“Welcome back to Merlotte’s,” I said, grinning for all I was worth. “What can I get you two this evening? We put French-fried pickles on the menu, and our burgers Lafayette are real good.”
Lily looked as if I’d suggested she eat breaded worms, though Jack looked a bit regretful. He wouldn’t have minded the pickles, I could tell.
“A hamburger Lafayette for me, I guess,” Lily said unenthusiastically. As she turned to her companion, her T-shirt shifted and I caught a glimpse of a set of old scars that rivaled my own new ones.
Well, we had always had things in common.
“The hamburger for me, too,” Jack said. “And if you have a moment to spare, we’d like to talk to you.” He smiled at me, and the long, thin scar on his face flexed as his eyebrows rose. Was this personal-mutilation evening? I wondered if his light jacket, unnecessary on so warm a day, covered something even worse.
“We can have a talk. I figured you didn’t come back to Merlotte’s because of the great cuisine,” I said, and took their drink order before I went over to the window to hand the slip to Antoine.
With their iced teas and a dish of lemon, I returned to the table. I looked around to make sure no one needed me before I sat down opposite Jack with Lily to my left. She was pretty to look at, but so controlled and muscular I felt like I could bounce a dime off her. Even her mind was sort of tidy and strict.
“What shall we talk about?” I asked, and opened up my mind to them. Jack was thinking about Lily, some concern about her health, no, her mother’s health—a recurrence of breast cancer. Lily was thinking about me, puzzling over me, suspecting I was a killer.
That hurt.
But it was true.
“Sandra Pelt is out of jail,” Jack Leeds said, and though I heard the words in his brain before he spoke them, I didn’t have to fake a shocked face.
“She was in jail? So that’s why I haven’t seen her since her folks died.” The older Pelts had promised to keep Sandra in check. After I’d heard about their deaths, I’d wondered when she’d show up. When I hadn’t seen her right away, I’d relaxed. “You’re telling me this because?” I managed to say.
“Because she hates your guts,” Lily said calmly. “And you were never found guilty by any court of the disappearance of her sister. You weren’t even arrested. I don’t think you ever will be. You might even be innocent, though I don’t think so. Sandra Pelt is simply crazy. And she’s obsessed with you. I think you need to be careful. Real careful.”
“Why was she in jail?”
“Assault and battery on one of her cousins. This cousin had gotten a cut of the money in Sandra’s parents’ will, and apparently Sandra took issue with that.”
I was very, very worried. Sandra Pelt was a vicious and amoral young woman. I was sure she hadn’t hit twenty yet, and she’d made a determined attempt to kill me more than once. There was no one now to call her to heel, and her mental status was therefore even more suspect, according to the private detectives.
“But why did you make a trip down here to tell me?” I said. “I mean, I do appreciate it, but you weren’t obliged . . . and you could have picked up the phone. Private eyes work for money, last I heard. Is someone paying you to warn me?”
“The Pelt estate,” Lily said, after a pause. “Their lawyer, who lives in New Orleans, is the court-appointed guardian for Sandra until she reaches twenty-one.”
“His name?”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. “It’s a sort of Baltic name,” she said. “And I may not pronounce it correctly.”
“Cataliades,” I said, putting the emphasis on the second syllable where it belonged.
“Yes,” said Jack, surprised. “That’s him. Big guy.”
I nodded. Mr. Cataliades and I were friendly. He was mostly a demon, but the Leedses didn’t seem to know that. In fact, they didn’t seem to know much of anything about the other world, the one that lay beneath the human one. “So Mr. Cataliades sent you two down here to warn me? He’s the executor?”
“Yeah. He was going to be away from his desk for some time, and he wanted to be sure you knew the girl was on the loose. He seemed to feel some obligation to you.”
I pondered that. I only knew of one time I’d done the lawyer a good turn. I had helped him get out of the collapsing hotel in Rhodes. Nice to know that at least one person was serious when he said, “I owe you.” It seemed pretty ironic that the Pelt estate was paying the Leedses to come warn me against the last living Pelt; not ironic as in “ha!” but ironic as in bitter.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how come he contacted you two? I mean, I’m sure there are lots of private eyes in New Orleans, for example. You all are still based in the Little Rock area, right?”
Lily shrugged. “He called us; he asked if we were free; he sent the check. His instructions were very specific. Both of us, to the bar, today. In fact . . .” She glanced down at her watch. “To the minute.”
They looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to explain this oddity on the part of the lawyer.
I was thinking furiously. If Mr. Cataliades had sent two tough people to the bar, instructing them to arrive at a given time, it must be because he knew they were going to be needed. For some reason, their presence was necessary and desirable. When would you need capable hardbodies?
When trouble was on its way.
Before I knew I was going to do it, I stood and turned toward the entrance. Naturally, the Leedses looked where I was looking, so we were all watching the door when trouble opened it.
Four tough guys came in. My grandmother would have said they were loaded for bear. They might as well have stenciled “Badass and Proud of It” on their foreheads. They were definitely high on something, full of themselves, brimming with aggression. And armed.
After a second’s peek in their heads, I knew they’d taken vampire blood. That was the most unpredictable drug on the market—also the most expensive, because harvesting it was so dangerous. People who drank vampire blood were—for a length of time impossible to predict—incredibly strong and incredibly reckless . . . and sometimes batshit crazy.
Though her back was to the newcomers, Jannalynn seemed to smell them. She swung around on her stool and focused, just like someone had drawn a bow and aimed the arrow. I could feel the animal wafting off her. Something wild and savage filled the air, and I realized the smell was coming from Sam, too. Jack and Lily Leeds were on their feet. Jack had his hand under his jacket, and I knew he had a gun. Lily’s hands were poised in a strange way, as if she were about to gesture and had frozen in midmove.
“Hidee-ho, jerkoffs!” said the tallest one, addressing the bar in general. He had a heavy beard and thick dark hair, but underneath it I saw how young he was. I thought he couldn’t be more than nineteen. “We come to have some fun with you lizards.”
“No lizards here,” Sam said, his voice even and calm. “You fellas are welcome to have a drink, but after that I think you better leave. This is a quiet place, a local place, and we don’t need trouble.”
“Trouble’s already here!” boasted the shortest asshole. His face was clean-shaven, and his hair was only blond stubble, showing scars on his scalp. He was built broad and chunky. The third kid was thin and dark, maybe Hispanic. His black hair was slicked back, and his lips had a sensuous pout to them that he tried to counteract by sneering. The fourth guy had gotten off on the vampire blood even more seriously than the rest, and he couldn’t speak because he was lost in his own world. His eyes jerked from side to side as if he were tracking things the rest of us couldn’t see. He was big, too. I thought the first attack would come from him, and though I was the least of the combatants, I began to ease to my right, planning to come at him from the side.
“We can have peace here,” Sam said. He was still trying, though I knew he understood that there was no way we were going to escape violence. He was buying time for everyone in Merlotte’s to understand what was up.
That was a good idea. By the time a few more seconds had passed, even the slowest of the few patrons had moved as far from the action as they could get, except for Danny Prideaux, who’d been playing darts with Andy Bellefleur, and Andy himself. Danny was actually holding a dart. Andy was off duty, but he was armed. I watched Jack Leeds’s eyes and saw he’d realized, as I had, where the worst trouble would come from. The dazed hoodlum was actually rocking back and forth on his heels.
Since Jack Leeds had a gun and I did not, I carefully inched backward so I wouldn’t interfere with his shot. Lily’s cold eyes followed my small movement, and she nodded almost undetectably. I’d done a sensible thing.
“We don’t want peace,” snarled Bearded Leader. “We want the blonde.” And he pointed in my direction with his left hand, while his right hand pulled a knife. It looked like it was two feet long, though maybe my fear was acting like a magnifying glass.
“We gonna take care of her,” Blond Bristles said.
“And then maybe the resta you,” Pouty Lips added.
Crazy Guy just smiled.
“I don’t think so,” Jack Leeds said. Jack pulled his gun in one smooth movement. Possibly he would have done it anyway out of sheer self-defense, but it didn’t hurt that his wife, standing right by me, was a blonde. He couldn’t be completely sure they meant me, the other white meat.
“I don’t think so, either,” said Andy Bellefleur. His arm was rock steady as he aimed his own Sig Sauer at the man with the knife. “You drop that pigsticker, and we’ll work something out.”
They might be high as kites, but at least three of the thugs retained enough sense to realize that facing guns was a bad idea. There was a lot of uncertain twitching and eye shifting as they flickered gazes at each other. The moment hung in the balance.
Unfortunately, Crazy Guy went over the edge and charged for Sam, so now we were all committed to stupidity. With Were swiftness, Pouty Lips whipped out his own gun, aimed, and fired. I’m not sure who he intended to hit, but he winged Jack Leeds, whose return shot went wild as he fell.
Watching Lily Leeds was a lesson in motion. She took two quick steps, pivoted on her left foot, and her right foot floated through the air to kick Pouty Lips in the head with the force of a mule. Almost before he hit the floor she was on him, pitching his gun toward the bar and breaking his arm in a flow of motion that was nearly hypnotic. As he screamed, Bearded Asshole and Blond Bristles gaped at her.
That second of inattention was all it took. Jannalynn took a flying leap off her barstool, describing an amazing arc through the air. She landed on Crazy Guy as Sam tackled him, and though CG howled and snapped and tried to throw her off, Jannalynn reared back to punch him in the jaw. I distinctly heard the bone break, and then Jannalynn leaped to her feet and stomped on his femur. Another snap. Sam, still holding him down, yelled, “Stop!”
In those seconds, Andy Bellefleur rushed Bearded Asshole, who’d whirled to present his back to Andy when Lily attacked Pouty Lips. When the tall guy felt the gun in his back, he froze.
“Drop the knife,” Andy said. He was in deadly earnest.
Blond Bristles cocked his arm back to strike a blow. Danny Prideaux threw his dart. It got Blond Bristles square in the meat of his arm, and he shrieked like a teakettle. Sam abandoned Crazy Guy to punch Blond Bristles right in his brisket. The guy went down like a sawn tree.
Bearded Asshole looked at his buddies, down and disabled, and then he dropped the knife. Sensible.
Finally.
In less than two minutes, it was all over.
I’d whipped my clean white apron off, and I bound Jack Leeds’s wound while Lily held his arm out for me, her face white as a vampire’s. She wanted to kill Pouty Lips in the worst possible way, because she loved her husband with an overwhelming passion. The strength of her feelings almost swamped me. Lily might be icy on the outside, but inside she was Vesuvius.
As soon as Jack’s bleeding slowed, she turned to Pouty Lips, her face still absolutely calm. “You even move, I’ll break your fucking neck,” she said, her voice uninflected. The young thug probably didn’t even hear her through his own groaning and moaning, but her tone came through and he tried to inch away from her.
Andy had already talked to the 911 dispatcher. In a moment I heard the siren, a disturbingly familiar sound. We might as well retain an ambulance to stay in the parking lot at this rate.
Crazy Guy was screaming weakly at the pain in his leg and jaw. Sam had saved his life: Jannalynn was actually panting, she was so close to changing after the excitement and stimulation of the violence. The bones had slid around underneath the skin of her face, which was looking long and lumpy.
It wouldn’t be good if she became a wolf before law enforcement got here. I didn’t try to spell out why to myself. I said, “Hey, Jannalynn.” Her eyes met mine. Hers were changing shape and color. Her little figure began to twist and turn restlessly.
“You have to stop,” I said. All around us there was yelling, and excitement, and the thick atmosphere of fear—not a good atmosphere for a young werewolf. “You can’t change now.” I kept my eyes fixed on hers. I didn’t speak again but made sure she kept looking at me. “Breathe with me,” I said, and she made the effort. Gradually her own breathing slowed, and even more gradually her face resumed its normal contours. Her body ceased its restless movement, and her eyes returned to their regular brown.
“All right,” she said.
Sam put his hands on her thin shoulders. He gave her a tight hug. “Thanks, honey,” he said. “Thanks. You’re the greatest.” I felt the faintest thrum of exasperation.
“Left your ass in the dust,” she said, and laughed raggedly. “Was that a good jump, or what? Wait’ll I tell Alcide.”
“You’re the quickest,” Sam said, his voice gentle. “You’re the best pack enforcer I ever met.” You would have thought he’d told her she was as sexy as Heidi Klum, she was so proud.