The natural sounds of the land were interrupted only by the distant rise and fall of the bandit’s voice. From her Spanish, she’d come across the border from Mexico. I’d checked the pockets of the others. One had Mexican papers, the others were Texomans.
The next time I looked down, Eli’s eyes were open.
“You’ve had to do this often?” I said.
“Stop bandits? Only once or twice. You did very well.”
“It’s my living,” I said.
“How long?”
“How long have I been a gunnie? Since I got out of school. At first with whoever needed an extra hand, and then with Tarken and Martin and Galilee.”
“Your mother didn’t have other plans for you?”
“Did your folks have other plans for you?” I said.
He laughed, just a little, and then winced. “Not this,” he admitted. “But it was my talent, and the best service I could offer my tsar.”
A shriek rose in the air and was abruptly cut off. After a moment Paulina came into view. She was wiping off a knife on the kerchief I’d last seen on the wounded woman’s neck. Guess “wounded” wasn’t the correct term anymore.
“Random bandit,” she said. “If there was some kind of targeting, she didn’t know anything about it.”
The idea that they’d been waiting for us, just us, to come along . . . I’d wondered about that. This was a good place for an ambush, out in the middle of nothing, no witnesses. If I had been a thief, I’d have picked this spot. But you might wait for days for a good enough target to pass through. On the other hand, if you knew someone was very likely to use this road because it was the obvious route to Juárez . . .
We might not be the only people who’d talked to Becky Blue Eyes about the death of Oleg Karkarov. That was a question I’d never thought to put to her.
I’d used up some of Eli’s unconscious time—while Paulina had been interrogating the former surviving bandit—by tying a rope to the tree and then to the hitch on the rear of the car. Very carefully I’d pulled the tree out of the way. Paulina seemed surprised to find the road cleared.
“You did that?” she said, looking down at me.
I nodded. Who the fuck else would have done it?
“You know how to drive?”
“Part of a smuggling crew,” I reminded her.
“Then you can drive now.”
“I can’t drive and shoot at the same time, Paulina. You hired me to shoot.”
She wanted to argue. She didn’t like that I made sense. Her mouth got all puckered.
“Gunnie’s right,” Eli said. He struggled to sit up, and Paulina was on the ground instantly, putting an arm behind him. I didn’t think they were lovers, but I knew it would be a mistake to touch Eli in front of Paulina.
I went over to the car, holding open the passenger door. He would not feel well enough to drive.
Paulina got him there and into the car, and then she took the driver’s seat. I got into the back. We had spent well over an hour by this road. We wouldn’t get to the larger town we’d hoped to reach by dusk.
If we didn’t want to camp again, and I didn’t, we’d have to spend the night at the next small settlement on the map. It was about two hours’ drive away, and it was named Mil Flores—Thousand Flowers. We got there about five. I spotted a hotel and a restaurant and a garage. That persuaded Paulina that Mil Flores was a good stopping place.
We might have driven longer, tried to make the larger town, if Eli hadn’t been so ragged. He was still a little wobbly. The instant Paulina noticed this, she was determined to stop. Eli was clearly the center of her universe. If you’d asked me, I’d have guessed Paulina would be a ruthless boss to any apprentice or minion, along the lines of “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
We went into the hotel, a weather-beaten two-story wooden building, to see about rooms. We were able to park right by the step up to the porch.
Comstock’s Hotel was nothing much inside. I expected Paulina and Eli to stick up their noses, but they didn’t. At least it seemed clean, if the wood was rough and splintery and the few carpets almost worn through. The man at the desk didn’t have a gun out on the counter, always a good sign. Also, he didn’t blink an eye at Paulina’s tattoos or Eli’s grigori vest, though you could tell he noticed those things.
Me, he ignored. I was getting used to it.
There were two rooms free. Paulina said she and I could share one, and Eli would have the other. That kind of surprised me. I would have thought she and Eli would bunk together. When she’d paid and gotten the keys, Paulina asked if the hotel dining room was open for supper and breakfast (it was).
She’d turned away when the host said to me, “Come down from the north?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Uneventful trip?” he asked.
So he was more than just curious. “We saw a coyote and a buzzard and a few hundred snakes,” I said. “Why?”
“Wondered if your friend here had been in a fight,” the host said. Eli was leaning against the wall, looking like he needed a bed. “By the way, I’m Jim Comstock.”
“Jim, my friend ate something bad,” I said, smiling. “Nothing to do for that but get out of the car and let his stomach settle.”
Paulina and Eli had their own bags. I picked up my gun bag and my personal bag and went up the stairs, which were wooden and noisy. You couldn’t sneak out of here, for sure. On the other hand, we wouldn’t be taken by surprise.
We came to Eli’s room first. When he unlocked his door, I saw a double bed with a washstand. The next door was ours, and the door after that was labeled BATHROOM. I glanced inside to see it was clean and held a big white bathtub and toilet. Eli went directly to the bed, pulled off his boots, and was prone in less time than it takes to tell, leaving me to pull his door shut. Paulina and I went into our room. It held two narrow beds but was otherwise the same as Eli’s. I’d seen much worse.
Since Paulina avoided conversation by lying down with her eyes closed, just like Eli, I took clean clothes and my towel and soap to the bathroom. The window was open and a breeze was coming in, and that side of the hotel was in shade, so it wasn’t horribly hot. Though I needed more alone time, I couldn’t linger. Someone else might need the room. I quickly washed myself, and then I washed everything I’d had on. I pulled on some fresh Levi’s and a sleeveless blouse with a bigger one over it to camouflage the gun belt.
Clean and wearing clean clothes, I felt like a better person. Back in the room, I opened the window to hang my clothes out. In the dry heat, with the breeze, they wouldn’t be wet for long.
As soon as I lay down, Paulina got up. She’d decided I’d had such a good idea, she’d duplicate it. I took a nap while she was in the bathroom. I woke up ten or fifteen minutes later. My roommate was coming in wrapped in a towel, her clothes in hand. Not modest, then. She fished clean clothes out of her bag and began to dress.
When I spoke, she jumped a little.
“The hotel owner, Jim. Maybe those were his buddies, back on the road.”
She sat down on her bed and stared at me while she combed her long, pale hair. “Why do you think that may be so?”
“He didn’t expect to see anyone driving in from that side of town. Might be another reason for that. Might not.” I was pretty confident this little hole in the road didn’t get more than a handful of visitors, just enough to keep the hotel, and the whorehouse next door, open.
So it could be that Jim Comstock knew there were bandits on the incoming road, and was pleased we’d dodged them so he could have our business. Or it could be he was surprised we’d made it into Mil Flores, because he’d expected we would be shot before we got there.
“We should have hidden the bodies better.” Paulina’s mouth turned down, sour.
I nodded. “We can hope three things. O
ne, Jim Comstock doesn’t know the dead guys from Adam. Two, if someone does find the bodies, maybe Jim won’t believe it was us because we don’t look that scary.” Though if anyone talked to Paulina for more than five minutes, that wouldn’t fly. Plus, the tats.
“The other thing?”
“Three, we can hope if Jim’s in on it, no one else is. If they all know . . .”
The grigori stared at me without seeing me. “The whole town,” she said slowly. Paulina was thinking hard, which was a good thing.
“Or even part of it,” I said.
If the town knew about the bandits—if they were Uncle Willy and Cousin Bart and Aunt Freda to half the people of Mil Flores—we were as good as dead if the bodies were found before we left.
“If we tried to leave now—after paying for the rooms—we might as well hang out a sign saying, ‘We Did It.’” I wasn’t really joking.
“I’ll tell Eli,” Paulina said. There was an interior door between our rooms. She knocked on it softly. After a moment Eli answered. He’d cleaned up a little. He looked as though he felt much better. Paulina beckoned him to come into our room. They sat on her bed, so she could keep her voice soft while she explained the situation to him. “This is what the gunnie thinks,” she said to begin with. Somewhat to my surprise, it didn’t sound like she was advising him to take it with a grain of salt. More like she was giving me credit.
“We should stay, and get as early a start as we can,” he said, though he didn’t sound sure.
“Tonight,” I said, “after we eat, we come up here, we take turns sleeping. Or I can sleep in the car, make sure no one lets the air out of the tires tonight. In case they come for us.”
Eli met my eyes. I had no idea what he was thinking. Paulina, however, was real straightforward. She said, “What if they kill you before you can yell, and then let the air out of the tires?”
“I guess I won’t care too much what happens after that,” I said, and she flushed, red flaring up her cheeks behind the blue tattoos.
Eli smiled before he could stop himself.
“We can make sure everyone in the town knows we’re here,” he said. “It’s not a great idea, but it’s better than doing nothing. If there are townsfolk who know nothing about the bandits, they might help us if we need it. At least they’ll be able to point our people in the right direction, should we go missing.”
“I can try to kill them all, take them unawares,” I said. “Myself, I think that’s a mistake, but you’re the bosses.”
Paulina looked at me in a weird way, as though I’d crawled out from under a rock.
“I said I thought that was a mistake,” I told her after an uneasy moment. This was the woman who had tortured a bandit to death that afternoon.
“Maybe it would only take killing the man downstairs,” Eli said. “That Jim Comstock.”
I spread my hands as though to ask, Do you want me to do that?
“Let’s go down to supper,” he said. “See how Jim smells.”
After a second I got that he wasn’t referring to food. I wondered what he could pick up from a person’s smell. Since I’d always thought my ability to catch the smell of magic was unique, I didn’t like the idea that all people with grigori blood could smell things about other people. Put me firmly in the grigori camp.
It would have looked very strange to carry Jackhammer when I went down to supper. I did wear my Colts, but the loose shirt worn over my sleeveless blouse was a polite camouflage.
Downstairs the ceiling fans moved the limp air around in a halfhearted way, and the smell of fried chicken came from the kitchen at the back. I had been hungry, but now I was all geared up inside, kind of twitchy, ready for action. Jim appeared, with an apron wrapped around him, and waved his hand to indicate we should sit anywhere we liked. There were only two other people in the room, a plain woman in her forties in a conservative dress, and a man who looked like he chewed nails for a living.
All the tables were picnic style, with long benches on either side. Hard to get out of quick; that wasn’t good. I sat facing the kitchen door, and the grigoris sat across from me. There were tablecloths covering the planks of the table; once, the blue-and-green stripes might have looked nice. Now the cloth, though clean, was marked with countless stains and holes. My mom would not have used them for rags.
At least the droopy cloth provided cover. I drew my right-hand pistol to have it at the ready. I laid it carefully on the bench right beside me. That way my hands were visible and empty.
When Jim pushed through the swinging kitchen door, I tensed, but he was carrying only a platter with fried chicken piled on it, and a bowl of mashed potatoes. In another trip he brought the gravy and the green beans. Third trip, biscuits. He served the three tables the same way, except the single people got smaller bowls.
I made myself eat. This was good food, and anytime good food was in front of you . . . you ate. The wizards cut up their chicken with knives and ate it with a fork. Picking it up was fine for me.
Jim came by to chatter every few minutes, inquiring about the food, how our rooms were. He stuck in questions about where we’d come from and where we were going. He directed all his palaver at Paulina and Eli. He’d definitely put me in the hired-help category.
Jim might have been naturally curious. Or he might have been calculating how many people would know or care if we disappeared.
When we finished eating, Paulina asked him if there was a store that had women’s blouses.
“Well, there’ll be shirts and such at Godley’s Store, across the street and one north,” he said. “Should be open for a little while.”
“We’ll go there,” she said. We all got up at once, as if we’d practiced. My gun was back in its holster by the time I stood.
As soon as we came out onto the wooden sidewalk, right by the Celebrity Tourer, we saw the sign reading GODLEY’S. We sauntered across the packed dirt of the road, looking around as if the quiet street deserved some studying. I checked the rooftops. I checked the windows.
We came to the barbershop, which had a big glass window. We beheld the biggest gathering we’d seen in Mil Flores: four men, all eyeing us hopefully.
“I think I’ll get a shave,” Eli said, as if an evening shave was simply a great idea. I didn’t like us splitting up, but before I could speak, Eli had pushed open the door. I could see him nodding to the men, who nodded back, smiling. They were pretty excited at the prospect of talking to a stranger, and a real exotic one at that.
Paulina and I went into Godley’s Store. Though it had a narrow front, it ran deep, a real cave of anything you could want. Everywhere I looked, there were goods for sale. Every inch of space, except what had to be left open for walking, was lined with shelves and racks and bins and barrels. I found that Godley’s sold dry goods ranging from clothes to pots and dish soap and clothespins.
Paulina was enthralled. I had to figure she’d never been in a country store before. While she slowly browsed through stacked shirts and ladies’ underwear and frying pans, I made common ground with the girl behind the counter, a Godley daughter named Manda. She was quite the flirt, and interested in flirting with me, which was a mild surprise. So I was pleasant in return. Why not? Paulina came to the counter with a couple of things and got out the money to pay.
While Paulina was counting her change, Manda stared at Paulina’s tattoos. If Paulina was having a new experience, so was Manda. She’d clearly never seen a grigori. I sure wished Paulina hadn’t been so proud of being a wizard that she’d gotten inked on her face, and it wasn’t the first or last time I’d think that.
“Ain’t you scared of being with her?” Manda whispered after Paulina had walked out the door. First. Before I could check.
“I’m getting used to it,” I said. “They pay me good money.” I bid farewell to Manda as though I’d enjoyed talking to her, and that was the truth, as
far as it went.
“Friendly girl,” Paulina said as we walked back to the hotel in a very leisurely way.
I nodded. “Seemed okay,” I said. “Paulina, do you have to get the tattoos? Is it part of the job?”
Paulina debated for a minute over whether to answer. “My guild rules tell me what tattoos I should get, and in which order,” she said, deciding to tell me the truth. “At least in part. They all have some magical significance. To put some on my face, that was my decision. I am committed to my craft.”
That was a pretty bold commitment. “Guilds. That would be like a union? How many are there, for wizards?” I might as well ask, since she was in what passed for a chatty mood with Paulina.
“Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Healing, Death,” she said. “But a death wizard can deliver a baby and heal small wounds, an earth wizard can provide wind to get you across an ocean. Or take that wind away. It’s not that you lack power in other areas, but you specialize in what is your strongest talent.”
That was the longest speech Paulina had ever made in my presence.
“So your guild is . . . ?”
“If you see this symbol”—and here Paulina tapped her face, against what looked like some jagged mountain peaks—“you know the person is a fire wizard.”
“I would have thought you were a death wizard.” She knew her way around a torture.
“No. It’s simply one of my talents.” Paulina smiled. It was as unpleasant a smile as I’ve ever seen. “If I were a death wizard, we wouldn’t need a gunnie.”
And that would have suited Paulina just fine.
I could smell Eli coming out of the barbershop from ten feet away. “Yow,” I said, unable to stop myself. The plain woman who was also a guest at the hotel, out for an evening stroll, turned her head and tried not to smile too broadly.
Paulina’s face tightened like someone had pulled a string on her head. “Smells like a whorehouse,” she said.
Eli looked embarrassed as we got closer, probably because we were making gagging noises. “Some friends you are!” he called in a hearty voice. I caught a glimpse of the barbershop men, laughing fit to burst as the plain woman stepped inside the shop, still smiling. There was really not much to do here.
An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1) Page 10