An Easy Death Page 26

  I fell asleep.

  When I woke, there was a short, dark man fiddling with a bridle under a lantern. I didn’t move, hardly breathed. I had no idea what my state of visibility might be, a really strange state of being.

  After a while he said, “Señorita, I have left some food for you. Please be gone in the morning.” And he walked out of the stable with the lantern.

  That was my stroke of luck. Now I knew two things: I was visible again (and that was a huge good thing; I hadn’t realized how odd it made me feel, not knowing if I could be seen or not). And even better, he’d left me food. For nothing.

  Somehow, as I groped my way to where he’d been working and found a plate with beans and rice and tortillas on it, I thought I might live to see home again.

  I ate and was full. I slept for another while, maybe a couple of hours, and then I started out. I was afraid of oversleeping, and I wanted to be sure I did what he’d asked. Walking in the dark was not easy or pleasant, but when is anything?

  I managed to get at least a couple of miles away before I gave up. I sat down to wait out the night. When dawn broke, I could see I was in the nothing that lay all around Juárez, and I began walking, facing the rising sun.

  I had to think about something.

  First I thought about Eli.

  Once I got over him being the son of a prince, I couldn’t figure out why I’d been so angry or why that had made any difference. After all, we’d lied to each other equally. And he hadn’t acted like the son of a prince, though I wasn’t sure what that behavior would look like. At least, he hadn’t been all lordly or snooty. And he hadn’t looked down on me any more than Paulina had, and she’d definitely not been a princess.

  No wonder Paulina had had such an attitude about Eli. She’d made an effort to defer to or at least confer with him, when her natural inclination was to dominate. Respectful, when she would have enjoyed scorning him.

  Eli had always treated Paulina with respect, too. I figured he had admired her skill, if not her winning personality.

  So I didn’t hate Eli quite as much after a day or two. Because we’d had some hours together when I had seen the real Eli, and he’d been a lot of fun.

  It’s no news that most men who want you will act completely different once they’ve had you. This is a true thing. But Eli hadn’t. He’d been the same person.

  These thoughts didn’t get me any food or water. But I felt like a more reasonable person, more grown up.

  I would have given a lot to have a map. I was out in what I thought of as a semidesert. By the third day my situation was pretty desperate. If I was near a town, I could live. If I wasn’t, the prospect was iffy at best.

  There wasn’t a town, but there was a little settlement, huddling around a well. Not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but just off-center. My arrival was the biggest thing that had happened to these families in weeks. A stranger! And a lone woman! Both things they didn’t often see. They gathered around that evening and asked me a million questions. It wasn’t hard to make up a bad-luck story, because I had one. I just didn’t tell them the true one.

  I had a mother in Texoma. I’d come south to meet my father for the first time. (They gasped at that. An unknown father! They’d never heard of such a terrible thing.) By the time I’d arrived, my father had died, and I’d had to stay with my uncle. He’d beaten me, burned my skin with a match, and told me I had to marry a man who was many times my age, with grown sons and daughters, a man to whom my uncle owed money.

  So I’d decided to return to my mother, carrying the guns my father had left me, his only legacy. My mother was sending her brother to meet me halfway. I expected to encounter him any day. (That seemed like a good safety measure.)

  In the meantime, I would like to sell a gun. Could I have food and water and a place to sleep while I rested up a bit, and then be on my way? And was there any ointment for a burn?

  After a lot of consultation, that was fine with them. They didn’t want trouble, and a woman with a lot of guns might be trouble. On the other hand, the town bachelor proposed within two hours. With great regret I turned him down, because I hadn’t had a chance to consult with my mother and uncle.

  “Yes,” said his aunt with approval and some relief. “Every traditional girl should consult with her family before she enters into a marriage.”

  At the end of two days of sleeping and eating, I bid them good-bye. We were best friends by then, just about, and I left them a pistol and ammunition. They were delighted. They would rather have had one of the rifles, but I pointed out that the rifles were my dowry. A very old woman helped me clean the burn, hissing in sympathy when she saw it, and she gave me some kind of liquid from a proper bottle, which might have come from a real pharmacy. It hurt enough to work well, I figured.

  I set off very early the third morning, hoping to get a good distance before the sun killed me. I had water and food, and they’d told me that in two days I would come to the village of Hortensio . . . of course, unless I missed it entirely.

  If it hadn’t been for the dog, I would have. I saw a dog trotting all by itself, and it had a purpose. A lone dog was not with a pack, of course, and that meant it was going somewhere where there was food and water. It was heading northeast, so I followed it. I had to pick up my pace to keep it in sight. This dog was really covering ground. I was sweating, and I had to fight the urge to sit down, just for a minute. I knew I would not catch up if I did that.

  Hortensio was mean.

  I was on guard from the moment I saw a man kick the dog. That dog had gotten me to a place where I could find water and food, and I didn’t take kindly to it being kicked. Neither did the dog, which growled at the kicker. Who then shot the dog dead.

  So I had both Colts out when two men decided to rape me right in the middle of the village, despite the protests of several women. I didn’t know if the women were upset because they didn’t think I should be raped, or because they didn’t think their very own men should have sex with someone else. After all, I might be diseased. Or a demon. A lot of the yelling was beyond my Spanish, and I was ready to kill them all by the time a woman with a withered arm told them I had the mark of a sorceress upon me, and anyone who harmed me would regret it a whole lot. Forever.

  I didn’t know if it was true that Klementina had put some kind of mark on me that only people with magic could see, and at the moment I didn’t care. For all I knew, the withered-arm woman didn’t want me to shoot the men or didn’t want the men to harm me for her very own reasons. She was clearly the village wisewoman.

  After some tense moments a little boy was delegated to approach me and take my canteens and refill them. I was terrified he would not come back with them, that they’d drive me off into the wasteland with no water or food, but he returned and laid the canteens, full, at my feet. And one of the women contributed some kind of meat jerky and a couple of tamales. I literally backed out of Hortensio while the village people were having another huge argument, deliberately started by the withered-arm woman. She jerked her head at the path I should take after she’d yelled for a minute at one of the men. Whatever she’d said, she’d hit a nerve.

  She was very clever, and I found myself wishing I’d learned her name.

  That day I shot and killed a rabbit, and I ate it and the tamale. I saved the dried meat for the next day.

  Two awful days later I knew where I was. I saw Ciudad Azul atop its hill. I got only close enough to find a stream, where I finally got to wash myself and my clothes. When I didn’t look too much like a scarecrow—as far as I could tell—I used some of my precious money to buy some food from a vendor, and I sat down to eat it on a bench in the plaza. I was comfortable in the mild air because my burn was finally getting better. I ate every tiny crumb of food. As soon as I was through, I shook the dust of the town off my feet and got out of there.

  After I left the outskirts of Ciudad Azul, hoping I never went back, I got a ride from a family crammed into an ancient vehicle, wh
ich was the most wonderful luck I’d ever had. They were on their way north to visit relatives, and they worked me into the car somehow. I was glad I’d taken the time to clean up in Ciudad Azul, because otherwise they would have been stunk out of the car. There were three adults and three children in this ancient Ford, and they asked me about a million questions because they didn’t have anything else to do.

  I stuck to the story I’d created in the nameless settlement, and they oohed and aahed like they were watching a film or a play. By the time they let me out, we were all good friends, and they wished me well and wanted me to write them to tell them what happened after.

  By this time my Spanish was better, and I was so exhausted I could hardly imagine another day on the road.

  But I had to. I had to imagine several days.

  When I walked into Segundo Mexia from the south, I weighed so little my jeans would hardly stay up. I was as tan as I would ever get. I had blessed the stupid hat I’d gotten in Juárez over and over. I’d traded both the skirts for bits of food. I still had my guns, having carried them the whole damn way.

  My mother cried. The only other time I’d seen her cry was when one of her students died of a spider bite. Even Jackson looked somewhat relieved. I could tell my mom wanted to keep me near her, but I wasn’t putting any strain on her and Jackson, and after so long by myself, I liked that state even better. So after a big meal and a lot of catching up on the Segundo Mexia news, I set off to my own place.

  Chrissie let out a yell when I passed her cabin. “You’re alive, you’re back! Hey, I let them in because they said you’d want it!”

  I could only stand and stare at her. “What?” I was in no mood to be delayed.

  “You’ll see,” she said, grinning. That is my least favorite thing, not being told something I want to know, because surprises are not something I’m fond of.

  But I was so anxious I strode up the remaining bit of hill, unlocked my cabin, and opened the door.

  I had a refrigerator. I stepped back outside, to see the electric wires running to my roof. I went back in. The refrigerator was small and white and perfect, and it hummed. The refrigerator. And my bed was new and bigger. And I had an easy chair.

  I decided to get pissed off. “He better pay me anyway,” I said out loud. “This is not what I would have done with my pay.” Because I couldn’t have. I could not have paid for the electricity to the hill to be beefed up so much. I could not have imagined buying a refrigerator, of all things, though I’d wanted one very much. I could not have imagined having anything besides the bench and stool on either side of my table. And I could never have chosen the beautiful new gun belt lying across the table. The pay I was owed was in an envelope beside it.

  And there was a note. I had a little trouble reading the spiky handwriting, but I worked on it for a few minutes. Eli had written: I saw how you looked at the refrigerator in the bar in Cactus Flats, on our first trip together. I hope you enjoy it. I would not have lived through our adventure without you. I don’t know if I will see you again, but I hope I do.

  I didn’t know how to act. I pulled the door shut behind me and sat on the edge of the bed. I stared at everything. I’d come home, but it didn’t look like home. I tried to get angry about it, but the truth was that my home looked a lot better. And this wasn’t payoff for the sex. This was gratitude that he was still alive, and that his mission was done.

  I had a lot of feelings, and I wasn’t used to that.

  Finally I put the gun bag down on the floor, and realizing I didn’t have to carry it anymore made me cry. I pulled off my boots, my socks, my everything, and I got in the shower, which was also working. This was everything I’d longed for all those hot, dusty miles, when I’d suffered and sweated and thought about home. The kindness and meanness, the blood and hate and friendliness, the dying and the dead.

  “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 Eli’s dad showed up at the Antelope, which was 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.