“She’s a tall drink of vinegar,” Andy said after he’d had a look at Paulina. I guessed he had to be a good judge of character in his profession.
“You ever seen the dead man before?” I asked. “Montes, his name is.”
Andy shook his head. “The woman who owns the wagon, she’s been in Mil Flores two days,” he said. “She didn’t bring anything in on it. No one knows what she’s planning on taking out. Had to bring it along with her for some reason. Why?”
This was good information. “I appreciate your taking the time to tell me,” I said politely. “Please let me give you something for your trouble.” I handed Andy a couple of the Holy Russian coins Eli had given me for expenses, and the boy slipped them into his pocket with a happy smile.
Paulina glanced over our way once and looked back at the body with no change of expression.
“She’ll be over tonight,” Andy said.
“No!” I said, truly surprised. “For you or for the ladies?”
“Me,” he said with the same certainty. “She’ll act like she’s in charge, but she’ll be glad when I let her know I am.”
Well, he’d be the expert. But before I went back to join my little corpse-stripping party, I said, “Andy, you watch out for her. She’s a killer, and she can do some gruesome shit.”
Andy looked at me and smiled. “Well,” he said, “you oughtta know. I’d be happy to see you later, if you want to come over.”
I was real popular in Mil Flores. Maybe I should move here, after this was over. I laughed and bid him good-bye.
Now that the two grigoris had backed off, I had a look at the dead man myself. I wanted to be sure what I’d noticed earlier was true. Montes did have tattoos, and one of them looked similar to the wizards’, but the ones on his chest had not been made by the same hand. They were colorful, and they consisted of animal figures. The blue one, the one that looked grigori-like, was a symbol, and Paulina had already identified that one.
“Eli, Paulina. Look here. Lobo Gris,” I said, tapping the snarling canine head in the middle of his chest. They turned from their quiet conversation to join me at the wagon. The Trotter woman was still observing with bright-eyed interest. I had to show them this. It was hard to ignore her.
Paulina gave me the look I was coming to know, the dog-is-talking look—wonder crossed with irritation. “What do you mean?” she asked.
These HRE grigoris didn’t know shit. “Lobo Gris, Gray Wolf. It’s a criminal crew in Mexico, where gray wolves live. Marcial Montes was a member.”
“Gray wolves are different from the wolves in Canada?” Eli looked down at me with nothing but interest, at least that I could tell.
“They’re smaller. But their size doesn’t make them less dangerous, ’cause they hunt in big packs. Which is the point of naming a crew after them.”
Eli should have been concentrating on what I was saying, because it was important, but I felt his eyes wandering to my scalp. Was he sidetracked by the puckered scar? It was healing well, but it wasn’t pretty.
Miss Trotter said, “I’ve heard of them.” A second later she was exchanging remarks with Paulina, who was trying to be subtle about persuading the woman to leave the yard. They looked good to talk at cross-purposes for a few minutes.
“Ask Trotter what she has the wagon for,” I said on the quiet.
“She must have brought cargo in on it,” Eli said, as if I was missing something real obvious.
“No, she didn’t,” I said. “One of the whores said it came in empty.” I didn’t look up to get his reaction. He’d believe me, or he wouldn’t.
I stepped away from him to spend a little more time looking at the body of Marcial Montes. I identified not only the crew tattoo, but a few more. “This is his nagual,” I told Eli, who was sticking with me instead of doing what I’d asked. I touched one outline.
“That is?”
I would have thought a grigori would know this. “His spirit animal, in the old language. In Spanish, zopilote. That means vulture.”
“The spirit animal gave him special talent? Protection?”
“He might have believed so.” He’d been mistaken. “I don’t know what . . . attributes . . . go with each animal. El chamán tells you. He figures out your spirit animal by using your birth date. It’s not cheap.” When you’re in my business, people talk about protection a lot.
“So what does this tell you about this Marcial Montes?” Eli asked, as if he really wanted to know the answer.
“He was hired help. Someone approached his crew and asked to hire someone for a murder, and the crew boss picked Montes for the job. See? He’s got the death symbol.” I touched the skull on his left shoulder. “So he was okay with killing. He’d done it before. And he’d made a decent amount of money doing it. The tats and his clothes and his rifle were expensive. He was good.” I glanced over at the rifle, another Winchester, newer than my grandfather’s. I was pleased to have it in my little arsenal.
“You’re better.”
“So far,” I said. “Maybe Montes hired the bandits from this afternoon, too. He himself would be the fallback, in case the bandits didn’t stop us.”
“Who do you think he was trying to kill?” Eli asked.
“You and Paulina,” I said, trying hard not to sound like I thought that was a stupid question. “The bullet came mighty close to you.”
“Because I would have sworn he was trying to kill you,” Eli said in a calm and conversational way, and I felt a shiver down my back. “I think you hit him enough to make his aim go wide.”
I had. I just hadn’t looked at it that way.
“Don’t know why he would be aiming for me, unless he thought that’d leave you unprotected,” I said, trying to cast off that creepy feeling. “What are you going to do about fixing the car? It’s getting on to dark.”
I needed to give him something else to chew on before I walked away. We’d ventured into dangerous territory. If Eli was right, someone knew everything about the grigoris’ mission, and everything about me. If that was so, I’d have to tell the grigoris everything, too. I sure didn’t want to have that conversation.
Eli took the hint and headed off to the only local mechanic’s shop, hoping to talk to the man before it turned dark. I left Paulina and Miss Trotter still talking, though Paulina was looking very impatient. I got the rifle and took it in with me.
Jim Comstock was sweeping the lobby. He stopped when he saw me.
“Good with a gun,” he said, by way of greeting.
“My job. You know why that Belinda Trotter is here?”
He wasn’t surprised I was asking. “She says she’s on her way to Juárez to pick up a load of medical supplies for her clinic.” That was a believable reason for her trip. Medicine was cheaper in Mexico. The only other major manufacturers of medicines were in Canada and Britannia, so it had to travel a far way, which jacked up the price. Of course, those medicines were purer.
“Where is it? The clinic?”
“In Texoma, north of here,” Jim said. He was smiling. Everything in Texoma was north of here.
“But she’s lingered,” I said.
“Says her mules were tired out, needed a rest.” Which Jim didn’t believe any more than I did. “You all going to stay the night, or are your friends spooked?”
“Depends on them,” I said. “I’m just the help. I guess they’ll tell me before I start to climb in bed.”
Jim nodded and went back to his sweeping. The lobby was clean. I figured he’d been waiting for me to come in to see if I had any questions.
I glanced out the door again, to see Eli and a dark man I figured for the mechanic standing beside the Celebrity Tourer. The dark man had looked under the car, I could tell by the dust on his jeans. Eli looked pleased at whatever the mechanic was telling him, so I figured the mechanic had the right part to fix t
he car, or it hadn’t been bad broken.
Dark fell soon after that. The grigoris and Miss Trotter came in and joined the single man, who was sitting in the parlor. There were some lamps on. The electricity was steadier in Mil Flores than I’d expected. Several things about Mil Flores were not square with the appearance of it. The well-stocked stores. The number of barbers and whores. The presence of a full-size hotel. I was thinking about that while I sat in a corner chair in the parlor.
I didn’t want to talk myself, but to listen. In my opinion, these four new friends were doing enough chitchatting for seven or eight people.
Miss Trotter talked about the hospital in Juárez where she bought her medical supplies, and about her clinic. Though she never pinpointed the location of this clinic.
Mr. Parsons, the single man, talked about the notions he had in his sample bag: needles, thread, thimbles, patterns, scissors, shears, powder compacts, perfume, fancy writing paper. He was trying hard to interest Paulina, but soon Paulina looked even more bored than I was. Mr. Parsons didn’t seem to be a very good salesman, if he was targeting Paulina as a woman who needed a thimble.
Belinda Trotter told us she’d already seen Mr. Parsons’s wares. For a minute I thought the woman was making a bawdy joke, though not a very funny one. But Belinda went on to tell us she’d bought a pattern and a pair of scissors. She turned to smile brightly at me, as if she expected me to get excited about her purchases. I gave her a flat stare. She looked away right smart.
But before long Miss Trotter was back in the conversation again, asking about our plans. She tried to find out when we were leaving Mil Flores. Neither Paulina nor Eli gave her a definite answer, and I had to admire the way they dodged the woman. The two grigoris were so smart in some ways, so scary.
But they were so dumb in others.
So far I’d done well by them, though I was on my own personal mission. It would take only one big mistake, like Manda blurting out my most notorious act, for the grigoris to find out more about me than I wanted them to know. I was walking a tightrope with my employers. I would never forget Eli making the blood leave the man’s body this morning. I’d never forget Paulina’s interrogation.
After one of the longest hours I’d ever spent in my life, Eli and Paulina decided we’d turn in. As I’d expected, they didn’t give me a hint of what they’d decided to do the next day, or what they wanted done with Marcial Montes’s body. Paulina didn’t tell me anything even when we were alone in our room, and I was irritated enough to not ask a single question.
Usually, when my head hits the pillow, I’m out, but this night I stayed awake a little while, thinking about Lobo Gris and the vulture nagual. I made myself relax and breathe evenly. That usually worked, the few nights I didn’t drift off quick.
My roommate must have believed I was deep asleep. She got up and left our room, quiet as a shadow. I heard the back door of the whorehouse open and a voice bid her welcome three minutes later. Sounded like Andy’s.
He was right, I thought. And somehow the fact that Andy had found it easy to read Paulina made it easy for me to sleep.
I didn’t hear Paulina slip back into our room, but she was there in the morning when I got up and washed. She didn’t move as I dressed and left the room. I hoped she needed her rest, that her night of pleasure had softened her a little. Or something. Made her happy for a few seconds.
I was surprised to find I was very hungry, and to my pleasure I could smell that breakfast was ready. Jim had just served Mr. Parsons and Miss Trotter, who were sitting together. They invited me to join them, but I said, “You’d be sorry. I’m not a morning person,” and set myself at a table on my own.
That was a flat-out lie; I was a morning person, for sure. But I’d listened to them talk enough the evening before to last me for a good long while. I ate some eggs and some bacon and some pancakes. I didn’t know Jim Comstock’s true purpose, or what he was doing in Mil Flores, but he was a truly great cook. Right up there with my mom.
Paulina and Eli came down together a few minutes later. Sure enough, Paulina looked very relaxed. They sat with me, and Jim hustled in with some plates for them, and some coffee. They were quiet. I got to enjoy that for too short a while.
“What will happen to the body?” Paulina asked out of the blue.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said.
She ignored that. “I begged an old sheet off our host and covered Montes last night.”
So Montes’s body was still lying in the backyard on Miss Trotter’s wagon. Interesting that Miss Trotter hadn’t insisted on his removal. “I doubt Mil Flores pays a gravedigger,” I said. “And no one does that for free. I reckon they’ll throw him out in the desert.”
The two grigoris stared at me. I wouldn’t say they were horrified. It would take a lot to horrify these two. But they were for sure taken aback.
“What?” I said. “The dead from the ambush are out there. You never asked about burying them.” I’d made a point, I thought, even though I’d had to do it in a whisper. “In fact, since the body on the wagon is there because of us, we should do the disposing of it, I figure.”
I could see both of them, especially Eli, struggle to come up with some kind of sensible reply that would end up in Montes’s being magically buried by someone else. But in the end neither could find anything to say.
“Hold on a minute,” I said, and swung my legs free from the bench. I went to the door at the back of the passage and opened it to look out. Andy was getting water from a pump behind the whorehouse, and we waved at each other. I returned to the dining room.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“What?” Paulina didn’t keep her voice down.
“He’s gone. They came and got him in the night.”
“Lobo Gris?”
So she had been listening. “Yeah, I reckon it was them. I don’t guess he got up and walked away on his own.”
“That means . . .” Eli stopped while he thought. “That means someone here told them one of their members was here, dead.”
I nodded, ate some more pancake. “Yep.”
“Could have been anyone in the crowd,” Paulina murmured. “Someone else who belongs.”
“Could have been whoever hired him,” Eli said.
“That, too. You talked to the mechanic last night?” We were all keeping our voices very low, but it was time to change the subject. We couldn’t know who had tipped off the crew that Montes was dead, and might not even want to know, I suspected, at least right now. “How is the car?”
Eli said, “Mechanic says that only a cap was loosened, and he replaced the oil and tightened it. He was going to come over this morning and take a slower look to be sure. I’m going to talk to him as soon as I finish eating.”
I nodded. A good precaution.
Eli added, “With the car parked in front, it seems unbelievable that no one noticed the man fiddling under the car.”
“It all ties in,” Paulina whispered. “The car out front, any number of people could have seen whoever was trying to sabotage it.”
I didn’t really believe everyone in Mil Flores was willing to ignore such a strange thing because they were all in a criminal crew. That was possible, but not probable. “Most likely some people did notice, but it wasn’t any of their business. Why would they be on your side?” I said with some reason, considering Paulina and Eli were openly grigoris. Even I didn’t necessarily think grigoris were good guys, but they were not criminals. Maybe. And they were the ones who were paying me.
As scary as Paulina and Eli were, and lethal as they were, I had to stick with them until we found the remaining Karkarov brother in Juárez.
That ended our conversation. After I’d gone up to brush my teeth, I went out to the car, since Paulina and Eli were lingering over their coffee. The hood of the Celebrity Tourer was up. The dark man from the evening befor
e was scrambling out from under the car. When he’d gotten to his feet, he lowered the Tourer’s hood.
“Good morning. I hope you got some good news?” I said.
“Yeah, I’m Desmond. Morning, gunnie. And yes, I got good news.”
“I’m ready for it.” And that was God’s truth.
“I just had to put in some more oil and screw the cap back on the pan. Might have been a little problem if the asshole had made off with the cap, but it was lying on the ground under the car. Couldn’t be bothered, I guess. And the engine looks fine to me. No interference there.”
“That simple. Great. How much do we owe you?”
“Couple of dollars will do me.”
I handed it over, plus a little more. “We’ll probably come by to fill up as we’re leaving.”
“If I’m not there, my wife can pump the gas. Or either of the kids.”
Desmond was a man who stuck to business. I wished more people were like him.
While I was outside, I strolled between the whorehouse and the hotel. I noticed the fresh footprints in the dirt. Four men had walked here the night before. They’d gone in light and come out heavy. Carrying the body.
Eli came out onto the porch a minute later. “What did he say?”
“Car’s ready to go. He’s got gas if we need it. I think we should fill up.”
“Then we might as well start.”
“Okay.” I went upstairs to fetch my bags.
I would not be sorry to leave Mil Flores. I did not feel I could let my guard down here, not for a second. I had a gloomy feeling that the tension might not get any better when we left. It wasn’t only the town that made me jumpy, it was my employers.
If I could have been back in Segundo Mexia just by wishing, I would have been home. At the same time, I thought more and more about the chance that I had a half sister. I didn’t know if I wanted one or not. I wondered how it would feel if I did.
CHAPTER SIX
An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1) Page 12