Free The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

border, made it. Whoever roasted, roasted.
    The garbage truck, street crews called it.
    Don’t get busted, homes. They put you in the garbage truck for sure
.
    Catherine Case had had expensive shoes then, too—strappy delicate heels that clicked on the prison’s cracked concrete, sharply punctuating the heavier tread of her guardie escorts’ boots. Angel remembered the high heels for how they’d announced a change in the routine of the cages and made him peer out through the bars. He remembered staring at the strange doll-like woman, thinking that if he could just get his hands around her neck, all her gold and diamonds would make him one seriously rich
cabrón
. He remembered how she’d gazed back at him, her blue eyes intense and fascinated, as if he were an animal in a zoo and she were making a study of him. He remembered the purity of her concentration, how she’d seemed to be hunting for something, and how he’d wanted to lash out at her and teach her a lesson.
    And then she’d surprised him completely. She’d reached through the bars all on her own, to caress the dampness on his brow. Just stuck her hand in, despite the warning hiss from her bodyguards.
    “Do you want to stay?” she’d asked, and her blue eyes had been steady and unafraid.
    And Angel had nodded, sensing opportunity.
    The bodyguards had pulled him out of the cell and put him in a room without windows. Made him wait, sweltering, for her to come. “I hear you’ve taken bullets,” she said when she finally sat across from him.
    Angel looked at her with contempt and lifted his shirt, all machismo, showing puckered scars. “I took a few.”
    “That’s good. The work I’ve got for you might involve a few.”
    “Why’d I want to get shot for you?”
    “Because I pay better.” She smiled slightly. “And I’ll give you decent ballistic armor. With a little luck, you might even live.”
    “I ain’t afraid of dying.”
    It made Angel smile now, thinking back. He hadn’t been afraid. Not of dying in a Vegas garbage truck, and not of Catherine Case. He’d faced his own death for so long by that time that it had become a best friend. This doll lady wasn’t nothing. Angel had La Santa Muerte tattooed on his back. He’d put his life in the Skinny Lady’s hands. Death was his best girl now.
    “Why me?” he’d asked.
    “You fit a profile I can use. You’re aggressive, but you have sufficient impulse control. You’re intelligent. You’re flexible to changing circumstances. You’re tenacious.” She’d looked up at him. “It doesn’t hurt that you’re a ghost as well. We don’t have any documentation on you. We have a few fingerprints from a juvie facility in El Paso, but that place…” She’d shrugged. “Maybe there’s something down in Mexico, but here you’re a ghost. I have uses for ghosts.”
    “What you need a ghost to do?”
    She’d smiled at that, too. “How are you at cutting throats?”
    There had been other recruits as well, but over time most of them evaporated. Some almost immediately, washing out of guardie training camps and police exercises. Some of them had wandered off on their own. Some failed Case’s increasingly complex requirements.
    When she’d first hired him, Angel had thought she’d wanted a shooter. But she had him learning how to do everything from read a legal contract to plant heavy explosives. Plenty of people washed out. Angel thrived.
    And in return the Queen of the Colorado knighted him. She gave him residence permits in Cypress 1. Bequeathed upon him driver’s licenses and bank accounts, badges and uniforms. Camel Corps first, but later others, and not all of them hers to give. Colorado State Patrol. Arizona Criminal Investigations Division. Utah National Guard. Bureau of Reclamation. Phoenix PD. Bureau of Land Management. FBI. Identities and vehicles and uniforms and badges came and went, depending on where the Queen needed a knife. Angel took on roles as easily as a chameleon,