“I don’t believe you ever gave me your name.”
Lucy swallowed, scanning for help in the morgue. Christine was nowhere to be seen. Timo as well. She pried his fingers off, made herself glare at him. “You’re way out of line.”
“You think?”
“Back off, or I’ll bring every real cop down on your head.”
She guessed she had a fifty-fifty chance of convincing bystanders that he was an impostor. If Christine had been in the room, it would have been different.
Lucy scanned the room again, looking for the ME—where was she?
The guy with the goatee and the tattoo on his arm ambled over. “You got something?” He reached to his belt, pulling handcuffs. “She got a lead for us?”
The scarred man glanced at his companion, then back to Lucy.
To Lucy’s surprise, he let her go.
“Nah,” he said. “Nothing here. Just a blood rag girl who don’t know shit.” He glanced over at her, warning in his dark eyes. “Blood rag journos don’t know shit, ain’t that right?”
It took Lucy a second to find her voice. “Right,” she whispered.
“So go on.” He jerked his head toward the door. “Beat it. Go vulture somewhere else.”
Lucy didn’t wait for the scarred man to repeat himself. She fled.
CHAPTER 11
Angel watched the blood rag journo go.
Something about her wasn’t right, but he hadn’t liked the way Julio zeroed in on their conversation. With Julio, there was a decent chance that anyone he questioned would end up worse for wear. So Angel had let her go. And now he regretted it.
I’m getting soft.
“Hey.” Julio gripped his elbow. “We got company, cabrón.”
A couple guys were pushing through the crowds, jostling EMTs, showing badges. State cops, from the look.
“You know them?”
“Calies.” Julio turned away, keeping his back to them. He murmured, “If they see my ass, they’ll know me for sure. Phoenix is too small a town for this shit.”
Angel gave them a once-over. They had the look, he decided. Where Catherine Case recruited her people from prisons and desperation, California had its own processes and spent its vastly larger pool of money in different ways. The pair threading their way between the gurneys had the clean-cut look of rich Stanford graduates. No visible tats. Hair trimmed just right. Real overachievers.
“You sure they’re Calies? Maybe they’re real CID.”
Julio elbowed Angel impatiently. “Hell yes, I’m sure. I got cams on Ibis, and those guys are in and out of the headquarters all the time.”
“That company might as well be a Cali embassy.”
Julio was already scanning the exits. “I knew I shouldn’t have agreed to come down here with you.”
“Calm down, ése. Let’s see what they do. Maybe we’ll see us something interesting.”
“Fuck you and your ése bullshit.” Julio’s face was a death mask of fear. “Ten to one those motherfuckers have badges that actually check out. If they want, they really could arrest us. Start running background checks on our asses. You want that?”
“You serious? They can do that shit?”
“Calies are way ahead of us on everything. You’re running with the big dogs down here, ése.” Julio emphasized the final word, mocking. He tugged Angel’s sleeve. “Now will you come on?”
Julio had lost it, Angel decided.
Time was, the man standing next to him would have let a rancher put a shotgun in his mouth and wouldn’t blink. Julio would tell that redneck and his shotgun that Vegas was putting a call on his water and he could kiss it goodbye. No fucking fear. Julio’d just hand over the papers and wait to get his brains blasted out the back of his head.
Now a couple Calies had the poor bastard jumping out of his skin.
“Do what you feel,” Angel said. “I think I’m going to linger. See what our friends get up to.”
Julio hesitated, clearly torn between his urge to run and his desire to keep Angel’s respect. “It’s your funeral,” he muttered, and then he was off, squeezing through the crowds, fleeing the scene.
Angel kept wandering among the bodies, occasionally lifting a sheet, pretending to do official business while keeping an eye on the Calies, who were busy making their own tour of the dead.
Despite what Julio claimed, they looked a hell of a lot like real CID to Angel. It would make sense that CID would be here, given that Texans were stacked in the morgue like cordwood. Even Arizona had to give a shit once in a while, if only to show the tourists that the state wasn’t deliberately aiming to become the next poster child for ethnic cleansing.
The blood rag photographer was still snapping pictures, his flash going off like a bomb. Angel watched the guy work the bodies, fluid and professional. The man’s presence reminded him of the journalist who had fled. Something had been off about her.
So why’d I let her go?
Still keeping his eyes on the Calies, Angel moved to join the photographer. The man was trying to get an angle on a corpse, holding up a gurney sheet as he took the shot, one-handed.
Angel plucked up the sheet and held it for him. “Looks like business is good.”
The photographer nodded at Angel, grateful. Fiddled with his camera settings. “Oh, man. You wouldn’t believe it.” He sighted through the viewfinder. “Could you hold that up a little higher? Thanks.” He snapped pictures. “I want to get her missing teeth. They pried all the gold out, but…”
Angel obligingly tugged the sheet into the position. “Say,” he said, “you had a friend here. Lady working the blood rags with you.”
“Who? You mean Lucy?” The photographer took another shot. Stepped back, considering the angles. “She’s not blood rag. Woman’s got Pulitzers.”
“No shit?” Angel kicked himself for letting her go. “Guess I should have known she was good. Asked smart questions, you know?”
“Yeah.” The photographer nodded, distracted, still focused on shooting.
“I was supposed to give her some background, but…” Angel waved at the chaos around them. “I forgot to get her name and number with all this shit coming down.”
“You can just Google her. Lucy Monroe.” The photographer rattled off her phone number from memory, not pausing as he took shots. “Can you lift that higher?”
More commotion came from the hallway. They both turned, expecting another surge of excavated corpses, but instead it was families, a whole flood of people, not just Texans, either. Locals, it looked like. A rainbow of skin colors. Black and white and brown and yellow. All united in their loss, all pouring past the cops, who were losing control of the situation, people babbling in Spanish, English, and Dallas Drawl, and all sounding pretty much the same in mourning.
“Oh man, this is going to be sweet!” the photographer said. He dove into the action. Angel faded up against a wall, keeping an eye on the Calies as they made their rounds.
Lucy Monroe. Winner of Pulitzers.
The Calies paused at James Sanderson’s body and called out to the Chinese lady who ran the morgue. Two clean-cut guys, doing the exact same routine Angel and Julio had pulled just a few minutes before.
This ought to be interesting.
The ME was gesturing, arguing with the Calies. They showed her badges, and now she was turning, her whole demeanor changing as she scanned the mayhem…
She pointed, picking Angel out.
Thanks a lot, lady.
Angel smirked, tipped an imaginary cowboy hat in the Calies’ direction. “Too slow,” he mouthed to them.
Of course, they went for their guns, but by then Angel was plunging into the crowd of grieving families.
As he bailed, he casually tipped a gurney, double-stacked with bodies, sending corpses tumbling behind him.
The Calies went sprawling in the mess, and the families lost their shit, seeing their loved ones dumped on the ground. They went after the Calies, screaming blood and vengeance.<
br />
Angel grabbed a nearby cop and flashed his badge. “Get those idiots out of here! This is a crime scene, goddammit!”
He kept moving, threading the crowds before the Calies could get themselves untangled from the raging families and the guards.
They were good. One of them managed to get past the cops.
Angel kept forging through the crowds, fighting against the incoming flow of bodies, families, and med techs. He yanked a sheet off a gurney as he passed, leaving another dead Texan exposed, then cut left into a side hall.
The Cali came around the corner, hot on Angel’s trail. Angel threw the gurney sheet over the man’s head. He yelped, but Angel yanked him close, slamming his elbow into the man’s nose. He caught the Cali’s gun as it came up and smashed it against the wall, knocking it free. He spun the man about, put him in a headlock, and started dragging him down the passage.
The man kept thrashing, yelling through the muffling sheet.
“Police business!” Angel shouted as people stared.
He hit the man again and got him in a chokehold. A few seconds later the man went limp.
Angel flipped him over and cuffed him for the benefit of the watching crowd, then dragged him farther down hall, out of the mayhem.
He shoved the man under a gurney and riffled the man’s badges and wallet, then draped the sheet over him. He returned to the main hall, looking for signs of the guy’s partner.
The other Cali was still tangled up with the cops and families, all of them pointing fingers at one another, pissed off that someone’s kid had come apart in the chaos.
Angel ducked his head low and pushed out through the steel doors, into the heat and bustle of cops and ambulances and Texas refugees. Arizona sunshine blazed down, turning the blacktop sticky. Angel jammed his way through the press, half-expecting pursuit but seeing none.
He picked up Julio in the parking lot. The man looked like he was about to piss himself from anxiety.
“You were right,” Angel said, tossing him the wallet as he climbed into Julio’s truck. “They were Calies.”
Julio caught the flying billfold against his chest. “Chinga tu madre. I told you that.”
“They zeroed right in on Vosovich and that other deader.”
“Fantastic. You’re a real Sherlock Holmes.” Julio powered up his truck, kicking the A/C to full. “Can we please get the fuck out of here?”
“Yeah, let’s roll.” Angel strapped his seat belt. “I think I want to check on that journo next.”
“The blood rag lady?”
“Not just blood rags, apparently. Real journo. Pretty sure she knew that other deader who was cut up like Vos.”
“The water lawyer?”
“Yeah. Since the lawyer’s missing his tongue, let’s see if she talks any better.”
“Got to find her first.”
Angel laughed as Julio pulled out of the police department’s lot. “Journos are easy to find. They like attention.”
Julio steered around piles of dust that had been pushed aside by street cleaning crews. They headed downtown, Julio’s truck bouncing on the cracked concrete of the highway. “Not like us,” he said.
“No.” Angel watched the hollowed-out city passing outside his windows. “Journos—it’s like they got a death wish.”
Julio changed lanes, gunning his truck past a couple on a scooter, full-head dust masks and helmets making them look like the shock troops in Fallout 9.
“That was a hell of a lot of bodies back there,” Julio said.
“So?”
“Think I’m going to put some more money on the lotería. They ain’t anywhere near done digging.”
“Is that what you spend your time doing down here?”
“Don’t laugh. Payout is sweet. Crypto cash, so no one can track it. Tax-free profit. So?” Julio waited, his expression expectant.
“So what?”
“So you want to go in on it with me? There had to be at least a hundred bodies in the halls—plus you got your regular deadfall all over the city. I mean, we got a chance to really skew the numbers here.”
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you nothing comes free?”
“Shit.” Julio laughed. “It’s the Texans who do all the paying round here.”
CHAPTER 12
Maria heard the hyenas long before she saw them. Their giggles rose and echoed, chittering over the abandoned subdivision.
The Vet had claimed an entire neighborhood, turning it into his own gated community, stretching a double barrier of chain-link fencing topped by concertina wire around the stuccoed homes and Spanish tile roofs.
I’m going to die, she thought. And yet she kept walking as the chatter of the hyenas became a chorus.
The animal noises resolved themselves into animal shapes. Surreal loping monsters behind chain-link, running in the no-man’s-land between the two fences. They peered through at her, yipping, showing teeth, all matted hair and swaying heads, loping beside her, keeping pace as she wound her way up the lane.
When she’d been sitting with Sarah after her disastrous day, clutching the yuan and dollars that she’d earned, Maria had thought about running. The money was a joke. Too little for her own needs, let alone Sarah’s. A tiny pathetic pile of cash sitting on their sandy sheets.
“We can run,” Sarah had said finally.
But they couldn’t. Not really. If Sarah couldn’t work the Golden Mile, she was dead. And if Maria couldn’t sell water beside the Taiyang, she was dead, too. It was all borrowed time.
“I’ll talk to Damien,” Maria said. “See if we can get an extension.”
“I can’t go there.” Sarah didn’t meet Maria’s eyes as she said it, just picked at her ankle where her strappy high heels cut into her tan skin. “I—”
“It’s not on you. I’ll talk to him,” Maria said.
“I can’t—” Sarah broke off. “He opens their pens at night. I seen them. He opens up the pens and lets them run through the houses.” She shuddered. “I can’t go back there.”
“You told me,” Maria said.
Except she hadn’t. Not with words, anyway.
Instead, Sarah had returned from the Vet’s all-night party and huddled up against Maria, shivering in their tangled sheets, even though it was bakingly hot in the basement. The girl who’d gone to the party wearing the best clothes she owned—sleek black dress, pretty and sophisticated, something a fiver had bought for her, treating her like a princess. Her going to that party, hoping to meet guys who were tight with the Vet. Hoping to find her golden ticket. And then, that same girl stumbling back after dawn, curling up against Maria as if Maria could protect her from whatever she’d seen.
“They couldn’t run fast enough,” Sarah had kept blubbering.
Later Maria heard from other witnesses that the hyenas had been let loose inside the compound and that Doña Arroyo and her blond boyfriend, Franz, had died. The hyenas had run them down and fed on them, a lazy easy hunt, because hyenas were used to more difficult pursuit than just tearing apart a couple dumbass Zoners who thought they could hold back from the Vet.
But even without knowing the stories, the hyenas frightened Maria. Their yellow eyes seemed to hold ancient knowledge, as if their memories of want and drought and survival were so much more than Maria’s. As they paced her, they seemed to say that she would soon be dead, but they would last forever.
The snarling increased as more hyenas caught wind of her. They emerged from the hollowed-out houses that the Vet had given over to them, yipping and whistling, laughing and chuckling. Swarming. And then they were running past her, racing ahead to some new attraction.
Maria looked ahead to the main gates of the compound. Beyond the iron bars, a man with white hair was hurling bloody hunks of meat over into the hyenas’ part of the compound. The beasts clustered and jostled one another, giggling and surging, leaping for the chunks of ragged flesh as they sailed over the chain-link and razor wire.
Big monsters, more t
han a dozen. Some of them tall enough that they would have stood face-to-face with her. Dusty and wild and fast, lunging in for a morsel and then pulling back to crouch and feed, cruising back and forth behind the fence, alert and excited, entirely focused on the Vet as he lobbed more meat.
The animals arched and leaped.
Maria wanted to put the hyenas’ movement into some category that she understood. To say that they leaped like dogs or crouched like cats. Something to match against her own life experience, but they were their own strange thing.
Another gob of bloody meat spun over the coils of razor wire. A hyena stood upright for a moment. Jaws snapped. Jaws that would have fit around Maria’s head.
The Vet laughed at the animal’s clever capture, his arms red to his elbows. A group of the Vet’s men were smoking cigarettes, handing a pack between them, keeping an eye on the street as the hyenas called and begged for their master to feed them. Esteban was one of them. When he saw her, he smirked and called to Damien.
“Yo. That little water puta’s here.”
Behind them the Vet pulled something stiff out of the bucket. A human arm. The hyenas went after it, giggling and tearing.
Damien ambled over to the gate. “Thought you made the run across the border, with all your money.”
Despite herself, Maria scowled. “Ask Esteban about that. He took everything. He’s right there.”
“So…you want me to go get him? Maybe sit down and hold a peace rose? Talk it through like little kids in school?” The way Damien was smiling at her…he wasn’t even surprised that she was short on cash. He knew she was short.
He’d set it up with Esteban. He’d meant for her to end up short.
“You already got your money.”
Damien was grinning now, enjoying the whole charade. “You want to complain?” He jerked his head toward where the Vet was flinging more gobs of meat over the fence to his pets. “There’s your complaints department.”
Maria glared at him. It was rigged against her. It was all rigged against her. She wasn’t supposed to make money. She wasn’t supposed to get out. She and Sarah were supposed to keep sweating and screwing and dying until there wasn’t anything left of them. And then?