The Water Thief

by Nicholas Lamar Soutter

  “It takes a minute to warm up. Can I help you?”

  “Yes, I rented a friend, Kate. My name is Charles Thatcher.”

  “Oh yeah, the overages. Long night. She didn’t screw up anything, did she?”

  “Oh—no,” I answered. “In fact, I wanted to speak with her for a few minutes if I could.”

  “Well, she’s not due in today, and we’re not scheduling her at the moment.”

  “I see. Do you have a number where I could reach her?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sure you understand we can’t give out friends’ numbers to clients. I can have her contact you.”

  I shook my head. “You’re outside my Karitzu. My corp might find out if you called me. I’ll just try again next week. When might be good?”

  “Like I said, we’re not scheduling her right now. I can offer you a different friend, if you’d like.”

  I shook my head. “No, don’t worry about it. Maybe I can try again later, or go with another firm. Do you think you could call me a cab?”

  The man nodded. When I stepped out onto the curb, I saw no trace of the curious neighbors or children.

  A few minutes later a cab arrived. I climbed in, and the driver asked me where I wanted to go.

  “Do you have an anonymizer?” I asked.

  He looked me over, suspiciously. “Sure. It’s eighty percent more.”

  “Does it work?”

  “The bill will say you hired a trade consultant—all on the up and up. You can even put it on your ledger.”

  “Do it. Head a mile east, as if you’re going to the city. Then stop.” I commanded, handing my ledger forward.

  “Pay when we get there.”

  “Run it. It’s going to be a long tab.”

  The driver beamed when he ran the ledger, still laden with borrowed cash.

  I sat back into the dirty, beaten old seats. For a moment I felt the pride of ownership, a pride I had purchased. In MidSec I was an average guy. Here I had complete authority over the driver, enough money to sell and buy him a hundred times over. I wondered if HighCons felt like that all the time.

  “Got a romantic interest? Don’t want the corp to know?” the driver ribbed.

  “When we get there,” I said, “come back to the spot you picked me up, but on the intersecting street, kitty corner to the building. I want to be able to see who goes in and out of there.”

  “You got it.”

  He didn’t say anything else. If there was one thing money bought well, it was silence. I burrowed into the back seat and waited.

  “Mr. Thatcher?”

  I had fallen asleep. It was night, and about half of the street lamps were out. But by the dim light of the rental sign, I could see a young olive-skinned woman approaching the office.

  “That her?”

  I nodded. She went inside.

  “What if she goes out the back?” I asked.

  “Nah, she’ll come out the front where there’s more light.”

  A few minutes later she came back out and began heading down the street. I reached for the door handle.

  “Hold on!” cried the driver, reaching for the dome light. “You open the door, she’ll see us! You know, if she gets into a car, how you gonna follow her?”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  “Stay in here, we can watch her from the car.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “She’s gonna notice a car following her.”

  “Nah, I can do it. If I switch to the battery, this thing’ll be dead quiet. If we stay between the lampposts, stay a couple hundred yards back, she’ll never see us.”

  Every person I added to this intrigue increased the chance that I was going to get caught. Still, he seemed to know what he was doing (which was more than a little unsettling in its own right). I offered him a bonus of two hundred caps if he got me to her house without her knowing.

  “Yes sir!”

  So we followed her. Every time she approached a light, he’d release the brake, rolling forward into another dark spot between the lamps. I felt like a stalker, like I was committing a violation. It didn’t seem to bother the driver any.

  Half an hour we did this. She would turn down a street or vanish between buildings, and more than once I thought we’d lost her. The weather was getting worse; the moon vanished behind the clouds, and it was already beginning to drizzle. But my driver never failed to find her again. As she went deeper and deeper into LowSec, fewer and fewer homes were lit.

  Finally she turned into an industrial park. It began to rain heavily, and I could no longer make her out. He pointed to a large warehouse with a very dull firelight shining through the windows.

  “She went in there.”

  “What is this place?”

  “Everett Park. It’s a communal.”

  “You mean like communism?”

  The driver shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s just a place where a bunch of people take over a building. If there’s an owner, they may pay him something to look the other way. Maybe not.”

  I authorized his bonus.

  “Pleasure, my man,” he said. “Listen, bro, this can be a rough neighborhood. I can stick around if you’d like. I mean the nearest working phone could be miles away.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  The warehouse was about three stories tall. If it was a shelter, I couldn’t imagine it being a good one. Windows were smashed out, the fire escape was barely hanging on, and there were large cracks in the wall.

  As I got out the smell of sulfur hit me. I made a mad dash for the side door, which opened onto a stairwell. The air was so thick with smoke, I thought I had stumbled into a building fire. But I could smell tobacco, wood and paper pulp, and looking out over the main floor I could see nearly two dozen fires in everything from oil barrels to metal pails. Already the lack of oxygen was making me dizzy

  Even with a thirty-foot ceiling and half the windows open, how are they not suffocating?

  It was a shantytown. Wire frame bunks, old prison mattresses, shopping carts and makeshift partitions were scattered everywhere. The air was rank with the smell of rotting meat, body-odor and feces. Water dripped from the roof and broken windows, and everything seemed damp and moldy.

  I couldn’t make out any faces, so finding Jazelle would be nearly impossible. I made my way as best I could, looking for someone who looked like her. After a few minutes I had covered only a small part of the warehouse, but somehow managed to work myself into a dead-end corner behind several drums and a large wooden industrial spool.

  “You lost?”

  Through watery eyes and thick smoke I could make out three men approaching me. The first was a large bald man with a boxer’s nose and meaty hands, callused with scars and rope burns. The second was thinner, but carried a bat and had a vicious look on his face, while the third walked with a limp, dragging a metal pipe behind him.

  “I... Yes, I’m looking for a friend,” I said.

  “You ain’t got any friends here, HighCon.”

  “No, no, I’m a MidCon; I’ve got a Delta contract. My name is Thatcher, I’m looking for Jazelle.”

  “Jazelle ain’t got no HighCon friends.”

  “No, I’m a Delta contract—almost a LowCon myself! I met her at work.”

  “Almost a LowCon, eh? Think you'se better than us?”

  “The last thing I want is trouble. I just need to talk to Jazelle.”

  “Seems to me if you’se her friend you w’udn’t be following her.”

  “I’m not following her.”

  “Yes, you is. Come out of that cop car.”

  “Oh my god, that wasn’t a cop car, it was a cab.”

  “So you was following her?”

  “Yes, but not like—”

  A fist met my jaw, and I tumbled back onto the concrete floor. I took a few staggered breaths before managing to get up on my hands and knees. The pipe hit me in the chest, and I felt a sickening crack. I tried to ask, to beg, them to stop. But I couldn�
��t even tell if I was breathing. I fell to the floor, and they grabbed me by the legs and began dragging me over the concrete. It was chipped and cracked, and I dug my nails into every crevice I could find, clawing at it. They hauled me over debris, bits of broken glass and metal digging into my chest and stomach. They flipped me over, and I looked up just in time to see a boot coming down on my face.

  Chapter 9

  I woke up against a steel drum, my legs sprawled out on the floor. It was hard to breathe. My nose was running, so I wiped it on the back of my hand, but instead of mucus, I came up with blood. My hair was wet and matted from a gash in my head, and my knuckles and fingertips were raw and bleeding. I wiggled my toes—they hurt, but they moved. I couldn’t move my right leg, though. Whether it was suffering from the old injury or from the beating I couldn’t tell. But splayed out like that I kept sliding down, so I grabbed my leg and propped it underneath myself to try to get more comfortable.

  I was in a corner somewhere. Someone had opened a nearby window to let in a little fresh air, but at least one of my ribs was cracked, so it was hard to breathe anyway. Around me were several four-foot bookshelves, a dingy mattress, and a small metal pail hosting a fire. Book spines—the pages torn and used for insulation or kindling—littered the floor.

  “Who are you?” Jazelle asked.

  She sat in an old wooden chair, watching me.

  “My name is Thatcher.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “I’m not lying. My name is Charles Thatcher.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to find Katherine.”

  “I don’t know any Katherine.”

  “You know, Kate. You dropped her off at my apartment. I rented her for the night.”

  “There is nobody named Kate who works at our agency.”

  “She was filling in.”

  “Our agency doesn’t send unlicensed friends into Capital City. It would violate our contract with Ackerman and half a dozen other firms.”

  I scooched higher up the drum.

  “I’m not trying to blackmail you.”

  “That’s all your type ever tries to do. I didn’t drop anybody off at your place. I’ve certainly never met you.”

  “Please. My name is Charles, but she called me Charlie. I rented her. I don’t want any money; I just want to talk to her.”

  “Charlie? The MidCon? Ackerman Perception?”

  I nodded.

  “What the hell are you doing here? Did you want a refund?”

  “I told you, I want to see Kate.”

  “She said that all you two did was argue.”

  “Yeah,” I grinned. “So she remembered me too?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. She wasn’t that impressed. Why do you want to see her so bad?”

  “Well, to be honest, when I decided to come, I hadn’t actually priced baseball bats into the equation.”

  “What do you want to see her for?” she repeated.

  “It’s private.”

  “Well, since I’m the only one who knows where she is…”

  “I wanted to know more about the republic.”

  “My god,” she said, rolling her eyes. “She wasn’t going on about that, was she? Oh, Mr. Thatcher, I’m so sorry she got you so worked up. You know, that is just like her. She’s new to the friend business. I told her to make stuff up to make herself more exotic, to engage you, give you guys more to talk about. She is supposed to be getting you excited, to enjoy the friendship. I’m so sorry if you misunderstood, or if she crossed a line. Most clients know that friends are faking. Was she your first friend?” she said, handing me a towel and some water. “Oh, this is a disaster. I feel so guilty. I wonder if we have any pain killers around here.”

  She examined the wound on my chest. “Oh, Spag did a number on you, didn’t he?”

  “Which one was Spag?”

  “The big one.”

  “She wasn’t faking,” I said.

  Jazelle nodded. “She was. I’m sorry. Her job was to chat you up. She has talent, but her choice of subject matter… I’ll make it up to you. We can get you a credit, send you a professional next time. Staff came up short and we sent her out. This really is all my fault, I recommended her to the boss. I hope you won’t take it out on the company; we have lots of good, reliable friends. She just acted unprofessionally.”

  I dabbed the wounds on my face and shook my head. “If you believe that, then you don’t know her half as well as you think you do.”

  “I’m one of her good friends, I know her just fine, and I’m telling you, there’s been a huge mistake. Listen, I can get you your money back—even a bit more for your trouble. And your medical bills, of course! We’ll take care of this.”

  I gawked at her. “Oh, my god. It’s not just her, it’s all of you—the entire agency.”

  “Okay, now you’re just trying to extort us. How much are you really looking for?”

  “Is everyone down here like this?”

  “Christ, you higher contracts. All Epsilons and Zetas must be citizen communists, why else would they be poor, is that it? They’re lazy, useless….”

  “No, you’re not lazy. You believe. You’re actually looking to change the system—not just for your own sake—for everyone. You’re a real citizen.”

  “If you’re just going to sit here and insult me—”

  I laughed. “Don’t try to manage my perception. I’ve been doing it a lot longer than you have. You’re a citizen.”

  I heard an uneasy rustling in the shadows, just out of view.

  “Do you know what could happen, you coming down here?”

  “Well,” I said, dabbing my nose, “I might get a fine, maybe lose a rank or two. Worst case I could pay it off in about six months.”

  “Christ, you arrogant ass, I mean to us. They won’t be polite, they won’t fine us, and there won’t be any charges or indictments. They’ll come in here with Tommy guns. They’ll go floor to floor, spraying automatic gunfire everywhere. Armor-piercing rounds, they’ll cut through ten people like tissue paper—through walls, hitting people in other buildings. It won’t matter how many people here are ‘guilty.’ They’ll mow down children and newborns. They’ll kill everyone; they’ll call it an uprising. They’ll reclamate our bodies and get a nice bonus out of it. That’s what they’ll do, Thatcher.”

  My first instinct was to protest, to defend Ackerman. I was going to tell her that they were a good firm, that whatever they did was in everyone’s best interest. I had said it so many times, managed so many perceptions, that I thought that way by rote.

  But it wasn’t true.

  Like a person, the corporation only did what was in its own interest, only without the burden of consequences or conscience. Somehow I had gone my entire life knowing corporations were ruthless, soulless paper constructs. I had said as much a thousand times. But no matter how often I had said it, somehow I never actually recognized it.

  I had found a den of citizens. But I didn’t care, either as an economic opportunity or for the novelty of it. I didn’t care who Jazelle was.

  “I just want to see Kate. Please, just once.”

  “You could be an agent, Thatcher. You can’t prove you’re not, and we can’t take the risk.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t prove it. But I’ve already seen you, this place. It’s not as if I don’t know who she is. Let me talk to her. I’m talking to you right now. What’s the difference? I just….”

  Jazelle stiffened. I shouldn’t have tried to sneak in. I should have just waited, or just rented Jazelle myself. My own impatience was going to get me killed.

  “You know,” I said, “it’s just as possible you’re setting me up. I’ve taken a risk coming here too. I just want to talk to her.”

  For all she knew I was a lovesick client. Heck, for all I knew she was right.

  “Corporatism breads paranoia,” I said.

  She took in a deep breath and then nodded.

  “
All right. You’ll be blindfolded. We’ll let her make the call.”

  Chapter 10

  They threw me into the trunk of a car, and drove me around. I can’t imagine a trunk being comfortable even under the best of circumstances, but bruised and bloodied, joints stiffening up, it was dreadful.

  Believing in government wasn’t technically a crime. Neither was failing to make a profit. Heck, neither was being a citizen. You can’t commit a crime without a contract. But it wasn’t until I had lain there, waiting for them to let me out, that I knew they had every right to be worried.

  They drove for at least a half hour before I was dragged from the trunk, up a stoop, down a hallway and into an apartment. They sat me down and, after hearing a few whispers, everyone appeared to leave.

  “Hello?”

  A hand grabbed my hood and pulled it off. It was Kate.

  My lips were swollen, joints and muscles all stiff, and I had bruises and welts all over my body. Still I couldn’t help but smile with, what I must imagine, was the goofiest grin anybody has ever seen.

  “Oh, Charlie, my god.”

  “Hi Kate.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  “Nothing,” I said, with the smile of a newborn who first recognizes his parents.

  “What on Earth were you thinking? Why did you want to see me so badly?”

  “Well, like I told Jazelle, I didn’t really think it was going to be this hard. And I thought colleagues were paranoid.”

  “It’s corporations we’re afraid of. Tell me, is there a single colleague you don’t fear?”

  The apartment was not bad for LowCon. The walls were painted cinderblocks. The table also rested on cinderblocks. The windows were cracked, but they weren’t missing any panes. Pipes ran down the length of the walls, all patched and expertly wrapped in plumbing tape. She even had a television, though it heavily favored the green range of the spectrum. The place had a quiet dignity to it.

  She handed me two painkillers and a cup. I tasted the water; it was fresh.