Drought (37 page)

Jim Broader coughed, and said, ‘Boss?'

‘What?' said Joseph Wrack. ‘I thought I specifically told you to cancel all of my appointments this morning.' He continued to stare out of the window. He had decided that he quite enjoyed watching buildings burn.

‘With me, you don't
have
an appointment,' said a woman's voice. ‘You can't very well cancel something that you don't have, now can you?'

Joseph Wrack turned around, a spoonful of muesli half lifted toward his mouth. There, in the doorway, stood Saskia Vane. She was still dressed in her black silk blouse and her tight-fitting black jeans, but her black hair was gleaming and she was wearing full make-up, including blusher on her cheeks and shiny scarlet lip gloss.

‘Well, well,' said Joseph Wrack. ‘This is a surprise, Ms Vane. So where the hell have
you
been? My people have been looking for you.'

‘Don't let me interrupt your breakfast,' she told him, walking up to him so that he could smell her perfume. ‘A boy needs his strength, doesn't he?'

Joseph Wrack put down his bowl on his desk. ‘Do you know something?' he said. ‘Suddenly I've lost my appetite. Just like I lost it yesterday, when I lost a two-point-three million dollar helicopter, and nine of my security guards.'

‘I'm glad to hear you have your priorities right,' said Saskia. She went over to the window and looked out at the smoke, which was even thicker now, and filled with whirling scraps of white ash. ‘Holy moly. The whole city's on fire, almost. It always confuses me, though. When people riot, why do they always destroy their own neighborhoods? You think it would be more sensible to burn down somebody else's neighborhood. Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face.'

‘I thought you'd run off with that Martin Makepeace,' said Joseph Wrack. He circled around the back of his desk, but Saskia circled after him.

‘I did. You're right. I did run off with him. But you know what they say about flogging a dead horse.'

‘So what does that mean? You and he aren't buddies any longer? I never understood why you were in the first place.'

‘We never were. But I've always had a thing for knights in shining armor.'

‘He's not a knight in shining armor. He's a fucking post-traumatic trigger-happy nut-brain.'

‘Maybe I wanted to get back at Halford Smiley.'

‘Oh,
I
see. Now I'm beginning to get it. This is all about you and Governor Smiley, isn't it? And I don't suppose it has anything to do with your late lamented husband David?'

Saskia gave Joseph Wrack the most hostile stare that anyone had ever given him in his life. He wouldn't have been surprised if sharp steel blades had come flying out of her eyes and pinned him to the wall. ‘I'm not saying anything to you, you creep. The only person I'm going to speak to is Halford.'

‘You're not even going to give me a
hint
where I can find Makepeace? He has to be out in the desert someplace. If you don't tell me now, we'll still find him, you know. We have heat-seeking sensors on all of our helicopters. We'll find him. Nobody does what he did to me and gets away with it. Nobody blows up a two-point-three million dollar helicopter and expects me to turn the other cheek.'

‘You forgot about the nine men.'

Joseph Wrack pointed one finger at her and said, harshly and hoarsely, ‘Don't you fuck with me, Ms Vane! Don't you ever try and fuck with me!'

‘I wouldn't dream of it,' said Saskia. ‘I don't like scrawny men with cigar breath who eat muesli for breakfast.'

Joseph clenched his teeth to rein himself in. Then he said, even more hoarsely, ‘Where is he, Ms Vane?'

‘I told you. The only person I'm going to speak to is Halford.'

‘He's hiding in some Godforsaken canyon, isn't he, someplace in the Big Morongo? That's where he is!'

‘I'm not telling you. I'm only telling Halford. Nobody else.'

Joseph Wrack stood with his lips pursed for a moment, looking down at his desk. Then he picked up his half-finished bowl of muesli and threw it across the room, so that it spattered all over the carpet. Saskia smiled the small, confident smile of a woman who knows that she's winning.

‘Halford's back in Sacramento right now,' said Joseph Wrack. ‘I'll have my assistant set up a video link.'

‘Oh, no. I need to talk to Halford face to face. In person.'

‘Read my lips, Ms Vane. He's in Sacramento. He has a statewide emergency on his hands, in case you hadn't noticed. And even if he has some kind of unresolved issue with you, he doesn't give a rat's ass about Martin Makepeace. Unlike myself, of course.'

‘This is about
much
more than Martin Makepeace, I can assure you, and if Halford doesn't get to know about it until it's too late, he's going to be very,
very
sore about it. Let me give you a clue. This is about water.'

Joseph Wrack opened his box of panatelas and took one out. ‘Go on,' he said, reaching for his lighter.

‘Are you hard of hearing or something? I just told you twice that the only person I'm going to speak to is Halford. I want him here, in person.'

‘How about I fly you up to Sacramento to see him?'

‘No good. Too much security, too much media attention, even if the media are being gagged. I need to talk to him here, in San Bernardino, in private.'

‘And if I
can
arrange for him to come here?'

‘Then I will tell you exactly where you can find Martin Makepeace. However much you bluster that you'll be able to track him down, Mr Wrack, I can assure you that you never will. Not without my help.'

Joseph Wrack sat down and lit his panatela; but almost as soon as he had puffed it into life, he crushed it out in his ashtray. He flicked the switch of his intercom and said, ‘Mandy? Get me Governor Smiley, will you? I don't care where he is, or what he's doing. Tell his PA that it's an emergency. Make sure she lets him know that Saskia Vane is here – Saskia Vane. No –
Saskia
, you moron!

He sat back, lacing his fingers together across his stomach. ‘Satisfied?' he asked.

‘We'll see. It depends if he agrees to come back down here to San Bernardino or not. But I'm quite confident that he will, once I've told him what the deal is. If this goes according to plan, all of us should get what we want.'

‘What plan, Ms Vane?'

Saskia gave him that smile again, that smile that meant she was two steps ahead of him.

‘So we're staying?' said Peta.

Martin was sitting on the trunk of his car with his feet on the back seat, his Colt Commado across his knees. He was keeping watch for any sign of ESS guards making their way down the valley, and staying alert for the sound of any helicopters coming their way. It was almost noon. The sky was cloudless again, and the temperature had reached 121 degrees.

He shrugged. ‘I don't really see that we have any choice. At least here we have a chance of survival. Better than the city, anyhow.'

‘Do you think that Saskia will have told ESS where we are?'

‘I have no idea. When you think about it, why should she? And even if she does, it doesn't seem very logical for them to send out any more choppers after us, does it? I don't think they're going to risk losing another one, just for me. Besides, they must be pretty much overstretched right now, with all of those riots.'

‘I guess so.'

She stood next to him in silence for a while, and then she said, ‘This drought can't go on for ever, can it? I mean, what's going to happen to us, if it does?'

‘Don't ask me. But I don't see how a whole continent can go for year after year without
any
rain at all. Maybe it's something to do with global warming. Who knows? But if it does go on, God knows how many people are going to die.'

As if to emphasize what he had said, there was a distant crumpling sound of thunder. The dry desert air was highly charged with static, and last night it had thundered for nearly an hour, without a single drop of rain.

Peta said, ‘I think you know what I'm going to ask you, Martin.'

He turned to look at her. ‘What you're going to ask me is, can I keep those djinns bottled up?'

‘You still have them?'

‘I think I'll have them for the rest of my life, darling. I could back to Dr Vaudrey, I guess, but I wouldn't hold out much hope. Maybe I need an exorcist, rather than a shrink.'

‘I miss you,' she said. ‘I miss you more than I can tell you, and sometimes I almost manage to persuade myself that those rows we had weren't all that terrible. But they were, Martin. You almost broke me.'

He reached out his hand to her and said, ‘Come here,' but she stayed where she was.

At that moment Nathan came running up to them, holding up both hands, and jingling something shiny in each of them.

‘Your keys! We found your car keys! And grandpa's, too!'

‘Found your car keys!' panted George, running up close behind him.

Martin swung off the trunk. ‘Thanks, Nathan. You're amazing.'

‘Our dinosaur got away and we chased our dinosaur into the bushes and there they were.'

‘Brilliant. Tell your dinosaur he deserves a medal.'

Nathan followed Martin around to the back of his car. ‘Why did Saskia go away?' he asked him.

Martin unlocked his Eldorado's trunk and lifted the lid. He looked down at Nathan with his sad brown squint and his curly black hair which badly needed cutting. He was wearing a faded orange T-shirt with a ragged hole next to the collar.

‘I don't know, Nathan. I wish I did.'

‘I really liked her,' said Nathan. ‘She said that when I grew older I could be whatever I wanted. And she said she was sad about my mom. And she gave me a hug.' Suddenly he was blinking back tears. ‘I miss my mom. And I miss Mikey. I miss them so much.'

Peta came over and put her arms around him. It was then that George started crying, too, and she had to put her arms around both of them.
God
, thought Martin
, these are people, these are two small people with emotions and ambitions and their whole lives in front of them, and Halford Smiley is quite prepared to let them die of thirst
.

He lifted the second Colt Commando out of the trunk, as well the last two thirty-round magazines. He was just about to close the lid when he realized that he couldn't see the second M-67 fragmentation grenade which Charlie had given him. He lifted the spare-wheel cover, but it hadn't rolled under there. Maybe Charlie had taken it with him when they had stopped the prison bus, and had dropped it. Most likely he had still been carrying it when he had blown himself up, either in his pocket or hooked to his belt, and it had blown up, too.

Whatever had happened to it, it was no longer in his trunk, which was a relief, in a way. Martin couldn't think how he could have used it, except to pull out the pin and keep on holding it tight, as Charlie had suggested, if life ever got too boring.

Susan came out of the crevice and called out, ‘Lunch! Come see what I've cooked! Chicken and pumpkin surprise!'

Halford was in a foul temper when he returned Joseph Wrack's call. Although it hadn't been reported on the news, the rioting in South Los Angeles had degenerated into an orgy of burning, looting and shooting. Halford had brought in the National Guard from three different armories – Long Beach, Van Nuys and San Bernardino – but even they had been forced to retreat. Now they were doing nothing more than holding the perimeter around those areas where the water supply had been cut off, trying to prevent the chaos from spreading.

The Chief of Staff of the West Los Angeles National Guard, Colonel Hank Spanner, had reported to the governor and the mayor that the rioters were ‘almost as well armed as we are, and certainly much readier to open fire'. In the 1992 riots, Korean storekeepers with rifles had positioned themselves on rooftops to protect their property. This time, the Korean storekeepers had joined the rioters – Hispanic, African American, Asian and white.

Governor Smiley had been asked by an NBC News reporter why he simply didn't order the water supply to be turned back on. Wouldn't that end the riots immediately, without any further damage or loss of life?

Halford had looked at him as if he were retarded. ‘The reason I'm not going to turn the water back on is because there isn't enough water to go around, and if you think that I'm prepared to give those people water just because they've threatened us with violence, then you're out of your cotton-picking mind. Most of them never pay for their water … why should we deprive hard-working families who do? Jesus. Now you'll be telling me you were in favor of Proposition Thirty-four.'

Saskia could hear Halford barking at Joseph Wrack over the phone. It reminded her of those coyotes yipping, back at Lost Girl Lake. Joseph Wrack said, ‘OK, your honor. I agree. But she won't talk to anybody else but you. She flat-out refuses.'

At last he came over to the couch and handed the phone to Saskia. His expression was grim. While Saskia and Halford talked, he went back to his desk and lit another panatela. He would have preferred a nostrilful of Colombian blow, but a panatela would have to do for now.

‘Hel-
lo
, Halford,' Saskia purred. ‘It's your favorite persuader.'

‘So – you came back! Don't tell me that you grew tired of Mr Makepeace that quickly? I thought he was just your type. Muscular, stupid and pliable. That's how you like them, isn't it, my darling?'

‘He's muscular, yes. But he's not at all stupid, and he's not very pliable, either. He's just a bit too sentimental for me. Too hearts and flowers, would you believe? He's still carrying a torch for his ex.'

‘So what the fuck does that have to do with me? I'm a busy man, Saskia. I've got five major cities on fire, I've got the President threatening to send in troops under the Insurrection Act, I've got Mona whining that she hasn't seen me for a week, and I'm trying to keep everybody in a state that has absolutely no fucking water.'