The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “So you don’t think these water rights he was hunting were real?”

  “I’m saying I don’t give a shit. This place is dead, and I’m out of here. Only reason I stayed this long is ’cause you’re a friend.”

  “Sure,” Angel said. “I get it.”

  It made Angel feel old, seeing Julio turned into something so different from what he’d been. They’d done work down on the Pecos and out on the Red River in Oklahoma. They’d done work on the Arkansas, making sure Colorado’s eastern cities stayed fat and didn’t make another run at the water on the far side of the mountains that Vegas depended on. They’d done a lot together. But now Julio was like a beaten dog, eager to cower and flee.

  Angel decided he wasn’t sorry to see the man go.

  After Julio departed, Angel flipped open his tablet again, going back to the journo, still trying to get a feel for her. Like all ambitious journalists, she’d even written a couple of books.

  The first one wasn’t anything special. Typical collapse porn—following a neighborhood as it fell apart. Wells had been pumped dry, and Phoenix had refused to run water lines out to support them. And then the CAP had been blown, and water got cut off to the whole city for a while, throwing everyone into a panic, and Lucy Monroe had been there to document.

  Angel had seen plenty of journos do this kind of work; it was easy to feed outsiders’ interest in a collapsing city. Cheap tearjerker stuff. Masturbation material for preppers.

  The only difference between Phoenix and a dozen dying cities in Texas and Alabama and every coastal city around the world was that Phoenix had taken hits not just from climate change and dust storms and fires and droughts but also from a competing city.

  Angel enjoyed how Lucy’s finger spent a lot of time pointing north to Vegas. Catherine Case got a chapter, along with the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the suspicious circumstances of the CAP’s bombing.

  It wasn’t particularly deep stuff. Lots of people profiled Case. Queen of the Western Desert, Queen of the Colorado River, all that. And lots of people noticed that when the CAP blew up, Las Vegas immediately stopped spilling water out of Lake Mead, keeping the reservoir’s water level just above Intake No. 3.

  Angel was pleased that Lucy had gotten even a little bit of his secret world right, but collapse porn was a dime a dozen, really.

  The second book, though. That was something else entirely. The second book was deep.

  A murder book. A body book.

  Lucy hadn’t written anything for years after the tearjerker, and she’d changed as writer. This was Phoenix after everyone stopped giving a damn. This was Phoenix with a murder rate that approached the levels of the Cartel States’ births. This was a Phoenix where people just gave up and sold their children. Implosion porn on a whole other level, and as far as Angel could tell, Lucy was up to her neck in it.

  Before, she’d been on the outside, reporting. Now it was personal. More like a journal that she kept at night. Bitter. Raw. Exposed and intimate. Full of madness and loss and disappointment. The kind of journal that a person on the ragged edge of sanity kept and wrote between the switch from Tecate to tequila.

  She was drowning. Angel could see it on the pages. She was embedded so deep, the place was pulling her down. Julio was smart enough to get out and not die for Phoenix, but this journo…

  Angel had a feeling she’d follow her stories right down to Hell.

  And now she was focused on James Sanderson. From the articles she was writing, it looked like the water lawyer was where she planned to make her last stand.

  Angel studied her pictures.

  Striated sun-browned skin, wild pale gray eyes. She’d gone native. In some indefinable way, she’d gone pure Phoenix. She was going crazy. Lost in uncharted territory. That was what he’d seen when he’d met her in the morgue—she’d been looking at him, and he’d felt the connection immediately. Someone who’d seen too much. Just like him.

  He’d known her.

  And she’d known him, too.

  Angel stood and went to the window, looking out at the dying city. Watching crowds and the clubs down on the wannabe Vegas strip. People pretending they had a life. People scrambling and wishing for a future that was already out of their reach.

  Above them another Chamber of Commerce billboard glowed: PHOENIX. RISING.

  When Lucy Monroe had written her first book, she’d barely grasped what Phoenix was, or what Vegas was, or what loss was. Now she knew. And she knew him.

  “And if she knows you,” Angel murmured, “there’s a good chance she knows a hell of a lot more.”

  CHAPTER 14

  To Lucy, the golden anoncard in Jamie’s wallet had stood out like a flaring beacon. Jamie had partied, but he didn’t do the Golden Mile. The man wouldn’t have touched a place like Apocalypse Now! with a ten-foot pole. He liked jazz and dimly lit boy bars, not the gauche flash and noise of the Golden Mile’s gambling and club scene. And definitely nothing as tacky as the postmodern cliché that Apocalypse Now! represented.

  Apocalypse Now! was the kind of club where Calies and fivers picked up desperate Texas girls. Jamie would never have stooped so low.

  “It’s got a fucking exclamation point in its name,” he’d once lamented.

  “Maybe it’s meant to be ironic,” Lucy suggested.

  “No. This is what happens when Phoenix tax credits fuck narco dollars.”

  They’d been winding down the Golden Mile one evening, dodging Texas hookers and keeping an eye out for someone willing to sell Jamie some bubble. “And no, that’s not on the record,” he said. “The Water Board’s position is that economic development is necessary, and that an entertainment draw for outside dollars is a priority for water allocation. So don’t fucking quote me.”

  The Golden Mile had been Phoenix’s attempt to build a Las Vegas south of the river. To siphon off some of the gambling capital’s capital, and to do unto Vegas as Vegas had done unto the CAP.

  It had produced a dismal result, but despite Phoenix’s failure to suck up its rival city’s gambling dollars, bars and restaurants and casinos and clubs had opened, and a certain amount of revenue flowed in; fivers liked slumming out of the Taiyang, and Calies liked to bordercrash for the weekend. Foreigners liked to tour the apocalypse by day and party themselves senseless by night.

  Places like Apocalypse Now! prospered.

  “Maybe we should use exclamation points at the Development Board,” Jamie had said glumly. “PHOENIX! RISING!”

  So to Lucy, standing in the morgue and riffling through Jamie’s last belongings, the anoncard stood out like one of the Phoenix Development Board’s desperate neon signs—exclamation points and question marks scrawled all over it.

  She parked her truck and grabbed her mask. Winds were kicking up again in the evening. She didn’t think another dust storm was coming, but better safe than sorry.

  At the doors to the club, bull-necked men wearing CK Ballistic and Apocalypse-branded dust masks waved metal wands over the men and women in line as the winds kicked street sands into mini-whirlwinds around them. The guards pressed their fingers to earbugs, listening to instructions, and squinted in the flying grit. Girls in skintight sheaths stood on tiptoe, whispering promises, offering bribes to get past the velvet ropes, while rich fivers and Calies stormed the doors with nothing but the credibility of their tailored suits.

  As soon as the guards got a look at Lucy, though, they did their job and bounced her. Everything from her outdoorsy dust mask to her jeans and T-shirt told them she didn’t belong.

  Behind the club she found people more amenable to cash and conversation. She ended up in the back alley, sharing an electronic cigarette laced with a hashish overdrive cartridge, talking to a bartender on break and squinting as dust devils scoured the alley.

  To Lucy’s surprise, the bartender identified Jamie’s photo with pursed-lip recognition.

  “Sure. I see him all the time,” she said. She sucked on the cigarette, purple LED glowi
ng on its tip.

  “You’re sure?”

  She exhaled slowly. “Just said so, didn’t I? Shitty tipper considering who he runs with.”

  That sounded like Jamie. “Who’d he run with?”

  “Fivers, mostly. People out of the Taiyang.” She shrugged. “Dadong chum.”

  “Dadong?”

  “You don’t know that one?” The bartender laughed. “You know—da dong. ‘Hit the hole,’ right?” She made a motion with her fingers. “It’s Chinese, right?”

  She made a face of exasperation at Lucy’s puzzlement. “Oh, come on. It’s what the Texas bangbang girls say to the Chinese execs. It’s about the only Mandarin those girls can say. So you got all these bangbang girls saying, ‘Da dong, da dong’ to the Chinese fivers. Makes you ill. Don’t even get the tones right.”

  “Are those the kind of girls you have inside?”

  The bartender shook her head violently. “That trash? No way. They work the streets. We only let in the ones who know how to mind their manners. But they’re all trying to get their five-digit ticket punched.” She jerked her head to the north, and the skyline of rising towers and cranes. “Taiyang, baby. As close to Heaven as you can get when you’re stuck in Hell.”

  “So you saw Jamie with girls?” Lucy was puzzled.

  “Nah.” The bartender studied the picture. “That one, he didn’t play like that. It was fivers he hung on. They the ones had the girls.” She exhaled sweet vapors. “Your boy here, he was odd. At first I thought he was hanging on the fivers, looking to hook up with one of them, even though we hardly get any gay boys. Not really their scene. But he looked hungry like that, you know? Like he was starved for someone to throw him some scraps. Wouldn’t touch the girls. But he still kept hanging on the fivers.”

  “What kind of fivers was he hanging with?”

  “Expat types, mostly. You know, corporate credit cards and hardship posting bonuses, that kind of thing. Chinese solar. Calies. Narco boys up from Juárez and the Cartels.” She shrugged. “Whoever had money.”

  “You know any names?”

  The bartender shook her head. “No.”

  “I can pay.”

  The bartender turned speculative, then shook her head again. “I got to keep my job.”

  “I can pay.”

  She drew again on her cartridge. Exhaled vapors. “Look. You want, there’s one inside right now. Fiver getting his party on. Your boy used to hang with him a lot. I could point that one out. But that’s all I do. I don’t do names.”

  “How much?”

  “Shit. For you? You got fifty?”

  Lucy ended up watching from the edge of the club’s darkness as the fiver dirty-danced with a pair of Texas bangbang girls, one blond, the other Latina, neither of them looking old enough to be doing what they were doing.

  Whatever the man was, he just looked like another rich asshole to Lucy.

  “You’re sure that one was with Jamie?” Lucy shouted over the noise of the bar.

  The bartender glanced up from pouring out a red Negroni. “Oh yeah. Lots of times. Man pays his bills. Big tips.” She tapped her head. “I remember the boys who pay.”

  “He’s spendy?” Lucy asked, glancing back at the man.

  “Oh, hell yes.” The bartender grinned. “Ibis don’t put any limits on its execs. Soon as you see the blue and white, you know the money’s going to flow.”

  “Ibis?” Lucy’s head whipped around. “Ibis, you said?”

  “Sure. Big company. You see their billboards all over. ‘Fracking for the Future’ or whatever.” The bartender started shaking tequila and Cointreau. “He’s always bragging about how they’re drilling some new wells that are going to make Phoenix green.” She laughed. “We all know it’s bullshit, but the Ibis corporate cards all spend big.”

  “Thanks,” Lucy said. She slid a fifty-dollar bill across the bar. “You’ve been a huge help.”

  The bartender looked at the money like it was dogshit.

  “You got yuan?” she asked.

  —

  Lucy met Timo on the roof of Sid’s, smack in the middle of the old Sonora Bloom Estates, a subdivision that had gone belly-up, leaving half-finished housing studding the dirt, and Sid’s rising like a beacon amid the devastation. The regulars were busy taking potshots at prairie dogs, passing an old .22 down the line, cheering when they nailed one of the animals in the increasing dusk. Lucy climbed up the ladder, cradling a pair of Dos Equis, and gave one to Timo.

  “Come on, Timo, help me out.”

  Timo’s phone rang. Almost before he answered, she could hear his sister Amparo starting to bitch him out.

  “Help you out?” Timo sounded incredulous as he hung up. “Help me out, how about? I’m up to my eyeballs in pics of dead Texans. But I still need words. You going to do this with me, or what? Amparo’s boyfriend dumped her again, so I’m earning for everyone. I got obligations.”

  “I just don’t want to do this collapse porn stuff anymore,” Lucy said.

  “You were happy to do it when it paid the bills.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll see if we can get a couple fast stories.” She waited. “But I’ve something else, too. Bigger stuff.”

  “Prize-winning stuff?” He was interested despite himself.

  “No guarantees.” But she let it dangle, letting him imagine the credibility a really big story could bring for him.

  “What you got?”

  “I got a name on a guy. Michael Ratan. Works for Ibis.”

  “He dead?”

  Lucy laughed. “No. I think he’s here, working for California. I spent a lot of time digging through all their corporate databases looking for pictures, and I think this is the guy.” She showed him the pic on her phone. “I’m pretty sure he’s a fiver, but I can’t seem to get any other information on him. Can’t get an office address. Can’t get a home address in the Taiyang. I’m wondering if some of your friends might be able to track him down.”

  “What else you got on him?”

  “Not a lot. He’s with Ibis Exploratory. I confirmed that, but only because their corporate PR announced a reshuffling. He was sent out here to serve as chief hydrologist on the Verde Aquifer project. Seismic interpretation, exploratory hydr—”

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s fine. What else?”

  “That’s pretty much it. He’s had his records suppressed from public search, and my private searches don’t even have him in Arizona. They’ve still got him out in San Diego.”

  “Yeah, if he’s rich, it’s harder, for sure. Those people pay to keep themselves real private.”

  “I’ve got some money I could put into this.”

  “Yeah?” Timo perked up. “Someone funding us? I can do something with an expense account.”

  Lucy shook her head. “It’s not like that, so don’t get crazy. I’m doing this on spec. It’s out of my pocket.” She drank from her beer. The rifle cracked and a prairie dog did a cartwheel out in the dust and fell still.

  “Oh.” Timo mulled. “Well, if you’re willing to front the cash, I’ve got a lady who does the records for Taiyang utilities. If your guy Ratan has got a bill in his name, and not his company, might be able to pull it that way.”

  “How long would that take?”

  He made a face. “Well, I got to wine and dine her…”

  Lucy opened her bank account and keyed an amount. “I can give you three hundred yuan if you can make it happen fast.”

  Timo grinned and pulled out his own phone. Bumped hers, transferring cash. “Guess I know what I’m doing tonight.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “Are you sure this is going to work?” Maria shouted over the crash of the music.

  She tugged at the hem of her sheath, feeling painfully exposed in the borrowed dress. It barely covered her ass. Sarah gave her an encouraging look, shouted something that was lost in the noise of Apocalypse Now!, and dragged Maria deeper into the crowd. Dancers’ faces flashed in shadow relief, strobes of color, skull hollo
ws, blood splashes, icy cheekbones. Dizzy heavy beats, and the press of bodies.

  Maria let herself be guided. This was Sarah’s world; Maria understood almost nothing of it. Everything was new and overwhelming: the bass beats, the crowds, the press of skin against skin, the feel of her sheath, the exposure of her body. She felt hyperaware of everything. Of flesh. Of breath. Of eyes wide open. People’s teeth blue under black light—

  Sarah dug in her purse and pushed something into Maria’s hand.

  “Take this!” she shouted over the noise.

  Maria held up the minuscule squeeze tube, a bit like the liquid tears that people used to clear their eyes when flying sands got too bad.

  “What is it?”

  “Bubble!”

  Maria shook her head and offered it back. “I don’t want it.”

  Sarah shrugged and pushed it up her own nose. Squeezed and inhaled. She gasped and reached for Maria’s shoulder, her fingers digging in as the drug hit.

  Sarah shook her head, laughing and shaking. Her nails cut into Maria’s skin. She swayed for balance, eyes bright, peeking up at Maria through the fall of her hair.

  “You sure?” she teased. “It makes it easier. Makes this fun.”

  Maria hesitated. “Okay.”

  Sarah grinned, pleased, and pulled another bulb from her purse. “Don’t worry! It’s good.” And then she was cradling Maria’s head in her hand and pressing the bulb into her nostril.

  Cheap plastic whiff, like vinyl.

  “Do it!”

  Maria inhaled, and Sarah triggered the dose. Bubble spiked Maria’s sinuses. Maria jerked away, blinking, eyes watering. Hot then cold, wasabi painful right behind her eye sockets, and then more. She swayed.

  Sarah wrapped her arms around her as she shook. “Easy, girl. Easy.”

  But it wasn’t easy. Maria’s skin felt as if it were covered with a million coiling snakes, microscopic, writhing across her skin. Coiling, sliding, slithering patterns that pulsed and twisted in time to the pounding of her heart, the surge of her blood, the beat of the club. The drug was music, pounding through her, filling her, stretching and smearing her—and then blossoming with wild life.