Angel reloaded his SIG Sauer. Chambered a round and sighted on Julio’s truck. “Pshew,” he whispered, imagining the pistol kicking in his hand.
Angel knew the safe-house layout from training walk-throughs, and it looked just the way it had been in VR, except now the sun blazed down on his back as he approached.
A realtor’s keylock was attached to the door. Angel tapped the keys, holding his breath, hoping that Julio hadn’t switched the safe-house codes…The door clicked open.
He jerked back as screams ripped through the gap. Ragged. Animal-like. He eased down the hallway to the kitchen, checking rooms as he went. The screaming stopped, replaced by ragged breathing. Angel peered around a corner. Lucy was tied to a chair, stripped to the waist. Her lips were broken and bloody, her breasts raked with slashes. Julio and some Phoenix cholobi with gang tats on his face stood over her, both holding knives while Lucy shuddered and whimpered.
Angel stepped through the door. “Thought you left for Vegas, Julio.”
Julio dropped the knife and whipped out a pistol. The cholobi ducked behind Lucy and put his knife to her throat. Angel felt death’s presence, black wings beating air. Angel and Julio both raised their pistols, but Angel fired first. The cholobi’s head exploded. He fell away from Lucy. Julio’s bullet hit Angel in the shoulder, blasting him back like a horse kick. Angel tried to raise his gun and return fire but nothing happened. The bullet had done something to his gun arm. He couldn’t lift his hand.
“Told you you should leave,” Julio said.
He pulled the trigger again. As his gun went off, Lucy threw herself forward. She toppled, still tied to her chair, into Julio. The bullet that had been destined for Angel’s eye hammered past his ear.
Lucy and Julio crashed to the floor in a tangle. Julio kicked free of journo and chair, cursing. Angel slapped the Sig into his left hand and braced it against the wall. Julio’s gun was coming up, but he was too slow.
Angel fired.
A bloody hole appeared in Julio’s chest. Angel kept pulling the trigger. More holes blossomed in Julio. Chest. Face. Belly. Bone and blood mist.
Julio dropped his gun and fell. He rolled, trying to reach his pistol again. Angel stumbled over and kicked it clear. Rosettes of blood stained Julio’s chest. The man’s jaw was shattered. His breathing bubbled with blood. Angel crouched beside his former friend.
“Who you working for?” Angel demanded. “Why’d you do this?”
He wrenched Julio around, staring into the man’s tooth-shattered grinning face. Julio was trying to say something, but his voice was a rasp. Angel hauled him close, pressing his ear to the man’s lips.
“Why?” Angel demanded, but Julio just gave a final cough, spraying blood and teeth, and died.
Angel knelt back, gripping his wounded shoulder, trying to make sense of Julio’s betrayal.
“Can…can you…help?”
Lucy was lying on the floor, still tied to a chair.
“What? Yeah. Sorry.”
Angel went searching for a knife. Found one on the counter. He sawed clumsily at her bonds with his left hand, cutting her free. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Her voice was hoarse. “I’ll live.”
She peeled herself away from the toppled chair, moving stiffly. Pulled herself into a ball, staring at Julio and the dead cholobi.
“You okay?”
She huddled there, hugging her knees. Breathing. Staring intensely at her torturers.
“Lucy?”
At last she took a deep shuddering breath, and her eyes seemed to find focus. “I’m fine.” She stood shakily and went to pick up her T-shirt. She examined the slashed rag and tossed it away. Went over to the dead cholobi and crouched down beside him. Started tugging off his wife-beater. Angel was careful to look away as she pulled the clothing on.
“Don’t bother,” she rasped. “They’re just tits.”
Angel shrugged but still didn’t look. He heard her suck in her breath as she pulled the shirt over her ravaged skin. “Okay, I’m decent,” she said. “Thanks for saving me.”
“Told you I could help,” he said.
“Yeah.” Lucy laughed shakily. “You do seem to have your uses.”
She dragged her chair upright and sat down on it, wincing. Her blood was already staining through the shirt. She stared down at the stains, pulling the shirt away from her skin. Her hands shook. “How’d you find me?”
“Put a tracker on your truck. Another on your purse.”
“I don’t have my purse.”
“Someone saw you get taken by Julio. Got lucky because he used one of his old safe houses. He should have changed up more, but he didn’t.”
“I thought you were all connected.”
Angel stared down at Julio’s dead body.
“I did too.”
It raised Angel’s hackles to admit how much he’d missed. He should have seen it coming. If not in the man, then in the details around him. He’d missed whole pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. It made him wonder what else he wasn’t seeing.
“What do you know about all this that you wouldn’t tell me before?” Angel asked.
“Why should I tell you now?”
“Other than that I just took a bullet for you?”
“You didn’t do that for me. You did that for Vegas. Little Miss Catherine Case.”
Angel scowled. “That how you’re going to play it?”
“Is that a threat?” she asked. “You think you’re going to take a run at me like your friends did?”
She was smiling tightly, and now he saw that she had a gun in her hand.
How—?
Julio’s gun. She’d collected it while he’d been distracted. She didn’t miss a thing.
“Bet I beat you to the draw,” she murmured, and her gray eyes were hard, cold chips.
Angel glared. “I ain’t like that. I just put a bullet in a friend for you,” he said. “I think I deserve to know why.”
She stared at him, her jaw clenched. Finally she nodded, looked down at Julio.
“He’s the one who killed Jamie and that other guy, Vosovich. He wanted to hijack the water rights Jamie was selling for his own profit. I think he ambushed Jamie and his own guy at a meet, so he could get his hands on them. The joke was on him, though. Jamie had already sold the rights to California.”
“He wasn’t selling them to us at all?”
“Jamie hated Vegas. He was just screwing with you. I told him he was in over his head.”
“So he sold them to Michael Ratan?”
“I think so. Your…friend…sure wanted to know if I could get into Ratan’s computer. From what he said, Ratan was trying to do almost exactly what Jamie had done. Sell the rights to the highest bidder. So Ratan contacted the most likely buyer: Vegas.” She smirked slightly. “Your friend was desperate to find out if I could open Ratan’s computer.”
“Can you?”
“I doubt it. Ibis has pretty good security.” She looked at Angel. “You’re bleeding.”
“I told you I took a bullet for you,” he said, exasperated.
She laughed at that. “My hero.” She got up and went to the kitchen. Came back with a bunch of towels. “Let me see.”
Angel shrugged her away. “I’m fine. Just tell me about the deal your friend Jamie was doing.”
“No. Let me see.” Her voice was commanding. Angel gave in. He eased out of his jacket. Lucy sucked air through her teeth. “Shirt, too.”
Wincing, Angel let her peel off his T-shirt.
Her eyes traveled over his chest, the scars and tattoos. “You were in a gang?”
“Long time ago.” He shrugged and winced again. “Before I started working for Case. Before I made it into Nevada.”
She turned her attention to his shoulder. “Your jacket took most of it. But your skin looks like someone ran it through a grater.”
“Julio liked choppers. Bullets that blew apart. Shitty on armor, though.”
“Be glad your jacket
’s ballistic.”
“Comes with the job.”
“You get in a lot of gunfights?”
“Not if I can help it.” Angel laughed. “Guns kill people.”
She frowned. “There’s a lot of shrapnel in here.” She went back to root through the kitchen cabinets and came back with a bottle of tequila and a knife. Angel made a face.
“What?” she challenged. “You want to go to a hospital? See if Phoenix PD gets curious about you?”
Angel submitted.
Lucy was efficient. She cut and poked and prodded. She poured tequila over the wound, and he gritted his teeth and bore it. She didn’t apologize for what she did or make a production of it. She just dug in, as if excavating a gunshot victim’s shoulder wasn’t much worse than wiping counters after dinner.
She was good. He watched her pry into the shredded meat of his shoulder, her eyebrows knitted in concentration, pale gray eyes intent on the task.
“You got a lot of experience with bullets?” he asked.
“Some. We used to spend time shooting coyotes at this bar. Then we’d go down and skin them.”
“Coyotes?”
“The furry kind.”
“You dug the bullets out of the animals you shot?”
“No. That was for a friend. Photographer I know got himself shot up a couple times. Caught in the middle of a murder scene when the shooters came back for a second round.”
“The photographer you were with at the morgue.”
“Good memory. Yeah. Timo.” The knife sank deep. Angel hissed. Lucy glanced up. “Sorry.”
“I didn’t complain.”
She smirked a little at that. “Tough guy, huh?”
“Got to be tough. Water knife basic training.”
“I thought water knives didn’t exist.”
“That’s right.” Angel gritted his teeth against the pain. “We’re a mirage.”
“A figment of Phoenix’s imagination,” she murmured.
Angel couldn’t help liking her. Something about her efficiency, no bullshit. Most people would have been losing their shit right now, after going through what she’d gone through, but she’d just gotten up from being tortured and gotten back in the game.
She studied his wound, evaluating. Angel thought maybe he loved her eyes. He kept wanting her to look up at him. Wanting to hunt for the recognition that he thought he’d find there.
“You ever get a feeling that you know someone, first time you meet them?” Angel asked.
Lucy glanced up, sardonic.
“No.”
But even as she said it, he knew she was lying. Her gaze lingered too long, and when she started cutting into his shoulder again, her cheeks were flushed.
Angel smiled to himself, content. They were the same, and they both knew it. He’d seen the same eyes in other people. Some cops. Some hookers. Doctors and EMTs. Narcos. Soldiers. Even the sicario who had scared him to death when he’d just been a little kid. It was the same look every time. A tribe of people who had seen too much and had given up on pretending that the world was anything other than a wreck. And Lucy Monroe was right there with him. Lucy saw things. They were the same.
He wanted her. He wanted her like he’d never wanted another woman.
Is that why I shot the cholobi first?
A troubling thought.
In the moment he hadn’t paused to consider his targets, but he clearly should have dropped Julio and his gun first, then gone after the knife guy who was holding Lucy hostage. Instead, he’d mixed up the order of his kills.
Lucy had gotten to him, without him even knowing it, and it had almost gotten him a bullet between the eyes.
“You’ve got a lot of scars,” Lucy said.
“Can’t help but pick up a few.” He changed the subject. “You said your friend was in over his head.”
“Yeah.” Lucy finished patching up his shoulder and rocked back on her heels. She was kneeling inches from Julio’s corpse, but she didn’t seem to care. “Jamie came up with this scheme to get rich and get into California,” she said. “I was just going to write it up, after. Exclusive. Pulitzer stuff. Inside story of how a pile of unexploited water rights changed the game for half of the American West.” She sighed. “And then he got greedy and decided he wanted to try to fuck Vegas, too.”
“What is it about these rights? What makes them such a big deal?”
“You ever hear of the Pima tribe?”
“Indians?”
“Native Americans,” she said dryly. “Yeah, the Pima. They’re descended from the Hohokam, who used to farm this area, back in the twelve hundreds.”
Lucy scooped up the knife and bloody towels and went back into the kitchen, talking over her shoulder. “Years ago they made a deal with Phoenix to shift all their tribal water rights over to the city. The Pima had water rights to Central Arizona Project water because of old reparations; Phoenix needed that water when the rivers around here started drying up, so it was a win-win. Phoenix got the water it wanted to keep growing, and the Pima got a massive cash settlement that they used to buy land up north.”
Angel smirked. “Where it actually rains.”
Lucy used the water urn to wash her hands and the knife. Came back wiping her hands on her jeans. “Sure. The Colorado River didn’t look like a good bet, long term. Having paper rights to a dying river is useless.”
“So the Pima sold their water and bailed. And?”
Lucy sat down on the chair beside him. “The tribe thought they just owned a piece of the Central Arizona Project’s supply, okay? A cut of Arizona’s cut of the Colorado River. Pretty junior rights, when you look at the overall river. Lots of people have older, more senior rights, so you’re always in danger of getting cut off by someone else. That’s why they bailed.
“But Jamie was always in old archives. Not just water filings—other archives, too. Bureau of Land Management. Bureau of Reclamation. Army Corps of Engineers. Bureau of Indian Affairs…There are so many overlapping jurisdictions and conflicting judicial rulings, and conflicting agreements about water, that it’s like digging through bureaucratic spaghetti. You have to file Freedom of Information Act requests up the ass to get anything at all, and lots of times those FOIAs get lost or forgotten, or they’re so redacted that they’re useless. It takes forever to drag information out of an agency, so if you don’t have the kind of personality that Jamie had, you don’t get far.”
“But your friend Jamie had that kind of personality,” Angel said.
She made a face. “Jamie was the kind of anal-retentive egotist who likes to prove he knows more than everyone else. Which doesn’t get you friends and doesn’t get you promoted—it gets you dumped out on old Indian reservations digging through paper files in storage lockers, with black widows and rattlesnakes and scorpions, while your bosses laugh it up and go to banquets inside the Taiyang.
“It also puts your hands on a lot of very old documentation. All these intersecting agreements that the Pima had with the feds and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, from generations ago. We’re talking from when the reservations first were getting set up. The Pima have rights that go way back. And Jamie was up to his neck in all these file boxes.”
“And one of those was water rights.”
“Not just any water. Water from the Colorado River.”
“What date?”
“Late eighteen hundreds.”
Angel whistled. “That’s old.”
“That’s senior. Some of the most senior rights on record.”
“How’d people miss it?”
“Jamie thinks—thought—the Bureau of Indian Affairs deliberately buried it. It was an inconvenient agreement that the bureau regretted. They didn’t give a damn about some tribe in the middle of nowhere. And for a while it probably wasn’t even relevant, because it wasn’t like Arizona could touch the Colorado back then.”
Despite himself, Angel found himself becoming intrigued. “But now there’s the Central Arizona Project. A
big old straw to carry water straight across the desert.”
Lucy was nodding. “Which means Phoenix and Arizona trump California. Cali’s got senior rights on four million acre-feet of water, but if that gets taken away from them—they’ve got the Imperial Valley and fifty million people depending on that water.”
“They need these rights to die quick and quiet.”
“And not just California. If Phoenix shows up in court, waving these senior Pima water rights, everything changes. For everyone. Phoenix could have the Bureau of Reclamation drain Lake Mead. Send all the water down to Lake Havasu for Phoenix’s personal use. They could make Los Angeles and San Diego stop pumping. Or they could sell the water off to the highest bidder. They could build a coalition against California, keep all the water in the Upper Basin States.”
“And then California would blow up the CAP, just like they took out that dam up in Colorado.”
“Yeah, except the feds have drones all over the CAP now. They’d see it this time. Even California would think twice about starting an actual civil war. Lobbying for the State Sovereignty Act so you can patrol state borders with National Guard troops is one thing. Even blowing up a dam for water that’s already yours is legal…in a way. But starting an open shooting war? America might be broken, but it still exists.”
“People used to say that about Mexico, too. Then one day people woke up in the Cartel States.”
“Just because the army’s stretched thin doesn’t mean Washington, D.C., is going to tolerate an open war over water.”
“Have you actually seen these rights? You read what they say?”
“Jamie wouldn’t show me anything. He was…paranoid. Secretive. He kept saying after the deal was done, he’d lay all the details out.” She sighed. “He was worried that I’d betray him, I think. He denied it, but by the end he barely trusted anyone.”
“Seems reasonable, considering how people act when they get their hands on them. Your friend Jamie gets them and decides to make a score off them. Julio hears about it and does the same. Even Ratan, as soon as he gets hold of them, starts trying to do a side deal. As soon as people get a whiff of these rights, they try to make a score.”