We made Jeff leave, too.
Terry resumed his place behind the bar and began dispensing drinks, but he was limping slightly and had a strained look in his face, which worried me. Terry’s war experiences hadn’t left him real stable. I’d had enough trouble for one night.
But of course the night wasn’t over yet.
About an hour after the fight, a woman came into Merlotte’s. She was plain and plainly dressed in old jeans and a camo coat. She had on boots that had been wonderful when they’d been new, but that had been a long time ago. She didn’t carry a purse, and she had her hands thrust into her pockets.
There were several indicators that made my mental antennae twitch. First of all, this gal didn’t look right. A local woman might dress like that if she were going hunting or doing farm work, but not to come to Merlotte’s. For an evening out at the bar, most women fixed themselves up. So this woman was in a working mode; but she wasn’t a whore by the same reasoning.
That meant drugs.
To protect the bar in Sam’s absence, I tuned in to her thoughts. People don’t think in complete sentences, of course, and I’m smoothing it out, but what was running through her head was along the order of:
Three vials left getting old losing power gotta sell it tonight so I can get back to Baton Rouge and buy some more. Vampire in the bar if he catches me with vamp blood I’m dead. This town is a dump. Back to the city first chance I get.
She was a Drainer, or maybe she was just a distributor. Vampire blood was the most intoxicating drug on the market, but of course vamps didn’t give it up willingly. Draining a vampire was a hazardous occupation, boosting prices of the tiny vials of blood to amazing sums.
What did the drug user get for parting with a lot of money? Depending on the age of the blood—that is, the time since it’d been removed from its owner—and the age of the vampire from whom the blood had been removed, and the individual chemistry of the drug user, it could be quite a lot. There was the feeling of omnipotence, the increased strength, acute vision, and hearing. And most important of all for Americans, an enhanced physical appearance.
Still, only an idiot would drink black-market vampire blood. For one thing, the results were notoriously unpredictable. Not only did the effects vary, but those effects could last anywhere from two weeks to two months. For another thing, some people simply went mad when the blood hit their system—sometimes homicidally mad. I’d heard of dealers who sold gullible users pig’s blood or contaminated human blood. But the most important reason to avoid the black market in vamp blood was this: Vampires hated Drainers, and they hated the users of the drained blood (commonly known as bloodheads). You just don’t want a vampire pissed off at you.
There weren’t any off-duty police officers in Merlotte’s that night. Sam was out wagging his tail somewhere. I hated to tip off Terry, because I didn’t know how he’d react. I had to do something about this woman.
Truly, I try not to intervene in events when my only connection comes through my telepathy. If I stuck my oar in every time I learned something that would affect the lives around me (like knowing the parish clerk was embezzling, or that one of the local detectives took bribes), I wouldn’t be able to live in Bon Temps, and it was my home. But I couldn’t permit this scraggy woman to sell her poison in Sam’s bar.
She perched on an empty barstool and ordered a beer from Terry. His gaze lingered on her. Terry, too, realized something was wrong about the stranger.
I came to pick up my next order and stood by her. She needed a bath, and she’d been in a house heated by a wood fireplace. I made myself touch her, which always improved my reception. Where was the blood? It was in her coat pocket. Good.
Without further ado, I dumped a glass of wine down her front.
“Dammit!” she said, jumping off the stool and patting ineffectually at her chest. “You are the clumsiest-ass woman I ever saw!”
“ ’Scuse me,” I said abjectly, putting my tray on the bar and meeting Terry’s eyes briefly. “Let me put some soda on that.” Without waiting for her permission, I pulled her coat down her arms. By the time she understood what I was doing and began to struggle, I had taken charge of the coat. I tossed it over the bar to Terry. “Put some soda on that, please,” I said. “Make sure the stuff in her pockets didn’t get wet, too.” I’d used this ploy before. I was lucky it was cold weather and she’d had the stuff in her coat, not in her jeans pocket. That would have taxed my inventiveness.
Under the coat, the woman was wearing a very old Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. She began shivering, and I wondered if she’d been sampling more conventional drugs. Terry made a show of patting soda on the wine stain. Following my hint, he delved into the pockets. He looked down at his hand with disgust, and I heard a clink as he threw the vials in the trash can behind the bar. He returned everything else to her pockets.
She’d opened her mouth to shriek at Terry when she realized she really couldn’t. Terry stared directly at her, daring her to mention the blood. The people around us watched with interest. They knew something was up, but not what, because the whole thing had gone down very quickly. When Terry was sure she wasn’t going to start yelling, he handed me the coat. As I held it so she could slide her arms in, Terry told her, “Don’t you come back here no more.”
If we kept throwing people out at this rate, we wouldn’t have many customers.
“You redneck son of a bitch,” she said. The crowd around us drew in a collective breath. (Terry was almost as unpredictable as a bloodhead.)
“Doesn’t matter to me what you call me,” he said. “I guess an insult from you is no insult at all. You just stay away.” I expelled a long breath of relief.
She shoved her way through the crowd. Everyone in the room marked her progress toward the door, even Mickey the vampire. In fact, he was doing something with a device in his hands. It looked like one of those cell phones that can take a picture. I wondered to whom he was sending it. I wondered if she’d make it home.
Terry pointedly didn’t ask how I’d known the scruffy woman had something illegal in her pockets. That was another weird thing about the people of Bon Temps. The rumors about me had been floating around as long as I could remember, from when I was little and my folks put me through the mental health battery. And yet, despite the evidence at their disposal, almost everyone I knew would much rather regard me as a dim and peculiar young woman than acknowledge my strange ability. Of course, I was careful not to stick it in their faces. And I kept my mouth shut.
Anyway, Terry had his own demons to fight. Terry subsisted on some kind of government pension, and he cleaned Merlotte’s early in the morning, along with a couple of other businesses. He stood in for Sam three or four times a month. The rest of his time was his own, and no one seemed to know what he did with it. Dealing with people exhausted Terry, and nights like tonight were simply not good for him.
It was lucky he wasn’t in Merlotte’s the next night, when all hell broke loose.
2
A
T FIRST, I THOUGHT EVERYTHING HAD RETURNED TO normal. The bar seemed a little calmer the next night. Sam was back in place, relaxed and cheerful. Nothing seemed to rile him, and when I told him what had happened with the dealer the night before, he complimented me on my finesse.
Tara didn’t come in, so I couldn’t ask her about Mickey. But was it really any of my business? Probably not my business—but my concern, definitely.
Jeff LaBeff was back and sheepish about getting riled by the college kid the night before. Sam had learned about the incident through a phone call from Terry, and he gave Jeff a word of warning.
Andy Bellefleur, a detective on the Renard parish force and Portia’s brother, came in with the young woman he was dating, Halleigh Robinson. Andy was older than me, and I’m twenty-six. Halleigh was twenty-one—just old enough to be in Merlotte’s. Halleigh taught at the elementary school, she was right out of college, and she was real attractive, with short earlobe-length brown hair and huge brown eyes and a nicely rounded figure. Andy had been dating Halleigh for about two months, and from the little I saw of the couple, they seemed to be progressing in their relationship at a predictable rate.
Andy’s true thoughts were that he liked Halleigh very much (though she was a tad boring), and he was really ready for her to give it up. Halleigh thought Andy was sexy and a real man of the world, and she really loved the newly restored Bellefleur family mansion, but she didn’t believe he’d hang around long after she slept with him. I hate knowing more about relationships than the people in them know—but no matter how battened down I am, I pick up a trickle of stuff.
Claudine came in the bar that night, toward closing time. Claudine is six feet tall, with black hair that ripples down her back and bruised-looking white skin that looks thin and glossy like a plum’s. Claudine dresses for attention. Tonight she was wearing a terra-cotta pants suit, cut very snug on her Amazonian body. She works in the complaint department of a big store at the mall in Ruston during the day. I wished she’d brought her brother, Claude, with her. He doesn’t swing in my direction, but he’s a treat for the eyes.
He’s a fairy. I mean, literally. So’s Claudine, of course.
She waved at me across the heads of the crowd. I waved back smiling. Everyone’s happy around Claudine, who is always cheerful when there are no vampires in her vicinity. Claudine is unpredictable and a lot of fun, though like all fairies, she’s as dangerous as a tiger when she’s angry. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen often.
Fairies occupy a special place in the hierarchy of magical creatures. I haven’t figured out exactly what it is yet, but sooner or later I’ll piece it together.
Every man in the bar was drooling over Claudine, and she was eating it up. She gave Andy Bellefleur a long, big-eyed look, and Halleigh Robinson glared, mad enough to spit, until she remembered she was a sweet southern girl. But Claudine abandoned all interest in Andy when she saw he was drinking ice tea with lemon. Fairies are even more violently allergic to lemon than vampires are to garlic.
Claudine worked her way over to me, and she gave me a big hug, to the envy of every male in the bar. She took my hand to pull me into Sam’s office. I went with her out of sheer curiosity.
“Dear friend,” Claudine said, “I have bad news for you.”
“What?” I’d gone from bemused to scared in a heartbeat.
“There was a shooting early this morning. One of the werepanthers was hit.”
“Oh, no! Jason!” But surely one of his friends would’ve called if he hadn’t gone into work today?
“No, your brother is fine, Sookie. But Calvin Norris was shot.”
I was stunned. Jason hadn’t called to tell me this? I had to find out from someone else?
“Shot dead?” I asked, hearing my voice shake. Not that Calvin and I were close—far from it—but I was shocked. Heather Kinman, a teenager, had been fatally shot the week before. What was happening in Bon Temps?
“Shot in the chest. He’s alive, but he’s bad hurt.”
“Is he in the hospital?”
“Yes, his nieces took him to Grainger Memorial.”
Grainger was a town farther southeast than Hotshot, and a shorter drive from there than the parish hospital in Clarice.
“Who did it?”
“No one knows. Someone shot him early this morning, when Calvin was on his way to work. He’d come home from his, um, time of the month, changed, and started into town for his shift.” Calvin worked at Norcross.
“How’d you come to know all this?”
“One of his cousins came into the store to buy some pajamas, since Calvin didn’t have any. Guess he sleeps in the buff,” Claudette said. “I don’t know how they think they’re going to get a pajama top on over the bandages. Maybe they just needed the pants? Calvin wouldn’t like to be shuffling around the hospital with only one of those nasty gowns between him and the world.”
Claudine often took long side trails in her conversation.
“Thanks for telling me,” I said. I wondered how the cousin had known Claudine, but I wasn’t going to ask.
“That’s okay. I knew you’d want to know. Heather Kinman was a shape-shifter, too. Bet you didn’t know that. Think about it.”
Claudine gave me a kiss on the forehead—fairies are very touchy-feely—and we went back into the bar area. She’d stunned me into silence. Claudine herself was back to business as usual. The fairy ordered a 7-and-7 and was surrounded by suitors in about two minutes flat. She never left with anyone, but the men seemed to enjoy trying. I’d decided that Claudine fed off this admiration and attention.
Even Sam was beaming at her, and she didn’t tip.
By the time we were closing the bar, Claudine had left to go back to Monroe, and I’d passed along her news to Sam. He was as appalled by the story as I was. Though Calvin Norris was the leader of the small shifter community of Hotshot, the rest of the world knew him as a steady, quiet bachelor who owned his own home and had a good job as crew foreman at the local lumber mill. It was hard to imagine either of his personas leading to an assassination attempt. Sam decided to send some flowers from the bar’s staff.
I pulled on my coat and went out the bar’s back door just ahead of Sam. I heard him locking the door behind me. Suddenly I remembered that we were getting low on bottled blood, and I turned to tell Sam this. He caught my movement and stopped, waiting for me to speak, his face expectant. In the length of time it takes to blink, his expression changed from expectant to shocked, dark red began to spread on his left leg, and I heard the sound of a shot.
Then blood was everywhere, Sam crumpled to the ground, and I began to scream.
3
I’
D NEVER HAD TO PAY THE COVER CHARGE AT FANGTASIA before. The few times I’d come through the public entrance, I’d been with a vampire. But now I was by myself and feeling mighty conspicuous. I was exhausted from an especially long night. I’d been at the hospital until six in the morning, and I’d had only a few hours’ fitful sleep after I’d gotten home.