An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1)

by Charlaine Harris

  “Thank you,” I said, after a quick glance in the small mirror.

  “You look pretty,” Eli said, almost shyly, and then he left on his errand.

  I was out the door shortly after Eli, locking the door behind me and stopping at the front desk to tell the clerk that we didn’t want the room cleaned. I had too many guns for the taste of most innkeepers, and we might get thrown out.

  The clerk looked very confused. I had to remind myself that Eli kept making him forget us.

  It felt good to get out and walk free, and it felt good to stop worrying for a few minutes. I didn’t spot a single grigori, and I didn’t feel the presence of any. On the other hand, I did see my friend Chauncey Donegan.

  Last time I’d seen Chauncey, he’d told me he’d been guarding Mr. Harcourt and Mr. Penn.

  I thought it was real odd that the two Britannians were nowhere to be seen.

  I wasn’t with my charge, either. But I had the feeling I’d gotten when my mother took me to the river when I was little. I’d waded out into the shallows, on the stones worn smooth with the passage of the water and slick with slime, and the next step I’d slid into a deep hole that had been hidden from sight.

  Cee hadn’t seen me yet, or maybe he hadn’t recognized me in my skirt and sandals. I stepped into the open doorway of a jewelry shop that had just opened. I stared down at a turquoise necklace while the shop owner began to tell me how much handwork had gone into it, and how beautiful I’d be with it around my neck. I smiled and nodded, but I was thinking hard.

  Running across Cee here again, that was a real strange coincidence. Meeting him earlier on this trip, that could happen to any two people in the same profession. It was even especially likely in Mexico, where affluent gringos often traveled with someone who knew how to shoot.

  I was clean out of the ability to trust two coincidences in a row.

  I turned down the necklace with regret and drifted away from Cee. The best way to get someone to not notice you is to not look at him. And the best way to do that was to be sure he was behind me. As I poked along, stopping to purchase a cheap shopping bag and buying a batch of tortillas to put in it, I thought over our encounter in the bar. Had the men he’d identified as his employers ever acknowledged him? No. But he’d told me they didn’t hold him in high regard . . . maybe so I would not be surprised if they didn’t nod or speak to him. Was Cee more clever than I’d ever given him credit for being?

  That didn’t seem likely, yet the evidence was before me.

  When a hand clamped down on my shoulder, it was all I could do not to turn and stab. My hand was on my knife. But when I did glance over my shoulder, trying to look only as indignant as any other woman touched by a stranger, I saw Eli. Who still looked like someone else, but I knew it was him. “¡Hola!” I said, and gave him a kiss. I knew Eli was taller than his illusion, but I had to kiss the mouth of the illusion, right? It was so weird. “Mi corazón,” I said fondly, and wrapped my arms around what should have been his waist.

  “I completed my mission. And someone’s watching us?” Thank God Eli was smart.

  “Yes, mi hombre viril,” I murmured. “You remember the old friend I saw in the saloon where we had dinner?”

  Eli nodded, smiling down at me.

  “I spotted him just now, so he’s on our trail. I don’t know if those two Britannians were really his bosses, or if he just pointed them out to make his being in Mexico more believable.”

  “What had we better do?”

  “We had better get back to our room as soon and as quietly as we can. Then we can talk.”

  Eli, wearing his illusion, and I, wearing a skirt and a big hat, made it back and hightailed it up to our room. Where we took off our clothes as fast as we could and had sex, bang-the-wall sex. He looked like him, and I looked like me.

  “That was the best feeling I’ve ever had,” he said with a gasp, rolling over onto his back.

  “Yes,” I said. I was in complete agreement. We lay for maybe five minutes in contented silence before dragging ourselves back to the real world and our real problems.

  “What do you think will happen if no direct descendant of Rasputin can be found? Besides me, I mean. That is, do you think the blood Alexei needs has to be Rasputin’s blood?”

  “We certainly tried a lot of other peoples’,” he said. His voice was very dry. “And none of it made the tsar recover except for Rasputin’s. When we could see the monk was fading, we tried the blood of his oldest child, Daniel. It worked. And that gave us hope. But then Daniel died.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “A terrible accident,” Eli said without expression. “He was swimming by himself in the tsar’s pool when his foot got caught in a drain and he drowned.”

  I shook my head. “Accidents will happen.” Unless someone was there to prevent them.

  “There was an investigation, which came up with nothing.”

  “And who headed that investigation?”

  He hesitated. “Actually, my father.”

  “Wow. That’s an important responsibility. Did your family come over with the previous tsar’s?” Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children had been rescued in the nick of time by a team of White Russians and the English. Nicholas was first cousins with the English king. But Parliament had voted to keep Nicholas and his family from settling in England, so the royal family and all its retainers had started roaming in a little flotilla, until the offer came from the Hearst family to settle in California.

  “Yes, my father . . . owned an estate next to the royal family’s. In the country. He and Nicholas grew up together. My father is still alive.”

  “Your mom, too?”

  “My mother is my father’s second wife, and much younger than him. She became an attendant to the tsarina when they went into exile. She was on the same ship. Any other suitable ladies-in-waiting had been killed, or were too old or too young.”

  “Were you born then?”

  “Yes. I was very young. I had two older brothers by my father’s first marriage. Mother was carrying my little brother when we landed in America.”

  “And she’s had two more children since she got to these shores. Girls.”

  He nodded proudly. “Yes, plenty of family. Do you have any sisters or brothers? By the man your mother has married now?”

  I shook my head, my bristly hair brushing his shoulder. He rubbed my head like it was a good luck charm. “Not a one. Jackson has a brother, but no kids.”

  We sighed at the same time, because we had to get back to the real world, where none of our family history mattered because we didn’t need to get to know each other . . . because we were both (probably) going to die soon.

  I was surprised we’d lived this long, but it was waving a red flag at fate to say that out loud.

  “Okay, then,” I said, sitting up and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “Where’s the car?”

  “It’s parked behind the hotel, you can see it from the window,” he said. “It’s a black Proenza. It has only five thousand miles on it, at least that’s what the odometer says and the mechanic I hired to check it told me it was in reasonably good shape. I’m not sure what that means, but he said the brakes work and the tires are okay. I had to accept that.”

  I went to our window and looked down. There was a little parking courtyard behind the inn. There were four cars parked there, a shiny black Proenza among them.

  “You got a mechanic to check it out,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound amazed. I’d never thought of doing that. Of course, I’d never bought a car before, and all the people I knew who’d bought vehicles had been mechanics, more or less.

  “Sure,” Eli said, trying just as hard not to sound surprised.

  Galilee had once told me she knew an early boyfriend wasn’t going to work out because there was a difference between them as wide as
a river. There was more like an ocean between Eli and me. At least our parents both served their communities, my mother by teaching and his father by helping the tsar.

  I’d been staring at Eli, and he was beginning to look uneasy. I had to talk fast. “That was a good idea. So the Proenza runs, it’s downstairs waiting for us, and how much money do we have left?”

  Eli sat up, too, and bent over to get his trousers from the floor. I tried not to think too much about the long line of his back, to say nothing of his butt. He rummaged in his trouser pocket and pulled out a much smaller wad of money, which he handed over to me.

  I felt like his mom. I counted it, trying not to make a big show of doing that. But I had to know if the cash could fund our trip out of Mexico. I breathed out, long and slow. “This should cover us,” I said. “For the distance we got to go.” I tried not to think of the many things that could happen to eat up that money.

  “I haven’t paid you,” Eli said, holding his shirt in his hand. I could tell from the way he looked at it that he was thinking that if he talked about money while he was putting on his clothes, it would feel awfully like asking a prostitute how much he owed her.

  “At this point I’ll be glad to get out of Mexico alive,” I said. “If we manage to do that, I trust you for my pay.” More or less. But I had to say it.

  Eli looked a little embarrassed and a little gratified. He didn’t have simple emotions except when he was naked with me.

  “But I’m going to give you some expense money. You’ll need it in hand, in case I’m not near when you need to make a purchase,” Eli said, sounding very reasonable. He pulled the bills out and set them on the night table. “So what do we do now? Start out of town?” He felt he could dress now, so I did, too.

  “Maybe I should find out what Chauncey is up to. I don’t know if we can drive out of the area without someone noticing, now that I’ve seen him prowling. If he’s watching, maybe other people are, too. Cee knows for sure I’m with you. Maybe he doesn’t know Paulina is dead.” There were too many things I did not know. I was trying to steer a course that would take everything into account, and that was impossible. “The thing is, I wouldn’t have thought he was smart enough to have acted so innocent when I saw him, and now to seem so deep into the plot . . .” Imagining Chauncey caring about Russian politics almost made me laugh.

  “Maybe he’s just doing it for the money,” Eli said.

  “Exactly like me,” I said. “I got a deep interest in this whole thing now, but I took the job for the money. Also, I had to find out what you and Paulina were up to, naturally. And if I had a sister.”

  Eli’s accent got stronger as he said, “I hope now we can be honest with each other.”

  “I hope so, too,” I said, but I didn’t have any surety that would be so.

  I thought while I pulled on the new skirt and blouse. I didn’t mind the sandals so much, or the hat. But after a couple of days I was getting tired of skirts flapping around my legs. I opened the room door, and I heard a familiar voice floating up the stairs. I raised my hand and Eli stopped to listen, too.

  “You got a young gringo gal here, maybe twenty, with real short black hair and a lot of guns? My boss asked me to track her down to offer her a job, and I ain’t had any luck.”

  “No, sir,” said the desk clerk politely. “We have no one here like that.”

  “She might be with a tall woman and a man, older than her. Some of them tattooed Holy Russians?”

  “I haven’t seen people of that description,” the clerk said just as politely.

  “Lucky I blurred his memory,” Eli said into my ear.

  If we ever got naked together again, I was going to do something really special for Eli.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  We waited until Cee had left— and then a bit more—before we went down. The clerk pointedly nodded to us without looking directly at us, and Eli slid a coin across the counter to the young man, which appeared to startle and confuse him. I pulled my straw hat over my hair, tied the damn kerchief around my neck (which looked and felt much better), and prepared to step into the street.

  “He went to the right,” the clerk murmured almost as if he were talking to himself, and we went to the left without saying a word. When I glanced at Eli, who was a step behind me, I saw I was actually accompanied by Jim Comstock again. It gave me a little shock, and I glared at him.

  “Let me know when you’re going to do that,” I said, and then I steered us back to one of the open-air markets and got a very thin shawl to drape around me, the kind that’s not meant to keep you warm. It was just for pretty. Off went the hat, folded under my belt, and I covered my hair with the shawl and tossed the ends around my neck. It was red and green, and I was looking almost as colorful as the other young women on the street.

  Eli said, “It becomes you, Lizbeth.”

  I smiled up at him and took his arm. We didn’t look like an employer and his gunnie, for sure, especially now that he was Jim Comstock. We looked like an older man and his young companion, who was well paid and not abused . . . and, therefore, happy.

  We wandered and shopped for a little, to see if anyone was paying attention to us. I was always on the alert. It paid off. We saw a grigori, a very old woman, walking through the driveway that led to the back courtyard of our little hotel. She had a cane and her hair was white, but if you peered under the brim of her hat (which was very like mine), you could see the faded tattoos.

  “Shit,” said Eli. “It’s Klementina.”

  “She’s . . . ?”

  “She’s the head of my order,” he said. “And she’s the one who sent me on this mission.”

  “So she might be here to rescue you?” I sounded doubtful, and that was how I felt.

  “Klementina might be here to help me and Paulina,” he said, but sounded even more doubtful than I had. “But she’s not exactly a rescuer. She believes a good wizard should be able to rescue himself.”

  She would be awfully disappointed in the wizards we’d killed in the past week.

  “Klementina preferred Paulina to me, by a large margin.”

  I tried to figure out what he was really telling me. “You don’t want to approach her?”

  “I wonder why she went to the parking space behind the hotel,” he said, instead of giving a direct answer. And I figured that was an answer in and of itself.

  So we returned to the hotel, and the clerk was luckily turned away from us, putting notes in the key boxes. Maybe it wasn’t luck. Maybe he was making a conscious effort to not see us. Or maybe it was Eli’s spell. We ran up the stairs as quietly as we could, and were in our room and at the window.

  Klementina was looking at all the cars. From the way she bent over, I decided she was actually smelling them. Her hands were moving. She was trying to find out if a grigori had been in one of them.

  Because there was really nothing to say, I calculated angles. “Shall I shoot her?”

  Eli looked at me as if I had suggested shooting God. “She might be looking for me to . . .”

  “Help you? Right, so why aren’t you running out there yelling, ‘Klementina, I’m so glad to see you’?”

  “You are a sour person,” Eli said. Now he looked like Eli again, and himself was being pretty judgmental, though there was a little smile on his face.

  “Yeah, that’s my job,” I said. “I just want to stay alive, and we have only each other to depend on.”

  “I am sad,” Eli said, his face expressing that sorrow. I could tell he was expressing a new and deep truth, and it had made him a different person. “I see traitors everywhere, and I don’t know who is for me and who is against me.”

  I said, “I just assume everyone is against me.” Except for the few people I trusted, who all lived in Segundo Mexia. But three of those people had died less than a month ago. “And if you tell me what a terrible world I l
ive in, I’ll punch you. We do live in a dangerous world, all of us.”

  I raised the Winchester and experimented with the shot. “I can take her.”

  Still Eli hesitated. “What if it’s not really her?” he said. “Or what if she knows we’re here watching her, which is quite possible, and she is waiting for us to reveal how we are going to proceed?”

  “All that might be true,” I said. “Make up your mind.”

  “Hide,” he said. In the next instant he opened the window and leaned out, while I flattened myself on the floor. “Revered mother,” he called.

  “Ah, good to see you. You have saved me from having to wait for you to come, in this hot sun.” The voice definitely belonged to an older woman, but there was no tremor, no hesitation. This Klementina had all her wits, and maybe more than her fair share.

  “She’s on her way up,” Eli said. “It’s really Klementina.”

  “How do you know?” I sat up and dusted off my skirt. This hotel was not as well kept as the one in Mil Flores.

  “She used the word ‘hot,’” he said.

  “Code word?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one else could know it?”

  Eli shook his head. He seemed certain.

  “And you don’t think there’s a chance that the word ‘hot’ would be easy to use in Mexico, even if she didn’t know it was the code word?”

  And then there was a knock at the room door, and no more time to think about what danger we were in.

  Eli moved to open the door, and Klementina strode in. No other word for it. She glared at me, and I realized she was very sharp. Well, shit.

  “And you are?” the older woman said.

  Up close she looked much older, her face seamed and cracked like dry dirt in the desert. But Klementina’s eyes were a bright brown, and her hair was wiry and thick.