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.”
“A police baton?” Lucy asked.
Christine caught the implication as soon as Lucy asked—the widening of the eyes, the fast-covering blankness. Christine glanced furtively to where the cops were milling at the far side of the room with a new flood of bodies, and she glared at Lucy for speaking aloud what everybody whispered—that Phoenix’s cops were thugs for hire. “It could have been some sort of poker.”
She plunged on. “He was probably killed several times, then revived. The adrenaline in his system points to revivification. The eyes were removed pre-mortem. Of the other body parts, only the hands and feet were removed pre-mortem. The legs and the rest happened after he was dead. It appears that there was some attempt to tourniquet the limbs and prolong life longer still.”
Lucy forced herself to breathe slowly, to take the information as it came. The room felt as if it were tilting under her feet. She gripped the gurney, steadying herself. Christine was completely dispassionate as she described the stages of Jamie’s abuse. But it hadn’t been dispassionate for Jamie. He would have been sobbing and blubbering and screaming and begging, snot running down his face. Tears and spit. His voice would have been raw from screaming…
&nbs
p; Lucy leaned close, staring at his mangled face.
He’d bitten off his own tongue.
The blood was still in his teeth.
She straightened, fighting the urge to throw up. It would have been frantic for quite some time, until finally Jamie’s attackers lost the ability to reach him anymore. And that must have made them angry, because they’d pulled him back from his place in Heaven or Hell to have another run at him.
And another, after that.
Christine could describe the stages of Jamie’s disassembly, but that didn’t begin to describe the horror that he had experienced as his attackers broke him apart. God, Jamie had been a fool. So pleased with himself and his plots. All his ideas of how he could make himself rich and get away with it.
“Did he have his things here?” Lucy asked.
The ME gave her a long look. “Yeah. He wasn’t robbed.”
“Can I see?”
She hesitated. “You knew him, didn’t you?”
Lucy nodded. “Yeah.”
“I could tell.” She sighed. “Put on gloves.”
Lucy did, and Christine let her paw through the bag of Jamie’s effects. His bloody clothes. His wallet. She opened it and flipped through. Found credit cards, a few yuan. Scraps of receipts. She looked them over. Food stall receipts, the kind of hand scraps that Merry Perry churro vendors would make out. Jamie always made sure he got reimbursed for his business expenses, but this was ridiculous. A couple of business cards. Salt River Project. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Bureau of Reclamation. The ephemera of his work.
Looking through his credit cards, Lucy came up with a chip-and-pin anoncard. Gold laminated, with a bloody slash logo: Apocalypse Now!
Lucy turned the card over. It was the kind that had stored value in it. You dumped cash into it via Bitcoin or other crypto currency, then used it without fear of being traced. Nice if you didn’t want a financial trail. Nice if someone else was dumping money into it, too. An easy, anonymous way to be paid.
She tapped the card against her palm, thinking. It bothered her, this card. It didn’t fit with Jamie. He had more style.
“Bad way to die,” someone said behind her.
Lucy jumped at the voice, shoving the papers and the card back into Jamie’s wallet.
A pair of plainclothes detectives were standing behind her. Hispanic men with thumbs in their belts, pulling their jackets back to show handguns and badges.
One guy was short, with a bit of a gut, a trim goatee, and a knowing smirk. The other one was tall. Serious, angular, and weathered. They were both looking at Jamie.
“Damn,” the short goateed one said, “looks like someone wanted this motherfucker to hurt for a while.”
“Can I help you?” Christine asked sharply.
“CID.” The taller man flashed his badge and joined his partner in the examination, leaning close to study Jamie’s face. “He hurt all right. Looks like he bit off his own tongue.” He glanced over at Lucy, dark eyes cold. “Those his things?”
He plucked Jamie’s wallet from her hand before she could answer.
“The Coyote Killers’ bodies are all over there,” Christine said pointedly.
The serious cop straightened. “Not looking for old dug-up bodies,” he said. “Looking for nice fresh ones. Like this.” He stared down at Jamie’s corpse. “This one got a name?”
“James Sanderson,” Christine said.
“Huh.” He shrugged. “Not the one I want. We’re looking for one named Vosovich.” He looked thoughtful. “Beat all to fuck like this one, though.”
Lucy didn’t like the way the cops held themselves, how their eyes went from Jamie’s corpse, to Christine, and then to her.
The short cop with the goatee had the tracery of what looked like a snake tattoo running down the back of his hand. The tall one had a scar on his face and neck, a pale ragged thing as if someone had jammed a bottle into his throat and then dragged it down to his chest. The short one was pawing through Jamie’s wallet as Christine led them to another body and pulled off a sheet.
“Is this the one you want?” she asked.
Curious, Lucy followed. The cop with the grin and the goatee still held Jamie’s effects. Lucy desperately wanted to look at the receipts again, the club card—but she forgot all about it as soon as she saw the other body. They were connected. The two corpses could have been mirror images, for all the difference their torture had taken.
“Look at this,” the short one said. “Vosburger. Chihuahuan Apocalypse 3.0. Now you tell me this ain’t all hell breaking loose.”
The taller one snorted. “End of days, for sure.” He jerked his head back toward Jamie’s body. “And he’s got a twin.”
“Probably just a coincidence,” the goateed one joked.
“Coincidences do happen, I hear.”
They were both smiling, eyes boring in on Lucy now.
“You know this one?” the scarred cop asked. He was pointing down at the new corpse, the one they’d called Vosovich.
The dead man’s ravaged body looked so much like Jamie’s that the connection couldn’t have been missed by even the stupidest cop.
Lucy shook her head. “Never seen him.”
The scarred man pointed at Jamie. “That one, though? That one’s a friend of yours?” He plucked Jamie’s wallet from his partner’s hand and pulled Jamie’s driver’s license. “Who’s this James Sanderson?”
“Says he’s a legal associate. Phoenix Water,” the short one said. “Least, if that’s his business card.”
“That right?” the tall one asked Lucy. “That what Sanderson did. Water? Legal?”
Lucy didn’t like the way the cop was looking at her. He seemed to hold himself casually, but his question was pointed. His dark eyes had her pinned.
“Hell if I know.” Lucy made herself pretend disinterest. “He’s just a swimmer to me.” She jerked her thumb toward where Timo was shooting photos. “We’re with Río de Sangre. Thought the body might be good enough to make the cover.”
“Huh. Didn’t peg you for a vulture.” The scarred cop nodded toward Jamie and the new body. “You see any other kills like this lately? Tortured like these ones? Swimmers maybe? Hanging off overpasses—that kind of thing?”
Lucy shrugged. “Narcos do things like this sometimes.” She let the conversation roll along, pretending boredom, using everything Ray Torres had ever taught her about pushing aside cop interest. “Timo over there has whole catalogs of pics, if you want to take a look. He’s probably got something like this.”
“I bet he does.” The cop turned and called to Christine, who had gone off to supervise more of the chaos. “Hey! This guy have any belongings?”
“He might have,” Christine called back. “If you can find them, they’re all yours.”
“If you can find them,” the short one grumbled, scanning the chaos. He ambled back over to Jamie’s corpse.
Lucy was trying to figure out the connection between the two cops and if there was something she could pry out of them. Vosovich, the cop had said. She wished she could ask for the spelling, so she could start digging. She was sure it would tell her more about Jamie’s death. Just this one time, a death wouldn’t be a mystery.
Unbidden, an image of Ray Torres rose in her mind, wagging a warning finger. Don’t write about the bodies.
“You have any leads?” she asked the cops.
The pair exchanged amused glances. “Bad guys,” the goateed one said. “Real bad guys.”
“Can I quote you?” Lucy shot back.
“Sure. You do that.” The scarred one was looking at her in a way that made her suddenly uncertain. Her eyes were drawn to his scar, running up his neck to his jaw, disappearing down beneath his shirt, that ragged slash in the hard mahogany of his skin. Puckered broken flesh. Violence there.
“Tell me again about this man,” he said, tapping the gurney where Jamie lay. “What’s your interest in him again?”
“I—” Lucy found her voice. “Like I sa
id. I was just looking for something bloody. For the rags.”
“Right.” He nodded. “For the rags.”
Lucy had the sudden uneasy feeling that she had met him before.
It’s his eyes, she thought. There was something about the intensity of his watchfulness. Dark and hard. Eyes that had seen too many horrors and held no illusions. He saw things the same way she did.
Her mouth felt dry.
Timo sometimes talked about people walking on your grave. If you were paying attention, he claimed you could feel death’s wings, flapping over your head, and that was the moment you needed to hightail it to a Santa Muerte shrine and make some big fucking offerings. If you were quick, the Skinny Lady could lay protection on you—if she liked you. If you made the right offerings.
Lucy had laughed it off as Zoner superstition. But now, suddenly, she believed.
This man was death.
“I didn’t get your name,” he said. Lucy swallowed. She didn’t want to give him her name. She wanted to blend into the walls. She wanted to run.
“I’m sure you got a name,” he pressed, smiling.
His head was cocked, studying her. Like a crow eyeing carrion. His eyes were picking her apart. Plucking at skin and flesh, muscles and tendons. Flaying her wide. She’d been a fool to come to see Jamie, she realized. A fool to even consider tracing the story of her friend’s death.
“You’re not a cop.”
As soon as she said it, it seemed obvious. He wore a badge, but he wasn’t a cop.
A tight smile confirmed her guess, even as he said, “No? You don’t think so?”
She wondered if this was the man who had tortured Jamie. If he’d left Jamie and the other body in the morgue to draw her in. Cholobi gangs sometimes used that trick. They murdered someone, then waited for the victim’s friends to come close, and then killed them, too. A sly trick. A favorite trick. A way to squeeze more death from a target, like wringing the last juice from a dry lime.
Lucy took a step back, but the cop seized her arm. His fingers dug into her skin. He dragged her close, and his head dipped low. His lips brushed her ear.