had a large crimson lump on her forehead and she was obviously concussed, because she nearly fell over again. Martin led her over to the front steps of the house and sat her down. ‘Just stay there for a moment, ma'am. OK?'

The husband meanwhile stared at Martin with bulging eyes but he was clearly too frightened to say anything. It was only when Martin turned back to face the gang members that he saw that one of the young men who was pressing him up against the wall was holding a shiny double-edged knife up to his chest.

Always go for the guy with the weapon first
. He expected that all of the gang members were carrying knives, but this one had a blade that was out and ready, and probably wouldn't think twice about using it.

Without warning, he kicked the gang member in the mirror sunglasses very hard between the legs. When the young man soundlessly bent forward, his mouth wide open, his sunglasses flying off his face, Martin heaved him over backward, so that he staggered into the arms of his friends. Then, with no hesitation at all, Martin stalked up to the gang member who was holding the knife, seized his hand and bent his wrist backward so forcefully that he could hear his tendons crackle. The young man screamed in a piercing falsetto and dropped the knife on to the brickwork. Martin kicked the knife underneath the gate at the side of the house and then seized the young man's ears, which were both pierced with six or seven earrings each. He twisted both of the young man's ears around in opposite directions, first one way and then the other, ripping at least half of his earrings out. The young man dropped to his knees on to the driveway, stunned, and with his ear-lobes in bloody rags.

Martin had taken out their leader; and the one with the knife. Now he turned around and faced the rest of them. He saw one of them pulling up his T-shirt at the front, as if he might be going for a weapon that was tucked into his belt. Martin couldn't actually see a pistol-grip, but he shouldered two of the other gang members out of his way, and went for him. He grabbed his wrist with his left hand and punched him hard in the mouth with his right. There was a deafening bang, and the legs of the young man's jeans were suddenly flooded with blood.

The young man stared down at himself, and spat out two teeth. Smoke was rising out of his waistband. He looked back up at Martin and his face was white with shock, all except for his burst-open lips, which made him look as if he were holding a blossoming red rose in his mouth.

‘You fucking shot me, man,' he bubbled. But then he pitched over backward and lay on the driveway with his eyes rolled up into his head and his legs twitching.

Martin bent over him and wrestled the gun out from under his belt. It was a Sig-Sauer compact 9 mm automatic with frayed duct tape wound around the grip. He held it up and said to the rest of the gang, ‘One of you give me a knife. I have to see how bad this wound is. Come on, right now! Give me a knife! And handle first, OK, if it's all the same to you.'

A skinny gang member with a wispy black moustache took a clasp knife out of his jeans and held it out to him. Martin took the knife, opened it up, and then knelt down beside the young man lying on the driveway and cut open the left leg of his jeans, all the way up past his knee. His thigh was smothered in blood, but Martin could see by the puckered wound just above his kneecap that the bullet had missed his femoral artery.

He folded up the clasp knife and dropped it into his pocket. Then he said, ‘Time for you morons to hit the bricks now, wouldn't you say? You'd better take your buddy down to the ER, and quick.'

Three of the gang lifted up their wounded friend and carried him over to the Chevrolet. The gang member who had been wielding the knife shuffled past Martin nursing his swollen wrist. He gave Martin a glare of venomous hatred, but he didn't say anything. Last of all, with his hand still cupped between his legs, the leader of the gang picked up his mirror sunglasses and put them back on, even though one of the lenses had dropped out, and Martin could see his left eye. They climbed into their vehicles and roared away in clouds of burned rubber, leaving tire tracks all the way along the street.

The homeowner had been leaning over to comfort his wife, but now he came up to Martin and said, ‘I don't know how I can thank you, sir. You took one hell of a risk there. One hell of a risk.'

‘What happened?' Martin asked him. He looked up and down the street and he could see that the man's neighbors were beginning to emerge from their houses. ‘Why did they pick on you?'

The man shrugged and shook his head until his jowls wobbled. ‘They came driving past and I guess they just saw me watering my plants and they decided that I was an easy mark. They stopped and asked me if they could fill up all of their containers but I said no way.'

‘Why not? It's only water.'

The man stared at Martin as if he had spoken in a foreign language. ‘Well, sure, but it's not just any water. It's
my
water. I pay for it. Why should I give it to some gang of hoodlums? Those people, they never pay for anything. They're all on welfare and who pays for that? I do, out of my taxes. I don't have any choice in that, but today I had a choice and I said no.'

‘Yes, all right,' said Martin. He wasn't going to argue about it.

‘Ralph? Are you OK?' called a podgy, white-haired man from across the street.

The homeowner lifted his arm in acknowledgement and called back, ‘We're fine, thanks, Leland, thanks to this gentleman here. I didn't think they made Good Samaritans any more, but I was wrong.'

W
hen he turned the corner, he found that the road outside Highland Medical Center was crowded with vehicles, and that a large crowd was gathered outside, at least two or three hundred people. He had to park five hundred yards away and then walk. The crowd weren't shouting or tossing rocks like the crowds downtown, but it was edging close to 120 degrees and everybody was clearly suffering from heat exhaustion and growing restless.

Martin maneuvered his way through to the front of the crowd. A barrier had been lowered across the entrance to the medical center's parking lot, and it was guarded by five men in dark blue police-style combat uniforms, with peaked caps. Martin recognized who they were without having to check out the badge on their sleeves: a rising sun with the letters ESS embroidered on top of it.
Empire Security Services
.

He approached one of them and said, ‘What's going down here?'

‘Do you have an appointment to see a doctor here, sir?' the security guard asked him. He had bleached-blue eyes and clear drops of perspiration on his upper lip.

‘No, I don't. I tried to make an appointment but the phone's always busy and the website's not working. I need to see Doctor Lucas. My daughter's sick.'

‘Well, your daughter and a whole lot of other folks, I'm sorry to say.' He was carrying a clipboard under his arm and he lifted it up and folded back the first two or three pages. ‘Want to tell me where you live, sir?'

‘My daughter lives at sixteen-oh-five Fullerton Drive. She's registered with Doctor Lucas. She's been on his list for two years at least.'

The security guard licked the ball of his thumb and turned over another sheet of paper. ‘Fullerton Drive … Fullerton Drive … oh, yeah, here we are, Fullerton Drive. I'm sorry, sir, but no.'

‘What do you mean, “no”? What difference does it make where she lives? She's sick. She has a fever.'

‘Don't waste your time, buddy,' said a man in a 66ers baseball cap standing close behind him. ‘My wife has diabetes and they won't let her in to see Doctor Grove. Just because we live on West Kendall Drive.'

‘I'm sorry, sir,' the security man repeated. ‘The medical center can't deal with any patients from hiatus areas.'

‘You mean neighborhoods where the water supply has been shut off?'

‘That's correct, sir. The doctors simply can't handle the demand from those areas.'

‘But the people from those areas are the people who need treatment the most. You heard this gentleman. His wife has diabetes. I'm not a doctor but I do know that it's dangerous for a diabetes sufferer to get dehydrated.'

The security man had heard some shouting on the opposite side of the medical center and he turned his head to see what was happening. ‘I'm sorry, sir,' he said, abstractedly. ‘The hiatus period in your area is only expected to last for another twenty-four hours. Then
you'll
get priority medical care and the people from other areas will have to wait, the same way that you're having to wait now.'

‘This is insanity,' Martin protested. ‘The council is cutting off people's water but when they get sick they're actively preventing them from seeking treatment – even though it was them who made them sick in the first place?'

‘The way I understand it, sir, each hiatus is only going to last forty-eight hours. Even the sickest person can survive without water for forty-eight hours.'

Martin stood very close to him, face to face, so that his chest was actually touching the security man's clipboard. ‘Are you going to let me in to see Doctor Lucas, or what?'

‘No, sir. I'm not.'

‘Do you know who I am?'

‘No, sir, I don't.'

‘My name is Martin Makepeace and I'm an officer with Children's and Family Services. So I represent the council even more than you do. Apart from that I served three years in Afghanistan and other places east and they trained us to eat little shits like you for breakfast, just to keep our bowels moving.'

The security guard remained impassive. ‘I'm sorry, sir. I'm not allowed to admit anyone domiciled within a designated hiatus zone during the period of hiatus.'

‘OK,' said Martin. He had to concede that this security guard had neither the imagination, the authority or the inclination to use his initiative. The British squaddies he had met in Afghanistan would have called him a ‘jobsworth,' as in, ‘I can't let you do that, it's more than my job's worth.' He turned away and walked back to his car. He was so angry now that he felt deadly calm. He knew exactly who he needed to talk to now, and that was Saskia Vane.