The Water Knife (14 page)

“And who was that?”

Julio came up from his casing of the fridge, made a face. “Vos was cagey. ‘Water lawyer’ was all he said. Wouldn’t give me any more details.”

“And you let him get away with that?”

“I just figured the
pendejo
was going to put the squeeze on me. Add a broker fee, that kind of shit. Zoners are always looking for an angle. It’s the fucking culture down here. They’re corrupt as shit.”

“So what was getting brokered?”

“Might not have been anything. Me? I’m starting to think it was Arizona counterintelligence, trolling us. Whole thing feels like a sting.” He came up with a can of Tecate. Cracked the can. Sipped, eyes closed. Let out a sigh. “God damn, that’s good. Spend enough time out in the dark zone, you think a cold drink is a fucking mirage.” He glanced over at Angel. “You want one?”

“I’m good.”

“You sure?” He jerked his head toward the fridge. “They still got one more. After this it’s all Coronas and Chinese stuff.”

“Do you think your guy Vosovich gave you up?”

Julio gave Angel a look. “Well, since I seen his morgue video, I’m pretty sure he gave up something.”

“And you think you’re vulnerable?”

“If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have been worried.” Julio shrugged. “Most of the people I use, I keep real arm’s length. Anonymous drops. Encrypted front e-mails. All that good stuff. But with Vos? Shit.” He shook his head. “We been working together for, like, almost ten years.”

“So you’re compromised.”

“People questioned Vos for sure. Fucker looks like one of those Zoners that your Desert Dogs like to string up on the river for warnings. Fucking hamburger. He talked, and if they were asking the right questions, it’s not just me in the crosshairs. He was helping me recruit, you understand?”

“How many people?”

“Are vulnerable? At least twenty. Plus whoever he might have used who wasn’t on my payroll. I feel bad for whoever gets handed this shitstorm. That motherfucker’s going to be blind for
years
.”

“So you’re out of here, just like that?”

Julio gave him a look. “The cops ID’d my man by his
fillings
. That’s how I even heard about him. His name pinged on the sniffers we installed on Phoenix PD’s servers. Couple teeth were pretty much all Vos had left.” Julio took another gulp from his beer can. “This place brings out the worst in people.”

“Any chance your guy Vosovich was in some other business?” Angel asked. “Maybe narco? Cartel States are moving in. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with our thing.”

“All I know is, I don’t make bets on shit I don’t know.” Julio gestured at Angel significantly with his beer. “And that, my friend, is why I’m still alive in this game.”

“Anyone else moving? Anything shaking up? Some sign about who did him?”

“Nah, man.” He took another swallow. “It’s quiet like a fucking mouse. No chatter at all. My guy is on the front page of the blood rags, looking like a pile of shit, and everything’s fucking silent. It freaks me the fuck out—” Julio broke off, his gaze caught by images on the TV.

“You see this shit?”

He went over and turned up the sound.

The TV flashed perp-walk footage of the trafficking pair being brought out of their house in the burbs, a strange castle surrounded by barbed-wire fences with its own generators and cisterns. Camera interior images of the lavish life the husband-and-wife team had lived as they baited sad-sack Texans and Zoners into making the run north.

“That’s a fuckton of bodies,” Julio said, “even for this hellhole. Threw off the odds on the
lotería
big time. I thought I was betting big when I put three hundred yuan on a count over one-fifty for the week. Now I’m wishing I went higher.”

“Have you seen him yet?” Angel pressed.

“Who, Vos?”

“Yeah, Vosovich,” Angel said, exasperated. “Your hamburger man.”

“You mean seen him
seen him
? In the flesh?”

“Yeah.”

Julio looked up from the TV. “I saw him on the police server. That was more than close enough for me.”

“Afraid?”

“Fuck yes, I’m afraid. Why you think I moved out of my sweet-ass condo in the Taiyang in the middle of the night? If someone squeezed Vos like that, fuck knows how bad they’d squeeze me—” He broke off, seeing the expression on Angel’s face. “Aw, shit.” He started shaking his head. “You seriously want to go see him?”

“Got to be thorough.”

Julio made a face. “Smart people spend their time staying out of the morgue, just so you know.”

“Fillings, huh?”

“It’s bad,” Julio said. “I mean, Phoenix is one barbaric shithole, but I ain’t seen nothing like this.”

“You came out of Juárez.”

Julio gulped the rest of his beer and crimped the can. “That’s what scares the shit out of me. I already made it out of one apocalypse. I don’t need another.”

L
ucy forged through the morgue’s jumbled crowds. Shouting EMTs and Phoenix PD, FBI and state troopers. Hysterical victims’ families, morgue techs, and medical examiners.

It looked like the city of Phoenix had called up its entire overtime roster to process the corpses lining the hallways. Bodies were stacked on gurneys and dumped outside the morgue proper. Everywhere she looked, there were more bodies. Flashbulbs strobed in the corridors, journos working the blood rags, capturing the chaos.

A new rush of bodies poured in, wheeled on stretchers, shoving Lucy aside. She flung out an arm against the wall, bridging a desiccated corpse that was barely covered by a sheet. The stink of rotten meat boiled up, mingling with the sweat and reek of the emergency workers. Lucy fought an urge to gag.

“Lucy!”

The shout echoed above the general din.

Timo, skinny and grinning, waved to her as he clawed through the crowds, clutching his camera. A familiar face. A friendly face.

Timo had been one of the first locals to take her under his wing when she’d come to Phoenix. Ray Torres had introduced them when Lucy asked about how the blood rags did their business, and she and Timo had formed a wary working relationship that eventually strengthened into something more.

Now when Lucy had a story assignment and needed stunningly executed art, she got Timo onto the project. When he had exclusive art that needed words and access to the big-name mags and news feeds, he called her.

Symbiosis.

Friendship.

A bit of bedrock in the shifting sands of Phoenix’s many disasters.

Timo plunged between sobbing victims’ families and grabbed Lucy’s arm, dragging her deeper into the chaos.

“Didn’t know you’d be covering this! Last time we talked, you said you were done chasing bodies!”

“What the hell is going on?” she shouted.

“You don’t know? They found half of Texas buried out there in the desert! Bodies just keep coming!”

The photographer showed her his camera, shoving aside his amulet for La Santa Muerte when it blocked the screen, thumbing through shots as people jostled around them. “Take a look at these babies!”

Photos of corpses being excavated, body after body after body.

“Coyotes were taking people’s money and just burying them out there in the desert,” Timo said. “Nobody knows how many they’re going to find.”

Lucy glanced around at the chaos, shocked. “I had no idea it was this big.”

“I know, right? And I thought it was good when I first got tipped! This sucker’s going viral,” Timo gloated. “Half the world’s sending journos in to cover this, and I got all the best pics. Paid for exclusives out at the dig. Cops aren’t letting anyone else in except me. La Santa Muerte’s paying off big for me this year.” He kissed his amulet. “Skinny Lady’s taking care of her own.” He jostled Lucy. “So? You want in? I got the art.”

“Looks like you do.”

“I’m serious, lady! My phone’s off the hook, I’m supersexy to all the biggies right now, but I’ll give you first crack. I’m not handing these over to some wet asshole who just jumped off a plane. Locals get first pick!”

“Thanks. I’ll let you know.”

“What’s up? There something else you need here?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s personal.”

“Okay.” Timo looked doubtful. “But call me about the art. We got things no one else is going to have for weeks.” He raised his voice as more EMTs came shoving through, pushing more bodies on gurneys, pressing them apart. “We can blow this up!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll call you.”

“Don’t wait!”

She waved acknowledgment and pressed on through the crowds following the EMTs. She found a cop. “Do you know where Christine Ma is?”

“What’s your business?”

“I’m supposed to ID someone,” she lied. “Christine called me down!”

The cop looked around, harried. “You better come back! This thing’s blowing up!”

“Don’t worry about it.” She pushed past him. “I’ll find her.”

The cop didn’t even hear. He was plunging through the crowds, shouting, “Sir! Sir! You can’t touch evidence!” as some old Texan howled and hugged a dirt-encrusted corpse.

Lucy shoved her way farther down the corridor and into the chill of the morgue. More bodies. Every open space. Lucy recognized the medical examiner and waved.

Christine Ma was gesturing sharply to some EMTs. “I don’t have room for them!” she was saying. “I don’t know who the idiot was who authorized all these bodies to be moved! They should have been left at the site!”

“Well, we can’t take them back,” an EMT was saying, “not unless someone’s paying us for the return trip.”

“But I didn’t authorize these!”

“Like I said, we’ll take ’em back if you pay.”

“Goddammit, who’s in charge of this?”

No one
, Lucy realized.
No one is in charge
.

Staring at the bodies and frantic emergency personnel, she felt as if the whole world was collapsing. It had been slow at first, but now it felt fast. Too fast to get free. Lucy was having a hard time wrapping her head around the number of bodies she was seeing. She’d written enough stories about populations on the move to know that refugees numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and yet still, how had a single pair of predatory human traffickers managed to get their hands on so many?

For all the statistics of people displaced by tornadoes and hurricanes and swamped coastlines, these piled corpses who had tried to buy their way north to places with water and jobs and hope struck
Lucy more forcefully. Every time she thought she had hardened completely to human suffering, something like this hit her, and it was bigger and more overwhelming than the last time.

Marooned in the chaos, she wrapped her arms around herself and suppressed a shiver.

It just keeps getting worse
.

Christine was still shouting at the EMTs to take the bodies back, but they were walking away.

It was as if high tide had poured into the morgue and left bodies as driftwood, piled haphazardly on every table, stacked on the floors.

Christ, she could practically write the copy off dictation. Timo was right—this was big. She could probably sell exclusives to Fox and CNN. Google/
New York Times
. Supplement it with hits on her personal feed and #PhoenixDowntheTubes, plus a direct-to-epub on
Kindle Post
.

If she played it right, she might even be able to sign a book deal. She couldn’t help but add up all the potential income options. She could sell this story six different ways, and still have more plays…

Timo was snapping pictures of Christine’s altercation, more fodder for his blood rags. He caught sight of Lucy and gave her a thumbs-up.

“They say it’s going to be a record!”

Of course it was a record. Anything less wouldn’t bring the rest of the journos flooding back to Phoenix. Everyone knew the place was dying, but slow death didn’t attract attention. A record mass murder, on the other hand, that got American bureau chiefs salivating and news teams on the next plane out.

It could keep her and Timo eating for months.

Timo snapped pictures. Lucy watched, impressed at how fluidly he shoved himself into the most broken and intimate moments of people’s lives. One minute he was squatting with grieving Texas parents who had sent their daughter north to a better life—now he was squeezing into the heart of a struggle between more EMTs dumping bodies and Christine as she fought for some measure of control.

Nobody minded Timo. He was so familiar, he was practically family. In and out, snapping pictures. The man was mercury. By tonight,
the photos he shot would be spinning across the Internet, and Anna would be on the phone, begging Lucy to come north again. Begging her to rethink the need to play voyeur in the increasing pull of this vortex.

I worry
, Anna had said.
That’s all. I just worry
.

This would make her worry more. This wasn’t something that Lucy could just explain away as media sensationalization. It was too big. There were too many bodies. There was too much horror for even Anna, secure and safe up in lush green Vancouver, to miss.

This was true apocalypse. The world after all the rules had stopped existing.

And wasn’t that why Jamie had decided he needed to risk everything? To get his share of the good stuff before it all fell apart? He’d been living in a horror, and he needed a way out. Everyone did.

Timo jostled up beside her, breaking her train of thought. “Seriously, what are you looking for?” he asked. “Maybe I can help.”

“I was waiting for Christine.”

Timo snorted. “Come back next year.” He held up his camera. “Check this one out.” Showed her a screen of moldering bodies. “They got whole families in here. I mean, these people paid a fortune to cross into California, and this is where they ended up. You’ve got to be able to use this, right? Human interest angle? Some kind of sob story?” He thumbed through more pictures. “I got close-ups, too. Check that—you can still see where the wedding ring was.”

Another body rolled in.

“Hey guys, hold on for a sec.”

Timo got the EMTs to pause while he unzipped the body bag and shot a flashbulb. Another image of a rotten corpse. Long hair, but Lucy wasn’t sure if it was a man or a woman. “Great! Thanks!” He zipped it up and snagged Lucy as she started to turn away.

“You let me know, right?”

“Sure, Timo. You’re my first stop if I do a story.”

“Don’t wait too long! People don’t love a disaster for more than a week! We got to hit this hard while the page views are up!”

She clapped him on the shoulder and managed to snag Christine as she came back from her battle with the EMTs.

“Lucy!” she exclaimed. “Are you here for this, too?”

“No.” Lucy hesitated, then plunged on. “I wanted to see Jamie. James Sanderson.”

“The water department guy? The lawyer?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not doing a story on him?” Christine looked concerned.

“No. Just background.” Lucy made herself laugh. “I’m not crazy.”

Christine pursed her lips, staring around at the stacked bodies. Her eyes were bruised and sunken with exhaustion. “I have no idea where he ended up.” She pulled out a tablet and penned through it. Frowned. Looked up. “You sure you want to see this?”

Lucy almost laughed at the incongruity. They were surrounded by decayed bodies, more of them flowing in every minute, and the ME was worried about the sight of one more.

“It’s fine.”

Christine shrugged and led Lucy into another room. “He got lucky. He came in before we ran out of beds.” She went to a gurney. “We’re about to ship him out, though. We don’t have the space to hold all of them. It’s too many.”

That was the story, Lucy realized.

That was the angle for the pitch to the big media buyers: not that there were a thousand sob stories that Timo could document, but that Christine Ma could be overwhelmed.

When Lucy first came to Phoenix, she’d been so stunned by the fragmenting city that some nights she thought she was going crazy. But when she met Christine, she’d realized that she could take it. Christine was never overwhelmed. Christine ran her morgue the way she’d run her combat medical unit in the Arctic. She was never overwhelmed. She was never frazzled. She was never broken.

Now, though, Christine looked almost skeletal under the strain. “I think this is him.” She hesitated, her fingers pinching the stained sheet. “He was tortured,” she warned.

Lucy gave her an irritated look. “I can handle it.”

She was wrong.

Jamie’s executioners had carved a story into his ruined flesh, and in the chill of the morgue, without the muffling veils of the raging storm and her scratched filter mask, his torture stood out, intimate and nasty. Infinitely worse than Lucy remembered.

She swallowed hard, fighting to keep her expression neutral.

Christine pointed with a rubber-gloved hand. “Electrical burns on the genitals. Adrenaline injected into the body. Signs of trauma at the anus. Rape with blunt object. Probably a club of some kind.”