An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1)

by Charlaine Harris

  I shook my head, sparing my throat.

  “Anything else we should know about you?”

  That was harder to answer. “I’ve saved your ass so far,” I said. She had no reply for that. But my conscience was nipping at me. “Thanks for hitting that thing on the head last night,” I said. “I thought I was going to die.”

  “I think that was the idea,” she said.

  I had nothing to say to that. Whether it had been me or Eli or Paulina who was the primary target, that false Peter had been designed to lure us in and do some damage.

  I got out of the car and stretched, trying to relieve the tension. I was weak in the legs. “We need to eat and get on our way,” I said.

  We sat in a little circle, me with my back against a tree. I divided the food. Eating wasn’t going to be comfortable, but I needed food. I chewed real thoroughly, and I swallowed with care. I ate until the pain got too nagging. Finally I stopped, worn out from the effort. I took a long drink of water.

  “Let me look,” Eli said.

  I pulled off the bandanna and stuck it back in my pocket. Paulina looked uncomfortable when she looked at my neck, and Eli tried hard not to wince. And this was after he’d worked some healing. Eli got some goop out of Paulina’s bag and smeared it on my bruises. It stunk, of course. But after a few minutes, I was able to think about talking, which we needed to do. Dammit.

  “Who is Peter?” I whispered. It came out hoarse.

  “My younger brother.”

  “Whoever left that false thing in your room, it was someone who knows what he looks like.” I was glad we were out in the middle of nowhere, so they could hear me without me raising my voice.

  “I was going to find a telephone in Ciudad Azul so I could try to call Peter,” Eli said. “I’m really worried. He should be back at school in San Diego, after his stay with my parents.”

  “You didn’t know the dead man? When he went back to his real . . .” I hadn’t seen the man’s true face myself.

  “I’d never seen him. Paulina?”

  “Nor I.”

  “Now you’re just lying,” I said, meeting her cold eyes.

  Paulina waited too long to deny it.

  Eli said, “Who was it?” There was an edge to his voice I hadn’t heard before, at least when he spoke to his buddy Paulina.

  “It might have been Timofei Bazarov,” Paulina said. “The body went bad so fast I can’t be sure.”

  That explained the odor hovering around the car. The stink must have been terrible if Paulina’s odor-away spell hadn’t conquered it.

  “Could Timofei have been following us all this time?” Eli seemed both puzzled and outraged. “Who could have put such a powerful spell on him, and to what purpose?”

  Sometimes I just couldn’t understand these people. “Who would run to a body that looked like his brother?” That was a lot of words, and it hurt.

  Eli muttered, “Me.”

  “Who would have been choked?”

  “Me.” He shot to his feet to pace restlessly up and down in the scant shade, not looking at either of us. “And I would not have fought back as hard, because I believed it was my brother. So I must thank you, Gunnie.”

  I didn’t want to look at anyone, either. I closed my eyes. My neck hurt. I felt tired. I felt used up. I thought of my cabin with a longing I could almost taste. If I’d been a wizard like these two, I’d have sent myself home.

  All this was my own damn fault, because I’d been curious. And angry.

  “Are all hangings like that?” Paulina said. I opened my eyes a slit. Yep, she was talking to me.

  “You don’t have hangings in the Holy Russian Empire?” I let my eyes close again.

  “Only people guilty of treason are killed in public. The rest are put to death in privacy.”

  “In a lot of Mexican villages, the remote ones, the church is in charge of justice. It got that way when the depression hit, and it stayed that way. People get excited about executions. It’s a holiday, civil and religious. They don’t have a lot of ’em. It puts a scare in ’em. And they can be relieved it’s not their own neck in the noose.” There’s a lot of joy to be found in I’m not dead.

  “Why did you think they’d turn on us?” Eli sounded just a little hurt.

  “You’re grigoris. The Catholic Church in Mexico, specially the church in remote areas, again . . . it doesn’t approveof witchcraft or whatever you want to call it. Magic. Your Rasputin isn’t their kind of holy man. Not a Catholic monk.” I rested for a minute. “It would be real easy to get caught up and decide that if one hanging was a cleansing, two would be even more fun, especially if there were barbarian grigoris to be strung up.”

  “They wouldn’t have hung you?” Eli was thinking this over.

  “I’m short, I have black hair, I don’t look rich. No tattoos. Maybe I could have gotten away.” And taken the car with me. I wondered what I could have sold it for.

  “Why didn’t you do that?”

  “Oh, Eli. Jesus. Because I have standards.”

  I didn’t bother opening my eyes to see their faces. After a minute or two I said, “If you all don’t want to tell me who has it in for you, particularly for Eli, okay. But the more I know, the better job I can do.”

  “We didn’t hire you to think, but to shoot,” Paulina informed me.

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself. We need to go now. We got to get gas and find a place to sleep.”

  “Then whenever you are ready, Your Highness, we can go,” she said.

  I was on my feet in a flash and had a hold of her, disregarding the pain. I was so angry I couldn’t speak. Tall as she was, and healthy as she was, she could not break free of my grip. She didn’t want to lose her dignity by trying very hard, though.

  Eli said, “I beg your pardon, Lizbeth. For her insult.”

  I took a sharp breath, pulled myself together with every bit of self-control I could muster up, and let go of Paulina. I could not get rid of these two. I had told them that gunnies had standards, and it was time I showed I would stick to them.

  I got into the driver’s seat. I wanted them to sit in the back, where I couldn’t see them, for a while. I opened the map to make sure I knew what we were doing. For the first time in hours, soon it would be possible to make a wrong turn. Another road crossed the one we’d taken out of Ciudad Azul.

  “Poorly done, Paulina,” Eli whispered to his companion as they got into the car. She didn’t answer, of course.

  I figured he was throwing a bone to the dog (that would be me), but I decided I would take it. “We’ll get to El Soldado in maybe three, four hours,” I told them. “There’s nothing after that. Ciudad Juárez, the next morning before noon, if nothing else happens.” There was no response, yea or nay. I started the car. We had just enough gas to get to El Soldado if nothing happened—a big if, given the way this trip had gone so far.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  No one tried to kill us all afternoon, I didn’t say another word, and the gas held out until we stopped at a garage on the outskirts of El Soldado. We had to add some oil and water, but everything else was okay. The mechanic seemed to know what he was doing.

  El Soldado was situated in the middle of a long, shallow basin surrounded by high, rolling hills. The basin stretched into the distance, broken only by one broad, low hill, after which the road ran straight as an arrow out into the barren land.

  With a little more water, El Soldado would have been a pretty sort of place. It wasn’t bad the way it was, if you liked one-story whitewashed houses, dirt streets, and cactus in your yard instead of grass. There were chickens and goats and a pig or two in pens behind most houses, and there were children everywhere. I stopped beside a crowd of the kids and asked them where a hotel would be, in my slow Spanish. They laughed and told me to drive on through the town, that on the other side of the square wou
ld be the Hotel para Desconocidos. Señora Rivera ran it, they told me. The walls were yellow and white; we couldn’t miss it. Then they offered to go with us. I declined with a smile, handed out some coins, and began searching.

  The kids had been right. We couldn’t miss it. The hotel was distinguished by its paint job, which was not only white and yellow, but striped white and yellow. I liked it. I told the grigoris I’d see about rooms. I didn’t wait for an answer. I pulled the bandanna back over my bruised neck, and I left my guns in the car. I didn’t want anything to shake our chances of getting a place to spend the night. I needed to get away from the grigoris, especially Paulina. In fact, I handed her the car keys, hoping she’d decide to drive away while I was in the hotel.

  Señora Rivera was delighted to rent us three rooms, and was even more delighted to be paid in advance. She did not have a dining room, she said with a good imitation of deep regret, but there was a café one block away—or if we wanted to drive, there was a place to eat a few miles south. They were both excellent. She handed me the room keys with a great smile and flourish, and I went outside to collect Eli and Paulina. Who were still there. Dammit.

  Señora Rivera was not as delighted when she saw my companions were wizards, but she was polite enough (or cautious enough) to keep comments to herself.

  I hadn’t even asked if our rooms were together, which showed how rattled and ill I felt. My room was on the main hallway past the señora’s desk. Two rooms after mine, the hallway turned right to another block of twelve rooms, six on each side of the corridor. The second and third rooms on the northern side of the corridor were Paulina’s and Eli’s; at least they would be side by side. I returned to the desk to ask the señora if there were rooms closer together that we could choose, but she told me that we had rented the last three vacancies.

  I returned to Paulina and Eli, who were standing in the hall outside their rooms, looking impatient. I told them what the señora had told me. I said, “You sure you want to stay? I didn’t count on us being apart from each other.”

  “You’re that fond of us,” Paulina said, sneering.

  “You’re the reason I’m here.”

  “Yes, and you have standards,” she said.

  Even devout farm families, who’d tried to get me to see the error of my ways while they were paying me to shoot people for them, hadn’t been this irritating. I took a deep breath. “Paulina, if you don’t think I’m doing a good job, fire me,” I said. “Pay me what you owe me. I’ll be gone tomorrow.” I didn’t add how happy that would make me. I didn’t need to.

  She was genuinely taken aback.

  Eli opened his mouth, but I glared at him until he mashed his lips together. Good choice.

  “We are better with you than we are without you,” Paulina said after a goodly pause. “I hope you will stay.”

  I didn’t hear an apology in those words, and I started to make that clear. But I remembered Paulina had killed the not-Eli’s-brother creature who’d been trying to choke me to death. She’d saved my life.

  “No mocking me,” I warned her.

  “You have no sense of humor?”

  “Not where you’re concerned.” I gave myself a mental shake, got back down to the present moment. “If you want to stay here, I think you and Eli should share a room.” I looked from Eli to Paulina, making sure they knew I was serious.

  “All right,” Eli said. “We’ve done that often enough.”

  Paulina’s face turned a dull red. She nodded, just a jerk of her head.

  “Don’t give up the extra room,” I said. “Give me the key to it. I like being at the head of the stairs, but we might need the room . . . for something.”

  Eli shrugged and handed me his key. After a brief talk about dinner, we went our separate ways for an hour.

  We went to the cantina down the street. It had been an easy decision. No one wanted to get back in the car. We ate in silence. By the time we finished our supper—beans and rice, of course, and some chicken—the streets were mostly empty. This little town rolled up the sidewalks—well, there weren’t any—early.

  I wore my guns openly, and I wasn’t the only one. People were cautious in El Soldado, seemed like. Even if I’d been the only armed woman in the town, I would have carried my Colts. Someone had been dogging our trail and sniping at us. It was only a matter of time before that someone got lucky.

  After Paulina and Eli retired to the room that had been assigned to Paulina, I cleaned up, and then I settled down to listen. Two hours after darkfall the hotel was quiet. Then someone wearing spurs went past my room whistling a cowboy song. I was not waiting for anyone who would announce he was coming.

  The whistler had a room close to the grigoris’. His steps stopped after the opening and closing of a door.

  I kept seeing that boy’s body on the floor, the body that looked so much like a younger Eli. It had been a booby trap, a good one. I’d never thought I’d die any way but by the gun; choking had never been my picture of how I’d leave this world.

  When no one had stirred in half an hour, I took off my boots and stepped out of my room in my socks, Jackhammer in my hand and my gun belt on. I left my door unlocked.

  Señora Rivera did not believe in wasting money on electricity. There was only one dim bulb at the conjunction of the halls, just enough to let a guest see the numbers on the room doors . . . if he was sharp eyed.

  I stood still and listened, got used to the little sounds. In the lobby someone had turned on a radio, keeping the volume low out of consideration for the patrons. From a room across the hall, I heard the slapping sounds of sex.

  When I was sure I knew what was happening around me, I began to scoot along the inner wall. I looked around the corner. Nothing. I kept moving—real quiet, real slow. No sound from Paulina’s room. I unlocked Eli’s room, didn’t like the little click the key made. I slid inside real quick, pushed the door almost closed behind me. When I’d given the room a good once-over, I turned the knob very slowly and pushed the door shut, releasing the knob just as carefully.

  The curtains hadn’t been drawn in this room, and the moonlight flooded in. Jesus, did I have to tell these people every little thing? Eli should have pulled the curtains to. I half expected to hear a challenge from Paulina’s room next door, but there was no sound. They were sleeping. For a minute I hated them. More.

  Keeping out of the line of sight, I slunk over to the window and looked out from the right side. Nothing but moonlight, and a dog trotting down the dirt-packed alley with something in its jaws. I dropped to my knees, crawled under the window, repeated, looking left. I could see the end of the alley where it met the street in front of the hotel. In fact, I could see the dog pause at our car and sniff the tires before leaving his own message.

  Nothing was out of place. But the silence was getting to me. My skin was crawling. Magic prickled at me. Was it just the nearness of Eli and Paulina? I was sure something was wrong. What if the grigoris weren’t asleep? What if they were dead? When the idea crawled into my brain, I couldn’t make it go away.

  Maybe someone had killed Paulina and Eli while I waited in my room. After keeping them alive this long, maybe I had been outwitted.

  I could go back out into the corridor and knock at Paulina’s door. Or I could try the connecting door between the rooms, which I hadn’t expected, since my room had none. It should be locked, of course, since Eli had never been in this room. But I stole over to try it . . . and it opened. My skin crawled so hard I thought it would leave my body. I whispered, “Eli? Paulina?”

  The curtains were closed in here, but the moon streamed in from the other room. There were two beds, one against each side, and they were both empty.

  No suitcases. No clothes.

  The grigoris weren’t here. Their things were gone. But they hadn’t left town. The car was outside.

  “Huh,” I said, and sat o
n one of the beds to think.

  After a moment I checked the window. It was shut but not locked. They could have gone out the window and closed it behind them. The window in the other room had definitely been locked.

  I felt pretty dumb.

  If Eli and Paulina had been stolen, they’d have put up a fight, and it would have gotten noisy. Right? But why sneak away when I’d practically begged Paulina to fire me?

  I could not figure this out. I wasn’t sure what to do.

  Those are not my favorite feelings.

  I grabbed my Winchester and left the room. There was a lamp on in the lobby. From his resemblance to his mother, the night clerk was a son of Señora Rivera, and no more than fifteen. He was sound asleep, his head on the check-in desk. I opened the front door and stepped out onto the rock-paved entrance.

  Yes, the car was still there, and yes, it was definitely the right car.

  I was back in my room in a minute, and thinking as hard as I could.

  After a short while of coming up with nothing, I went back to the empty rooms. This time I searched. I had to be quiet, and I had to be careful, but I was no longer concerned with there being light in the window.

  The señora kept a very clean hotel. I know because I crawled on the floor while I looked behind and under the beds. Same with the little chests of drawers, the seat cushions, the throw rugs and bathroom fixtures . . . everywhere.

  And finally I found something in Paulina’s room: the keys to the car. They’d been jammed between the mattress and the box spring. Nothing would land there by accident. If Paulina had wanted to hide the keys from me, she’d have taken them and pitched them out the window. It would have taken me hours to find them in the debris of the alley.

  So she’d been hiding them from someone else. And that someone else had stolen Eli and Paulina, two powerful magicians who could kill with a few gestures.

  So that someone was pretty damn dangerous.

  I could figure only that one thing for sure. So why would have to wait.

  I went back to the lobby. I hated to wake the boy, but I did it anyway. In my faulty Spanish I asked him if he’d seen the two tall people leave, the ones with the tattoos. Yes, he had.