The Water Knife (9 page)

A
truck idled in the alley behind Lucy’s house, a predatory gasoline growl. It had been rumbling outside for ten minutes and didn’t seem to be leaving.

“Are you even listening to me?” Anna asked. Lucy’s sister was staring out from the computer screen, her expression a mix of frustration and pained compassion. Cool gray Vancouver light streamed through floor-to-ceiling windows behind her. “It’s okay if you want to leave.”

The truck wasn’t leaving. Its engine revved, rattling Lucy’s windows before falling back to bass grumble.

Lucy stifled the urge to go outside and challenge the assholes.

“—keep saying it’s horrible,” Anna was saying. “You don’t need to prove anything to anyone. You’ve stayed longer than any journalist who’s been assigned down there. You’ve beaten them all. So leave.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is, though! For you, it is. You’ve got New England ID. You’re probably one of the last people down there who can just walk right out. And yet for some reason you’re still there. Dad says you’re begging to get yourself killed.”

“I’m not. Believe me.”

“You’re afraid, though.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Then why are you calling?”

Anna had her there. Lucy wasn’t the one who called—that was Anna’s role. Anna was the one who maintained relationships. Anna, who still had all her East Coast manners and still sent physical Christmas cards every year—real cards and real paper, crafted with real scissors and the help of her sweetly real children. Intricate images
of snowflakes and evergreens accompanying red-ribboned gift boxes containing replacement REI microfilters for Lucy’s dust mask. Anna always was there, reaching out. Maintaining contact. Caring.

“Lucy?”

There wasn’t a single bar on Anna’s windows, Lucy realized. Her window glass was beaded with rain, and her garden beyond the glass was emerald, and there wasn’t a single bar to keep Anna’s family safe.

“Things are just…difficult right now,” Lucy said finally.

In her mind this was code for
Someone pried my friend’s eyes out and dumped him in the middle of the Golden Mile
, but Anna couldn’t decrypt the words, which was probably best for both of them.

Outside, the truck revved its engine again.

“What’s that sound?” Anna asked.

“A truck.”

“Who the hell makes trucks like that anymore?”

Lucy made herself laugh. “It’s part of the culture.”

Stacie and Ant were giggling offscreen, playing with Legos, programming some creation of theirs to chase the cat around the house. Lucy suppressed an almost overwhelming urge to reach out and touch the screen.

“I’m not looking to move,” Lucy said. “I just wanted to say hi. That’s all.”

“Look, Mommy!” Stacie shrieked. “Grumpy Pete’s eating it!” Peals of laughter.

Anna turned to tell her children to pipe down, but even Lucy could tell she didn’t mean it.

Stacie and Ant’s laughter quieted to whispers for a few moments, then exploded again. Lucy caught a glimpse of the cat, riding on the back of a rover the pair had built. Stacie had an American football helmet on her head, and it looked as though Ant had on the
luchador
mask that Lucy had given him the last time she’d come up to visit.

It was surreal, their two realities separated by a thin wafer of computer screen, so close that Lucy imagined that if she were to take a hammer, she could crack the distance between them and pass through to that green safe place.

Anna turned serious again. “What’s going on down there, really?”

“I—” Lucy broke off. “I just missed you.”

I like seeing a place where kids don’t know to be afraid
.

Seeing Stacie and Ant alive and well reminded her of the first body she’d covered, a girl not much older than Stacie. A pretty Hispanic girl, marionette-shattered, lying naked in the bottom of a swimming pool. Lucy could still remember Ray Torres standing beside her, taking a drag on a cigarette, telling her, “You don’t got to write about the bodies.”

Lucy remembered Torres as a good ol’ boy cop in a good ol’ boy cowboy hat and tight faded Levi’s. A big belt buckle and polished gray cowboy boots. He’d smirked at her from behind black-wrap mirrored cop sunglasses that ran facial recognition even as they talked. “There’s plenty of other shit to vulture on in this city,” he said.

A few med techs and cops had been down in the dusty swimming pool with the girl, stomping around the body, trying to make sense of what they were seeing.

When Lucy ignored him, Torres had tried again. “This ain’t the kind of thing a pretty Connecticut girl like you wants to be writing about.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she’d replied.

At least that was how she remembered it now. She remembered herself as being tough, standing up to the patronizing cop. She definitely remembered Torres tipping his cowboy hat in response and ambling off to join the cops and EMTs beside the ambulance.

The girl had been dumped like trash. She couldn’t have been much into her teens, and now she was dead in the bottom of a dirty turquoise hole that was bluer than the sky overhead.

Wild dogs had been down in there with her, tugging her back and forth, worrying at her guts, leaving trails of bloody mud before fleeing at the arrival of crime scene techs. The girl’s blood had clotted. The scrapes on her knees were black blood and gray dust. A young girl with pixie-cut black hair and little silver heart earrings who could have been anybody, except that she had become nobody.

Torres and his friends had joked with one another, occasionally glancing in Lucy’s direction as they smoked their cigarettes. Saying things in Spanish that she couldn’t catch. Lucy’s Spanish had been shit then. She’d forced herself to stand at the pool’s edge, looking
down at the girl’s snapped arms and legs longer than she wanted, feeling the men’s eyes on her, trying to prove she wasn’t intimidated by Torres’s gaze.

And then Torres had come back over, tipping his cowboy hat at her again. “Seriously. Don’t write about the bodies. They got a way of making more trouble than they’re worth.”

“What about her?” Lucy had asked. “Doesn’t she deserve to be remembered?”

“Her? She don’t care now. Hell, maybe she’s glad she ain’t here. Maybe she’s glad she finally found a way out of this damn place.”

“You’re not even going to investigate?”

The cowboy laughed. “Investigate what? Another dead Texan?” He shook his head. “Shit. The whole city’s a suspect. Who misses these people?”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Hey.” He grabbed her arm. “I’m serious about the bodies. You want to make your career in the blood rags, there’s plenty to see. But some bodies”—he jerked his head toward the girl in the bottom of the empty pool—“they aren’t worth the heat.”

“What’s so special about this girl?”

“Tell you what. I’ll put you in touch with the editor over at
Río de Sangre
. You can hit all the bodies for them. I can even give you exclusive ride-along if you want. After this girl, I got two
cholobis
dropped over on Maricopa in a drive-by. Plus I got five more swimmers I still got to hit, soon as my partner gets back.”

“Swimmers?” Lucy asked.

Torres had laughed, exasperated. “God damn, girl. You are wet.” He’d walked away, shaking his head, chuckling. “Wet and soft.”

Back then Lucy hadn’t known how easy it was to write the wrong thing. How easy it was to end up slumped over your steering wheel with a bullet in your head.

She’d been wet and soft then, just as Anna was wet and soft now.

“You can live with us, you know,” Anna said. “Arvind can arrange it through the National Professionals Program. You can come to the university first. With your credentials, you’d be a shoo-in for visas. And Stacie and Ant would love to have you with us.”

“There’s mold up there.” Lucy tried to make herself laugh. “Even your underwear molds. They’ve got studies that say how bad that is for your health.”

“Be serious, Lucy. I miss you. The kids miss you. You’re alone down there. And there are nice men up here.”

“Nice Canadian men.”

“Arvind is a nice Canadian man.”

Lucy looked at her sister helplessly. There wasn’t anything to say. Anna stared back at her, equally helpless—an entire lecture held back, all the things she desperately wanted to say but wouldn’t.

You’re insane
.

You’re being stupid
.

I’ve never seen someone so willfully suicidal
.

Normal people don’t do what you do
.

All of it held back because what was the point of arguing?

However much Lucy might want to slip through the looking glass and join her sister’s world, she didn’t want Anna’s world infected with all the things that were inside her now. She wanted, no,
needed
this glass between them, protecting Anna and Arvind and the kids. It meant that there was still some place where the world wasn’t falling to pieces.

Finally Anna relented and made herself laugh. “Don’t stop talking to me just because I’m a pain in the ass. You know I love you.”

“I only beat you because I love you.”

“Exactly.” Anna’s smile was bright with everything she wasn’t allowing herself to say, and then she turned from the camera.

“Stacie! Ant! Come talk to Aunt Lucy. You were telling me all week you wanted to talk to her, and here she is calling us!”

The kids got on-screen, and they were adorable, and Lucy thought that if any kids were worth having, Stacie and Ant were a delight. And then Arvind passed by, smiling at her, his dark skin so much a contrast with his wife’s paleness, and then he was scooping the kids off to wash their hands and eat their lunch.

Anna reached out and touched the screen. “I worry,” she said. “That’s all. I just worry.”

“I know,” Lucy said. “I love you, too.”

They said their goodbyes and closed the connection, leaving Lucy
staring at the darkened screen, thinking about all the warnings and caretaking and advice that people held back because they were too afraid of severing relationships, even though they could see disaster looming.

I just worry
.

“I worry, too,” Lucy murmured. The truth she couldn’t say to Anna.

Outside in the alley the truck revved its engine again. Irritated, Lucy stood up and grabbed her pistol. “All right, asshole. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Sunny wagged his tail hopefully at Lucy’s sudden movement.

“Stay!” Lucy ordered. She worked the dead bolts, chambered a round, took a deep breath, and yanked open the door.

Sunshine blazed down as she strode across the yard. Just beyond her chicken-wire fencing, the pickup waited, rumbling. Cherry-red paint, massive jacked-up tires, tinted windows.

Lucy couldn’t see the driver through the glass, but she knew he was looking at her. Lucy held her pistol at her hip, ready to lift and fire, wondering if someone was already pointing a gun at her from within the cab, wondering if she should already be shooting—

“What do you want?” she shouted as she stormed closer. “What the fuck do you want?”

The truck gunned its engine. Its tires spit gravel, and it took off, tearing down the alley, leaving dust and discarded Clearsacs billowing in its wake.

Lucy stared after the retreating truck, her heart pounding. Dust drifted over her, lazy and feathery. She coughed and wiped at sweat with the back of her arm, wishing she’d gotten a license plate.

Am I going insane?

Either someone was stalking her, or she’d just been about to shoot some innocent kid because she was losing her mind to paranoia. Either way she was a walking tragedy. She could practically hear Ray Torres and Anna both shouting at her to run like hell.

A whole Greek chorus, right inside her head.

From inside the house, Sunny barked, annoyed at being abandoned. Lucy went and opened the door. The dog came bounding out in an eager dash of jangling tags and flopping pink tongue.

He trotted to her truck and sat, waiting expectantly for her to open the cab.

“Christ. Not you, too.”