An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1)

by Charlaine Harris

  “It was the grigori,” Chrissie told me the next day. I’d slept almost around the clock. She’d peeked in at me a couple of times, she told me, because she’d wanted to make sure I hadn’t died and gone to heaven from the magnitude of the gift.

  “He was here?” That was hard to picture, Eli back here, without Paulina.

  She nodded, her pale hair swinging with her head. I could see she was pregnant again. “He come back after about, I dunno, two weeks after you left? We thought that meant you were dead. But then he went to talk to everyone in town, including Jackson, about the electricity, and after that things started happening like you wouldn’t believe. We’re all hooked up out here, and it’s wonderful. Thank you!”

  “Not my doing,” I said, and she knew that was true, so she nodded.

  “And then the men from Seewall’s in Corbin brought the refrigerator and the bed and the chair.” She glanced down at her cabin, where her oldest, Dellford, and his brother, Rayford, were playing a game with rocks and sticks.

  “All at once.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Yeah, all at once, so it was good you left your key with me, because I could let them in, and they had it all done in lickety-split. What you gonna keep in the refrigerator?”

  I had no idea. I shook my head. I was sitting outside my cabin on the little bench, working the stiff leather of the new gun belt, making it pliable, and wondering how my Colts were going to look holstered in it.

  I glanced up when I sensed movement. There was a gunnie coming up the hill. “Get out of here, Chrissie,” I said, and she looked where I was looking. She was gone in a flash.

  Of course I had a gun with me, and I was on my feet with it before he’d gone another yard.

  “I’m a friend,” he called, real easy, and proved it by drawing and shooting. He was faster than anyone I’d ever seen. He would have gotten me if Chrissie’s Dellford hadn’t chosen that moment to throw a rock at him. Either by chance or by God, the rock hit his right arm, his shooting arm, and the bullet missed me by a hair. My bullet did not miss him. But it didn’t kill him, either. He proved he was as versatile as I was by drawing with his left and shooting me that way. If I’d been where I’d been standing a second before, he’d have gotten me, but I’d dived for the ground, and the bullet went over my head, while mine plowed into his leg.

  And he was down. Hit twice. Not dead.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” I asked when I’d gotten up.

  He just smiled. “Paid to do so,” he said. “Plus, I didn’t think no girl could shoot the way you do. Pride goeth before a fall.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Father of a man who gave you a refrigerator.”

  “Son of a bitch. That prince.”

  He nodded. “God have mercy on my soul,” he said, and he died, bled out.

  By the time the prince showed up at the Antelope a month later, I’d prepared for him. I figured someone who could hold a grudge and spend money on it like he had was not going to let the matter lie.

  I’d had a consultation with Jackson and with the staff of the Antelope and with my mother. We’d all reached an agreement. So I knew the minute Prince Vladimir arrived in Segundo Mexia, calling himself something like Alex Budurov, but that didn’t match the initials on his fancy luggage. Eli’s dad arrived with two servants, that’s the only thing I can call them. Both men, both cheerful killers. I knew that the minute I saw ’em, which was from a safe distance. I was standing in Trader Army’s, watching them lounge down the street. They were smiling, and they were contemptuous of everything they saw, and it was going to be a pleasure to kill them.

  Trader Army said, “How come you got to do this, again?”

  “He got me to promise I’d kill his dad if I ever saw him,” I said. Not for the first time.

  “And you have to stick to it.”

  “Normally, I’d just take it with a grain of salt. Did he mean it? Maybe not. He was pretty mad at the moment. But this asshole has tried to kill me six ways from Sunday, and I think I’ll make good on my promise.”

  “What you going to do about the hired help?”

  “Oh, I got a plan.”

  It wasn’t much of one, but it was a plan.

  I walked into the Antelope that evening when the prince was sitting down to dinner. His henchmen were at a separate table. There was one other guest in the hotel, a gnarled little woman with a withered arm. She was eating with her one good hand, eyeing the prince and his men as though they were scorpions.

  It had been hellish, tracking the Hortensio shaman down. I didn’t exactly have clear memories of directions I’d taken during my long march through the desert.

  The prince, it was clear, did not enjoy being in the same room with the withered-arm woman. She did not look like she had ever shared a space with royalty. She did not look like she’d ever worn a pair of shoes, for that matter. However, she was eating neatly, and she was intent on her food.

  When I came in, I was disguised. I was wearing a green dress I’d borrowed. My hair had been busy growing. I had curls all over my head. I wasn’t quite as brown as I’d been after crossing back into Texoma . . . or as peeling and red.

  I hadn’t put on the weight I’d lost, though. Maybe my fat had gotten burned off.

  So while I was sure Eli’s father had heard a description of me, that didn’t match the woman he saw in front of him. As grigoris do, he pretty much ignored me. His employees looked up, gave me hard eyes, dismissed me.

  If I had started shooting then, it all would have been over quick. But I could see the face of one of the cooks peering through the glass in the swinging door to the kitchen. They weren’t supposed to be there.

  I crossed the room to the kitchen door and went in. The cook, the server, and the dishwasher had overstayed their welcome.

  “Sorry,” whispered Don, the cook, as he threw off his apron. They ducked out the back door.

  I had to refocus myself.

  This was the man who had tried so hard to kill his own son, to kill me, too. He had killed Paulina and Klementina and sent many grigoris and gunnies against me, and I had killed them all.

  I wondered how Eli would feel about me killing his father. But even if he were on the spot and voted no, I would do it.

  Just in case I was killed before I could wipe Prince Vladimir out, I had Jacinta of the withered arm as backup. Turns out, what Jacinta wanted more than anything in the world was a mule. And she was willing to help me out to get it.

  I had one of the Colts in my purse. I had another in the kitchen already. There was another pistol, Tarken’s, in the dining room waiting for me. I’d determined the shooting order. Common sense said to kill the gunnies first and the prince last. But I’d thought about it over and over, and the prince needed to go out.

  Gun in hand, I pushed open the door to the dining room, to see someone else had entered while I prepared.

  It took me a second to recognize Eli’s brother Peter, whom I’d last seen lying dead on a hotel room floor; Peter, who’d come back to life so spectacularly to try to choke me to death. That had been an image of Peter, but this was the real thing. He had a gun, too. But it was pointed at his father.

  Peter opened his mouth to start talking. No! Never talk! Shoot!

  To get in there ahead of him, I threw the small rock that Eli had given me so many weeks ago in Mexico, the one he’d said would help me. I had transferred it from pocket to pocket, every day when I dressed.

  I hit Prince Vladimir square in the middle of the chest. His arms flew out, as if he’d been going to cast a spell, and he tried desperately to breathe, his face all twisted with the effort of sucking in air . . . which didn’t agree to enter his lungs. He slumped forward, his hands clawing at his throat. Peter turned to me with his mouth still open and his gun rising.

  The two gunnies
pushed up from their seats, both with their pistols in their hands, one turning to me, one turning to Peter. Deciding without thought, I shot the one aiming at Peter, and I paid the price for that. At the impact of the bullet, I staggered back a little, but I kept my aim and got the second gunnie in the head. A .45 will take out a lot of head.

  I was so angry. “You little asshole,” I said to Peter with great sincerity. Then I hit the floor.

  Eli was sitting by my bed. I’d known he was there. I was never unconscious, though I’d wished I was, until the doctor put me under. I’d never had an operation before, never been in a hospital, and I hated every minute of it. A different bed, strange smells, people coming in when they wanted to without asking permission, people touching me when they decided to. The anesthetic made me nauseated, which is just what you want after you have a bullet taken out of your side.

  Now, two days after, I was real sore and real cranky, and yet here was Eli.

  “This is too familiar,” he said.

  “It’s the job,” I said. “If you shoot at people, they shoot at you.”

  Eli’d gotten a new tattoo. I could see it on the back of his hand. It was still red. “What for?” I said, pointing at it.

  Eli glanced down. “Protection against bullets,” he said. “We’ll see if it works.”

  “That gets widespread, I’ll be out of business.”

  Eli smiled, but only a little. “You planned all this.”

  “I did. I knew he’d come.”

  “But Peter got in the way.”

  “He did.”

  “He’s sorry now.”

  “He ought to be. He’s okay?” The boy had been standing the last I’d seen of him, but I’d had my own fish to fry after a certain point, and I had not been in the condition to watch him.

  “Yeah, but I’m bawling him out at least once every day.”

  “Well . . . good. Idiot kid.”

  “He’s not that much younger than you.” Eli’s eyebrows made a point.

  “Idiot kid, like I said. Hey, thanks for the refrigerator.”

  “De nada. Well, it wasn’t nothing. It was a lot of arranging, what with the electricity and everything.” This time Eli really smiled at me. That was better.

  “The whole neighborhood thanks you. That was lots of money to spend. . . .” I let my voice trail off, because I didn’t know what to say next.

  “Glad to be alive to spend it,” Eli said. “Now my oldest brother will have the pleasure of asking me why I sold off one of the family heirlooms.”

  “Your dad didn’t know?”

  “I told him I needed to make a thank-offering for my life, and he agreed that was the pious thing to do. He never asked me who I was going to thank. I think, somehow, he had the wrong idea the money would go to the church. And though he didn’t know I understood who had tried to kill me, he did understand that the less we discussed it, the better.”

  “So you’re okay with . . .”

  “You killing my father?” Eli looked down at me, and I could not read his expression. “I am. I’d made you promise, after all. He tried to kill me, he would have let his gunnies shoot Peter, and he was a traitor, though he called me one.”

  “So what happened with the grand duke?”

  “He knelt before Alexei and pledged his oath in front of the court. In return for his life and the lives of his family.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “No. He’ll have a reckoning.”

  From Eli’s face, that would not be long in happening.

  “Do you want to know about Klementina?” I said. “Because you all had left.”

  “Tell me. I know she didn’t survive the train station. I put feelers out to the police to find out what bodies they had taken from the scene, and hers was among them. Yours . . . wasn’t.”

  I felt a little awkward, as though I’d committed a social mistake in not letting him know I was alive. But I hadn’t had any way to do that; I hadn’t had the money and I hadn’t been close to a telegraph office. “Klementina saved me,” I began, and told him the story of the train station and my journey. “So in the end I came home, to find out I had a refrigerator. Oh, has the baby come yet? Alexei’s?”

  “A boy. Healthy, so far.”

  “So that’s good, I guess. What about Felicia?”

  Eli smiled. “She’s a pistol like her sister. In a different way.”

  I tried to think how to put it, and then I just asked. “How’s she with the bloodletting?”

  “We found one other descendant, a boy who’s sixteen, and she has watched the transfusion process with him as the donor. We don’t want her to be frightened or furious. She is furious a lot.”

  I found something else to talk about, because it kind of hurt to talk about Felicia. “Your mom? How’s she?” Being a new widow, whose husband had tried to kill her son.

  “She’s coping with the situation. He was not always good to her, and she loves us.”

  I’d run out of things to ask, though I had more questions. But maybe it was better not to ask them? I was out of my depth. I sighed and turned my head to look out the window. At least I had a window, though it opened onto a boring street, where the most exciting thing that happened was a mother walking by with her baby in her arms.

  “My father came to Segundo Mexia to kill you,” Eli said.

  “Sure.” That was plain and clear.

  “And you’d expected that.”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?” I could tell Eli was a little delicate about asking that.

  “Killers got to kill,” I said, shrugging. “I made him mad, though I’m not sure how he found out about that; about me, I mean.” I waited for Eli to tell me.

  “That would be Peter,” Eli said, looking away. “That would be my fault. I thought Peter was ready to hear the truth, but he wasn’t. He went off like a stick of dynamite. He’s more volatile than me.”

  I was assuming that meant Peter flew of the handle real quick. “So he had some kind of showdown with your dad?”

  “Yes, and in the conversation Peter mentioned you, and to my father that was enough. He felt you’d thwarted him and his ambition, and he decided to teach you a lesson. And that would have an effect on me and Peter, of course. Show us our places.”

  “He came all the way here to get vengeance.” That was some expensive grudge holding.

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “And I guess your brother followed him?”

  Eli nodded. “Yes, Peter saw the receipts for the tickets, understood what they meant, and set off to follow Father, leaving me a note.”

  Peter was clearly rash and a man of action, even at his young age. I kind of admired that.

  “So you followed.”

  “A trail of Savarovs, leading across the continent,” Eli said, trying to sound light.

  As soon as we finished this conversation, he would leave. “How are your brothers with this? The ones by another mom?”

  “I don’t know.” For the first time he looked guarded. “I think they are on my side, the tsar’s side, but I can’t be sure. Speaking of unknowable . . . who was that woman?”

  “Jacinta, with the withered arm? She’s a witch woman who kept some men from raping me. She’s really something, huh?”

  “She handled one of my father’s gunmen, who didn’t die right away,” he said. “She said something about you throwing a rock at my father?”

  “It was the one you gave me,” I said. “I kept a hold of it.” After a little silence I said, “Did you give Jacinta the mule I promised her?”

  “She has knowledge of things,” Eli said. “I asked her to come to San Diego with me.”

  “What has she said?”

  “She only wants the mule.”

  I laughed, and it hurt, but it was worth it. Eli l
aughed with me.

  “Mom tells me you got your dad’s body shipped out.”

  “Yes, I got it embalmed. We have to have some kind of service. And his servingmen, they were buried in the gunnies’ corner of the cemetery in Segundo Mexia.”

  Mom had told me that. I found I was getting tired, but I didn’t want Eli to go. I knew I’d never see him again. I didn’t know how I felt about him, but did it make any difference? He’d be gone, and that would be bad.

  Eli stood up. “I have to catch a train,” he said. “At least this time I won’t have Felicia with me. She nearly drove me crazy on the way to San Diego. Never been on a train, never had a real bath, never eaten any of the food. She loved all of it.”

  I felt a swell of pride, though I had small right to feel that way. “You know you have to keep an eye on her,” I said, by way of warning.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought later about what she said. That Paulina wasn’t dead? But had bitten Sergei?”

  “Yes.” Eli was still sad about Paulina, which didn’t surprise me. And it seemed to me that he felt guilty, though I couldn’t imagine what he thought he was guilty of. He said, “She died trying to save my life.”

  So that was it. “So you should live to deserve that,” I told him. I couldn’t think of how else to say it. Eli looked surprised, and then maybe thoughtful, so I let it be. “Here’s the point I want to get back to,” I said. “This is all what Felicia says.”

  Eli looked inquiring. The eyebrows again.

  “She’s the only word we’ve got for that.” Explanation finished.

  But not enough for Eli. “What do you mean?” He looked almost amused. “Do you think Felicia bit her uncle?”

  I shifted my shoulders a little. “Let’s try again. My point is, we don’t know what happened to him. Maybe what Felicia says is gospel. Maybe she panicked and shut him in with Paulina and locked the door from the outside. Maybe she . . . I don’t know. But only one person showed up at the train station, and that was my sister, Felicia.”