A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose)

by Charlaine Harris

  “You are a priest?” Moses rumbled at Eli.

  Real thunder sounded, far away. The clouds were advancing from the east, and the sky was darkening.

  “I am a grigori, a wizard, in service to the tsar. The Russian ruler.”

  I’d never heard Eli sound so formal, so awed. He was a true Orthodox believer. He’d never talked about that; I hadn’t known.

  What Moses the Black would have said in reply I will never know. Reva had latched on to the important thing.

  “Moses,” Reva said. “We have to get you to town. That’s where you’re needed.” Her rusty voice was strong and sure. Hosea stood behind her, his hands on her bony shoulders.

  Moses the Black laughed. “Let us go,” he said.

  He couldn’t fly, it seemed. I was disappointed when he had to get in the car to be driven. I never thought I’d chauffeur a saint. I drove Moses in the car Eli and I had stolen. Reva and Hosea rode with Eli in his car. It seemed like a much shorter trip back to town.

  Sally was in chaos.

  Picking among clumps of brawling people, mostly men, we made it back to the courthouse. Fighting was especially intense there because of all the open space. There was a lot of gunfire, and lots of bodies. I’d never seen anything on this scale. This was a little war.

  We all got out and waited for whatever the saint decided to do.

  I figured Moses would weigh in with his sword, and I was looking forward to seeing that. He would step on the bodies piling up.

  What happened instead was completely different.

  Moses began singing. Didn’t make no nevermind whether his voice itself was beautiful, made no nevermind what he was singing. I felt my scalp tingle all over. Was this a church-type miracle? Was this magic like Eli had? No one besides me seemed to be asking any questions.

  Hosea and Reva went to stand by him, their arms spread at shoulder level, floating in the voice. Eli came to stand by me, and he put his arm around my shoulders.

  Rolling out from the sound of the saint’s voice, the fighting stopped. I could watch the progress of it, like a wave. All up and down the street, people came walking, staggering, bleeding, carrying all kinds of sharp things, and guns, and crowbars. And they came side by side, not trying to kill one another.

  Not even looking at one another.

  Not talking to one another.

  And they kept coming.

  This would have been the time I started shooting, if they’d been hostile. But they weren’t. They were empty: not angry, or terrified, or vengeful.

  But I was relieved and angry at the same time. I wasn’t under the same spell everyone else was. Neither was Eli.

  That was something I should have been thinking about.

  I should have been wondering what was going to happen next.

  But no matter what I’d guessed, I would have been wrong.

  Instead of telling the black people who had been stolen from Africa that they were free and equal to the white people, instead of advising the former slaves to rise up and take over the property of their former owners, Moses told the whole crowd, “You must love one another.”

  The skies opened and the rain fell. And they all laid down their weapons.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  This is just spooky,” I said. We were sitting on the hood of Eli’s Carrier, parked by the car I’d stolen. It was pouring rain, and we were as wet as we could be. But there was so much to watch.

  The people of Sally had begun to straighten up their town. They had shaken hands with one another, then cooperated with piling the bodies in the back of a two-ton truck and pushing abandoned cars off the streets.

  Then they’d faded away. We were almost alone at the recent battleground.

  “I wonder where Felix is,” Eli said. He hadn’t spoken in a long time.

  “Do you think Felix did this?” Though I’d had a wonder or two when Eli and I hadn’t become lovey like all the other people, I still hoped this was God doing stuff.

  “Moses the Black hasn’t moved in twenty minutes,” Eli said. That wasn’t an answer.

  “Yep.” I hadn’t had much else to look at. We were sitting in the rain watching a saint turn into a statue.

  I slid off the car hood and went over to Moses. I was watching him at every step. His eyes did not move to track me. His black skin was smooth and hard to the touch. The sword in his hand had turned into a scroll that read, Turn away from violence and love your fellow man. So he’d had the book after all, tucked under his robe.

  I thought about this piece of advice. I didn’t often begin the violence. And I loved some of my fellow men and women. That didn’t seem too bad a start.

  “What do you want to do now?” Eli asked from right behind me. He reached out a finger, as I’d done, and touched Moses’s shoulder.

  “You reckon everything is over?” I would have to check to make sure Maddie would be able to mend and go home. Charlie dead. Rogelio dead. Jake dead. Harriet, who knew? Travis, dead. Sarah, dead. The contents of the chest (standing before us and looking serious, maybe forever) recovered and delivered.

  “I don’t know.” Eli put his arm around me again. “I’m thinking about it.”

  Leaving this town, leaving Dixie, would be great. But I would also be leaving Eli. I sighed real heavy.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked me.

  At the edge of my vision, I caught a movement, and I was shoving Eli down as I heard the shot. I stood over him, my Colt in my hand, firing.

  Then nothing. Nothing moved. I crouched over Eli in the rain, which had turned to a light mist. I ran my free hand over him without glancing down. “You okay?” I said. I was keeping watch.

  But he didn’t answer.

  I glanced down to see blood soaking his shirt and vest.

  I needed help. Fast. “I got a man down!” I yelled, hoping someone could hear me. “I need a doctor!”

  “Do you need help?” a voice answered from maybe thirty feet away. Coming from the trees.

  “Yes,” I called back, but I felt this wasn’t someone who wanted to help at all. “Eli’s been hit,” I added, hoping the voice would answer, so I could get a better fix on it.

  Mr. Mercer from the hotel rounded a car maybe ten feet away, his arm already up with a gun in it. I fired before he could. And I fired more accurately.

  His bullet missed me by a foot.

  Mine did not miss him.

  I went to him to be sure. His eyes were open and filled with hate.

  “I guess you have magic blood too,” I said. “You can resist Moses’s message of love the same way Eli and I can. No wonder you hate us so much.”

  I turned and went back to Eli. I found I didn’t care if Mercer was dead or not, as long as he was down. It was hard and took longer than I wanted, but I managed to get Eli into the back seat of the stolen car—the owner wasn’t going to need it again—and drove to Ballard Memorial Hospital. I followed the signs to the emergency entrance. I honked the horn until the double doors opened. Two men in orderly white came out, but they weren’t moving fast enough to suit me.

  “Move faster than that, or die,” I said, showing them a Colt.

  “No call for that,” said the larger one. “We’ll hurry.”

  And they did, skillfully getting Eli out of the back of the car and onto a stretcher, with a little help from me.

  “You need to move this car while we take him in,” the smaller orderly said. “We’re gonna take care of him now.”

  I did move the car into a parking space. Ran into the hospital. Noticed it had quit raining. Got stopped by a nurse behind a desk, who had paperwork.

  There hadn’t been any new patients for an hour, since Moses had sung, the admissions nurse told me. “You’re lucky—the doctors have just finished operating and stitching and bandaging. We’ve been busy all afternoon.”

  “If I was lucky, Eli wouldn’t have been shot,” I said, and she began filling out forms real quickly.

  The two orderlies had
carried Eli into an examination cubicle—I could just see the end of the table from where I stood—and a doctor (name tag read GIMBALL) and a nurse (ALLEN) were already on either side of Eli, whose eyes were closed. The nurse began cutting off Eli’s shirt, while the doctor listened to his chest, asked Eli questions he didn’t answer, and began to examine the bullet hole.

  The canvas curtains were drawn around the booth beside Eli’s. From the sounds, a woman was having a baby.

  “Are you the wife?” Nurse Allen called. She was stocky and middle-aged. She looked tired. I signed the last piece of paper and ran over.

  “I am,” I said, and gasped like someone had stuck me with a needle. I landed back in my body from wherever I’d been.

  “You all right?” Nurse Allen’s heavy face was creased with concern.

  “Yes, ma’am. Just work on him! Please!”

  “We’ll take care of your husband. Please take a chair outside.”

  I didn’t want to leave Eli, but there was no room in the cubicle, even I could see that. I collapsed into a wooden chair against a wall opposite the canvas she pulled across. I could hear the doctor talking to the nurse, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  From my pocket I pulled the healing spell Eli had been trying to teach me. I began chanting the words just under my breath. The spell flowed out, all the words making sense to me. I kept it up, over and over, while I heard Dr. Gimball give orders to Nurse Allen. After twenty times, I had to stop for a minute.

  So this time, I heard what they said.

  “Bullet’s still in there. Where’s Dr. Fielder when you need him? Have you seen him, Nurse Allen?” Dr. Gimball was grouchy and tired.

  There was a heavy little pause.

  “I’m sorry to spread bad news, Dr. Gimball. Dr. Fielder went home to check on his wife, and someone had thrown a brick through their window. It hit Millie. She’s not conscious. Nurse Mayhew lives down the street, and she ran over when she heard him yell. He’s not going to leave her until he knows she’s going to recover.”

  “Poor fellow.” Dr. Gimball seemed more curious than grieved.

  “You taking the surgery?” Nurse Allen asked, after a respectful pause.

  “I have to. I guess I have one more left in me.”

  This did not inspire confidence. I doubled down on my chanting. I had my hands together, just in case. When Nurse Allen stepped from behind the curtain, she said with approval, “That’s the way to ask for help.”

  “You going to operate?”

  “Dr. Gimball has to get the bullet out. We’ll take him into the operating theater, prepare him for surgery, and then the anesthesiologist will make sure he stays asleep.” She explained all this as if she had done it twenty times today. I figured maybe she had.

  “How long do you think it will take?” I asked her, my voice sounding stiff and odd to my own ears. Inside, I said, If he doesn’t live, I’ll kill you all. If I told her that out loud, she might not be more skillful, but she would sure be more shaky.

  “At least an hour, maybe two,” Nurse Allen said. “There’s a lounge down the hall, opposite the operating theater.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I got to go do some things, but I’ll be back within an hour.” I looked directly in her pale eyes. “Don’t let him die.”

  Those eyes widened, and I saw that she understood me.

  “He’ll live,” she said, struggling to sound calm.

  I raised my eyebrows to let her know he’d better. And I left the hospital.

  When I got back to the courthouse, Mercer’s body was still there. He was for sure dead, now.

  I went over to the statue. “You could have told us your song wouldn’t work on us,” I said. “Did you know that would happen?”

  I didn’t really expect Moses the Black to explain this to me, and he didn’t. I wondered if he’d ever walk and talk again.

  I was leaving the stolen-from-a-dead-man car, with its rear seat stained with blood. Nellie Mercer was standing beside it. She looked like she’d been dragged through a bush backward. She was scratched and disheveled. But she wasn’t armed.

  I waited to see what she would say.

  “We were wrong.” She tilted her head and looked at me. “You were right.”

  “I am sorry about your father,” I said. I nodded to her, stepped around her, and left.

  This day had been one surprise after another. I had expected Moses the Black to bring a sword. He had, but he had changed it into words that would alter the way people thought. I hoped that would last, but I wasn’t putting money down one way or another.

  It was beyond my responsibility, and I was glad of that.

  I reloaded my guns, got my rifle out of the trunk and put it under the front seat where I could reach it. Then I drove back to the hospital.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Eli came out of surgery about thirty minutes after I’d returned to the waiting room. There had been a few other people slumped in the chairs that lined the wall, and they’d all looked exhausted … but not too tired to give me a long stare.

  I was past trying to pretend I was a Dixie woman, and our mission was over here.

  After a nurse came out smiling to talk to him, a man with two children left. I figured he’d been waiting to hear about the woman giving birth. Beaming, he took the kids’ hands and off they went.

  A white-haired man, slumped in the corner, had fallen asleep. No one but me was awake and waiting. It was black outside the window.

  Harriet Ritter walked into the waiting room. She’d had a chance to clean up sometime recently. She had fresh clothes, her hair was done, her shoes were polished. Once again, she was wearing confidence like a dog wears hair.

  “Why are you here?” I said.

  “What do you mean? I’ve been looking for you. I spotted the car outside, so I walked around the hospital until I found you.”

  “Why?” I asked again.

  “Has something happened to Eli?”

  I nodded. “They’re getting a bullet out.”

  The Iron Hand agent looked as unsettled as I’d ever seen her. “I’m sorry for my part in this,” Harriet said. “When we took the job of watching your crew, we didn’t know what you had. We did know how the Ballards were, though. And our job was only to watch, because Mrs. Ballard wanted to know who was going to receive the chest, so she could take care of them.”

  My brain wasn’t sparking after the long day, but a question drifted up. “You said you and Travis fired on the men attacking our car, after the wreck. Were you lying?”

  “No. We took care of two of them, at least. We didn’t know if the Ballards had sent them, or someone else. No one told us not to interfere. So we did.”

  “But … you went out to that awful house when Mrs. Ballard summoned you. What did you expect would happen?”

  “We expected we’d get a chance to explain to Mrs. Ballard. By then we had realized what a mistake Iron Hand had made taking a job from the Ballards.”

  I looked at her with some doubt. Harriet flushed.

  “We got our payback for being stupid,” she said.

  True enough.

  “Sorry about Travis,” I said. I waited to see how she would take that.

  Harriet looked like her face was made of iron. “I’m going to find that Sarah Byrne. I’m going to kill her slowly. After she cut Jake’s throat and grabbed the chest, she was spied by a man who worked for the Ballards. He told Holden, and Holden drove into town, picked her up, brought her and the chest out to the plantation. He paid her off big-time, asked her to stick around to help out. She was there when we arrived. She was waiting to get behind us with her gun.”

  “You don’t need to look for her.”

  After a moment of silence, Harriet shook her bright head. “So I won’t have the satisfaction of killing her myself. At least the bitch is dead.”

  We sat quietly, waiting together. “What will you do now?” she asked.

  “I got to find out how Eli i
s. After that, I may have to help him get home,” I said. “Then I’ll go back to Segundo Mexia.”

  “I may not have mentioned that I own a chunk of Iron Hand,” Harriet said.

  That was more startling news, but I was too tired to give it much energy. “No, I don’t believe you said anything about that.”

  Harriet smiled. “You need a job, you come see me. Our headquarters are in Britannia, in North Carolina.”

  That explained the accent. “I appreciate your offer.”

  “I’ll wait with you until the doctor comes,” Harriet said. And she did.

  We sat without speaking until Dr. Gimball came in. His white apron was bloody. Eli’s blood. “Mrs. Savarov,” he said. “Your husband is out of surgery.”

  “Okay,” I said, to show I was listening.

  “I got the bullet out. I stopped the bleeding.”

  I nodded.

  “The bullet didn’t hit anything vital. I sewed him up again. I think he’ll be all right.”

  Harriet patted my shoulder and left. I exhaled, felt everything inside me relax. “What now?” I said.

  “Lots of bed rest,” Gimball said. “No stairs, no walking for a few days. You can give him a sponge bath, but avoid the area of the incision. He’ll be taking antibiotics to avoid infection. I want to keep him in the hospital for two days, and then you can take him home. I’ll want to drop by to see him again, two days after that.”

  I wondered where I was supposed to take Eli. Where I could spend the night, for that matter. No matter what apology Nellie had given me, I didn’t want to go back to the Pleasant Stay; besides, it had stairs, which would be bad for Eli when he got out of the hospital. Of course, the Ballards’ house was empty now. That was an awful thought. I bit my lip to suppress a crazy giggle.

  “Do you know a place I can take Eli until he can travel?” I was not happy about asking, but I didn’t have the energy to scour Sally, which I wanted to leave at the first opportunity.

  Nurse Allen, who’d come out of the room where Eli was—at least, I figured so—said, “I don’t know about anything other than tonight, but I have an extra bedroom at my house, and that’s where I’m headed now.”